ePostal News articles from June 2005

ePostal News archives from June 2005

USPS may pull AuthentiDate's EPM franchise.
June 6, 2005... The USPS, which threw in the towel on its flailing e-postmark operation three years ago and outsourced the technology to AuthentiDate Holding Corporation, has sent the publicly held company a second notice that it has not hit its revenues...

US Postmaster General wants unprofitable initiatives ended.(Brief Article)
June 6, 2005... US Postmaster General John Potter has ordered a hiring freeze at headquarters, which, he said in a letter circulated to headquarters officers, must make a "sizeable contribution" to the overall cost reduction effort. He is contemplating cutting...

Canada Post quietly buys Smartmove web site.(Taylor Made Publishing Ltd)(Brief Article)
June 6, 2005... Well, it seems that Canada Post quietly bought the smartmoves web site from Toronto-based Taylor Made Publishing Ltd last November and has been keeping the news under wraps while it redeveloped the site into a "one-stop shop" for the 1.7...

Pitney launches dMail module for the executive suite.
June 6, 2005... Pitney Bowes has unveiled its new modular digital mail solution, dMail Executive Mail Management, the first generally available module in its dMail suite, which it positions as a complete solution for digitizing incoming correspondence,...

KPMG to study India post restructuring.(Brief Article)
June 6, 2005... KPMG is going to prepare a report on restructuring the Indian postal network that identifies new areas of business. The post want to eliminate the deficit it's been operating under by 2007. KPMG is supposed to review postal pricing and the...

Experian & QAS integrate offerings.
June 6, 2005... Experian, the global information solutions company, has integrated its data management solutions with the QAS QuickAddress suite of applications. The integration is supposed to enable organizations to maintain accurate and up-to-date address...

Pitney teams with MSA on security screening.(Pitney Bowes Inc.)(Michael Stapleton Associates )(Brief Article)
June 6, 2005... Pitney Bowes has established a strategic alliance with Michael Stapleton Associates (MSA), a Department of Homeland Security-certified provider, to offer a secure mail X-ray screening solution to both government agencies and the private sector....

Summary judgment asked in GPL price-fixing suit.
June 6, 2005... The Free Software Foundation (FSF) has hired Ice Miller, a local Indianapolis law firm, to defend it against the pro se antitrust suit brought by physicist and computer programmer Daniel Wallace in Indiana federal court. Wallace is charging the...

Java v .NET web services benchmark is born.
June 6, 2005... Bhe Transaction Procession Performance Council, better known as TPC, has a new transactional application-cum-application server benchmark called TPC-App that's supposed to simulate real-life B2B web services workloads and retail e-commerce...

HP gains traction in servers.(Hewlett-Packard Co)(Brief Article)
June 6, 2005... Server revenues came to $12.3 billion in Q1, up 4.1%, according to Gartner, which credited x86 servers. Growth was a point-and-a-half less than in Q4 and 5.4% less than it was in 1Q04. Last year the compare was easier because 2002 and 2003...

Aussie research to include the mail as part of media campaigns.(Brief Article)
June 6, 2005... Starting this month, the Asteroid software-based Single Source Survey used in Australia to determine the right media mix is going to include quantifiable research on addressed mail as well as commercial TV, commercial radio, newspapers,...

HP goes to market with Intel's new dual-cores & platform.
June 6, 2005... In support of Intel's expected release of its newfangled digital office platform, HP immediately introduced new business desktop PCs and workstations, the HP Compaq dc7600 Business Desktop PC series and entry-level HP xw4300 Workstation...

Anti-Microsoft OpenOffice file format standardized.(Brief Article)
June 6, 2005... Oasis has ratified OpenDocument 1.0, an XML-based file format for desktop applications, as a royalty-free standard. The OpenDocument format is the default in OpenOffice for text, spreadsheets, charts and graphical documents. Oasis got...

Nokia Internet tablet debuts.(Nokia Corp.)(Brief Article)
June 6, 2005... Nokia has unveiled its first widget without a phone in it--a so-called Internet Tablet, based on Linux, that offers broadband access to the Internet over Wi-Fi. The gismo, called the Nokia 770 Internet Tablet, was trotted out at the...

