ePostal News articles from May 2005

ePostal News archives from May 2005

Custom stamps back on!!
May 2, 2005... The US Postal Service is gonna give custom postage stamps another go, a decision that should endear it to all the folks smitten with the idea of having their own picture on a US stamp rather than some old codger whose term in office they can't...

Counterfeit money orders latest Internet swindle.(Brief Article)
May 2, 2005... For the last six months, the FBI and the United States Postal Service have been chasing down international forgers--mostly in Nigeria, but also in Ghana and Eastern Europe--who have been passing counterfeit US postal money orders. They...

Royal mail puts up its dukes.(Brief Article)
May 2, 2005... The Royal Mail is expected to sign a big IT security pact with Qualys and Qinetiq to protect the 80,000 servers and 50,000 PCs at the Royal Mail, the Post Office and Parcelforce against viruses, hacks and spyware. The company is supposed...

Posta Romana to dip into banking services.(Brief Article)
May 2, 2005... The Romanian state-owned postal company Posta Romana plans to start offering financial-banking services in the next few years in a bid to expand its product portfolio, according to the company's general director Dan Mihai Toader. It...

Travelocity to spark snail mail?(Brief Article)
May 2, 2005... A joint venture between Travelocity.co.uk and InAMobile is offering travelers the chance to send personalized postcards to family and friends worldwide. With the new service, travelers with mobile camera phones can take a picture of their own,...

8m and counting.
May 2, 2005... The USPS says it's picked up 8 million packages so far as a result of its Carrier Pickup Online Notification. Customers request a pick-up on usps.com.

Denmark--the most e-ready.(Brief Article)
May 2, 2005... Denmark is the most e-ready country out of the 65 countries ranked by the Economist Intelligence for 2005. The study defines a country's "e-readiness" as a measure of its e-business environment, a collection of factors that indicate how...

Adobe buys Macromedia.
May 2, 2005... Adobe is buying Macromedia for $3.4 billion in stock, the biggest example of consolidation in the software business since Oracle finally nailed PeopleSoft and Symantec said it was buying Veritas late last year. Such a deal has been the...

Intel overachieves.
May 2, 2005... Intel hit a home run that happened to coincide with the 40th anniversary of Moore's Law, itself a resounding homerun. It came with Q1 earnings up 25% year-over-year to $2.2 billion, or 34 cents a share, on revenue of $9.4, up 17%...

Broadband, mobile impacting TV advertising.(Brief Article)
May 2, 2005... The increased use of broadband, DVRs and mobile phones to access television programs will soon make advertising breaks redundant, according to a report by Deloitte & Touche's Technology, Media & Telecommunications Global Industry Group. ...

USPS takes three.(United States. Postal Service)(achievements and awards)(KioskCom.com Trade Show and Conference)(Brief Article)
May 2, 2005... The USPS was recognized for its interactive self-service applications at the 9th annual KioskCom.com Trade Show and Conference. The awards were presented for the best kiosk applications and designs in various industries. The USPS took...

Australian mobile market nears saturation.(Brief Article)
May 2, 2005... The Australian mobile market is slowly reaching saturation, according to Research and Markets. According to the firm, Australia has some 80% mobile penetration. The little growth that is still occurring comes mainly from new...

US slip-sliding away in broadband.
May 2, 2005... Thomas Bleha, a former US Foreign Service officer in Japan, has a fascinating piece in the May-June issue of Foreign Affairs that begins like this: 'In the first three years of the Bush administration, the United States dropped from 4th to 13th...

Stamps.com positions for growth.
May 2, 2005... Stamps.com earned $1.6 million, or seven cents a share, in the first quarter on $11.8 million in revenues, up 56% year-over-year in part because it's pushing customers into pricier monthly offerings. Earnings were flat sequentially but...

Biggies ranked on how they treat online customers.(delivery services' ranking)
May 9, 2005... The Customer Respect Group, a Boston-based international research and consulting firm that focuses on how corporations treat their customers online, has released the results of its Second Quarter 2005 Online Customer Respect Study of the...

