ePostal News articles from March 2007

ePostal News archives from March 2007

Australia Post signs its first VIP Online Security customer.
March 5, 2007... Australia Post has signed the NSW Teachers Credit Union as its first VIP Online Security customer. The deal follows the Australia Post and retail banking software house Ultradata Australia Pty Ltd partnering a month or so ago so the post...

UPU says posts have to crack e-commerce.
March 5, 2007... Posts have no choice but to develop strategies to harness the enormous potential of e-commerce. That's what some 30 electronic services experts from all over the world heard the other day at a workshop at Universal Postal Union (UPU)...

Lots of people prefer paper post.(Survey)(Brief article)
March 5, 2007... People want business and the government to talk to them by post, not the Internet, according to a Post Danmark survey taken by Epinion. If nothing else, snail mail seems more serious and higher priority than e-mail. Apparently 83% of Danes open...

Shipping Sidekick joins eBay Developers Program.
March 5, 2007... Webplus, a supplier of webby-style software like an application server and the stuff of e-commerce stores to small business, has joined eBay's Developers Program to tweak its Shipping Sidekick shipping rate comparison web site for use by eBay...

BBH unit fields new barcode readers.(Bowe Bell and Howell)(BCC Software Inc.)(VisionSensor 2020)(VisionSensor 2030)(Brief article)
March 5, 2007... BCC Software, the Bowe Bell + Howell unit that develops high-performance solutions for professional mailers, has new VisionSensor 2020 and 2030 barcode readers. They are supposed to instantly scan and interpret all commonly used postal codes...

Google makes its move on Microsoft office.
March 5, 2007... Google has planted its flag on the shores of Microsoft's Fortress Office, finally opening up shop to sell the anticipated commercial version of its comparatively rudimentary web-based productivity software, aiming it at the big enterprise, the...

Jury tells Microsoft to write Alcatel-Lucent a check for $1.52b.
March 5, 2007... A federal jury has found Microsoft and the Windows Media Player liable to the tune of $1.52 billion for infringing two patents held by what is now Alcatel-Lucent. It is reportedly the largest patent ruling in history and, ironically, the...

Dell hires Moto refugee to run new consumer unit.
March 5, 2007... Well, Michael Dell has solved the problem created when one of his prized bulls decided to turn VC rather than take over Dell's new consumer unit. He hired a guy who needed to get out of town fast because it was getting too hot for him. Ron...

iPhone flap settled.(Brief article)
March 5, 2007... Apple and Cisco say they have resolved their difficulties over Cisco's trademark on the name iPhone that Apple wants for its new gadget. They've decided to share the name, as Cisco had proposed, and "explore opportunities for...

HP earnings up 26%.
March 5, 2007... One can imagine the HP board patting itself on the back and thanking its lucky stars that it hired Mark Hurd. HP's fiscal first-quarter earnings were up 26% year-over-year to $1.5 billion, or 55 cents a share, on revenues of $25.1 billion,...

Intel jimmies schedule.
March 5, 2007... Having tied a can to AMD's tail, Intel's gonna try driving the poor beast out of town. It's moving up the production ramp of its first 45nm Xeon from the first quarter of next year to the fourth quarter of this year. It's also got a...

Sun grew more than anybody last year: Gartner.
March 5, 2007... Gartner says global server revenues hit $52.7 billion in 2006, up 2%, and shipments hit 8.2 million, up 9%. IBM got the bulk of the money, $16.9 billion, up 1.7%. HP was second with 14.2 billion, down 2.3%, Sun third with $5.7 billion, up a...

Microsoft releases free Vista tools.
March 5, 2007... Microsoft's Vista-optimized Virtual PC 2007 is out. Microsoft imagines people using it to run legacy Windows environments on Vista as well as use it for software development and testing. Remember now, Microsoft says low-end versions of...