EC funds FOSS study.(Brief Article)
June 6, 2005... The European Union has earmarked roughly $825,000, 660,000 euros for two year's worth of international research into the impact of open source software and standards on skills development, employment, regional differences in software...

Tick, tock, tick, tock, tick.(European Commission to fine Microsoft)
June 6, 2005... Microsoft had until June 1 to comply with the European Commission's antitrust sanctions or face paying fines of up to 5% of its global daily sales. According to what EC commissioner Neelie Kroes, six months into the job, told the Wall...

Microsoft grapples with Google.(Brief Article)
June 6, 2005... Microsoft has previewed MSN Virtual Earth, some free Google-matching layered geo-mapping widgetry complete with aerial shots and satellite images. Microsoft claims Virtual Earth will offer more of a you-are-there sensation than Amazon and...

Larry Acolyte in trouble.(Brief Article)
June 6, 2005... Apparently there could be a shareholder uprising at Siebel. Tealeaf readers read a lot into the fact that Carl Icahn has bought shares, as have Icahn buddy Jana Partners and activist hedge fund Tudor Investments. Choices could be Siebel spends...

Avalon, Indigo Beta 1 RC out.(Brief Article)
June 6, 2005... Microsoft has released a Beta 1 release candidate of Avalon and Indigo intended for the "general public." (Somebody ought to explain to Microsoft that the words developer and general public are not interchangeable.) Anyway, Avalon and...

New York Times plays at king making at Microsoft.(Brief Article)
June 6, 2005... Since there's no known succession plan at Microsoft, the New York Times, which is trying to juice up its business section, has singled out Eric Rudder, the adaptable 38-year-old head of the Windows Server unit, Microsoft's third biggest product...

Unicenter DB Management goes cross-platform.(Brief Article)
June 6, 2005... Computer Associates has unveiled Unicenter Database Management r11 for DB2 UDB for Linux, Unix and Windows (LUW), which is supposed to let users optimize and streamline database operations across multi-platform environments. The kit is...

Sun Wah Linux launches Project Liberate.(Sun Wah Linux Ltd)(Brief Article)
June 6, 2005... To promote open source collaboration in Asia, Sun Wah Linux Ltd has launched what it calls Project Liberate, a venture to transform previously closed source software into open source projects and make them readily available to community for...

Linux desktop has a future if ... BofA.(Brief Article)
June 6, 2005... Banc of America sees a $180 million sales opportunity for desktop Linux client OS by 2008. "We believe that many of the market myths around the Linux desktop (both good and bad)," it says, "have drowned out the fact that while Windows will not...

AuthentiDate in limbo.
June 13, 2005... AuthentiDate, the Electronic Postmark vendor put on notice by the US Postal Service that it may lose its franchise because it hasn't met its revenue numbers, claims to have been "surprised" by the May 23 letter telling it that it was in breach...

ConnXion ties up with DataPost & Datamail.(DataPost (Singapore) Pte Ltd.)
June 13, 2005... ConnXion Ltd, a document production and multi-channel delivery solutions provider, has signed agreements with both DataPost (Singapore) Pte Ltd, a subsidiary of Singapore Post, and Datamail Ltd, a subsidiary of NZ Post, extending its reach in...

Royal Mail credits technology for its turnaround.(Brief Article)
June 13, 2005... Britain's Royal Mail is crediting its recently installed e-business, ERP and business intelligence systems with playing a major role in its turnaround. It even says BlackBerries helped improve decision-making among its top executives. ...

DX service & mail boxes etc team on high street caper.(Brief Article)
June 13, 2005... DX Services plc, the independent British B2B mail company, is moving to the British high street. It's cut a deal with Mail Boxes Etc to offer its mail services through Mail Boxes Etc's UK high street outlets. Mail Boxes Etc has 96...

Ship by Blackberry.(United States Postal Service says that BlackBerry PDA users now have a direct link to usps.com for their shipping needs)(Brief Article)
June 13, 2005... The USPS says that BlackBerry PDA users now have a direct link to usps.com for their shipping needs. Users are told to go to the BlackBerry home page, look under "Helpful Websites" for the "Shipping" link, then follow the USPS link to usps.com...

