ePostal News articles from June 2008

ePostal News archives from June 2008

Israel Post Turns Branches into Hot Spots.
June 16, 2008... 012 Smile.Communications says it has nearly completed deploying an advanced broadband wireless Internet access network in 42 branches of Israel Post, Israel's national postal service. The company won a tender that set the terms under which it's...

Spanish Post Hires IBM.
June 16, 2008... The Spanish Post has hired IBM to implement the latest technologies available to guarantee the efficiency and quality of its information systems. For 1.8 million euros Big Blue is supposed to deploy and maintain a new corporate IT architecture...

Big Brown Comes A Cropper.
June 16, 2008... Big Brown, the odds-on favorite to become the first Triple Crown winner in 30 years and everybody's pet - the namesake of the world's biggest express carrier and carrying the company's colors - officially never finished the race Saturday that,...

Japan Post Wants Electric Vans.
June 16, 2008... Japan Post Service Company, the delivery arm of the Japan Post Group, wants to switch its entire fleet of about 21,000 short-distance delivery vehicles to zero-emission electric cars starting this year, according to Reuters. It's talking to...

FedEx Kinko's Becomes FedEx Office.
June 16, 2008... FedEx is changing the name of FedEx Kinko's, the copy shop retail chain it bought, to FedEx Office, and will be taking a $891 million non-cash charge to do it ($696 million, net of tax, or $2.22 per diluted share) in its fiscal fourth quarter,...

DHL's Yellow Planes Turn Brown in the US.
June 16, 2008... As a tourniquet to staunch the billions it's lost in America the last four years, Deutsche Post's express delivery unit DHL will be depending on the US Postal Service and rival UPS to make a lot of its state-side deliveries. But even if it...

Greece Post Faces Privatization.
June 16, 2008... Greece reportedly wants to sell its state-run Hellenic Post this year, ahead of EC-mandated deregulation in 2013. It could find a partner, it told Reuters, or list company shares on the Athens bourse and then find a strategic investor. Twenty...

Ex-Deutsche Post CEO Under New Investigation.
June 16, 2008... Klaus Zumwinkel, the former head of Deutsche Post, who resigned in February following charges of tax evasion, is now also under criminal investigation to see if he, as chairman of Deutsche Telekom, played any part in the phone company spying on...

Signature Verification in Eight Languages.
June 16, 2008... Authentidate, still the USPS' sole EPM provider, says its Signature-Check Web Service (www.signature-check.com) can create signature verification reports on electronically signed documents in eight languages including English, German, French,...

USPS Offers Green Suggestions.
June 16, 2008... The US Postal Service claims to be offering greener choices, and an easy online resource for consumers to make environmentally friendly decisions about their mail. Its site, usps.com/green, is supposed to list hundreds of facts, suggestions and...

Deutsche Post Doesn't Own the Word 'Post,' Court Says.
June 16, 2008... A Germany high court told Deutsche Post it can't stop competitors from using the word Post in their name provided they use qualifiers.

Direct Mail Debate.
June 16, 2008... According to a survey of 1,000 people run up for An Post by Dublin consultants Amarach, two-thirds of adults hate direct mail, yet 61% of them read all the direct mail they get though 70% find most of it "irrelevant" and 80% figure it should be...

Ah, Yahoo.
June 16, 2008... In case you've been held incommunicado lately, Yahoo's twice-delayed stockholders meeting, which it pushed off until the end of July after legendary corporate raider Carl Icahn threatened a proxy fight for control of the board, is now scheduled...

South Korea Fines Intel; FTC Opens Formal Investigation.
June 16, 2008... Intel has been fined $25.4 million by South Korean regulators for abusing its dominant position and discounting its microprocessors, thereby freezing AMD out of the market. The Federal Trade Commission, under pressure to look as tough as...

Microsoft Keeps XP Around.
June 16, 2008... Microsoft says it's going to ride the nettop wave and push XP, which is supposed to die this month, onto the ultra low-cost devices meant to put e-mail, web browsing and instant messages in your pocket. It says it's working with 20 OEMs. It's...

IBM Takes New Anti-Office Tack.
June 16, 2008... IBM is starting to monetize Lotus Symphony, its freebie collection of Office-displacing ODF-based software for creating and sharing documents, spreadsheets and presentations - but not for the money. It's offering unlimited subscription-based...

The Great MID Rollout Begins.
June 16, 2008... Intel hit Computex with enough design-wins in hand to put its newfangled netbook-, nettop- and MID-bound Atom chips in short supply at least for the next six-eight weeks, it said. The manufacturing giant had already confessed to hiccups with...