SQL Server SP2 out.
March 5, 2007... Microsoft released SQL Server 2005 Service Pack 2 on Monday, saying the thing will connect and integrate with Vista and Office 2007. Microsoft also said it was lifting its bar on virtualization and letting licenses of the Enterprise Edition of...

Dell reaches out to users.(launch of sites)(www.dellideastorm.com)(www.studiodell.com)(Brief article)
March 5, 2007... Well, it's not called a complaints department but Dell has set up two sites where customers reportedly stand a chance of being heard: www.dellideastorm.com and www.studiodell.com. The first is supposed to be an online community about building...

Cool and uncool.
March 5, 2007... AMD has introduced two new 65nm Athlon 64 single-core desktop processors that run at 45W, dubbed the 3500+ and 3800+ that run $88 and $93 respectively in 1,000-unit lots. It also introduced a 90nm 3GHz Athlon 64 X2 6000+ that runs at a...

MySQL diversifies.(Brief article)
March 5, 2007... MySQL, which, remember, wants to go public soon, has formed a new telecom business unit to meet what it says is growing demand high-availability real-time database solutions. And conveniently enough at the same time it announced a new...

Linux embraces KVM virtualization.
March 5, 2007... There's a new style of virtualization that made it into Linux a whole lot faster than Xen, which has been scratching at that door to no avail. The stuff is called KVM for Kernel-based Virtual Machine and it's supported by the latest cut of...

Supremes hear Microsoft's patent beef; Billions ride on decision for US software industry.
March 5, 2007... Microsoft and AT & T argued a key patent case before the US Supreme Court--one that's supposed to decide if US patent law unilaterally extends to software duplicated overseas off an American-supplied "golden master"--and, as a result, whether...

Cheetah in open beta.
March 5, 2007... IBM has gone into public beta with Cheetah, the next go-round of the Informix database. IBM and Novell are eventually supposed to put out a Linux version of the thing for SMEs using AMD 1000-based xSeries 3105 boxes.

Finn post's Itella arm cuts e-invoicing deal with neighbor.
March 12, 2007... Two European electronic invoice service providers, Finland Post arm Itella Information Logistics Oy and Finland-based Basware Einvoices Ltd, will expand their cooperation internationally. The agreement will enable Itella and BasWare...

NetDespatch fields courier e-commerce scheme.
March 12, 2007... NetDespatch has developed an e-commerce solution for express parcel and courier companies. It includes business-level hosting and individual web design with quoting, booking and tracking facilities, online credit card payments and...

Northrop Grumman gets big USPS contract.
March 12, 2007... Northrop Grumman has been awarded a hefty $874.6 million fixed-price contract by the United States Postal Service to provide 100 Flats Sequencing Systems (FSS) designed to further automate the flats mail stream that includes large envelopes,...

Bowe chases Nordic business.(Sefas Innovation )(Brief article)
March 12, 2007... Bowe Systec has extended its partnership with Sefas Innovation into the Nordic region. The two already partnered recently in North America. Bowe Systec Nordic is a supplier of high-performance inserting systems and mailroom solutions....

Danish Post signs agreement with Siemens.(Siemens Industrial Solutions and Services Group)(Brief article)
March 12, 2007... The Danish Post has signed a framework agreement with Siemens Industrial Solutions and Services Group (I & S) to supply up to 25 mail sorting machines of the integrated reading and video coding system (IRV) type. The first five systems to be...

Xign & SciQuest partner.
March 12, 2007... Xign Corporation, which operates a settlement network for business, and SciQuest Inc, the provider of on-demand supplier management and procurement automation solutions, have cut a strategic partnership designed to extend e-procurement...

Melissa claims a half-million people register for free location lookup service.
March 12, 2007... Melissa Data, which provides data quality software and services, claims 500,000 registered users of its free lookup service--900 new registered users daily. The search tools work by letting people input variations of street names, area...