EFT threatens post office.(electronic funds transfer seen as alternative for postal service)(Brief Article)
May 9, 2005... Ireland's Minister for the Marine and Natural Resources Noel Dempsey raised an alarm over the weekend at the annual conference of the Irish Postmasters' Union (IPU) warning that "The convenience of electronic funds transfer (EFT) means...

Privatized Philpost gets push.(Philippines postal service )(Brief Article)
May 9, 2005... The issue of whether to privatize the post and generate additional revenues for a cash-strapped government is being pushed in the Philippines by representative Hermilando I. Mandanas who's backing the creation of a new Philippine Postal...

IPS claims to eliminate the pull process.(Integrated Printing Solutions Inc. and PSI Group Inc. jointly develops IPS MailSort service)(Brief Article)
May 9, 2005... Integrated Printing Solutions Inc (IPS), a Colorado-based high-speed imaging, printing and card service bureau provider, has launched IPS MailSort, a service developed with PSI Group Inc that it hopes will revolutionize the mailing process that...

USPS seeks customer comment on future direction.(US Postal Service)(Brief Article)
May 9, 2005... The US Postal Service is seeking input from customers on the second phase of its Strategic Transformation Plan, the blueprint that's supposed to outline its goals, targets and strategies through 2010. The first phase of the plan is credited...

Q-Post to install Oracle eBusiness suite.(Qatar's General Postal Corporation)(Brief Article)
May 9, 2005... The General Postal Corporation in Qatar, aka Q-Post, has gone to an outfit called Mannai Corporation to implement the finance, human resources, payroll and purchasing modules in Oracle's eBusiness Suite. The deal was signed by Q-Post...

Letters weigh down Deutsche post.(Brief Article)
May 9, 2005... Deutsche Post's earnings are expected to be down when it reports its latest results. The operating profit of its letter unit, its most important operation, fell by around 100 million euros compared to the same quarter last year when it did 749...

TNT completes phase one of RFID program.(TNT Post Group N.V.'s Radio Frequency Identification program)(Brief Article)
May 9, 2005... TNT of the Netherlands has completed the first phase of its Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) program, demonstrating that using intelligent tags in real supply chain operations substantially improves efficiency and visibility into parts of...

Bahrain post turns bill collector.(Brief Article)
May 9, 2005... Bahrain has started using its post office as a place queue-weary people can go to pay their electric bill while the Ministry of Electricity and Water works on an online payment scheme that's promised by the start of next year. The ministry is...

Mendocino: the next best thing to an SAP-Microsoft merger.
May 9, 2005... Microsoft and SAP couldn't pull off an industry-morphing merger last year to deal with the Oracle-PeopleSoft combine but thanks to those talks they're planning a joint project code name Mendocino that will tie Office to SAP's business planning...

Siebel rescue plan vague.
May 9, 2005... When it posted its unhappy numbers Siebel said that it's going to cut people and costs to repair the serious Q1 shortfall that caused it to fire its CEO a few weeks ago. Of course, Wall Street had already dragged that strategy out of the...

Casualty count from the browser war.(Firefox Inc.)(Brief Article)
May 9, 2005... Firefox has doubled its market share, according to Janco's April Browser Market Share Study. It says that Firefox has grabbed 10.28% of the browser market in less than three months and based on conversations with a number of industry...

W3C works on rules.(World Wide Web Consortium's workshop on rule languages)
May 9, 2005... W3C ran a Rule Languages Workshop in Washington, DC, to kick-start the development of the next layer in the Semantic Web development stack. It wants to identify the requirements needed for a common rules language, and hence a basis for...

Consumer online content revenue doubling in Western Europe.(Industry Overview)
May 9, 2005... Revenues for online content in Western Europe will exceed 3 billion ($3.87 billion) this year, double what they were in 2004. They're expected to hit 16 billion ($20.64 billion) in 2008, according to the European IT Observatory (EITO). Online...

Telenor: more broadband speed, same price.
May 9, 2005... Telenor will start increasing the up-and-down ADSL broadband speeds for its Norwegian residential customers on June 1-at no increase in monthly fees. The company says it's responding to Norwegian consumer demand for faster Internet...

