ePostal News articles from June 2007

ePostal News archives from June 2007

USPS goes digital to promote Star War stamps.
June 4, 2007... The US Postal Service is hyping sales of its new Star Wars stamps with broadcast-quality video downloads of the production of the new commemorative Stamps series, as well as footage of several Star Wars movies, courtesy of Lucasfilm. ...

Latvia Post opens classrooms to train e-signature users.
June 4, 2007... The Latvia Post and the Salaspils District Council have opened the first computer classroom in Latvia to train e-signature users. The investments made by the district council will make training available not only to pupils, but also to local...

Finland Post to modernize its sorting & distribution process.
June 4, 2007... In the next few years, Finland Post, to be known as Itella Corporation as of June 1, will invest around 150 million euros in its mail processing. The aim is to enhance and improve the processing and handling of mail and, it says, "ensure a...

Royal Mail signs with Lockheed Martin for more recognition services.
June 4, 2007... Lockheed Martin UK is to provide additional address recognition services to the Royal Mail as an extension of the current Address Interpretation (AI) program. Under the extended contract, Lockheed Martin will provide address recognition...

La Poste & Royal Mail order Northrop Grumman automation systems.
June 4, 2007... Solystic, the French-based postal automation subsidiary of Northrop Grumman Corporation, has been awarded contracts from La Poste and Royal Mail to install 40 of its TOP2000 high-performance sorting machines for oversize mail. Each of...

Hasler partners with Rena GmbH to introduce new address printing solutions.
June 4, 2007... Hasler has partnered with the maker of addressing technology, Rena GmbH, to begin selling several new models in its HJ addressing and printing systems line. Designed to produce a professional printed image on a variety of mailings and eliminate...

Endicia upgraded to new US rates.
June 4, 2007... With the new US postage rates in effect, including shape-based pricing, simplified international mail classes, and new international discounts that offer online shippers significant savings, Endicia says its full line of Internet Postage...

Google-Salesforce whipers get louder.
June 4, 2007... Those Wall Street whispers about an alliance between Google and Salesforce.com we told you about graduated to the Wall Street Journal, which is expecting some of Google's SaaS productivity tools like e-mail and instant messaging to be mated...

Microsoft spends midas-like $6b chasing Google.
June 4, 2007... You know of course that Microsoft, supposedly thwarted in previous bids for other Google-adjusting properties, is paying $6 billion cash for aQuantive, a 10-year-old publicly held Internet ad company most people never heard of before Microsoft...

AMD brags about Puma.
June 4, 2007... AMD dreams about its Centrino-like Puma widgetry, called its "first explicitly mobile platform," mauling Santa Rosa as though the new Intel device had been thrown to wild beasts in the arena. However, Santa Rosa is here and Puma notebooks...

And the envelope, please.
June 4, 2007... Q1 server scores are out. According to Gartner IBM wins on revenues like it always does. HP wins on units sold. Dell's market share sunk further. Ditto Sun. However, IDC's numbers, which are calculated slightly differently, say that HP...

Business Objects enjoined.
June 4, 2007... Informatica has gotten a permanent injunction against Business Objects shipping its infringing Data Integrator software. A jury found in April that Data Integrator infringed Informatica data transformation patents, the stuff of reuse, and...

Lenovo seems to be recovering from ingesting IBM PCs.
June 4, 2007... When last seen Lenovo was busy losing market share to Acer, and had slipped from third to fourth place worldwide. Now, having posted its March numbers it's got its fingers crossed that it's making back some ground. It thinks it's gained...

Dell's Linux PC go on sale.
June 4, 2007... Congratulating itself on how quickly it was responding to customer demand, Dell US has started selling two consumer desktops and a notebook fitted with a factory-loaded copy of the new Ubuntu Linux 7.04, making it the first of the major OEMs to...

Centro & Cougar next year.
June 4, 2007... Microsoft is supposed to ship Centro, a mid-market version of Windows Server 2008, a k a Longhorn, next year as well as a small business version code named Cougar.

iPhone gets FCC okay.
June 4, 2007... Apple has gotten FCC approval for the iPhone, a hurdle that had to be cleared before the pricey GSM-based widget's launch in the US through AT & T reportedly on June 20.

