ePostal News articles from June 2009

ePostal News archives from June 2009

DHL Using Cognos Analytics.
June 15, 2009... DHL Worldwide, which has lost billions of dollars and can use all the help it can get, has started using IBM software to analyze more than 30 million customer records in seconds rather than hours while reducing its system maintenance costs. ...

iPhone Sends Real Postcards.
June 15, 2009... Apple's App Store last week sanctioned an AnguriaLab iPhone application called Postino that lets users send physical postcards anywhere in the world for $1.99, the price of a "virtual stamp." The Italian company says the postcards are...

Royal Mail Somewhere in Limbo.
June 15, 2009... Entitlements are on the line in Great Britain. Royal Mail chairman Donald Brydon said that if the government-owned operation doesn't get money by partially privatizing then postal workers can kiss their pensions good-bye or to quote him...

Estonia Post Launches into e-Invoicing.
June 15, 2009... Estonian Post's e-invoicing operator eArvekeskus has kicked off chartered to enable companies to move to paperless bookkeeping and put the post out of the business of carrying bills to their door. eArvekekus figures that - even though...

Certipost Moves into e-Contracting.
June 15, 2009... Certipost, the Belgian electronic document exchange operation, had launched a so-called e-Contracting service described as a user-friendly solution for electronically signing, sending and archiving contracts. The Belgian Post subsidiary...

Neopost USA & IKON in Cross-Selling Alliance.
June 15, 2009... Neopost USA and IKON Office Solutions, the Ricoh company, have joined in a strategic alliance to provide total document management and mail processing solutions. IKON's going to offer Neopost's mailing systems, folders/inserters and...

Cisco Pushes into Volume Server Market.
June 15, 2009... Cisco has come up with entry-level rack-mounted versions of its high-end Unified Computing System (UCS) that it means to push into the channel where it will piggyback on resellers that already sell other people's machines. That mean it'll...

Windows 7 Due October 22.
June 15, 2009... Microsoft says Windows 7, its new Vista-replacing operating system, will be generally available on Thursday October 22, a month ahead of Black Friday, the traditional holiday shopping kickoff in the states and three months ahead of its supposed...

Now Imagine a Sun Netbook, Larry Does.
June 15, 2009... Oracle CEO Larry Ellison, who is soon to own Sun Microsystems, made a cameo appearance at JavaOne to reassure the faithful of his continued investment in their pet language. And to those naysayers who figure Oracle's going to dump the...

Tibco Silver - Amazon for Dummies.(Brief article)
June 15, 2009... Tibco is going down the cloud path like everybody else and like everybody else claiming that what it's got is "unique." Its mission is to make it easier for the cloud-curious but diffident Global 2000 to use Amazon and put to rest their...

Russian Regulators Investigating Microsoft: Reuters.
June 15, 2009... Russia must need pin money. According to Reuters, its anti-monopoly police are investigating Microsoft because supplies of XP have dried up and it thinks Microsoft violated its laws by cutting deliveries of the operating system to the...

Verizon Takes to the Cloud.
June 15, 2009... Verizon has been talking about launching an on-demand Computing-as-a-Service (CaaS) utility for two years now. It didn't know then that it was talking about a cloud but it did when it finally launched the thing the other day, a few months after...

Intel Enables Anorexic-But-Not-Pricey Laptops.
June 15, 2009... Really thin laptops are pricey and little netbooks are dumb. That leaves a space in the middle that Intel - in a money-generating segmentation exercise - means to fill with low-cost, skinny, full-featured hybrids" that are a cross between the...

AMD Pushes Out Six-Core Chip.
June 15, 2009... AMD has a 45nm six-core chip now just like Intel that will appear in HP, Cray, Dell, SGI, IBM and Sun systems this month. How the Istanbul chip and its adopters fare in a lousy make-do market remains to be seen. AMD pushed the doohickey out...

Sun To Build Clouds.(Brief article)
June 15, 2009... Sun has gone into the cloud building business. It's supposed to announce a new portfolio of professional services aimed at businesses of all sizes called the Cloud Strategic Planning Service at the CommunityOne West conference in San...

Intel Buys Wind River $884m.(Company overview)
June 15, 2009... Intel is buying Wind River for roughly $884 million in cash, $11.50 a share, a 44% premium. The move into software will give Intel VxWorks, Wind River's proprietary and multi-core-ready RTOS, and its commercial-grade Linux operating system...

Acer To Sell Android Netbook.
June 15, 2009... Acer could be the first of the big PC vendors to peddle an Android netbook. It means to start selling such a device in Q3. It has not said what the widget will cost or what portion of its output will be dedicated to the Google OS. The...

Google Takes Another Crack at Enterprise Search.(Brief article)
June 15, 2009... Google has hauled out a next-generation yellow enterprise Search Appliance based as usual on a customized firewall-protected Dell PowerEdge rack server. The Linux-based widget is supposed to have a new architecture and new software as well...