Powerdata Iberica to distribute Firstlogic.(Brief Article)
June 13, 2005... Firstlogic Inc, the data quality and postal automation ISV, has signed Barcelona-based Powerdata Iberica, the data integration supplier, to resell and support its software in Spain and Portugal. Firstlogic technology manages information...

Pitney Bowes helps endow a chair in postal economics.(Brief Article)
June 13, 2005... Pitney Bowes pledged $100,000 toward the endowment of a chair in postal economics at Rutgers University's Center for Research on Regulated Industries (CRRI) at a dinner the other day at the annual Conference on Postal and Delivery Economics in...

CA reportedly selling Ingres; oracle better duck.(Garnett and Helfrich Capital)(Computer Associates International Inc.)
June 13, 2005... The whisperers say Computer Associates is going to sell off the Ingres database to Garnett & Helfrich Capital, the venture buyout operation dedicated to finding "broken and orphaned" businesses neglected by their parents. They're the guys that...

Office 12 to go with XML file formats.(Microsoft Office 12)(Brief Article)
June 13, 2005... This is not going to surprise anybody but Microsoft says that its next-generation Office 12, expected in the second half of next year, will use the enemy-instigated industry-standard XML 1.0 file formats as its default. Microsoft calls...

DITA standardized.(Darwin Information Typing Architecture 1.0)(Brief Article)
June 13, 2005... Oasis has standardized the Darwin Information Typing Architecture 1.0 (DITA), which defines an XML architecture for designing, writing, managing and publishing many kinds of information in print and on the web. DITA is a set of design...

Sun buys StorageTek: the old Boulevardier settles down with the frumpy stay-at-home mom.
June 13, 2005... Sun has finally figured out what do with some of that $7.4 billion cash pile it's been hoarding before its long-suffering stockholders turn nasty. It's going to buy StorageTek, the leader in tape, an old technology giving way to disk. Bank...

If the poor fools only knew.(web browsers)(Brief Article)
June 13, 2005... Opera, which only has a smidge of market share despite the renewed browser wars, figures the reason only 11% of users have switched to something a little more secure than Microsoft's Internet Explorer is that the poor dears are still blithely...

Carly didn't want to dance: McNealy.(Scott McNealy)(Carly Fiorina)(Brief Article)
June 13, 2005... Sun CEO Scott McNealy told a Wall Street Journal conference that he tried to partner with HP to create a common front against IBM and IBM Global Services but Carly turned him down. "I'll call Mark," he reportedly said, meaning Carly's...

India posts & BPL Mobile ally.(Brief Article)
June 13, 2005... With traditional mail in decline, India Posts and BPL Mobile have allied. Starting June 13, BPL Mobile is going to use India Posts' network in Tamil Nadu, a state in southern India, to market its prepaid cards, recharge coupons, and accept...

USPS testing hybrid electric vehicle.(United States Postal Service )(Brief Article)
June 13, 2005... Azure Dynamics Corporation, a developer of hybrid electric vehicles and electric powertrains for commercial and military use, has delivered a so-called series hybrid electric delivery vehicle to the United States Postal Service for in-service...

Red Hat enters directory, identity management market.
June 13, 2005... Red Hat's getting ready to take its next really big plunge, a move that's supposed to help it trash Novell and go mano a mano with Microsoft's fabled infrastructure. By mid-month, it's supposed to release the Red Hat Directory Server,...

Novell tries to tickle Linux desktop app development.(Brief Article)
June 13, 2005... Novell has set up a so-called Mono Kickstart program to support first-time developers using the open source Mono project for new application development or migrations. It's supposed to create desktop Linux applications. Mono is the...

IBM extends X3 Architecture to 32-way.(Brief Article)
June 13, 2005... IBM has upped the ante on its three-month-old eServer X3 Architecture and introduced a four-way box that scales to 32-way called the xSeries 460 meant for always-on environments. Not exactly unexpected. The entry x460 configuration...

Is Lawson a PeopleSoft-JD Edwards replay?(Software industry)
June 13, 2005... Lawson Software, which has been down in everybody's book as consolidator road kill, up and turned contrarian. Instead of getting gobbled up, it's going to acquire Sweden's Intentia International and try to become a "global leader in...

E-mail leans on the phone.(Brief Article)
June 13, 2005... E-mail is passing the phone as the favorite communication medium for work and play, according to a 12-month study by Reachon.com, a Miami-based permission-based e-mail marketing service. E-mail is so compelling that 20% of the 10,000 people...