VMware goes on attack against Microsoft.
March 12, 2007... Microsoft's virtualization restrictions have ticked off VMware, which committed its passel of complaints, complete with screen shots, to what it calls a white paper. Others might call it the prelude to a lawsuit. It claims that Microsoft...

Corel takes on Google to compete with Microsoft.
March 12, 2007... Taking a page from Google's anti-Microsoft book, Corel is publicly beta testing a free word processor called WordPerfect Lightning. At its core it's a cut-down version of WordPerfect--sorta like what Works once was to Word--that should be...

Dell tanks, profits down 33%, sales off 5%.(Financial report)
March 12, 2007... Dell turned chicken and canceled its fiscal Q4 conference call with Wall Street, leaving the punters with only its woebegone press release. So much for steely Texans. Profits plunged 33% to $673 million, or 30 cents a share, down from...

Samba wins draconian pricing round against Microsoft in EU.
March 12, 2007... The European Commission sent Microsoft an apparently surprise Statement of Objections (SO) accusing the company of setting unreasonable royalties for the server protocols that the EC ordered it to make available to its rivals back in 2004 when...

AMD's first chipset debuts.
March 12, 2007... AMD has its first chipset complements of its 2006 $5.34 billion acquisition of ATI. It's called the AMD 690 series, uses ATI's Radeon X1250 GPU and ATI's new, reportedly true-to-life Avivo graphics technology that can handle high-def. It's...

HP scores upset in blade market; Volume servers no longer a growth engine.
March 12, 2007... In Q4 for the first time in living memory HP took market share away from IBM in blades, a sacred Blue preserve. According numbers IDC put out, HP pushed IBM off the blade pedestal and into the number two slot at the end of last year taking...

Oracle buys Hyperion to surround SAP.
March 12, 2007... Nracle is buying Hyperion Solutions Corporation as part of its "surround SAP strategy," it said, and will use Hyperion's enterprise performance management software to flesh out its business intelligence portfolio. In response, SAP muttered...

Solaris vultures cruise skies over impending Linux divide.
March 12, 2007... As the Linux community titters towards what looks like a GPL-induced schism between those like Linux kernel creator Linus Torvalds who hew to the old, somewhat more permissive GPL 2 and those who rush pell-mell to embrace the controversial new,...

Dell unmoved by Linux plea.
March 12, 2007... Since setting up its online IdeaStorm customer suggestion box on February 16, Dell has been awash in requests for factory-installed Linux machines with open source apps like OpenOffice and Firefox. In response Dell posted back saying it's...

Despite Microsoft Novell loses money.
March 12, 2007... Novell lost $20 million, or six cents a share, on revenues of $230 million, down roughly 5% year-over-year in its first fiscal quarter ended January 31. Wall Street figured it would do $232 million and return a penny. The numbers are...

British PM asked to pressure Microsoft to cut prices.
March 12, 2007... There's a petition on British Prime Minister Tony Blair's web site asking him to pressure Microsoft to lower the price of Vista. The petition, part of a beta e-government scheme that started in mid-November letting the English e-petition...

USPS & SBA aim new Internet Service at small businesses.
March 19, 2007... The US Small Business Administration (SBA) and the US Postal Service have unveiled a new Internet tool for small business owners, designed to deliver business solutions to entrepreneurs. They say that "Delivering Success," an online...

Spanish Post deploys RFID-based track & trace.(Radio frequency identification equipment)(Brief article)
March 19, 2007... As part of its modernization plan, the Spanish Post Office, which handles 220 million shipments a year, has kicked off its new Mercury track & trace service, which promises to know where each of those parcels is all the time thanks to barcodes...

An Post upgrades its e-payment software.
March 19, 2007... Dublin-based e-payment house SmartCentric Technologies International Ltd, whose smart card widgetry was originally acquired from Fujitsu, is to supply An Post with the next generation of Bill Pay and Phone Top up (Etopup) applications for the...

