ePostal News articles from May 2006

ePostal News archives from May 2006

Post Danmark RFID's its roll cages.(using radio frequency identification tags)(Brief article)
May 1, 2006... The Danish postal service Post Danmark is supposed to tag 25,000 roll cages, the wheelies used to move mail around its mail distribution facility, with RFID tags by the end of the year. It thinks tagging its roll cages will reduce the loss of...

UPS claims QSF fund a success.(quality of service fund from Universal Postal Union)(Brief article)
May 1, 2006... Five years after setting up the Quality of Service Fund (QSF), the United Nations-backed Universal Postal Union (UPU) has tapped it to underwrite 279 projects aimed at improving postal services in developing and least advanced countries,...

Paper still precious.(survey for Posten reveals paperless society wants bills and tax returns )
May 1, 2006... According to a new survey conducted by SIFO Research International for Posten, the Swedish Postal Service, nine out of 10 Swedes feel it's important to get their bills and tax returns mailed to their home. Less than four out of 10 feel it's...

Click&Buy expands paid content software to multi-currency services.
May 1, 2006... Click&Buy, the ePayment house, has a new multi-currency service that will let merchants provide content in local currencies. US merchants will be able to expand their companies internationally to Click&Buy's five million consumers worldwide...

BBH moves to put an end to postage meters.(Bowe Bell & Howell Co. launches weight verification and management system)(Brief article)
May 1, 2006... Bowe Bell + Howell has announced a so-called WayMark weight verification and management system that will let mailers submit mailings to the USPS without using a postage meter. The WayMark modules, an answer to the USPS mandate to gradually...

TNT enhances tracking service.(TNT Express Worldwide, online shipment tracking service enhancement)(Brief article)
May 1, 2006... TNT Express, the B2B express courier, has introduced an enhanced tracking service so customers can monitor all shipments and get the status of multiple consignments with one click of a mouse. The new service, which is available in the...

Scott quits.
May 1, 2006... Scott McNealy stepped down, as we said he was likely to, on Monday when Sun posted its fiscal third-quarter results immediately turning the job over to his next-in-line successor, president Jonathan Schwartz--and don't you believe for an...

Yes but Larry already owns a Linux Distribution.
May 1, 2006... The world rolled out of bed the other day to learn that the ever-acquisitive CEO of Oracle Larry Ellison wants his own Linux operating system so he can have his own complete stack and that he's thought about buying Red Hat or Novell but can't...

Bloodied Intel on the walking wounded list.
May 1, 2006... The worst thing that could have happened to Intel happened. It hit its Q1 consensus numbers, its worst in four years, which has caused it to launch the first company-wide analysis since the mid-1980s. CFO Andy Bryant called it a time...

Novell buys e-Security.
May 1, 2006... Novell has bought e-Security Inc for $72 million, a move it figures will make it a pioneer in delivering a single view of security and compliance activities across the entire enterprise. It could also help soothe some of the stockholder...

Apple reports its first Intel sales.
May 1, 2006... Apple, which is in the midst of its historic transition to Intel, sold 1.11 million computers in the March quarter, up 4% year-over-year with Mac revenue up 5% to $1.57 billion. The company said most of the Macs were Intel-based, making...

The IRS tells Symantec it owes a billion dollars in back taxes.(Internal Revenue Service)(Brief article)
May 1, 2006... Symantec has gotten a dunning notice from the IRS telling the company that it owes a billion dollars in back taxes--and that's not counting penalties and interest. Symantec says it's going to protest the assessment, which covers the years...

IBM servers had a rough quarter.
May 1, 2006... IBM came in with Q1 results of $20.7 in revenues, earning $1.08 a share. The company did not set Q2 revenue targets. Hardware sales were up a modest 3% year-over-year (6% in constant currency) to $4.4 billion and were generally...

Massive stock buy-back covers EMC shortfall.
May 1, 2006... EMC made $272.5 million, 11 cents a share, up 1%, on first-quarter revenues of $2.55 billion, up 14% year-over-year. The revenues might have been a record but the numbers didn't quite make EMC's previous projections or Wall Street's...

Google upgrades corporate search.
May 1, 2006... In a prelude to pushing Gmail in the business world up against Microsoft, Google wants to search your business software even if keywords may not be the deftest of surgical instruments. It has gotten Oracle, salesforce.com and Cisco to kick in...