Swiss Post hit by phishing scam.
June 20, 2005... Depositors of PostFinance, the financial services arm of the Swiss Post, have been targeted by an e-mail phishing scam aimed at stealing their money. The post said the e-mails, in English and first sent the night of June 4-5, asked the...

AuthentiDate sued.(00000000)(Brief Article)
June 20, 2005... AuthentiDate says that since it had that June 2 conference call with investors when it claimed it couldn't understand why the United States Postal Service was threatening to revoke its Electronic Postmark franchise because it hasn't met its...

USPS awards eSPIN contract to Servigistics.(United States Postal Service)(Enhanced Spare Parts Initiative)(Brief Article)
June 20, 2005... The United States Postal Service has hired Servigistics to transform its nationwide service parts operations as part of its new Enhanced Spare Parts (eSPIN) Initiative. The USPS has more than $350 million in service parts inventory...

eFunds buys WildCard.
June 20, 2005... eFunds Corporation, whose e-payment software is used by the USPS, is buying WildCard Systems Inc, a privately held VC-backed vendor of prepaid cards and stored value solutions to financial institutions, retailers and other payment issuers. ...

Epost contemplates critical mass.(Brief Article)
June 20, 2005... Nearly 300,000 Canadians signed up for epost, Canada Post's e-bill service, in the first three months of this year, according to epost CEO Roger Couldrey, a fact attributed to the unit's acquisition of webdox, its primary competitor, last July....

Neopost buys BTA.(Brief Article)
June 20, 2005... Paris-based Neopost has acquired BTA, a 19-year-old Swiss software company specializing in print and mail flow management. The price was not disclosed. BTA's applications optimize postage costs by sorting the mail by zip code or grouping...

Harte-Hanks creates ADQ portal.(Brief Article)
June 20, 2005... Harte-Hanks Inc, a worldwide direct and targeted marketing company, has created ADQ Direct, an online portal that's supposed to leverage the Harte-Hanks Advanced Data Quality (ADQ) service for verifying, correcting and enhancing multi-channel...

USPS Web site deemed user-friendly.(United States. Postal Service)(Brief Article)
June 20, 2005... The WiredSafety Group has cited the United States Postal Service as having the most consumer-friendly web site among the agencies considered for The Best of the Web--Government Award. Others who were recognized include Microsoft Canada, the...

Apple packs its bags, leaves IBM for Intel: think different's not so different any more.(Apple Computer Inc. ends contract with IBM and ties up with Intel Corp.)
June 20, 2005... Apple CEO Steve Jobs said that "It's true." In a move that's widely believed to show that Apple has lost its cotton pickin' mind, Jobs confirmed that Apple is trashing its long-standing chip relationship with IBM and the PowerPC and will...

Oh?(Brief Article)
June 20, 2005... "Future 'Mactel' computers will have specially designated Intel chips, not generic x86-compatible chips found in common PCs. My sources say that Jobs is going to use Intel's cryptographic technology called LaGrande to make sure OS X will only...

Will Apple play taps over Linux?(Apple Computer)(Brief Article)
June 20, 2005... "It's quite possible that this new Apple strategy while obviously harmful to the computer makers in general and to Microsoft somewhat could actually be most dangerous to the emerging Linux OS environment. In fact it could kill Linux and in some...

Jobs: more Osbourne than Osbourne.(Brief Article)
June 20, 2005... "This really smells of Steve Jobs throwing a hissy fit that IBM has not kissed his ring nearly enough while they were off creating multicore designs for Microsoft, Sony and Nintendo. The strange thing is that one suspects that all these...

Transitive is Rosetta's Champollion.(Brief Article)
June 20, 2005... The technology under Rosetta, the dynamic binary translator that Apple's got that's supposed to automatically translate existing OS X programs to Intel code, hails from Transitive Corporation, the UK outfit whose first customer was SGI and...

Oracle buys TimesTen.(Brief Article)
June 20, 2005... Oracle says it's buying TimesTen Inc, the privately held real-time data management ISV that spun out of HP and has been run for eight of its nine years by James Groff, the guy who ran Apple's old Newton flier. Having been through...