Microsoft Does Search Deal with HP; Pushes Yahoo Out.
June 16, 2008... HP, which has previously given the space to Yahoo, is going pre-install a Silverlight-based Live Search-enabled toolbar on all consumer PCs it ships in the US and Canada starting in January. That's when the HP-Yahoo deal expires. The default...

Sun Jumps the Gun on Flash.
June 16, 2008... Sun is rushing in where other server vendor have so far feared to tread and says that starting in the second half it will offer servers and storage based on Flash, the pricey kind of widgetry found in cell phones and MP3 players. It claims it...

Puma Uncaged.
June 16, 2008... AMD has announced its next-generation Centrino-chasing notebook platform Puma, touting it as delivering the "ultimate HD visual performance" as well as increased energy efficiency. It's depending on the widgetry to fix some of the $4.3 billion...

And Next We Have the All-Singing, All-Dancing PDF Plus an Adobe Cloud.(Adobe Systems Inc.)(Brief article)
June 16, 2008... Adobe says Acrobat 9.0, a major upgrade, will be available in July and in three different versions: Standard, Pro and Pro Extended. It will be sold standalone and Pro will be integrated into Adobe's Creative Suite 3.3 Design Premium and...

Nvidia Joins the MIDs Race.
June 16, 2008... Nvidia - which Intel might say discounts the processor - has gone into competition against Intel and its tiny Atom MPU with a non-x86 family of processors called Tegra described as the first single-chip computer capable of accessing rich...

Sun's Sales Boss Jumps to HP; Sun Reorgs Sales.
June 16, 2008... HP has named Don Grantham, Sun's global sales and service boss, and an ex-IBMer, its chief sales officer responsible for enterprise accounts and public sector sales as well as sales to the communications, media and entertainment, financial and...

Microsoft Suffers Setback in Avistar Patent Challenge.
June 16, 2008... In the name of its unified communications interests and having failed to come to licensing terms, Microsoft a few months ago asked the Patent and Trademark Office to re-examine all 29 of Avistar Communications' patents, which cover stuff like...

Credit Suisse Enters the Virtualization Management Biz.
June 16, 2008... Is there anyone out there who's not in the virtualization game? Credit Suisse, the big broker and investment banker, has launched an independent company called DynamicOps LLC, quietly formed in January, to market a virtual machine management...

Brazil, India & Venezuela Join South Africa in Objecting to OOXML Standardization.
June 16, 2008... At the eleventh hour Brazil, India and Venezuela joined South Africa in appealing ISO's highly politicized standardization of Microsoft's Office Open XML (OOXML) file format. Meanwhile, the Danish Open Source Business Association has protested...

Google Moves Desktop Gadgets to Linux.
June 16, 2008... Google has put out the beginnings of Desktop Gadgets for Linux and is distributing the source code under the Apache 2.0 license. Gadgets are mini-applets that form part of the Google Desktop. They've only been available until now for Windows...

Uncle Walt Lauds Firefox 3.0.(Brief article)
June 16, 2008... Release Candidate 2 of Firefox 3 is out. The final ship date is still mid-June. Walt Mossberg, the Wall Street Journal's Petronius Arbiter, says it's "the best web browser out there right now, and that tops the current versions of both IE and...

Windows 7 Sighted.
June 16, 2008... Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer previewed Windows 7 at the Wall Street Journal's D6 conference in California. The next-generation operating system is due in late 2009, Ballmer said, confirming what we reported weeks ago, which probably means...

Now That's Penetration.
June 16, 2008... There were 3.3 billion cell phone users in the world at the end of last year according to the International Telecommunications Union. That's 49% of the world's population. The global annual growth rate was 22%.

Group 1 & MapInfo Support SQL Server 2008.
June 23, 2008... Pitney Bowes' Group 1 Software and its MapInfo unit are both supporting Microsoft's SQL Server 2008. Group 1's new Communications Intelligence (CI) Platform for address and mail management will support the database and MapInfo will support...

PB Offers New E-Commerce Services.
June 23, 2008... Pitney Bowes has introduced two new international mail services in response to increased demand for package solutions and customized one-to-one marketing. Its Small Package Mail Service is a new duty delivery paid solution for small packages...

Melissa Unveils New UAA Solution.(Brief article)
June 23, 2008... Melissa Data, a developer of high-performance mailing technology solutions, has released a new web service called SmartMover, a real-time move-update solution that is supposed to improve mail deliverability by processing mailing lists against...

