ePostal News articles from March 2009

ePostal News archives from March 2009

Saudi Post Cuts Handheld Deal.
March 9, 2009... Saudi Post has given Intermec Technologies a contract to equip its postal delivery team with CN3 mobile computers and add-on IP30 handheld RFID readers. The value of the deal was not disclosed. The contract is said to be a core component of...

UK Union Seeks Obama Magic.
March 9, 2009... Britain's Communication Workers Union (CWU), worried that its membership will be wiped out, has hired Blue State Digital, the US company that put together Barack Obama's slick groundbreaking e-mail drive for the presidency, which helped him...

'Taxed' for Using the Mail.(Brief article)
March 9, 2009... In casting about for creative ways to make up for what is likely to be a tax shortfall because of the number of people thrown on the dole, the 2009-2010 New York budget contains a provision to charge a $10 fee for income taxes filed on paper....

DHL Still Looking For an Answer to its Prayers.
March 9, 2009... Months after the nominal deadline expired and months now after the global recession set in and years after its US unit started losing the billions of dollars that convinced it to bolt the American market, DHL said last Thursday that it's still...

UPS Wary of 'Protectionism'.
March 9, 2009... UPS CEO Scott Davis has started warning against protectionism and the idea that global trade siphons off US jobs because of that "Buy American" clause added by Congress to the $787 billion economic stimulus package signed by President Barack...

PB Partners with Window Book.(Pitney Bowes Business Insight )(Window Book)
March 9, 2009... Pitney Bowes Business Insight (PBBI) is partnering with Window Book and its DAT-MAIL MSP Mail.dat mailing software to complete its Intelligent Mail solutions set. By combining MailStream Plus MAIL360 and DAT-MAIL, PBI says mailers will have a...

There's Too Much Printing Going On: Itella.
March 9, 2009... Based on a survey, Itella says that over 30% of consumers have an environmentally sound attitude as indicated by the fact that they sort their household waste and actively save water and electricity. Finns are also interested in the...

Intel & Dell Move To Protect the Word 'Netbook'.
March 9, 2009... Intel and Dell have moved to snuff out the trademark claims of Psion Teklogix, the Ontario-based Anglo-Canadian concern that has been sending cease-and-desist letters to PC manufacturers, retailers, the media and bloggers since right before...

The Lights Flicker at Dell.
March 9, 2009... Dell's earnings were down 48% to $351 million, 18 cents a share, on revenues down 16% to $13.4 billion and units down 12% in the January quarter, three of the single worst months since PCs were invented. Dell's gross margin dropped from 18.7%...

Google's App Engine Goes Commercial.
March 9, 2009... Google is ready to start charging for its App Engine cloud platform. For the 10 months it's been in preview it's been free to use but limited to 500MB of persistent storage and enough CPU, bandwidth and whatnot to support about five...

HP To Resell Solaris on ProLiant.
March 9, 2009... Sun and HP were once great enemies. Sun is now so toothless it needs to sell its software on other people's hardware. And, given the recession, HP is not so foolish as to leave a penny on the table. Besides it owns EDS now, an experience that...

Cloud Start-up Fails, Widgetry Goes to SAP.
March 9, 2009... Coghead, an Amazon EC2-hosted platform-as-a-service start-up that reportedly couldn't repay a million-dollar loan it owed to Western Technology Investment, has sold its IP to SAP, which has no intention of keeping the company going. Terms...

Microsoft Feels the Economic Pain, Shows Wall Street Where It Hurts.
March 9, 2009... Microsoft doesn't expect the global economic contraction to loosen up this year or for a long time after that. It's studied the worst of the US meltdowns - 1820, 1873, 1929 - and recovery always took time. The company says its sales...

Google Wants To Bring the Horse to Microsoft Hanging.
March 9, 2009... Google wants in on the European Commission's latest push to dismember Windows. It's asked to intervene in the EC's Opera-inspired case charging Microsoft with illegally tying its IE browser to its operating system. Google, which now...