A Google kind of wedding present.
June 4, 2007... Google has put $3.9 million in 23andMe Inc, the pre-launch biotech start-up of Google co-founder Sergey Brin's new bride Anne Wojcicki, according to an SEC filing. Some of the money was used to repaid the $2.6 million billionaire Brin...

Kinko's Print Online teams with Adobe.
June 18, 2007... FedEx Kinko's, the FedEx property, and Adobe Systems are collaborating to extend the reach of Kinko's Print Online application to users of Adobe Reader and Adobe Acrobat software. Both of the popular Adobe software applications will feature...

Digital signature services standardized.
June 18, 2007... OASIS has Digital Signature Services (DSS) 1.0. The spec defines an XML interface to process digital signatures for web services and other applications, enabling the sharing of digital signature creation and verification without complex client...

Hasler postal Accountant tracks & manages mailing costs.
June 18, 2007... Hasler has introduced what it calls an easy-to-use, cost-effective mail accounting software package that collects, accounts for and reports mailing information from a variety of mailing systems. The company says users will be able to...

eBay & Royal Mail cuddle up.
June 18, 2007... eBay and Royal Mail have joined forces so eBay sellers can pay for and print off postage stamps online direct from the eBay site. The eBay web site will let sellers price and book for collection. The solution prints off labels and electronic...

Authentidate sells off pieces.(Brief article)
June 18, 2007... Authentidate, the outfit that had such a devil of a time peddling the USPS' Electronic Postmark that the post office is looking for new partners, has completed the previously announced sale of its Document Management (DocStar) and Systems...

Russia & China sign postal money order pact.(Brief article)
June 18, 2007... Russia and China are going to be exchanging electronic money orders following an agreement signed by the Russian and Chinese posts on June 5. It is the Russian Post's first foreign postal order partner. Even with IT they expect a mean...

ITU & UPU pledge to develop postal services.
June 18, 2007... The International Telecommunications Union (ITU) and the Universal Postal Union (UPU) have renewed their intention of using the postal network to bring new technologies closer to people. At a recent conference on "The postal sector and the...

Stalemate in Europe.(Brief article)
June 18, 2007... The European Union is deadlocked over further liberalization of the old postal regime and has pushed back the chance of any resolution until the second half of the year. It looks like it's certain different countries will go now at different...

Viet Nam Post to spin off.
June 18, 2007... The Viet Nam Post and Telecommunications Group is supposed to spin off a new Viet Nam Postal Corporation on July 1, according to the Viet Nam News agency. The new company will have total equity of $500 million. It's supposed to be...

LG to pay Microsoft Linux tax.
June 18, 2007... Microsoft has signed still another of those patent cross-license that will set the open source community off because it claims to indemnify the licensees' use of Linux. This one is with LG Electronics (LGE) and Microsoft's announcement says...

Salesforce to sell Google ads.
June 18, 2007... So Salesforce.com is gonna be a distribution channel for Google ads. That's what their big, widely leaked alliance is all about; other things like integrating Google's e-mail and Google's online productivity apps into Salesforce could...

Microsoft buys interoperability house.
June 18, 2007... Microsoft has bought a little privately held Cincinnati firm called Engyro. A Microsoft partner, Engyro extends the interoperability of System Center Operations Manager 2007. Its Product Connector Suite lets Operations Manager share...

Sun tries to get in the blades game.
June 18, 2007... Hoping to play tag with HP and IBM, which are a league ahead of it in blades--collectively they hold 76% of the market--Sun introduced its Sun Blade 6000 Modular System designed by Sun's billionaire co-founder Andy Bechtolsheim. Sun has...

Rampant capitalist versus Ivory Tower academe.
June 18, 2007... Intel is working with Taiwan-based Asustek Computer on a counter to One Laptop Per Child's AMD-based currently $175 XO notebooks. The full-fledged Intel-Asustek PC will start at $199 and go to $299. Other than a low-end Intel chip, the...

