ePostal News articles from May 2007

ePostal News archives from May 2007

Smart Stamp technology converges Internet & mobile phones with US postal mail.
May 7, 2007... Intellareturn Corporation, the RFID company, announced its Append Envelope Technology at the Envelope Manufacturers Association's (EMA) Spring Meeting in Arizona. Its Append microchip-based Smart Stamp system links supplemental text and...

Snail mail the safest: US government.
May 7, 2007... The United States government has come to the common sense conclusion that the safest way to send and share information--given the rampant identity theft on the Internet--is the United States mail. The Justice Department and Federal Trade...

USPS signs potential $260m contract with Serco.
May 7, 2007... The US Postal Service has expanded its relationship with the multibillion-dollar British-owned international service house Serco by awarding it a $51 million contract for engineering support services, including support for the research and...

eBay sellers fret over rate hike.
May 7, 2007... Many eBay sellers (77%) are extremely upset about the looming rate hike. eBay is a business partner of the USPS and the most eBay sellers rely on the post office to ship all of their packages as it has always been the most affordable option....

DocuSign challenges business worldwide to save paper.
May 7, 2007... In recognition of Earth Day and in an effort to help save thousands of trees and reduce carbon monoxide emissions, DocuSign, the web-based electronic signature service, has announced the "Go Green with DocuSign Challenge." It is challenging...

UPS plans regional round tables.(Brief article)
May 7, 2007... The UPU International Bureau is organizing a series of regional round tables to evaluate the progress made with the Bucharest World Postal Strategy and better prepare the Nairobi Postal Strategy. The UPU postal strategy is a four-year...

Angola modernizes.
May 7, 2007... The Angolan National Post and Telecommunications will invest $24 million through 2012 in modernizing about 160 of its centers throughout the country. They will have Internet services.

USPS computerizes its files.
May 7, 2007... The USPS is converting all its paper personnel records to electronic folders that it says will transform the way employee information is stored, retained and retrieved, ultimately allowing postal employees to have 24-hour access to the contents...

Red Hat buys Metamatrix.
May 7, 2007... Red Hat is buying a privately held proprietary software company called Metamatrix Inc that's backed by Kleiner Perkins, the Invus Group and Integral Capital Partners on undisclosed terms. Red Hat senior VP of enterprise solutions Tim Yeaton...

Mister softee proves it's still the old money machine.
May 7, 2007... Well, Google hasn't put Microsoft out of business yet. Redmond is still a money machine. It posted record profits up 65% to $4.93 billion, or 50 cents a share, on revenues up 32% to $14 billion for the March quarter, its...

AMD swamped by Intel.
May 7, 2007... Mercury Research has charted the longitude and latitude of the "Perfect Storm" that AMD said swamped its dingy last quarter, causing it to lose $611 million. The storm was Intel, whose refreshed product line won back seven points of share...

Mark Hurd takes HP back to his roots.
May 7, 2007... Mark Hurd is going back into the data warehouse business that he used to be in when he was at NCR, the Teradata business that catapulted him to the top of NCR and from his success there to HP. Maybe it'll be a good luck charm for HP too....

EC contemplates drawing & quartering Microsoft.
May 7, 2007... Ahead of Microsoft's official response to the European Commission's March 1 Statement of Objections (SO)--you know, the one where the EC told Microsoft that the royalties it's set for those server protocols that the EC has been trying to pry...

Sun wheezing trying to turn the corner.
May 7, 2007... Sun, one of the walking wounded, earned $67 million, two cents a share, on revenues up 3.3% to $3.283 billion in the March quarter. It lost $217 million this time last year. This is the second time in a row it managed to squeak out a small...

IBM cozies up to rival MySQL.
May 7, 2007... IBM, ever the pragmatist, is going to support MySQL, the popular open source rival to its own DB2, on its mid-range i machines under a joint technology and reseller agreement it cut with the Scandinavian database company. The financial...

IBM's Power boxes to run x86 apps on Linux.
May 7, 2007... IBM has tied up with Transitive and its processor-agnostic QuickTransit technology, the stuff that's used already by Apple and Sun, so Blue's proprietary Power-based p Series servers can run most x86 Linux applications without modification. ...

Open source lawyers claim Microsoft users pay a 'patent tax'.
May 7, 2007... The Software Freedom Law Center (SFLC), the law firm established by open source champion and Free Software Foundation attorney Eben Moglen on the back of $4 million from a few OSDL members, has found its supreme distaste for patents and its...

Longhorn reaches public test phase.
May 7, 2007... Longhorn, the server version of Vista long, long, long in incubation, has finally reached Beta 3 status making it publicly available for test by what Microsoft expects will be hundreds of thousands of companies. It's due to hit market by...

Google delivers Microsoft another blow.
May 7, 2007... Google, not Microsoft, is now the most valuable brand in the world according to the latest research by Millward Brown. Google was number seven only a year ago and Microsoft is now only number three between GE and Coke. Wal-Mart is now seven and...

AMD touts Barcelona.
May 7, 2007... What with Intel waxing eloquent about its upcoming technology, AMD evidently felt it had better put in a good word for its upcoming Barcelona quad on which so much hangs. So it said it expects the part to have up to a 50% advantage on floating...