PC scorecard.
May 1, 2006... Gartner's preliminary Q1 PC shipment count estimates unit growth up 13.1% year-over-year, down 9% sequentially, which is slightly below normal seasonality. That would mean something like 57 million PCs, notebooks and servers went out the...

Green grid formed.
May 1, 2006... AMD, HP, Sun and IBM have formed the Green Grid to help reduce the power and cooling demands of enterprise data centers by propagating best practice in data center operations, construction and design. The Green Grid is supposed to be forum...

ODIN moves to Europe to avoid incompetent middlemen.
May 8, 2006... Four-year-old RFID specialist ODIN technologies has formed ODIN Budapest, a joint venture between ODIN technologies, the Swiss firm MTS and the Hungarian government. ODIN has been serving European clients from its US offices in Virginia...

Universal Express enters Ebay arena.(PostalNation to use kiosk technology from QuikDrop International )(Brief article)
May 8, 2006... PostalNation, a subsidiary of Universal Express Inc, the publicly held logistics conglomerate, will be putting QuikDrop International's proprietary hardware and software eBay kiosk technology in thousands of its PostalNation locations...

Correos cuts 8m [euro] deal with Microsoft.
May 8, 2006... The Spanish Post Office, Correos, is going to spend eight million euros with Microsoft Iberia between now and 2007 buying software such as Windows Server, Office and Exchange Server to modernize its technology infrastructures and communications...

Certipost signs up FEE members.
May 8, 2006... FEE, the European trade group that represents 130 importers and makers of electric devices, is backing electronic invoicing via CertiONE, the Certipost platform. From June onwards the big suppliers to the local electric sector, companies...

Deutsche Post World Net builds international research center.
May 8, 2006... Deutsche Post World Net will be launching new R&D initiatives that it says will be carried out at a new DHL Innovation Center that it intends to build in Troisdorf near Bonn. The center will reportedly support the development of...

DHL buys Siemens ParcelDepots.(DHL Airways Inc. contracts with Siemens Industrial Solutions and Services Group)(Brief article)
May 8, 2006... The Postal Automation Division of Siemens' Industrial Solutions and Services Group is going to supply DHL with 140 ParcelDepots, which will be scattered around Germany as part of DHL's Packstation project. The contract builds on tests of 10...

DX awarded Postal Services Framework Agreement.
May 8, 2006... DX Network Services has been awarded a Postal Services Framework Agreement by OGCbuying.solutions, the trading arm of the UK's Office of Government Commerce and appointed an accredited supplier of postal services. The arrangement means...

UPS tweaks its widgetry.
May 8, 2006... UPS says it's enhanced a bunch of its web-based tools to simplify the complexities of global trade starting with My UPS to address the needs of small businesses. Now any registered UPS customer can have quick access to package tracking,...

Americans do move a lot.
May 8, 2006... Last year, the USPS processed 45 million address changes, up from 44 million the year before. The agency advises using MoversGuide Online, its web service, which automates the address change and saves a trip to the post office. The...

Intel vows to change; semi giant claims it was undone by chipsets, not AMD.
May 8, 2006... Intel's embattled CEO Paul Otellini told Wall Street analysts that the company was in for a massive overhaul that leaves "no stone unturned" and affects "every part" of the place. What exactly that means is still unclear--and we may have to...

Intel to fast track microarchitectures.
May 8, 2006... Intel says that it's not going to sit around anymore and watch its microarchitecture cause market share losses by growing moldy like it did with NetBurst--which some would say wasn't anything to write home about in the first place. It's now...

Well no wonder Intel is whimpering.
May 8, 2006... According to Mercury Research, Opteron accounted for a devastating 22.1% of the worldwide x86 server chips shipped in Q1, up from 16.4% in Q4, and its revenue share increased at Intel's expense. Chip groupie Nathan Brookwood made some...

Microsoft trades profits for growth.
May 8, 2006... Microsoft's third-quarter profits, handsome though they may be and up 16% to boot, weren't quite what the pundits figured was on tap--and its end-of-year and next year forecasts weren't quite as bright and shiny as Wall Street estimated...

Ex-CA CEO pleads guilty.(Sanjay Kumar accused of accounting fraud, and obstructing justice)(chief executive officer)
May 8, 2006... Allocute is a word that most of us only know because we watch "Law and Order" on TV. That's when the guy knows the jig is up, has nowhere else to turn, and having copped a plea admits to the court what he did wrong to get a lighter sentence....