European Star Chamber Strikes Again.
March 9, 2009... The European Commission says it won't let Intel defend itself against antitrust charges that it has squeezed AMD out of the market at the oral hearing that Intel has requested and that usually caps such findings. It's being punished for...

Citrix Makes Bomb Run on VMware.
March 9, 2009... Citrix made an all-out strategic strike on VMware. It's going to stop selling XenServer 5 - the open source virtual infrastructure that it's added a bunch of proprietary features to since it acquired XenSource last year - and offer it to...

While Bullets Fly Around It, VMware Issues a Progress Report.
March 9, 2009... VMware has been peddling this vision of companies setting up internal clouds that bridge to external clouds using its promised Virtual Datacenter Operating System (VDC-OS), VDC-OS extensions and a management layer that lets service providers...

Red Hat Sketches Out Its KVM Virtualization Plans.
March 9, 2009... Red Hat, which is coming from behind and has to mange a change in strategic direction, moving its followers from Xen to KVM virtualization, is putting together a new portfolio of virtualization products that's supposed to break down the...

Bull Launches myVMBox.(Brief article)
March 9, 2009... Bull has come up with what it calls myVMBox, a built-to-order combination of VMware Infrastructure on Bull NovaScale servers and StoreWay storage plus a systems administration platform supporting VMware's vCenter and Bull's System Manager. ...

New CEO Remaking Yahoo in Her Image.
March 9, 2009... Carol Bartz, CEO of Yahoo for all of six weeks, is reorganizing the place and getting some of the yahoos out of Yahoo. Where Microsoft winds up is unclear. She appears to be centralizing more of the management in her own hands and trying...

Canonical Aims Koala at Amazon's Cloud.
March 9, 2009... Last Friday Canonical founder Mark Shuttleworth dubbed the next turn of Ubuntu "Karmic Koala," the future Ubuntu 9.10 due in October, and immediately pointed its server side to the cloud. "Ubuntu," he said on a blog, "aims to keep free...

Novell's Net Income Off 36%.
March 9, 2009... Novell's net income skidded 36% to $11 million, or three cents a share, in the January quarter, its first fiscal quarter, on revenues down $16 million, or 6.9%, to $215 million. On a non-GAAP basis the company beat the Street by a penny at...

PBS & Post Danmark Buy Out KMD's e-Boks Stake.
March 16, 2009... e-Boks A/S, the Danish e-bill operation and arguably one of the most successful digital mail experiments, is parting company with its creator KMD. The largest Danish-owned IT company is selling its one-third interest in e-Boks' to its...

Appirio Helps with Japan Post Cloud.
March 16, 2009... Appirio, one of the professional services firms nudging companies onto the cloud, is expanding into Japan and will be working with Salesforce.com to get the Force.com platform implemented at Japan Post Network Company, which serves over 50...

Technology Pushes Jersey Post To Restructure.(Brief article)
March 16, 2009... The Jersey Post is restructuring. Effective April 1, it will be streamlined into two autonomous trading businesses, separating the traditional postal services operation from a new enterprise group that will concentrate on developing its...

Zumbox Gets its First Government Account.
March 16, 2009... Zumbox, the new kid on the digital mail block, has got its first government partnership with the village of New Lenox, Illinois. Starting now, all residents of New Lenox will be sent official village communications to their Zumbox, saving the...

Postal Union Seeks To Discredit TNT.(Brief article)
March 16, 2009... Britain's Communication Workers Union (CWU), which is violently opposed to the government's plans to sell off a piece of the Royal Mail, has dredged up a bit of scandal about TNT, the Dutch company believed to have the best shot of cutting a...

Deutsche Post's Got a New Strategic Plan.
March 16, 2009... Deutsche Post has invited analysts and press to hear about its new "Strategy 2015" on March 11. Failing any leak by the post about what it's all about, Reuters quotes several people close to the supervisory board as saying that it "has no...