USPS promises to save delinquent husbands from the dog house.(United States. Postal Service)(Brief Article)
May 16, 2005... The USPS would like to make Mother's Day into a year-round affair. It's proposing that folks sign up at its NetPost CardStore on usps.com for a year's worth of "Love you, mom" cards it'll be more than happy to deliver automatically to let...

UPS drivers get new wireless computers.(United Parcel Service of America Inc.)
May 16, 2005... UPS has begun outfitting its drivers with a new-generation handheld computer that can "talk" with four different wireless communication systems to speed tracking information to customers. The widget is smaller and lighter than its...

SingPost tries witchcraft.(Brief Article)
May 16, 2005... SingPost said it's going to sell the latest Harry Potter book as part of diversification efforts that have recently included financial services including remittances and pawn brokering. It says it will deliver a hard-cover copy of "Harry Potter...

Zimpost reportedly allocated a heck of a lot of money.(Brief Article)
May 16, 2005... Zimbabwe's semi-governmental Zimpost has been "allocated" a hefty $250 billion--as in billion--under the Reserve Bank of Parastatals and Local Authorities Reorientation Programme (PLARP) to aid the ailing postal service provider and turn its...

French postal market to be opened up.(Brief Article)
May 16, 2005... The French National Assembly has passed a bill which will open the postal services market to competition by 2009. At press time it was expected that the legislation would be made into law by the French parliament after a joint committee meeting...

You've got mail.(UniversalPost)(MyMailEmail)(Brief Article)
May 16, 2005... UniversalPost, a subsidiary of publicly held Universal Express Inc, has formed a partnership with MyMailEmail, a mail delivery notification service, that has a software mailbox system that lets postal stores notify e-mail box holders when they...

Now where did I park?(United States. Postal Service)(Brief Article)
May 16, 2005... The USPS, we have come to find out, is under contract with Unisys and ID Systems for an enterprise-wide wireless asset tracking system dubbed Pivms or Powered Industrial Vehicle Management System that's supposed to help it manage vehicles such...

IBM to cut European jobs, revamp global structure.(International Business Machines Corp.)
May 16, 2005... IBM is going to cut 10,000-13,000 jobs, mostly in Europe where it's been weak and mostly out of its precious service organization, to propitiate the gods who ruined its first quarter. IBM has been hinting that it was going to restructure...

Royal Mail angling for more money.(Brief Article)
May 16, 2005... Allan Leighton, the chairman of Britain's Royal Mail, is supposed to propose giving partial ownership of the government-owned company to its employees and ask the British government for a loan of $3.8 billion, according to London's Sunday...

Siebel says it may buy something.(Brief Article)
May 16, 2005... Smarting from investor pressure, Siebel's unexpected new CEO George Shaheen, three weeks into the job, said that the company will make acquisitions and targeted investments, as well as the job and cost cuts he been talking about, to right...

Peter Moore Software supports Mail.dat 05-1.(Brief Article)
May 16, 2005... Colorado-based Peter Moore Software is up to rev 5.0 of its Mail.dat Excel macro. The macro, which comes in the form of an Excel spreadsheet, lets users import the most commonly used Mail.dat files into an Excel spreadsheet, format numeric...

Lenovo's acquisition of IBM's PC unit closes early.(International Business Machines Corp.)(Brief Article)
May 16, 2005... Lenovo closed on its historic and ambitious $1.75 billion acquisition of IBM's money-losing PC unit and is now ostensibly the third-largest PC company in the world behind Dell and HP. The IBM unit is supposed to be run as a separate...

50m and counting.(Brief Article)
May 16, 2005... The number of open source Firefox browser downloads has passed 50 million. The new Opera 8 at two-week-old was claiming two million downloads, 1.3 million in English, 400,000 in German. Opera 7 tallied 60 million downloads during its lifetime.

Deutsche Post may cut 6,000 jobs.(Brief Article)
May 16, 2005... Deutsche Post might have to cut up to 6,000 jobs due to its legally mandated co-operation with competitors, according to what group CEO Klaus Zumwinkel told the German daily Die Welt late last week. He estimates Deutsche Post revenues will drop...