CA pre-announces, comes up way short.(sales and revenue expectations)(Brief article)
May 8, 2006... Just when it should be ecstatic that its former CEO Sanjay Kumar's dirty laundry isn't going to be washed in a court of law, CA had another sorry tale to tell. It's not going meet its own fiscal fourth-quarter forecast. Its stock, as one might...

Intel creates new vPro brand.
May 8, 2006... Quick on the heels of its devastating first-quarter report, Intel previewed its first enterprise PC platform hoping to influence its second-half results by claiming to have reinvented the business client, even if all the widgetry won't be there...

Jeeves is working for Microsoft now.
May 8, 2006... Microsoft has hired Steve Berkowitz, the former president of Ask.com, nee AskJeeves, to run MSN and its newfangled Windows Live. He is expected to influence Microsoft's advertising business and its move to web-based software-as-a-service....

Linspire borrows from proprietary world to fill Linux holes.(plans to launch open source software)
May 8, 2006... Some of the Linux purists have gotten their knickers in a twist over the fact that Linspire, the Linux desktop commercializer that used to be called Lindows, is proposing to put out a freebie open source Linux distribution that includes...

LSB now embraces the desktop.
May 8, 2006... The Linux Standard Base (LSB) has reached its 3.1 cut, the first version of the thing to support portable Linux desktop applications and the biggest of the Linux tribe, even folks who haven't had much use for the LSB, have thrown their support...

HP throws in its lot with MySQL.(Hewlett-Packard Co. launches computer services)(Brief article)
May 8, 2006... HP is throwing in its lot with MySQL and is going to provide MySQL consulting, integration and support. HP and its channels are also going to resell MySQL Network subscription services, which includes certified software, upgrades and updates,...

Microsoft wants EC order trashed.
May 8, 2006... Microsoft has asked the 13 judges sitting en banc at the Court of First Instance in Luxembourg hearing its appeal to throw out the European Commission's two-year-old antitrust verdict as "fundamentally flawed in fact and reasoning." ...

Linux viral in more ways than one.
May 8, 2006... Did you know that the first virus, a worm, appeared in 1988 and was meant to attack Unix? Neither did I. Anyway Moscow security house Kaspersky Labs says Linux-targeting malware more than doubled last year. It found 863 species of the foul...

First Data gets Microsoft contract.
May 8, 2006... First Data Corporation has brought home a multi-year deal to provide Microsoft's online payment processing globally, both for Microsoft's consumer and business accounts. The deal includes risk management services.

Tit for tat.
May 8, 2006... Microsoft is going to buy $700 million worth of Chinese-made computers over the next five years, invest $200 million in Chinese software house and throw in a software innovation center with the Chinese government's planning agency. One assumes...

Gen 2 RFID reader Benchmark published.
May 15, 2006... ODIN technologies, which claims to be the leader in the physics of RFID testing and deployment, has released Gen 2 RFID Reader Benchmark sponsored by Unisys. calls it the first objective scientific analysis of Gen 2 readers. The report...

Finland Post & VTT deepen RFID exploration.
May 15, 2006... Finland Post and VTT Technical Research Center of Finland, the biggest contract research organization in Northern Europe, have tightened up their relationship. The new cooperation agreement will let the post dip into VTT's knowledge of...

Variety passes MAC tests.
May 15, 2006... Varsity Logistics Inc, a provider of IBM iSeries and AS/400 shipping systems, says it has successfully completed the United States Postal Service Manifest Analysis and Certification, also known as MAC, for 2006. Ongoing carrier compliance...

TAGSYS demos dual-frequency item-level RFID POS reader.
May 15, 2006... TAGSYS, a player in the item-level RFID infrastructure, has been demonstrating a new dual-frequency "universal" (UHF and HF) item-level RFID reader designed for point-of-sale (POS) retail applications. It claims the new reader represents a...

The USPS is into shoes.
May 15, 2006... What with eBay and other forms of e-commerce, the USPS has decided to go into the shoebox business. It seems shoes are a hot commodity so the post office has come up with a Priority Mail box that should fit almost any brand and size of shoe....

USPS to try incentives.
May 15, 2006... GiftCertificates.com, the nine-year-old Omaha-based incentives house, says it got the approval of the United States Postal Service to take an active role in developing recognition and award campaigns to support the agency's eAwards system. The...