Deutsche Post Complains to the EC.
June 23, 2008... Deutsche Post World Net AG and Deutsche Post Selekt Mail have complained to the European Commission about the Netherlands dragging its feet on opening its mail market. In May the Dutch government pushed back the end of its mail monopoly...

Spanish Post Lines Up Support.
June 23, 2008... The Spanish Post has given T-Systems a contract worth close to four million euros to maintain and service its computer equipment. T-Systems is part of Deutsche Telekom. The deal, part of the post's Integra modernization program, covers 2,600...

Kenya To Chair UPS Summit.(Universal Postal Congress )(Brief article)
June 23, 2008... Kenya will chair the 24th Universal Postal Congress in Geneva from July 23 to August 12 as well as UPU's Council of Administration for 2009-2012, which is responsible for overseeing the organization's finances, international postal regulations...

Cable TV Offshoot Adopts RPost's Registered E-Mail.
June 23, 2008... Cox Business, an offshoot of the third-largest cable TV company in the United States, has started offering RPost's registered e-mail solution to expedite the processing of service orders previously executed with paper contracts sent via postal...

No Deal! Microsoft-Yahoo Talks Collapse Again; Microsoft Leaves the Door Ajar - Is It Over? Is It Really Over? Hmmm.
June 23, 2008... Talks between Yahoo and Microsoft have failed for the second time. Yahoo said that Microsoft has refused to buy Yahoo for $33 a share, the price Microsoft offered May 3 and then pulled off the table when Yahoo's co-founders held out for...

Yahoo Cuts Deal with the Devil.
June 23, 2008... After failing to come to terms with Microsoft, and with antitrust regulators hovering in the background, Yahoo has gone and cut that death-defying deal on search advertising with arch-rival Google saying the agreement could clear $800 million...

Yahoo Biggie Quits.
June 23, 2008... Jeff Weiner, a key Yahoo executive, a Semel holdover second, they say, only to CEO Jerry Yang, isn't waiting around to collect on any controversial severance plan; he's leaving Yahoo reportedly to become an entrepreneur-in-residence at both...

Neelie Takes to the Soapbox.
June 23, 2008... Europe's antitrust chief Neelie Kroes, who has now taken on the role of open standards evangelist, gave a speech at OpenForum Europe the other day recommending that business and government adopt "open standards." "Open standards" in Neelie's...

Apple Hits the Pause Button.
June 23, 2008... Apple is in features-lockout mode as far Snow Leopard, the next edition of its operating system, goes. There aren't going to be many of new ones. Apple calls it "hitting the pause button." Instead it's concentrating on supporting increasingly...

iPhone 3G Only Looks Cheaper.
June 23, 2008... Apple has a history of carriage trade pricing, and, although such practices cost it the PC market - while imbuing it with a certain cachet - the policy was enshrined in the original iPhone. For the first time Apple is sorta kinda changing its...

WiMAX Supporters Form Patent Pool.
June 23, 2008... Intel, Alcatel-Lucent, Cisco, Clearwire, Samsung and Sprint have formed the Open Patent Alliance (OPA) in hopes of ensuring the future of WiMAX with a patent pool that helps participating companies get access to WiMAX patent licenses at a...

You Can Never Be Too Rich or Too Thin.(Brief article)
June 23, 2008... HP, which is trying to be stylish, is going up against Apple's MacBook Air with a Voodoo Envy notebook that's all of 0.70-inches deep and weighs 3.37 pounds wrapped in a carbon fiber skin. It's supposed to boot in seconds to access a browser...

FTC Starts Formally Investigating Intel for Antitrust.
June 23, 2008... The Federal Trade Commission has decided to formally investigate Intel for antitrust for pushing AMD to the wall with its sales incentives, an answer to a prayer AMD has been saying for years now. AMD supposedly only brought its mammoth private...

IDC, Gartner Adjust Their Periscopes.
June 23, 2008... IDC and Gartner have boosted their worldwide PC growth projections for the year. IDC thinks shipments will be up 15.2% to 310 million units compared to last year, not 12.8% like it said it March and Gartner puts the number at 12.5% rather than...

AMD & Intel Play Roadmap Leapfrog.
June 23, 2008... Lehman Brothers analyst Tim Luke thinks maybe, just maybe mind, AMD might try to move up Shanghai, the 45nm version of the 65nm Barcelona from 4Q08/1Q09 to 3Q08, which by the calendar is just around the corner. However, he's not giving the...