Rival claims USPS-AuthentiDate EPM upgrade flawed.(Electronic Postmark )(Postal Service)
May 23, 2005... AuthentiDate, the third-party vendor handling the US Postal Service's Electronic Postmark, quietly started pushing out an upgrade about a month ago. It's now about to go full bore with it. The new rev 2 time-and-date stamp, blessed by the...

Brazil screws Microsoft.(Brief Article)
May 23, 2005... State-owned Banco do Brasil, Latin American's largest bank, has announced the creation of a so-called World Open Source Software Organization to push the adoption of open source software in place of Microsoft by other developing countries. ...

Mail Boxes Etc launches Canada's largest Wi-Fi hotspots network.
May 23, 2005... Business services chain Mail Boxes Etc Canada (MBE) says that 260 of its 275 franchises have gone fully operational as secure public Wi-Fi (wireless fidelity) hotspots. The technology is coming from Bell Canada and BOLDstreet Wireless. ...

Deutsche Post WorldNet standardizes on IT portfolio management solution.(from PlanView Inc.)(Brief Article)
May 23, 2005... Deutsche Post WorldNet disclosed that it is using PlanView Inc's project portfolio management software to manage its best practice initiatives. "Our business divisions use the PlanView solution as part of our global IT strategy to...

Technology fails the USPS.(Postal Service)
May 23, 2005... Technology and automation have created excess capacity in the US Postal Service's nationwide mail processing and distribution system, but the agency has no clear strategy for closing facilities or cutting the jobs it no longer needs, according...

Pitney adds VeriMove Net change-of-address solution.
May 23, 2005... Pitney Bowes has launched VeriMove Net, an integrated move update solution designed for its SmartMailer 7 mail management software that comes with an NCOALink Limited Service Provider License from the US Postal Service. VeriMove Net...

IBM buys its first open source firm.(GlueCode)
May 23, 2005... IBM has bought its very first open source concern, four-year-old privately held GlueCode, a service outfit in El Segundo, California that sells a version of the Java-based Apache Geronimo application server called Joe. Terms were not disclosed;...

MSN makes move on China.(Brief Article)
May 23, 2005... MSN, Microsoft's online services division, has formed a joint venture with Shanghai Alliance Investment Ltd (SAIL) to launch MSN China. SAIL is an 11-year-old professional investment company funded by the state-owned Assets Supervision and...

Ex-SuSE chief quits Novell.(Richard Siebt)(Brief Article)
May 23, 2005... Richard Siebt, the ex-IBMer who was running SuSE when the company was sold to Novell, has resigned from his post as president of Novell EMEA, the job he's had since Novell took SuSE over. Novell was anxious to underscore the fact that Siebt...

La Post trades away part of its monopoly.(France Ministry of Industry, Postal Services and Telecommunications and Tourism)(Brief Article)
May 23, 2005... France's La Poste wants 9% of the home mortgage market in 10 years, a share equal to its position in French retail banking, according to AFX News. The state-owned postal operator has 4% now. The French Parliament just approved legislation...

i2 to integrate Microsoft widgetry.(i2 Technologies contracts)(Brief Article)
May 23, 2005... i2 Technologies and Microsoft have cut the proverbial strategic alliance that will see i2 supply chain solutions better integrated with Microsoft technologies. i2 will be developing its SCM solutions on the Microsoft platform. The deal...

W3C opens new mobile front.(World Wide Web Consortium)(Mobile Web Initiative)(Brief Article)
May 23, 2005... W3C has kicked off a Mobile Web Initiative (MWI), a new effort to improve the web experience for mobile devices and recognize them as first-class citizens, the equals of the desktop. Founding sponsors include France Telecom, HP, MobileAware,...

Novell buys Linux protection.(Immunix Inc.)(Brief Article)
May 23, 2005... Novell has acquired Immunix Inc, a Linux host-based application security solutions provider whose enterprise-level AppArmor is supposed to protect Linux environments against malicious attacks and viruses. The product, which will now be...