InSync gets funding.(from Intel Capital and Rustic Partners )(Brief article)
May 15, 2006... California RFID start-up InSync has picked up $7.5 million in first-round funding from Intel Capital and Rustic Partners as well several strategic investors. InSync's Edgeware software provides tools, frameworks, and applications to...

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!!!!!!!!!!
May 15, 2006... A couple of issues ago when we wrote a piece about the Universal Postal Union (UPU) and its five-year-old Quality of Service Fund (QSF) a gremlin crawled--unnoticed--into the system and we referred to UPU as--God help us--UPS in the headline....

Microsoft to bludgeon Google with its checkbook.
May 15, 2006... Ya know all that money that Microsoft will be spending starting July 1 when its new fiscal year begins--the couple of extra billion and change that sent Wall Street into a swoon when it realized what was going on? Well, Microsoft's chucking...

Search is mine, mine, mine, Google says.
May 15, 2006... Google, master of search, has been complaining to the European Commission and the Justice Department about Microsoft's new IE7 browser rev and the search box that Microsoft has put in its upper-right-hand corner that by default delivers search...

Honey, I shrunk the mainframe.
May 15, 2006... Resisting any impulse to call it a minicomputer, IBM has shrunk its signature z9 mainframe into a "Business Class" package it can sell for prices that start at $100,000, a tenth the price of a classic million-dollar mainframe, presumably...

Java reportedly simplified.
May 15, 2006... The Java Enterprise Edition 5 spec has reportedly gotten the unanimous blessing of the Java Community Process Java EE/SE Executive Committee, which means that an SDK and compatibility test suite will turn up at JavaOne in a few days. Java...

Intel arms for Goody-two-shoes battle with MIT.
May 15, 2006... Intel never had much use for the design of that $100 One Laptop Per Child thing that Nicholas Negroponte and MIT's Media Lab came up with. It liked it even less when they said that AMD would supply the chips. And the same has been true of...

Microsoft & SAP sing their first short duet.
May 15, 2006... Microsoft and SAP said that Mendocino, the integration project they started a year ago after attempts at merger failed, would ship June 28 as a product called Duet that lets people use the applications in Office to access some SAP business...

Amazon substitutes microsoft for Google.
May 15, 2006... Microsoft has nosed Google out of Amazon, which is now using Microsoft technology to run its A9 search engine. A9 finds things on the Amazon web site as well being a generic search mechanism. Amazon's contract with Google expired over the...

Lost in translation.(users grow for Skype Technologies S.A.)
May 15, 2006... Skype is claiming to have 100 million registered users, up from 54 million last September when eBay bought it. The bloggers say that statement really means 100 million usernames and that it's rare to find more than six million people actually...

Gartner doubts Vista schedule.
May 15, 2006... Gartner has its doubts about Microsoft getting Vista out next January. Based on Microsoft's track record, Garner is saying it doesn't expect Vista to be broadly available until "at least 2Q07," by which it apparently means summertime....

Microsoft + yahoo! = microsoft!?
May 15, 2006... Doing battle with Google has caused Microsoft--or at least a faction in Microsoft--to cast about for allies--other than AOL, which it failed to get--Google having appropriated the idea itself--and to consider taking a stake in Yahoo to buck up...

Starter edition to hit Africa.
May 15, 2006... Microsoft says that it's going to start selling its special entry-level Windows XP Starter Edition--the localized stuff it's been pushing in the third world--in Africa this summer. Microsoft usually has vendors pre-install the kit on cheap...

The evil empire meets the grey lady.
May 15, 2006... It appears that the Vista operating system is promising to make reading a newspaper online more of a natural activity. (It won't but let's humor them.) The New York Times is making like a test bed and working with Microsoft on a prototype...

Pot calls kettle black.
May 15, 2006... HP is enjoying IBM's latest stumble. Itanium may be nothing to write home about but at least HP can say that its Itanium-based Integrity server gained market share in 2005 while IBM's Power-based pSeries and iSeries were down 6% and 19%,...

Customized postage goes commercial.
May 29, 2006... The US Postal Service has expanded its popular third-party-supplied customized postage program to business. Customized postage lets a customer personalize postage with pictures or images using customized PC postage technology. The Postal...