Authentidate absolved of patent infringement.
March 19, 2007... Authentidate Holding Corporation, the electronic postmark (EPM) peddler with the unhappy relationship with the United State Postal Service, basically won a suit alleging that its secure time stamping technology, including the USPS EPM,...

Blackberry to track packages.
March 19, 2007... Mobile ISV Virtual Views is selling a $9.99 piece of software called TrakPak that lets you to track packages being sent through UPS, USPS, FedEx and DHL on your Blackberry. You enter the tracking number and the shipper and TrakPak will look up...

UPU preaches standardization & EDI.
March 19, 2007... Airlines and postal operators must focus more on standardization and up their use of electronic data interchange (EDI) messages to improve the quality of service and security of international mail, according to the head of the Universal Postal...

Omniplanar releases new barcode decoder.
March 19, 2007... New Jersey-based Omniplanar Inc has launched a new barcode image decoding software engine called Volo, designed specifically for the document processing and enterprise content management (ECM) industries. It says Volo instantly...

Stamp forger thrives on eBay.
March 19, 2007... Millions of dollars worth of forged and altered postage stamps have been sold on eBay, Yahoo and other Internet auction sites over the last nine years and according to a group of collectors known as SCADS, or Stamp Collectors Against Dodgy...

Document Command raises financing.(postal mail online services)(Brief article)
March 19, 2007... Seattle-based Document Command has arranged a $2.84 million convertible note, getting most of the funding from Keiretsu Forum Angels. The company's product, Remote Control Mail, lets customers access their postal mail online. It intends to use...

W3C does about-face on HTML.(Word Wide Web Consortium)
March 19, 2007... The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), admitting that, well, hmm, it was wrong in trying to XML-ize poor HTML years ago, is going to reverse course and stop trying to force a square peg into a round hole. It's finally figured out that the...

IBM taunts HP over storage losses.
March 19, 2007... IBM claims that HP CEO Mark Hurd's cost cutting has damaged HP's storage operation and explains why IBM passed HP in the external disk market last year while HP's market share dropped. IBM says HP inherited most of the business from Compaq...

Hey, look, somebody's licensed Microsoft's EC-mandated protocols.
March 19, 2007... Remember days ago when an even-more-bent-out-of-shape-than-usual European Commission sent Microsoft an apparently surprise Statement of Objections on account of the royalties Microsoft was demanding for those server protocols it's supposed to...

AMD's first quarter sours.
March 19, 2007... Before turning up at a Morgan Stanley confab the other day AMD put out a statement confessing that it was unlikely to meet its first-quarter revenue guidance of $1.6 billion to $1.7 billion. Considering the way things have been going nobody...

McAfee goes to EMC for new CEO.
March 19, 2007... McAfee, which is up to its eyeballs in self-inflicted backdating woes, still has to restate something in the neighborhood of $100 million-$150 million and has the Microsoft menace to contend with, has gotten EMC exec David DeWalt, who was CEO...

Microsoft calls Google 'cavalier' with copyrights.
March 19, 2007... Microsoft associate general counsel Tom Rubin, the head of the company's IP legal team, attacked Google's 'novel' interpretation of the so-called fair use doctrine before a meeting of the Association of American Publishers (AAP) Tuesday...

By 2010, stored data will reach the moon.(The Expanding Digital Universe: A Forecast of Worldwide Information Growth through 2010)(Report)(Brief article)
March 19, 2007... So EMC got IDC to do some projections and IDC came up with "The Expanding Digital Universe: A Forecast of Worldwide Information Growth through 2010," deciding that what came to 161 billion gigabytes worth of stored data at the end of last...

Free software out to corral the hardware companies.
March 19, 2007... The Free Software Foundation (FSF) is trying to nudge hardware makers into the fold urging them to support free software drivers, end the "Microsoft Tax," remove proprietary BIOS locks, support a free BIOS and reject DRM. According to a...