E-mail Worse than Liberalization: Norway Post.
March 16, 2009... A report run up by Economics and Business Research on the "Effects of Liberalization on the Norwegian Post Market" finds e-mail a bigger threat to the old monopolies than EC-ordered liberalization. The government is supposed to use the...

Albania Post Goes to Italian Post for Help.
March 16, 2009... The Italian Post is going to collaborate with the Albanian national postal service. Joint projects are supposed to improve postal and financial services and develop the countries' respective technological platforms. The benchmark will be Poste...

Hasler Intros New Production Postage Printing Rig.(Brief article)
March 16, 2009... Hasler says it's got a first-of-its-kind technology for the mail preparation process in its new EM150, a "direct onto documents" Production Postage Printing solution. The EM150 is a high-speed metering system that is supposed to transform...

USPS Getting Competitive.
March 16, 2009... With its pricing finally competitive - complements of new volume-related discounts - and DHL gone, the US Postal Service claims to have gained market share as the domestic US package shipping market goes to hell. Back at the end of...

Parascript Partners with Engineering Innovation.
March 16, 2009... Parascript, the image analysis and pattern recognition technology provider, brags that it has partnered with Engineering Innovation Inc to deliver its Optical Character Recognition (OCR) software to Address N' Mail so Address N' Mail can get...

Gartner Projects Nastiest PC Decline in History.
March 16, 2009... Gartner is currently figuring PC shipments will drop 11.9% this year to 257 million units worldwide, the steepest plunge ever. PCs' worst showing before was in 2001 when the market declined a mere 3.2%. Gartner says sales in emerging...

Bartz Lays Down Terms.
March 16, 2009... In her first public appearance since her apotheosis Yahoo's new CEO Carol Bartz laid down terms. If there are going to be talks with Microsoft, they're going to be private, not in the press, a perimeter she's apparently already communicated to...

Microsoft Testing Kumo.
March 16, 2009... Failing Yahoo, Microsoft went into the Live Search reconstruction business last year and is now starting to test the rebranded Kumo.com redesign internally. Kumo is a codename that surfaced months ago. It's unclear whether it will stick....

TSMC To Produce 'Strategic' SoC Atoms for Intel.
March 16, 2009... Intel has signed a strategic memorandum of understanding to ship its low-cost little Atom chip over to Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC), the world's largest build-to-order foundry, for System-on-Chip (SoC) treatment in order to...

DOJ Suspects EMC of Hanky-Panky.
March 16, 2009... The Justice Department is investigating storage biggie EMC, the parent company of virtualization leader VMware, for kickbacks and overcharging on government contracts. According to the Wall Street Journal, NetApp, an EMC rival, is expected...

Windows Widgetry Added to EC2 Europe.(Brief article)
March 16, 2009... In December Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud set up shop in Europe - Ireland actually - catering to folks using Unix/Linux environments and promising to add support for Windows Server and SQL Server down the road. Well, the company got to...

Microsoft To Expand its SaaS Base.
March 16, 2009... Microsoft is pushing its SaaS Business Productivity Online Suite, part of Microsoft Online Services, out for trial to 19 countries. That will make Exchange Online and SharePoint Online available for trial in Austria, Belgium, Canada,...

Spun-Out AMD Factories Dubbed GlobalFounderies.
March 16, 2009... AMD closed its long-sought manufacturing spin-out and a couple of days later those assets, transitionally known as the Foundry Company, were rechristened GlobalFounderies, the new repository of AMD's plant operations in Germany and the $4.2...

IBM & SAP Demo Load Balancing in the Cloud.
March 16, 2009... SAP and IBM have been showing off the live migration of SAP applications across remote IBM Power6 systems via the cloud, a bit of widgetry developed at IBM'S Research Lab in Haifa as part of the European Union-funded RESERVOIR cloud computing...