Norway post subsidiary buys Allianse.(ErgoGroup A.S. acquires Allianse Informasjonssystemer A/S)
May 29, 2006... ErgoGroup, the Posten Norge subsidiary, has acquired a majority 55.7% in publicly held Norway-based Allianse ASA and in June the remaining shareholders will be offered $3.20 cash per share, a premium of 29%. The offer values Allianse at a...

Finland Post revises its branding.
May 29, 2006... Finland Post Group is revising its branding policies. The Itella brand will expand to cover all of its corporate services in nine countries, while Posti will continue to be the marketing name for consumer services in Finland. The new brand...

Checkfree says US is moving closer to e-bills.
May 29, 2006... CheckFree Corporation calculates that at least two-thirds of US households that are online pay one bill online. The company did a survey on "The Latest Consumer Billing and Payment Trends," a study done every nine months by the Marketing...

Italian post buys fancy AMTs off NCR.
May 29, 2006... This fall Postale Italiane will be deploying a thousand NCR Persona M ATMs that dispense cash and pay bills by inserting a giro payment slip into a special image reader followed by an ATM or bank debit card. There are reportedly audio...

USPS experiments with hybrid van.
May 29, 2006... The USPS has converted its first delivery van into a hybrid electric vehicle as an experiment to determine its potential in reducing emissions and improving fuel consumption. It will be tested on the streets of Boston, where Azure Dynamics...

Royal mail reportedly in talks with FedEx & UPS.
May 29, 2006... Both UPS and FedEx are both supposed to be in advanced negotiations with the Royal Mail, which will pick one of the two Americans to forge a logistics alliance with. The American would reportedly be teamed with the Royal Mail's General...

Symantec sues Microsoft.
May 29, 2006... Screw Viruses; It Wants Vista Enjoined on Veritas Charges. Symantec has hit Microsoft with a federal suit charging it with patent and copyright infringement, misappropriation of trade secrets, breach of contract, unfair competition and unjust...

Dell capitulates; will use AMD chips.
May 29, 2006... The golden handcuffs that bound Intel and Dell together all these years have finally snapped. Dell is no longer the last remaining fastidious Intel purist. It is going to follow conventional wisdom and use dual-core AMD Opteron chips in...

Hurd's magic holds.(Mark Hurd of Hewlett-Packard Co. manages to increase the first quarter earnings)
May 29, 2006... If Dell is looking for some of its lost market share and some of its missing sales and earnings, they're over at HP, which claimed not to have noticed any of what Dell, when it warned of a shortfall, called its "accelerate pricing adjustments"...

Sun vows to open source Java.
May 29, 2006... Rich Green, the retread brought back to Sun a couple of weeks ago to run software, said that it's "not whether but how" Sun can open source Java and maintain compatibility that's delaying it from doing so. The promise, which might take...

JEE5 replaces J2EE.
May 29, 2006... At JavaOne Sun, as probably everybody expected, kicked off the latest commercial rev of Java. J2EE is gone. There is now Java Enterprise Edition 5 (JEE5), which promises to simplify what has become the highly complicated--and...

Microsoft handcuffed for another two years.
May 29, 2006... Microsoft's inability or unwillingness to write understandable documentation for the two sets of communications protocols that it's under antitrust orders to license to rivals has led the Justice Department to demand a two-year extension to its...

SAP muses.
May 29, 2006... SAP has been showing off an early cut of Project Muse, a prospective GUI that will give Mac, Linux and Windows desktop or mobile users, for that matter, direct access to SAP applications. The company intends it for people running the mySAP...

Microsoft tells you whether or not you've got what it takes to run vista.
May 29, 2006... Well, since Microsoft can't deliver Vista any time soon, it's done the next best thing and has condescended to tell people what they're going to need to run the thing, a little potential shopping list it's kept quiet until now even though it...

AMD goes for mobile jugular.
May 29, 2006... Considering that the PC business is all about notebooks, AMD, which needs to do some Intel blocking and tackling, has introduced the 90nm Turion 64 X2 mobile technology, the first and only family of 64-bit dual-core processors designed for thin...

Microsoft reportedly buys WebHancer IP.
May 29, 2006... Microsoft is reportedly buying software from WebHancer, the Canadian outfit that measure web site effectiveness and user reactions. The company lives on to do other work.

Is Ballmer out?
May 29, 2006... There's speculation on Wall Street that Microsoft is going to dump CEO Steve Ballmer and hold him responsible for the company's ills like not being able to get its stock price to move off the dime. There's no speculation about who would succeed...