SugarCRM sets up in Europe.(Brief article)
March 19, 2007... EugarCRM has opened an office in Dublin to service the continent, naming company co-founder Clint Oram to run the operation. It says a fourth of its commercial customers and 30% of its open source downloads are in Europe. Sugar intends to hire...

Red Hat goes Mexican.
March 19, 2007... Red Hat is setting up direct operations in Mexico City. It says it's hiring locals. It has already penetrated a couple of big Mexican banks and telecom companies and is expecting HP, IBM, Dell, Intel, SAP, AMD, even Oracle to help it push...

Google denies M & A designs.
March 19, 2007... Reluctant acquisition targets can sleep more peacefully in their beds. It seems it's unlikely they'll be Googlized. Google CEO Eric Schmidt told a Morgan Stanley Technology Conference Monday that it's unlikely the company will use the billions...

Piece of SAP may change hands.
March 19, 2007... There's been chatter in the German business press about a private equity firm maybe being interested in taking a 10% piece of SAP from one of its founders.

Even Intel postpones Vista deployment.
March 19, 2007... It looks like any real tickling done by Vista will have to wait until the second half. Wise to the ways of Microsoft by now, even Intel is postponing moving to Vista until after the first Service Pack and then it only intends to do "modest...

Symantec to spend $1b-a-year on acquisitions.
March 19, 2007... The head of Symantec's consumer arm Enrique Salem said to expect the company to make a roughly billion-dollar acquisition every 12 to 18 months, particularly in mobile security. In January Symantec agreed to buy Altiris for $830 million.

Is Oracle all bluster?
March 19, 2007... There hasn't been a peep out of Oracle about its "Death to Red Hat" move into Linux since it started last October. No major wins announced. Major software packages like IBM and SAP are uncertified on the Red Hat look-a-like Oracle Linux....

Microsoft appears to be regrouping.
March 19, 2007... The head of Microsoft's tail-dragging losing-share-to-Google Live Search operation, Christopher Payne, one of the guys who got Microsoft into search in the first place, is reported to be leaving to start his own company. Microsoft has cut its...

Dell needs to ape HP: Wall Street.
March 19, 2007... Wall Street is starting to beat the drum for Dell to make layoffs, especially since its workforce at the end of Q4 was up 26% year-over-year to 82,200 people, double what it was two years ago. Toni Sacconaghi of Sanford Bernstein figures Dell...

Pitney Bowes buys MapInfo.
March 26, 2007... P Pitney Bowes is buying MapInfo Corporation, the so-called location intelligence house whose software is used by 7,000 organizations worldwide, for an outlay of roughly $408 million cash. It will cost about $90 million less given what MapInfo...

Certipost gets big e-invoicing commission.
March 26, 2007... Certipost, the joint venture between Belgacom and the Belgian Post, has picked up part of Luxembourg-based Arcelor-Mittal, the biggest iron and steel company in the world, as an electronic invoicing customer. Arcelor Commercial FCSE (Flat...

Itella builds new medical service around eLetters.(Itella Information Logistics)(Medici Data Oy )
March 26, 2007... Itella Information Logistics, the Finland Post operation, and Medici Data Oy have co-developed a patient-reminder mailing interface for hospitals and hospital districts. Patient reminders created with the MD-Oberon patient system can be...

Wal-Mart cuts out shipping.
March 26, 2007... Wal-Mart is encouraging consumers to avoid shipping costs by buying at its online site and having the purchase sent to a nearby Wal-Mart store where they pick it up and perhaps buy something else. The retailer calls the scheme Site to Store...

BCC ties up with Gage-Line.
March 26, 2007... BCC Software, the Bowe Bell + Howell unit, has partnered with Gage-Line Technology Inc to offer a line of optical comparators to aid in the on-the-spot analysis and overall quality of postal barcodes. One comparator analyzes USPS Intelligent...

Deutsche Postbank moves new subsidiary off Microsoft.
March 26, 2007... Deutsche Postbank, the great German retail bank, is ushering Microsoft and CA out of its BHW Holding AG subsidiary and replacing them with Novell infrastructure, collaboration and management. A home financing and saving service or private...