EC Eases Up on Microsoft Surveillance.
March 16, 2009... The European Commission said it no longer needs a full-time monitoring trustee to ensure Microsoft's compliance with its 2004 antitrust decree. Instead it intends to rely on the ad hoc assistance of technical consultants. The trustee was...

IBM & Oracle Reported Interested in Satyam.
March 16, 2009... According to the Wall Street blog, The Motley Fool, both IBM and Oracle have been among the flock of 50-odd companies that have responded to the possible sale of Indian consulting/outsourcing biggie Satyam Computer Services, whose founder and...

If Wishes were Chips, Nvidia Would Have an x86.
March 16, 2009... In answer to a question at a Morgan Stanley tech conference the other day, Nvidia's senior VP of investor relation Mike Hara suggested that the graphics maven will try to get into the x86 SoC market for netbooks and mobile Internet devices...

Linux Foundation To Take Over Linux.com Site.
March 16, 2009... The Linux Foundation is going to take over SourceForge's Linux.com site and its flagging editorial, intending to change the focus from news to collaboration with the community creating the content. Terms were not disclosed but SourceForge,...

Economy 'Pretty Dire': Google CEO.
March 16, 2009... Google CEO Eric Schmidt told a Morgan Stanley Technology Conference that the economy really stinks and that it's going to catch up with Google eventually. "We may be better positioned from an advertiser perspective, but ultimately the real pain...

Whatever He's Smokin' I Want Some.(Brief article)
March 16, 2009... "I'm neither worried about the role information technology will play in the economy, nor am I worried about the relevance of Sun's offerings. I'm not worried about the future, I'm focused on its arrival date." - Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz, who...

World's Most Admired.
March 16, 2009... The top 10 on Fortune's latest list of most admired companies are: Apple, Berkshire Hathaway, Toyota, Google, Johnson & Johnson, Proctor & Gamble, FedEx, Southwest Airlines, GE and Microsoft. Southwest and Microsoft replace Starbucks and...

Servers Hurting: IDC.
March 16, 2009... IDC says server unit sales dropped 12% globally in Q4 taking revenues down 14% to $13.5 billion. All vendors, geographies and technology segments were impacted. IBM revenues were down 15%, HP's 10.1%, Dell 9.9%. Volume boxes performed the worst...

Google To Spend $200m on Data Center.
March 16, 2009... Google is going build a $200 million data center in that derelict paper mill in Finland that it's buying, according to what Google Finland chief told Reuters. The place should reach the testing phase by the first half of next year.

Next Vista RC.
March 16, 2009... Release candidates of Vista SP2 (32- and 64-bit) and Windows Server 2008 are downloadable.

Deutsche Post is Now Deutsche Post DHL.
March 23, 2009... Complaining that this year and next are going to be brutal for logistics, Deutsche Post trotted out its Strategy 2015 plan, a collection of small steps designed to address its weaknesses and calm investors. The post has evidently been...

Canada Post Uses AMC for Integration.
March 23, 2009... Canada Post has chosen the Multi-Channel Integration Server (MCIS) from AMC Technology LLC to integrate its SAP CRM and Nortel contact center implementations. Improvements in operational efficiency are supposed to decrease call times and...

Poste Italiane Goes to Italtel &Infoblox for VoIP.
March 23, 2009... Italtel and Infoblox have been signed to fit Poste Italiane out with the network infrastructure it needs so all its branches can connect to the network and access services such as Voice over IP (VoIP). The post intends to develop its...

Royal Mail Watch.
March 23, 2009... The bill authorizing the British government to sell off a piece of the Royal Mail made it to the House of Lords where Business Secretary Lord Mandelson, effectively its sponsor, told the assemblage that the uproar and xenophobia unleashed by...