Oracle adds to charges in SAP suit.
June 18, 2007... Oracle has added copyright infringement and breach of contract claims to the damages-seeking federal suit against SAP that it filed in March. The German is already charged with "corporate theft on a grand scale," fraud, unfair competition...

Google buys FeedBurner.(Brief article)
June 18, 2007... Google has bought a site called FeedBurner that distributes and helps manage blogs and RSS feeds, tracks usage and serves ads. It supports 721,000 feeds representing upwards of 400,000 publishers. Google will put more ads on those feeds giving...

More virtual still: the rented VM.(VMware Inc.)(Brief article)
June 18, 2007... On the cusp of its IPO, VMware is spreading into hosting. It announced a Service Provider Program for web hosting services, telecommunications companies and outsourcers to use its Infrastructure Suite to sell virtual servers as a service...

Microsoft acquires MDM company.
June 18, 2007... Microsoft has acquired Georgia-based Stratature, a 16-man company skilled in what they call master data management (MDM), which is apparently unified across SQL Server, business intelligence and SharePoint. Terms were not disclosed. ...

Microsoft spits in GPL 3's eye.
June 18, 2007... Goodness, didn't Microsoft just spit in Richard Stallman's eye? The GPL creator's attempts to stop Microsoft from cutting any more of those patent-protection deals like the one it cut with Novell don't quite seem to be working. The...

"Last call" GPL 3 draft out.
June 18, 2007... The Free Software Foundation (FSF) has released what it terms the "last call" draft of GPLv3, giving the industry until June 28 to comment. It expects the license to go into service on June 29. Novell's reaction was one of semi-relief. ...

Red Hat & Symantec pair.
June 18, 2007... Red Hat and Symantec have wheeled out what they call secure server bundles for SMBs, either Red Hat Enterprise Linux or the Red Hat Application Stack combined with Symantec Critical System Protection for both pre-configured and...

Dell exploring services.
June 18, 2007... Michael Dell told the Financial Times that he is contemplating a series of acquisitions and partnerships that would turn Dell into more of a services business. Seems that despite IBM growth hiccups with services, Dell's $6 billion services...

Sun says Apple will use its file system.
June 18, 2007... Sun's chatty CEO Jonathan Schwartz breached Apple security and publicly disclosed that Leopard, Apple's next-generation operating system, is going to substitute Sun's 128-bit open source ZFS file system for its nine-year-old HFS+. ZFS pools...

AOL report card due by end of year.
June 18, 2007... Time Warner will decide whether the remade AOL is a viable business with sustainable growth or not by the end of the year, according to what CEO Richard Parson told a webcast Merrill Lynch conference. He didn't say what would happen if it...

Authentidate hooks its signature widgetry to SAP.
June 25, 2007... Authentidate Deutschland GmbH, the German subsidiary of the USPS' indifferent Electronic Postmark peddler, has gotten its eBilling Connector 30.1 for electronic invoicing certified as "Powered by SAP NetWeaver." That means it can integrate...

USPS takes to first-ever infomercial.
June 25, 2007... The United States Postal Service has spent this week touting its services in a first-time 28-minute infomercial on a bunch of TV channels. The ad consists of a series of business success stories, each highlighting an online service...

Stopthejunkmail.com kicks off its web site.
June 25, 2007... Much to the annoyance of the United States Postal Service, which gets upwards of half its income from junk mail, Colorado-based Stopthejunkmail.com just launched its new brand (a felled tree) and consumer web site. For 20 bucks a year, it...

South Korea post to help Vietnam post modernize.
June 25, 2007... The Korean Post has agreed to help the Viet Nam postal service develop and modernize its IT systems under a newly minted memorandum of understanding signed by the head of VNPT's Media Department, Do Ngoc Binh, and Korean Post director general...

Netposti proves popular.(Brief article)
June 25, 2007... Finland Post says its Netposti consumer electronic transaction service is becoming increasing popular. In May the service covered over 2,000 sender companies or communities sending over 62 million letters annually; consumers can get...