Firefox 3.0 Due.
June 23, 2008... After three years development and testing, Firefox 3.0, Internet Explorer's nemesis, was released Tuesday, June 17. It's supposed to block phishing scams based on StopBadware.org and Google tips. Mozilla is praying for a record number of...

Vista's Screwed.
June 23, 2008... A survey of 372 IT people, mostly Americans, done by Sanford C Bernstein analyst Chris DiBona last month indicates that Vista isn't selling and, in fact, will take Microsoft revenues down $395 million or two cents a year in the fiscal year...

Jobs Watch.(Steve Jobs chief executive officer at Apple Inc.)(Brief article)
June 23, 2008... As anyone who's seen any of the pictures of the event knows, Apple CEO Steve Jobs looked lousy when he announced iPhone 2.0, which made everybody remember that he was operated on for a rare pancreatic cancer a few years ago after failing with...

Amazon Blacklists the South African Post Office.
June 30, 2008... Amazon.com has halted all deliveries to South Africa via the South African Post Office (Sapo) because of rampant theft, according to local press reports. Amazon already had high-priced goods such as electronics and perfumes on its...

Certipost Claims To Be at a Tipping Point.(Brief article)
June 30, 2008... Certipost, the electronic document exchange celebrating its fifth birthday, is claiming stronger-than-anticipated growth and believes it's on the verge of a tipping point. According to Certipost CEO Stijn Vander Plaetse, "Our market responds...

Earth Class Mail Adds Posh Addresses.(Brief article)
June 30, 2008... Earth Class Mail, the start-up that wants to digitize postal mail, has added three new physical addresses that businesses can use as a remote physical presence to get their postal mail and packages. It says virtual businesses, e-commerce...

FedEx Loses Money.
June 30, 2008... For the first time in 11 years FedEx lost money. It lost money in its fiscal fourth quarter because of that big $696 million one-time impairment charge it warned it was taking to change Kinko's name to FedEx Office. Although it complained...

USPS Hires Rivermine To Contain Telecom Costs.
June 30, 2008... The US Postal Service has hired Rivermine to deploy comprehensive telecom expense management (TEM) solutions for the agency's entire data network nationwide. The value of the contract was not disclosed, but Rivermine's technology is used to...

USPS Working on eBay Solution.
June 30, 2008... The USPS says it's working on a payment solution that will allow eBay buyers and sellers to stay on the eBay site to complete financial transactions or print USPS shipping labels online. Customers will no longer have to migrate to the PayPal...

Spring Global Mail Outsources F&A to Logica.
June 30, 2008... Logica, the European IT and business services house, has picked up a contract from Spring Global Mail to provide finance and accounting business process outsourcing (BPO) for Spring's global operations. Spring Global Mail is the cross-border...

Stamps.com Makes Fortune List.
June 30, 2008... Fortune Small Business magazine has ranked Stamps.com 50th on its annual FSB 100 list of the fastest-growing small public companies. Fortune had the financial research firm Zachs rank companies with annual revenues of less than $200 million and...

Emailvision Partners with Goodmail.
June 30, 2008... Emailvision, a European supplier of on-demand software for e-mail marketing, has partnered with Goodmail Systems on a CertifiedEmail Accreditation program, a premium class of trusted e-mail, to up customer delivery rates and ROI. Emailvision...

UPS Buys Out Korean Joint Venture.
June 30, 2008... UPS is buying up the joint venture it started with Korea Express. UPS, which already owns 60% of the operation, said it want "greater flexibility" to invest in facilities, infrastructure, technology and training. The value of the transaction...

Bush Appointee Sworn in as PRC Commissioner.(Nanci Langley appointed at Postal Regulatory Commission )(Brief article)
June 30, 2008... Nanci Langley, a Bush appointee, has been sworn in as commissioner of the Postal Regulatory Commission (PRC). She replaces former commissioner Dawn Tisdale. She was previously PRC's director of public affairs and government relations. The White...

Start-up Turns Office into Software-as-a-Service.
June 30, 2008... eXpresso, a year-old venture-backed California start-up, has taken Excel to the clouds with Microsoft's blessings. PowerPoint, Word and PDF files are set to follow by the end of the summer. eXpresso webifies legal Excel users and lets them...

Telstra Heads for the Clouds.
June 30, 2008... Telstra, the old Australian phone company before government-owned monopolies became unfashionable and now the country's leading telecom and media house, is going into the Software as a Service (SaaS) business. It's got a platform called...