MyUS.com Re-Ups with DHL.
March 23, 2009... MyUS.com, the Florida-based global packaging and mail forwarding service that handles Internet purchases, has extended its relationship with DHL and awarded the financial strapped company a three-year international express shipping contract....

Descartes Acquires Scancode.(Descartes Systems Group)(Scancode Systems Inc)
March 23, 2009... Descartes Systems Group, the Ontario-based on-demand software-as-a-service (SaaS) logistics solutions provider, has acquired privately held Scancode Systems Inc, the Toronto-based developer and integrator of carrier-compliant parcel and...

Deutsche Post Headquarters Raided.
March 23, 2009... Authorities tossed Deutsche Post headquarters in Bonn last week as well the homes of former Deutsche Post CEO Klaus Zumwinkle and former Deutsche Telekom CEO Kai-Uwe Ricke looking for evidence of complicity in a pretexting-style spying scandal...

Obama Appoints a Cloud Fancier.
March 23, 2009... Ahead of Barrack Obama's promised appointment of America's first CTO, he named the CTO of the District of Columbia, a Delhi-born ex-marketing guy, Vivek Kundra, America's first CIO. He's a self-professed cloud fancier who replaced...

Australia Post Launches Click and Send.
March 23, 2009... Click and Send is Australia Post's new online services for international deliveries. It lets customers prepare their documentation online then choose when and where they want to lodge and pay for them.

Google's Americas Sales Chief To Run AOL.
March 23, 2009... Time Warner has dumped the misbegotten team of AOL CEO and chairman Randy Falco and COO Ron Grant and wheeled in Tim Armstrong, until that minute Google's Americas sales chief, as CEO and chairman. Google, remember, owns 5% of AOL bought at...

Google's Cloud Springs a Scary Leak.
March 23, 2009... Some users of Google's vaunted Google Docs service suddenly discovered that behind their backs the widgetry has been sharing some of their documents with folks who were never authorized to see them. There are at least three things that...

Failures Darken Google Cloud.(Brief article)
March 23, 2009... No sooner was Google over a reportedly limited Google Docs security breach this weekend when Gmail started acting up, giving the Google cloud, in particular, and all clouds, in general, another black eye. Some Gmail users were without...

Satyam Goes to the Auction Block.
March 23, 2009... A majority 51% of the big survival-threatened Indian outsourcer Satyam Computer Services Ltd, whose disgraced founder and former CEO confessed in January to loading its books with a billion dollars in "fictitious" assets and "non-existent"...

Microsoft Tries to Antitrust-Proof Windows 7.
March 23, 2009... It's official. Microsoft is going to let PC users turn its browser off in Windows 7 to keep the European Commission at bay. The EC's latest indictment of Microsoft accuses it of the antitrust sin of tying Internet Explorer to the Windows...

EC Extends Microsoft Deadline.
March 23, 2009... Microsoft was supposed to submit its rebuttal to the European Commission's January antitrust finding that bundling the Internet Explorer browser with the Windows operating system is anti-competitive the other day. Instead it asked for and...

HP Claims 'Industry Changing' Data Center Design.
March 23, 2009... HP has come up with a timely new device that promises to cut the capital cost of data centers by 15%-25%. And increase their efficiency while it's at it. It claims it's "industry changing." It's called multi-tiered hybrid design and HP...

Stratus Gives Away VMware Software.
March 23, 2009... Stratus Technologies is giving away VMware's Infrastructure Foundation software for free with its Intel-based ftServer fault-tolerant systems. It calls it its "We Feel Your Pain" campaign. According to SVP, product & solutions development...

SAP Standardizes on Citrix XenServer & XenApp.
March 23, 2009... Citrix has picked up a little showcase account. It says SAP will virtualize about 500 servers with XenServer by mid-year to reap the rewards of server consolidation. Of course Citrix and SAP have been tight for a long time and of...