Wanted: ways of beating back private money transfer players.
June 25, 2007... The Emirates Post reports that a conference on electronic transfers through the postal network in Arab countries held recently in Damascus highlighted the need for greater coordination among Arab countries to tap the potential for growing the...

BCC to distribute USPS' SuiteLink.
June 25, 2007... BCC Software, the Bowe Bell + Howell units that develops high-performance solutions for professional mailers, is going to carry the United States Postal Service's SuiteLink software. Mailers will be able to add SuiteLink processing to any...

European liberalization reportedly delayed.(Brief article)
June 25, 2007... Well, it looks like Europe's best-laid postal liberalization plans are doomed to delay. The European Parliament's three main parties have reportedly agreed to push back the deadline to the beginning of 2011, two years later than proposed....

Brazil adds barcodes to its electronic postcode list.
June 25, 2007... Brazil's 2007 electronic guide to postcodes now comes with what's called Enderecador Office. The Windows-based CD-ROM tool apparently lets shippers generate labels with barcodes representing the postcodes of the addresses they're sending...

Canadian start-up uses a puck to rethink the enterprise PC.
June 25, 2007... There's a fabless semiconductor start-up hidden away out of sight in Vancouver, British Columbia that been rethinking the problem of thin clients and the so-called PC Blade for the last three years. And now that it's got the necessary...

Linspire next to pay for patent protection.
June 25, 2007... My goodness, they're starting to fall like nine pins. Linux distributor Linspire has followed Novell and Xandros into a patent protection deal with Microsoft despite the fire-breathing, contract-scorching wrath of the Free Software...

HP revs its PC blades.
June 25, 2007... HP has produced its third-generation PC blade solution, which it calls a Consolidated Client Infrastructure (CCI). (Well, actually it's its fourth set of blades but who's counting.) This stuff includes two new blade PCs and Remote Graphics...

Google claims Microsoft's violating its consent decree.
June 25, 2007... The Justice Department has brushed off a complaint from Google alleging that Microsoft is violating its 2002 consent decree because Vista supposedly discourages users from using Google's local desktop search as opposed to Vista's own. The...

Google called "endemic threat to privacy".
June 25, 2007... Privacy International says Google, the self-proclaimed "do no evil company," has an "entrenched hostility to privacy," a rating shared by no other web site it has been following. The British watchdog put out an interim report over the weekend...

Apple puts its Safari browser on Windows.
June 25, 2007... Apple has put its Safari browser on Windows, a browser that isn't even supposed to be the best browser for the Mac. Immediately the move was cast as a reprise of the browser wars and by jingo within 48 hours Apple was reporting more than a...

Industry unites to save the world.
June 25, 2007... Intel and Google together with Dell, EDS, the Environmental Protection Agency, HP, IBM, Lenovo, Microsoft, Pacific Gas and Electric, the World Wildlife Fund and a dozen other organizations say they're going to form the Climate Savers Computing...

Think Linus will defer to Sun on GPLv3?
June 25, 2007... Linux creator Linus Torvalds thinks the last GPLv3 draft is better than earlier drafts, but he still doesn't like it much, preferring the existing GPLv2 that the Linux kernel is currently licensed under. He has problems with the GPL 3's ban...

Adobe takes web 2.0 to the desktop.
June 25, 2007... Adobe has delivered itself of a public beta of Flex 3, a free open source cross-platform framework for creating Rich Internet Applications (RIAs) except they don't necessarily have to run on the Internet. The Flex 3 drop includes a...

War debt.
June 25, 2007... Although PC units are expected to be up 10% this year, the Semiconductor Industry Association has slashed its 2007 revenue growth forecasts from 10% to 1.8%, citing the sharp decline in the ASPs of processors, DRAM chips and NAND Flash. It's...

Acer blames Vista.
June 25, 2007... Acer, complaining about the slow consumer adoption of Vista, has trimmed its PC shipment projections back from over 40% growth to only 30%-40%.