Singapore residents get 25 Mbps broadband, free HP notebook.(Brief Article)
May 23, 2005... Singapore's StarHub has launched a 25 Mbps broadband service called MaxOnline Ultimate. It complements the company's 6.5 Mbps, 2 Mbps and 2 Mbps pre-paid broadband services. The 25 Mbps download service offers 1 Mbps uploads, both almost...

Lenovo talks tough.(Lenovo Group Ltd.)(Brief Article)
May 23, 2005... Lenovo's new CEO, IBM legacy Stephen Ward, thinks the world's new third biggest PC maker can double its profits in three years and defy near-universal doubt that it can turn the loss-making PC business it bought from IBM around. Ward also...

AOL as the rich dowager aunt.(America Online Inc. looses subscribers)(Brief Article)
May 23, 2005... Yime Warner recently announced that AOL's ISP business lost 2.3 million subscribers in the year ending March 31 and is now down to 21.7 million subscribers. In the last quarter, it lost 549,000 subscribers who paid AOL a monthly fee for an...

EC's temper shortening.(European Commission)(Brief Article)
May 23, 2005... The European Commission, increasingly chaffed by Micro-soft's non-compliance with its antitrust remedies, ordered on March 24 of last year, appears to have put a time limit on its patience. It's saying publicly that if Microsoft doesn't...

Pitney Bowes buys Imagitas in $230m stock deal.(Imagitas Inc)(Brief Article)
May 23, 2005... Pitney Bowes is buying Imagitas Inc, a marketing services firm, in a $230 million stock deal to expand its direct mail business. Imagitas, which will be run as a wholly owned subsidiary under its current management, has been partnered with the...

Deutsche Post & SAP pair on billing.
May 30, 2005... Deutsche Post and SAP say that companies can cut invoicing and invoice-processing costs with a newly developed B2B platform for electronic invoice exchange. Using software that SAP developed, Deutsche Post can import electronic invoice...

Pace of change is slower than you think: Esker.(Esker Software)
May 30, 2005... Esker Software, a provider of automated document delivery solutions and services, has surveyed over 500 North American billing and invoicing managers and found that despite the proliferation of enterprise software to manage financial...

Royal Mail confirms QinetiQ anti-hacker deal.(Royal Mail Group PLC, QinetiQ Ltd.)
May 30, 2005... T with QinetiQ for vulnerability scanning for its e-commerce infrastructure. The deal includes Post Office Ltd and Parcelforce. QinetiQ will manage a service that includes its own Managed Vulnerability Assessment and Alerting Service...

Canada Post subsidiary offers market-entry service.(Canada Post Corp.)
May 30, 2005... Toronto-based Canada Post Borderfree, which has been a Canada Post Group company since 2002, says it's moved beyond its focus as a technology provider and is now offering US retailers a suite of direct marketing, transportation and e-commerce...

Canada Post gets new chief.(Brief Article)
May 30, 2005... Moya Greene has been appointed president and CEO Canada Post. Greene, 51, has been a senior officer of three Canada's largest multinationals, first in banking and financial services, where she was managing director, infrastructure finance...

DHL redesigns its US web site.(DHL Airways Inc.)
May 30, 2005... DHL, now a $32 billion-a-year company, has redesigned its US web site to enhance functionality and provide what it hopes is the most customer-friendly shipping experience on the market, particularly for small and medium-sized business owners....

Royal Mail finds itself making historic profit-sharing outlay.(Royal Mail Group PLC)
May 30, 2005... Britain's Royal Mail, which was losing a million pounds a day three years ago, is now making two million pounds a day from operations. It has proven it can make money--and reward its staff--even if it can't get the mail delivered on time in...

RemoteScan claims to radically cut scanning costs.(RemoteScan Corporation)(Brief Article)
May 30, 2005... Montana-based RemoteScan Corporation, makers of network connectivity software for document scanners and digital cameras, has released RemoteScan for Government, which is specifically designed to cut document-handling costs for government...