SAP Drinks at the Star Trek Bar.
March 23, 2009... SAP's complex Business Suite software is on its way to the iPhone, Blackberry and Windows Mobile-based smartphones integrated with Sybase's mobile enterprise application platform. SAP and Sybase are working together on the project; Sybase is...

Royal Mail Launches New Direct Mail Resource.
March 30, 2009... Royal Mail is dangling a new online resource in front of business promising to help them make the most of direct mail. Called the Mail Media Centre, it's aimed at the UK's top 3,000 advertisers and 500 key agencies and is supposed to...

FedEx Calls a Bottom.
March 30, 2009... As a bellwether of the global economy, FedEx sounded another discordant note last Thursday when it reported its fiscal third quarter results. Revenues fell 14% to $8.14 billion. And that's the first time its sales have dropped in probably 10...

USPS Cuts Jobs, Closes Facilities, Tries Early Recruitment Again.
March 30, 2009... In a tailspin it knows it may not pull out of, the US Post Service said last Friday that it is cutting upwards of 3,000 jobs, closing six of its 80 district offices, and offering early retirement to 150,000 postal workers in an effort to save...

Deutsche Post Reportedly Sells Four Data Centers.
March 30, 2009... Deutsche Post has reportedly sold four of its 11 data centers to T-Systems, the Deutsche Telekom unit that operates the information and communications technology (ICT) for many multinational corporations and public institutions. Deutsche Post...

Earth Class Mail Staffs Up.
March 30, 2009... Earth Class Mail has hired Steve Zitkovich as international product manager and Ross Valenti as director of interactive marketing for the European rollout of its technology platform by Swiss Post's new online postal-mail division, Swiss Post...

Amazon Offers Free Shipping to Belgium & Holland.(Brief article)
March 30, 2009... Amazon.de is offering free shipping to addresses in Belgium and the Netherlands on all orders worth over 20 euros and all media shipments containing a book regardless of the value of the purchase. Other than books, music and DVDs the offer...

DX Invests in Directory Services Tools.
March 30, 2009... DX, the British mail and courier company, has launched enhanced Directory Services tools on its new web site to help its customers make more of their DX subscriptions. The company said it "invested in these tools to make it easier and...

Eesti Post Launches e-Learning.
March 30, 2009... Eesti, the Estonian post, has started using e-learning, unusual in Estonia, to keep its staff up to snuff. It calls the widgetry WebTrainer, and says it was brought in by Spin TEK AS. It apparently involves a variety of training programs,...

Finns Run to Buying Online from Foreign Sites: Itella.(Survey)(Brief article)
March 30, 2009... Itella did a survey of 1,500 people and found that 20%-25% of the goods Finns buy online are bought from abroad. Itella would obviously prefer it if people shopped at home. Last year, the number of purchases made on foreign web sites...

Pitney Bowes Expands Output Management Capabilities for Print and Mail Operations.
March 30, 2009... Pitney Bowes, which sells Production Intelligence Workflow Solutions for print and mail operations, has expanded its VIP, VDE and FlexServer output management solutions. VIP and VDE versions 8.8 now offer support for the PDF/A-1b format...

Intel Threatens To Pull AMD's x86 License.
March 30, 2009... Well, the fat's in the fire now. Intel has informed AMD that it's in breach of their 2001 patent cross-license and if the companies don't come to terms in the next 60 days it's going terminate the license and then AMD won't be able to make...

Cisco Takes its Long Shot at Morphing into IT's El Supremo.
March 30, 2009... Cisco CEO John Chambers is the latest in a long line of visionaries to come down from the mountain top with an architectural roadmap to the Promised Land at an exploitable industry inflection point. If the purportedly game-changing...

IBM Supposedly Interested in Buying Sun.
March 30, 2009... Back about 10 years ago after Lou Gerstner saved IBM from falling off a cliff and Sun was still a comer Gerstner and Sun CEO Scott McNealy used to have breakfast, lunch or dinner more than ever so often and Scooter invariably pitched Lou on...