CA spends $350m on Niku.(Computer Associates )
June 20, 2005... Computer Associates is buying Niku Corporation, now an IT management and governance house, for $350 million cash, or $21 a share, a 27% premium. With the money Niku's got in the bank, CA will really be laying out only $285 million. ...

CA poaches BEA exec.(Brief Article)
June 20, 2005... Computer Associates has poached BEA's senior VP, EMEA Andrew Dutton to run its EMEA operation, pointing out that EMEA is critical to it. It looks like it may be a surprise to BEA. Dutton is an old IBM hand who used to run Asia-Pac for IBM...

Siebel feeds meat-hungry shareholders watery gruel.(Siebel Systems Inc.'s investor relations)(Brief Article)
June 20, 2005... Siebel's solution to that $2.2 billion it's got in bank not doing its irritated shareholders much good, while it lost money in the first quarter and missed its revenues forecasts, is to declare a two-and-a-half-cent dividend payable July 15,...

StorageTek, Sun's new satellite, branches off into disk.(Storage Technology Corp. launches IntelliStore disk-and-tape drive)
June 20, 2005... StorageTek, the old tape maven, is branching off into disk archiving in competition with EMC Centera and IBM. In its first product announcement since Sun disclosed that it's buying the company for $4.1 billion, StorageTek launched IntelliStore,...

NonStops make the great trek.(Hewlett-Packard Co. develops new products HP Integrity NonStops with Intel status)(Brief Article)
June 20, 2005... HP's NonStop machines, the old Tandem fault-tolerant boxes that it inherited from Compaq, have finally migrated, as promised, to the Montecito Itanium chip that HP isn't quite as fond of as it used to be. As a result, they are now called...

HP thin clients undergo heart transplant.(Hewlett-Packard Co. to use chipsets from VIA Technologies Inc.)(Brief Article)
June 20, 2005... Hewlett-Packard is replacing the Transmeta chips in its thin client with Via widgets. Via says the new HP Compaq t5125, t5520 and t5525 thin clients will use its low-power Eden Platform. Eden features 128MB of RAM, up to 256MB of Compact...

Unisys goes on-demand.( Real Time Capacity (RTC) series )(Brief Article)
June 20, 2005... Unisys has gone on-demand with its ES7000 servers. It's now got a so-called Real Time Capacity (RTC) series of boxes that are supposed to scale as customers need capacity. It calls it "an industry first for customers running Intel-based...

Make that Black-and-Blueberry.(Brief Article)
June 20, 2005... Microsoft will be going after the Blackberry PDA later this year, according to Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer. It will give away Exchange and Windows Mobile upgrades so 130 million Outlook people can access corporate email on Windows-based...

Pro se antitrust suit against the GPL docketed.(Brief Article)
June 20, 2005... Well, this little bit of news is going to put the Linux crowd in high dudgeon. Daniel Wallace's pro se antitrust suit against the Free Software Foundation and GPL for price-fixing has survived its first test. Considering it's a pro se...

Merrill trashes Sun deal.(Brief Article)
June 20, 2005... "If Sun management called the HP/Compaq merger the collision of two garbage trucks, what is a Sun/StorageTek combination?"--Merrill Lynch. "Sun needs to attract new customers to make the deal work," the broker added. For that to happen it...

Linux may be hitting the wall: Cowen.(survey)(Brief Article)
June 20, 2005... SG Cowen thinks it's found the "first indication" that Linux adoption "may be hitting a wall." It surveys 500 North American companies every quarter and last September 56% said they were running business apps on Linux servers with 14%...

Microsoft royalties on protocols foil Samba.
June 20, 2005... Microsoft proposed a last-minute deal to keeps the European Commission from fining it $5 million a day for not complying with its 15-month-old antitrust order that basically freezes the open source community, specifically the Samba project,...

It ain't puppy love.(Brief Article)
June 20, 2005... "Open source is free like a puppy is free."--Sun CEO Scott McNealy, suggesting its high maintenance and needs cleaning up after.

Will Acer be HP's Lenovo?(Brief Article)
June 20, 2005... The Inquirer claims to have heard rumors--and it underscores the word rumors--that HP may dump its PC business and that the prime candidate to buy it is Acer. It also mentions Fujitsu Siemens as a possibility.