So the Dog Ate Your Presentation Huh.
June 15, 2009... PBworks, which used to be PBwiki until a month ago when it realized the name didn't fit anymore, is targeting professional services and agencies with a newfangled PBworks Project Edition that combines hosted collaboration with project...

Google Docs Adds Formats.
June 15, 2009... Google Docs now supports Microsoft's Open Office XML (OOXML) formats .docx and .xlsx. It already supports .doc, .odt, .xls, .ods, .ppt, .csv, .html, .txt and .rtf. IDG reports Google's enterprise unit president Dave Girouard chatting up...

FedEx Torches UPS in Straw Man Argument.
June 22, 2009... FedEx doesn't want to be unionized. It especially doesn't want the Teamsters unionizing its ground people. They can't be right now because its delivery guys are covered under the Railway Labor Act (RLA), which was meant "to avoid any...

Persystent To Keep USPS PCs Afloat.
June 22, 2009... Persystent Technologies, which claims to have the world's fastest automated PC recovery product, has gotten a contract from the USPS. Terms were not disclosed. Persystent Suite, which says it can restore corrupted, changed or missing...

Royal Mail's Fate Uncertain.
June 22, 2009... Royal Mail still lingers in limbo, its fate uncertain except now 10,000 postal workers are threatening to strike for 24 hours on Friday June 19 on the premise that modernization will lead to "arbitrary" job cuts. After the strike was...

Postal Mail a Step Closer to E-Mail.
June 22, 2009... Earth Class Mail (ECM), the company that digitizes postal mail, has officially released its updated postal-mail web application to customers worldwide. The new user interface, in beta for the past few weeks, lets customers get, read and...

Royal Mail Has 'Clear Prospects'.
June 22, 2009... Britain's Royal Mail has a new online tool that's supposed to help SMEs create business growth from their existing customer databases. It's called Clear Prospects. The secure web-based service lets businesses clean up and enhance their...

PB Centralizes Desktop Printing & Mailing.
June 22, 2009... Pitney Bowes has launched a piece of software called P/I OfficeMail, a secure mail solution that automates mailing business-critical office documents. An integral part of PB's Production Intelligence Software solutions to link print and...

BBH Creates Direct Mail Postcards.
June 22, 2009... B|we Bell + Howell has developed an integrated solution that converts letters and notices into a double postcard format. By using the its Pressure Sealer, B|we One ReCompose software and JETVision reading system, the company says mailers...

Intermec Claims Best-of-Breed Mobile Computers.
June 22, 2009... Intermec claims the two rugged 3G Wireless WAN (WWAN) mobile computers it just introduced are the most advanced in the business. The CN50, called the smallest device around, includes 3.75G WWAN HSUPA radio technology and is meant for...

Savi Develops First Wireless Tracking Device with GPS, RFID and Satellite Communications.
June 22, 2009... Savi Technology, a Lockheed Martin company, has come up with what it says is the first asset and shipment monitoring device that combines a Global Positioning System (GPS), active Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) and satellite...

HP Designs New Cloud-Size Server Family.
June 22, 2009... HP Wednesday took the wraps off the first new server family it's created since the BladeSystem C-class was invented and ran away with the market. The line is call ExSO, short for Extreme Scale-Out, and it's purpose-built for global...

Google Launches Guerilla Attack on Exchange.
June 22, 2009... If the mountain won't come to Mohammed, then, by George, Mohammed's gonna go to the mountain, which is exactly what Google's doing. Rather than try to get the throngs of immovable Outlook and Office users to switch to Gmail and Google...

Cisco Pays for its Server Impertinence.
June 22, 2009... Despite steep price cuts, Cisco lost 14.4 points of market share in high-end SAN switches and 9.8% overall to Brocade in Q1, according to the Dell'Oro Group because OEMs switched their allegiance when it became clear Cisco was going to enter...

Thinking Global, Big Chinese PC Maker Allies with NComputing.
June 22, 2009... Lenovo's not the only Chinese PC maker with global ambitions. So has Haier Computer Group, reportedly the country's second-largest PC maker and part of the $16 billion Haier Group, already the world's fourth-largest white goods manufacturer....

Russian, Korean & Malaysian Cloud Researchers Join Open Cirrus.
June 22, 2009... The Russian Academy of Sciences, South Korea's Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute and MIMOS, a strategic R&D organization under Malaysia's Ministry of Science, Technology and Innovation are joining the HP-Intel-Yahoo open...

China Requires a Censorship Wall on All PCs.
June 22, 2009... An ostensibly priggish Chinese government has mandated that all PCs sold in the country ship with a special piece of anti-pornography censorship software starting July1. Well, at least that's the way it's being positioned anyway. It's...

Second Bidder Upsets Micro Focus-Borland Deal.
June 22, 2009... Although a vigilant press never sleeps, we confess we nodded off there for a moment and this almost got by us. Last week while EMC was distracting everybody by one-upping NetApp in a hostile play for Data Domain, Micro Focus was saying...