Norway Post compensates with non-letter revenues.
May 30, 2005... Norway Post earned NOK 307 million before taxes in the first quarter, slipping NOK 26 million year-over-year, said, because of the early Easter and the NOK 65 million arbitration award it got last year, which throws comparisons off. ...

Open source start-up suits up for bomb run on Oracle.(EnterpriseDB Corporation)
May 30, 2005... If he still has it, Larry Ellison might want to take that fighter jet of his on a strafing mission over Edison, New Jersey one of these days. That's where a start-up called EnterpriseDB Corporation has created what it calls an...

Wall Street guru predicts massive layoffs at HP.(Hewlett-Packard Co.)(Brief Article)
May 30, 2005... After listening to Hewlett-Packard's second-quarter earnings call, revered Sanford C Bernstein analyst Toni Sacconaghi, who's generally on the money, sat down and wrote that "We expect that [HP] CEO [Mark] Hurd will likely articulate his...

Hurd says HP has to be 'bipolar'.(Hewlett-Packard Co.'s CEO Mark Hurd)
May 30, 2005... HP's new CEO Mark Hurd, the NCR conscript, got on the horn to Wall Street after the market closed to make his first quarterly report since he got there. Hurd said he hadn't been at HP long enough yet to detail a remedial plan to fix the...

Microsoft's me-too search arrives.(Brief Article)
May 30, 2005... Microsoft has released the final version of its Google-rivaling desktop search tool, Windows Desktop Search, in beta since December and meant to find the e-mail, Word documents, PDFs and web pages you're looking for. Google put out its...

Microsoft sued over spreadsheet widgetry.(Brief Article)
May 30, 2005... Microsoft has been in court defending itself against charges that it illegally poached a Guatemalan developer's technology for linking data in Excel and Access via a single spreadsheet. It's the usual story. Carlos Armando Amado...

Yo, boss, about that raise ...(Brief Article)
May 30, 2005... Mccording to the Yoh Index of Technology Wages, the salaries of experienced, high-impact high-tech professionals declined 0.8% in the first three months of 2005, compared to the first quarter of 2004. "Wages are not growing as rapidly as...

Oracle & Zend partner on PHP-based apps.(Zend Technologies Inc. Post Hypertext Preprocessor)(Brief Article)
May 30, 2005... Oracle and Zend Technologies Inc, the PHP commercializer, are teaming to produce Zend Core for Oracle, a fully tested and supported free download that's supposed to deliver tight integration between Oracle's 10g database and Zend's supported...

Xandros adds Skype.(Xandros Corp.)(Brief Article)
May 30, 2005... Xandros has started shipping Xandros SurfSide, a new desktop Linux that comes with free Skype-to-Skype calling worldwide and a Plantronics USB headset combo that calls "ready to plug in and call." The distro lists for $99.95. As special...

Microsoft cash cow due to calve next year.(Brief Article)
May 30, 2005... Microsoft said in time for its annual CEO Summit last week that the mysterious new Office 12--about which little is known other than that it's supposed to be collaborative--would be out in the second half of next year, the same time frame set...

Light summer reading.(Brief Article)
May 30, 2005... Bet this little number makes it to Microsoft's bestseller list. Dr Gary Hull, the director of the Program on Values and Ethics in the Marketplace at Duke University, and some other people have written a book called "The Abolition of Antitrust,"...

BT adding a broadband line every 10 seconds.(British Telecom)(Brief Article)
May 30, 2005... British Telecom patted itself on its broadband back when announced its financial results for the year ending March 31. According to BT chairman Christopher Bland, "We have more than doubled the number of broadband DSL connections in the year,...

It's a broadband world.(Brief Article)
May 30, 2005... "Within our lifetimes, the distribution of news and information is going to shift to broadband. We must enter the broadband world having mastered the three key skill sets--print, Internet and video--because that's what's going to ensure the...

Fellow travelers.(cuban government replace windows)(Brief Article)
May 30, 2005... People who regard open source as a communist conspiracy are gonna love this. The Cuban government is gonna dump Windows and go with Linux, according to the Agence France-Presse (AFP), which got it from the Cuban government daily Juventud...