HP names new CMO from the printer side.(Brief Article)
June 20, 2005... What does this tell you? Mark Hurd, the new boy at HP, has named the senior VP of business imaging and printing Cathy Lyons to be the company's new chief marketing officer, a job that Mike Winkler had. Winkler, once a PC guy, now gets...

Kleiner-backed start-up looks for big bucks from PC postage.(Zazzle.com)
June 25, 2005... An online Silicon Valley start-up called Zazzle.com, which just got a $16 million first round from Kleiner Perkins and Sherpalo Ventures, will be putting customized digital artwork on legal US stamps, contributing to the budding American love...

USPS-AuthentiDate impasse: not to decide is to decide.(United States Postal Service negotiations)(Brief Article)
June 25, 2005... The USPS' lingering impasse with AuthentiDate over the viability of their joint EPM franchise has got tongues wagging that--contract discussions notwithstanding--the post office wants out of the deal. AuthentiDate has twice failed to meet...

Certipost leverages Microsoft's RMS widgetry.(Rights Management Services)
June 25, 2005... Certipost, the joint venture of Belgian telecommunication company Belgacom and the Belgian Post, has branched out into protecting Outlook e-mails and Microsoft Office documents to make electronic exchange safer. Certipost is leveraging...

Harry Potter works his magic on USPS & UPS.(Amazon.com Inc. offers Saturday delivery services to its member customers, United Parcel Service of America Inc., United States Postal Service)(Brief Article)
June 25, 2005... The Harry Potter craze created the largest single-product delivery challenge for Amazon.com in its history. Amazon.com had offered a guaranteed Saturday delivery option to customers for the same price as Standard shipping, and Saturday...

Postcard to become an electronic admission ticket.(PostFinance and Kudelski Group to start new service)(Brief Article)
June 25, 2005... PostFinance, the Swiss Post subsidiary, and the Kudelski Group tested the Postcard as an electronic admission ticket from January to April and they have now decided to make the functionality permanent. Starting next summer, Yellow Account...

Bowe Bell + Howell buys BCC software.(Brief Article)
June 25, 2005... Bowe Bell + Howell (BBH), whose automation equipment touches one heck of a lot of mail, has acquired BCC Software Inc, the long-time developer of software for the postal market, on undisclosed terms. The pair describes their products as...

Japan Post to secure ATMs.(automated teller machines)(Brief Article)
June 25, 2005... Japan Post, at risk of losing tie-ups with international credit card companies, will spend hundreds of millions of yen to upgrade the security of its 26,000 ATMs. The upgrades are expected to include sophisticated coding functions and be...

German government sells its last Deutsche Post shares.(Berlin government sell its stocks in Deutsche Post AG, Deutsche Telekom AG)(Brief Article)
June 25, 2005... The German government is out of the post office business. Well, kinda. According to Bloomberg Berlin has sold its stock position in Deutsche Post AG and more of its position in Deutsche Telekom AG to the KfW Group, Germany's state-owned...

HP to whack 14,500 staffers.(Hewlett-Packard Co. to reduce workforce)
June 25, 2005... Hewlett-Packard's new CEO Mark Hurd said early Tuesday morning that he's going to can 14,500 people over a morale-killing year and a half, roughly 10% of HP's work force. Hurd, a lopper by reputation, said he was going to cut HP's staff...

IBM finally kills off OS/2.(International Business Machines Corp)(Brief Article)
June 25, 2005... OS/2, the Windows might-have-been and the source of IBM's hereditary hostility for Microsoft, is finally and irrevocably dead. IBM should have driven a stake through its heart long ago--it frittered away a billion dollars on the thing back...

As the ancients observed, beware of Greeks bearing gifts.(Microsoft Corp. developing new operting system to compete with Linux)(Brief Article)
June 25, 2005... If we've got this right, Microsoft has taken a new approach in dealing with Linux. It's reportedly been seeking out open source projects like Apache trying to entice them to optimize their widgetry on Windows. And if the implementation turns...

Whoops, there goes Norway.(implementing standards in open source code)(Brief Article)
June 25, 2005... According to what we read in the papers Norway would like nothing more than to outlaw the use of proprietary code at all levels of the government. At a press conference the country's minister of modernization Morten Andreas Meyer outlined plans...