Melissa fields unix revs of Address Object.
March 26, 2007... Melissa Data, the data quality ISV, has released its new 64-bit versions of Address Object for users of HP-UX and AIX. Address Object now functions across multiple platforms including Windows, Linux and Solaris. The company says the new...

Postal conference scheduled for April.(Brief article)
March 26, 2007... The Universal Postal Union (UPU) and the Management Chair of Network Industries at the Ecole Polytechnique Federal de Lausanne (EPFL) are co-sponsoring a Global Postal Research and Educational Network Conference to be held on April 23-24 at...

Red Hat starts moving out RHEL 5.
March 26, 2007... Red Hat has pushed out Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 (RHEL 5), the first major update of its operating system in a couple of years, a rev on which much hangs considering the threatening noises coming from the direction of Oracle, Sun,...

Microsoft buys Tellme's 'Dial Tone 2.0'.(Company overview)
March 26, 2007... Microsoft is buying privately held Tellme Networks Inc and its voice-enabled J2ME-based business search technology for what the press thinks may be upwards of $800 million, perhaps outbidding Google. Microsoft didn't say what it's paying...

Cisco buys WebEx.
March 26, 2007... The ever acquisitive and now, recently, ever diversifying Cisco is buying WebEx Communications Inc, the 12-year-old subscription web conferencing company, for roughly $3.2 billion in cash. It's paying $57 a share, a 23% premium. Less WebEx'...

Google to shield user data.(Brief article)
March 26, 2007... Google, which knows all about everybody's searches and has been storing all that information on its servers much to the consternation of the privacy-sensitive, has decided to come up with a privacy policy and "de-personalize" the data every...

Intel adds to quad line-up.
March 26, 2007... Intel has added two energy-efficient 50W Bensley platform server chips to its quad portfolio--that's 12.5W per core. The 1.6GHz L5310 and 1.86GHz L5320 represent a 35%-60% decrease in power from Intel's existing 80W and 120W quads. The...

Companies are storing lots of Junk: Kazeon.(Brief article)
March 26, 2007... Well, according to Kazeon, people are bulking up on storage to store trash. Based its new Data Assessment Service--and after working with 37 businesses in five countries in eight vertical markets like finance, manufacturing,...

Virtualization watch.
March 26, 2007... The researchers at TheInfoPro (TIP) figure only 10% of the server production environment in Fortune 1000s and mid-sizes firms was virtualized at the end of last year and that, based on answers to their questions, 25% of production applications...

Dell appears to inch closer to factory-installed Linux PCs.
March 26, 2007... What with its new IdeaStorm suggestion box crammed full of requests for factory-installed Linux, the Direct2Dell blog has started taking soundings to put a face on the demand. It says "we're crafting product offerings in response, but we'd...

Novell delivers native directory support for Microsoft Networks.
March 26, 2007... Novell says it's got a new way to manage Windows operating systems like Vista for people with a heterogeneous environment. Apparently it's made ZenWorks Configuration Management natively integrate both Microsoft's Active Directory and its...

Google to be eaten by Wales?
March 26, 2007... Wikipedia creator Jimmy Wales has commercial designs and that three-year-old for-profit ad-based Wikia Inc venture of his is aiming to build an open source search engine to take on Google. He wants 5% of the market according to reports out of...

Viacom sues Google & YouTube for $1b.
March 26, 2007... You've of course heard that Viacom, which owns MTV, Comedy Central and Nickelodeon, among others, has sued Google and its unprofitable but pricey $1.65 billion YouTube acquisition for damages of upwards of a billion dollars and an injunction....

Microsoft pushes Google off Lenovo.
March 26, 2007... Lenovo, the world's third-largest PC maker, is going to preload all its boxes with a default Microsoft toolbar that includes Windows Live online services and search instead of the Google toolbar it's been distributing.