Ballmer Pushes Back Against Obama.
June 22, 2009... At a Bloomberg Round Table Microsoft CEO Steve Balmer threatened to move "lots" of jobs offshore if Congress goes along with the president's plan to hike taxes on US companies' foreign profits. What the White House is planning would make...

Petabyte-Scale Data Analytics Moving to the Cloud.
June 22, 2009... Forrester analyst Jim Kobielus has predicted that data warehousing will evolve into a "virtualized, cloud-based, supremely scalable distributed platform." Greenplum, the Postgres-based massively parallel open source data warehouse company,...

ECIS Accuses Microsoft of Fudging Numbers.
June 22, 2009... The European Committee for Interoperable Systems (ECIS), which wants to nail Microsoft's hide to the barn door, told the European Commission that Redmond "substantially understated" its share of the European browser market in an effort to blunt...

Did Microsoft Just Give the EC the Finger?
June 22, 2009... Maybe it's just wishful thinking on our part, but it sounds like Microsoft - in the very nicest way, of course, to avoid any further fines - just told the European Commission to go %$#@ itself. See, at press time, CNet was saying that it...

Novell Reportedly Planning Free Apps Store.
June 22, 2009... Novell means to create an open source apps store chockablock with free software that can be uploaded in a click, according to PC Pro. The British publication talked to Novell's VP of business development Holger Dryoff. Apparently it's aimed...

Dell To Bundle Boxes with Open Source Apps: Report.
June 22, 2009... Dell is reportedly going to chase SMBs with offers of boxes preconfigured with open source software, according to what Amit Midha, the president of its SMB business in Asia-Pacific and Japan and the president of its Greater China operations,...

Why Novell Kisses Microsoft's Ring Every So Often.
June 22, 2009... Microsoft and Novell decided to revisit their eyebrow-raising pact the other day, the one that was signed in November of 2006 to the outrage of the FOSS mob, and let it be known - na-na-na-na-na - that it produced upwards of 100 new customers...

Oracle's Secret Plan for Sun.
June 22, 2009... If Oracle hasn't been exactly forthcoming with its reportedly three-year plan for Sun, it's because it's still trying to figure out exactly what it is. Like what it's really going to do about the Sparc chip, for instance. Oracle CEO...

Dell Believed on Acquisition Trail.
June 22, 2009... Dell now has ~$10 billion in its jean to spend on an acquisition or two. It raised another billion the other day selling bonds. That's the second time in two months it's sold debt, not something it's done much of in years past. It...

SAP Apes Oracle, Thinks Acquisitions.
June 22, 2009... Sounding a bit like Oracle CEO Larry Ellison, his bte noir, SAP CEO Leo Apotheker told the French daily Le Figaro that the company could throw $7 million (5 billion euros) at large acquisitions to get a bigger market share. It spent $6.7...

Bing Creates Mini-Surge.
June 22, 2009... The initial response to Bing, Microsoft's new 10-day-old search engine, is favorable. According to comScore, Microsoft's share of US searches was up two points from 9.1% to 11.1% after a week and Microsoft's penetration of daily searchers went...

Microsoft Kills Money.
June 22, 2009... Because of the competition, Microsoft says it will stop selling Microsoft Money, its personal finance program, at the end of the month. It stopped updating the software last year. Ah, remember when it tried to buy Intuit? The Justice Department...

Storage Market Bleeding.
June 22, 2009... Sales of disk storage fell 18.2% to $5.6 billion in the first quarter, with HP down 25.8%, IBM 21.7%, Dell 17.2% and EMC 16%, according to IDC. HP also lost some market share but is still number one. Capacity shipped was up 14.8% to 2.15PB. The...

Dell Sell Microsoft Software on its Store.
June 22, 2009... Dell US has started selling Microsoft software at its Download Store, stuff like Word, Excel and Office. It's a first for both of the desperate companies. The Microsoft software will be rubbing shoulders with packages from CA, McAfee, Intuit...

Microsoft's Free Anti-Virus Program Close.
June 22, 2009... The next sound of wounded market share you hear will be coming from the direction of McAfee and Symantec. Microsoft said Wednesday that it's testing a free PC anti-virus/spyware program dubbed Morro internally. A beta should be available soon...

Satyam Squeaks Out Profit.
June 22, 2009... Satyam Computer Services up and surprised everybody the other day by posting a profit for the December quarter that closed virtually minutes before its founder confessed to cooking the books for years. The numbers are unaudited but say it...

Lightning Strikes Cloud.
June 22, 2009... Amazon Web Services experienced a partial blackout in part of the US for a few hours Wednesday night, an event it ascribed to a lightning-induced power outrage. Let's see that makes four times in the last year.

AMD Up; Intel Down.
June 22, 2009... Intel lost market share across-the-board to AMD in Q1, according to iSuppli, suggesting that Intel isn't quite the bully AMD makes it out to be. Intel's market share declined 2.5 points to 79.1%; AMD was up 2.3 points sequentially to 12.8%,...