Armed with a Blade, HP Takes Another Stab at IBM's Mainframe Market.
June 30, 2008... Hewlett-Packard has torn a page out of Sun's book - at least the Sun edition that reads give gear away for free to buy market share - except HP's target is IBM and IBM's precious, profitable mainframe preserve. The notion, called the "NonStop...

China May or May Not Sue Microsoft for Antitrust.
June 30, 2008... So the Shanghai Securities News - sort of the Wall Street Journal of China but basically a government house organ often used for conveying official announcements - reported that Microsoft is being investigated for antitrust violations and might...

eBay Opens Its Site to Third-Party Developers.
June 30, 2008... eBay is opening its site so third-party developers can integrate applications directly into eBay Selling Manager, an online tool for managing and tracking listings on eBay. It's expecting a flurry of sales optimization apps. It says 700,000...

Microsoft To Open Search Center Somewhere in Europe.
June 30, 2008... Microsoft says it's going to open a Search Technology Center in Europe in the fiscal year that starts in July. The center is supposed to "accelerate Microsoft's investments in Live Search and disrupt the search and advertising marketplace to...

Microsoft's Side of the Yahoo Story.
June 30, 2008... In a Microsoft internal e-mail that just "happened" to get out, Microsoft said it lost interest in acquiring all of Yahoo because of Yahoo's foot-dragging and that it offered instead $1 billion for just Yahoo's search operation and another $8...

Microsoft Kinda Moves Offline.
June 30, 2008... Microsoft has bought Navic Networks, a move that puts it in the business of placing TV commercials in near real-time, one of the things that Steve Ballmer may have had in mind when he said there were a lot of things you could do with $50...

It's the Video, Stupid.(Brief article)
June 30, 2008... Having peered into various crystal balls, Cisco figures global Internet traffic will grow 46% a year between now and 2012, nearly doubling every two years. The projection translates into an annual bandwidth demand of more than a half a...

HP & VMware Cozy Up.
June 30, 2008... HP has cuddled up closer to VMware and introduced integrated management software for heterogeneous environments, basically a bunch of business technology optimization (BTO) software that's supposed to automate management across both physical...

Red Hat Adds to the Virtual Clutter.
June 30, 2008... Virtualization solutions have gotten to be about as plentiful as dandelions in the full sunlight - so it will come as no surprise that Red Hat, which never seemed quite happy with its open source Xen widgetry anyway and had less reason to smile...

JBoss Hits Amazon's EC2 Cloud.(Brief article)
June 30, 2008... Red Hat is beta testing its JBoss Enterprise Application Platform as a solution on Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2). It's a way to tickle enterprise adoption of its Java application server. EC2 offers developers, enterprises and start-ups...

After Dizzying 15 Years, Wine Called 'Stable'.
June 30, 2008... It only took 15 years but Wine, the open source Windows rewrite, so to speak, that lets Linux run Windows applications natively, has reached its first stable release, Wine 1.0. Compatibility isn't perfect, the Wine folk say, and not everything...

Sun Upgrades MySQL.
June 30, 2008... Sun has released a new real-time, shared-nothing, carrier-grade version of MySQL called MySQL Cluster Carrier Grade Edition 6.3 certified for use in telecom environments, such as subscriber data management systems (hlr, hss) and service...

Firefox: 8.2m and Counting.
June 30, 2008... After a bit of a breech birth - caused by visitors overloading its web servers - Mozilla released Firefox 3 seeking to set a Guinness World Record for the most downloads in 24 hours as a way to stir up interest and at the same time stick it to...

Oracle Ups Prices: Citigroup.
June 30, 2008... Citigroup analyst Brent Thill figures Oracle has raised prices "across all major product lines" 15%-20% after comparing the latest Oracle price list (http://www.oracle.com/corporate/pricing/technology-price-list.pdf) against older ones. Of...

iTunes: 5b and Counting.
June 30, 2008... Apple says iTunes sales have past 5 billion songs and it's renting and selling upwards of 50,000 movies a day.

Microsoft & eBay?
June 30, 2008... Several on Wall Street speculate that Microsoft could turn its acquisition attentions from Yahoo to eBay.

Google Docs & PDF.
June 30, 2008... Google Docs is now partially supporting PDF files. Users can upload, preview and share them but not edit or search them although they can copy and paste text.

Dell, Lenovo & eBay.
June 30, 2008... Dell will ship eBay icons on consumer PC and laptops in US, UK, Germany, France, Italy, Canada and Australia for the next nine months. Ditto Lenovo consumer and SMB laptops. The site already has deals with HP, Sony and Gateway.