Microsoft & inflation hit One Laptop Per Child.
May 7, 2007... Ya know that inflation they've been talking about? Well, the epicenter seems to be at that MIT-spin-out "One Laptop Per Child" (OLPC) project. Its XO box has now gone from $100 to $175 apparently because not enough of the third world...

Royal Mail & Sony DADC fuse traditional post with digital media.
May 14, 2007... Royal Mail is fighting back against increased competition in the advertising market by launching a concept that fuses traditional post and digital media in partnership with Sony DADC. The widgetry enables companies to personalize...

Sybase iAnywhere under Correos' RFID Track & Trace.
May 14, 2007... Sybase's RFID Anywhere software platform is underneath the Spanish Postal Service's Track & Trace service, one of the largest RFID projects in Europe. Using RFID Anywhere, Correos has introduced a radio frequency control system, called...

China's RFID pilot translates into productivity gains.
May 14, 2007... The China Post tapped Symbol Technologies, the Motorola acquisition, and its Chinese partner Concord Unity International Ltd to supply RFID technology to track express mail at the Shanghai Post and now says that it's proved that "we can greatly...

FedEx Trade Networks redesigns its WorldTariff web site.(Website overview)
May 14, 2007... FedEx Trade Networks Inc, a subsidiary of FedEx proper, is launching a redesigned WorldTariff web site. The site, at www.worldtariff.com, provides complete duty and tax information for 123 countries, updated by an editorial staff with...

Big Finn post survey says experience counts in online shopping.
May 14, 2007... The Finland Post says that consumers have new kinds of expectations for online shopping. Although they appreciate the fact that they can rely on the order-supply chain, they are also enamored of the experiential aspects related to online...

HayPost joins Eurogiro.
May 14, 2007... HayPost, Armenia's official postal service, has signed a membership agreement with the Eurogiro Network and will be electronically connected to more than 60,000 post offices across Europe; the 50 million Postbank account holders in Europe will...

Pitney Bowes slumps.(Pitney Bowes Inc.)
May 14, 2007... Pitney Bowes came in with lower-than-expected first-quarter results, which it blamed on delays in orders in the US and weak sales in Europe. The franking machine giant earned $144.8 million, or 65 cents a share, down roughly 6%...

Microsoft & Yahoo reportedly talking about Google counterweight.
May 14, 2007... According to the press Microsoft and Yahoo are supposed to be trying to figure out a configuration that would let them fight Google together. The notion of Yahoo's acquisition by Microsoft for, oh, $50 billion that was advanced by the New...

SaaS becomes 'software plus services' in Microsoft's mouth.
May 14, 2007... Bill Gates' replacement Ray Ozzie on whose shoulders the company's future rests, the guy who has to dig Microsoft out of the Internet hole it finds itself it and at all costs salvage the client, is trying to redefine SaaS,...

Microsoft buys French cell phone ad house.
May 14, 2007... Well, it ain't DoubleClick or Yahoo, but Microsoft is buying a French mobile phone advertising company called ScreenTonic. You can tell it ain't DoubleClick because the price for the venture-backed outfit wasn't disclosed. Anyway it's early...

Dell contemplates apostasy.(Dell Inc.)(Brief article)
May 14, 2007... In a leaked e-mail sent to employees worldwide Michael Dell admitted that Dell's vaunted business model wasn't working and that the company needs another approach to the market. "The direct model has been a revolution, but it is not a...

Yahoo buys all of Right Media.
May 14, 2007... Yahoo is buying the 80% of the industry's largest online display ad exchange Right Media that it doesn't already own to compete against the Google-DoubleClick combine, which gives Google a foothold in graphical advertising where Yahoo has been...

Rumors have Microsoft chasing 24/7 Real Media.
May 14, 2007... Citing unnamed sources the New York Post, a money-losing Rupert Murdoch publication--the same Murdoch now trying to buy the Dow Jones and the Wall Street Journal for $5 billion--reported Tuesday that Microsoft may bid somewhere around a billion...

HP shifts marketing chief to printers.
May 14, 2007... HP's chief marketing officer Cathy Lyons is being "repotted," as Peter Drucker would say, returning to the company's printer unit "to take on responsibility for strategic change management," whatever that means, reporting to printer boss...

Qantas abandons Linux for AIX.
May 14, 2007... Qantas is abandoning the Linux it's been using under its finance systems for AIX to "address some stability issues," according to a story in ZDNet Australia quoting a speech given by the airline's general manager for finance improvement and...

Google brands iGoogle.
May 14, 2007... Google has dubbed gadget-bedecked personalized versions of its home page "iGoogle" and provided a new coding-free Gadget Maker customization tool with seven templates for adding stuff like personal photos, YouTube favorites and users' own...

The Massachusetts halo effect.
May 14, 2007... Texas, California, Minnesota and Oregon are considering bills that could push them down the Massachusetts path and into the arms of the anti-Microsoft Open Document Format (ODF).

New Post Office service uses barcode technology for instant cash payments.
May 21, 2007... Britain's Post Office figures it will radically transform the way companies send customers payments, refunds and product incentives with a new payout service. This Post Office payout scheme is supposed to let companies distribute...

E-services big on POC's agenda.(Postal Operations Council)(Brief article)
May 21, 2007... The UPU's Postal Operations Council (POC), which just concluded its 2007 session at UPU headquarters in Berne, approved an e-services strategy developed by the Electronic Products and Services Group, as well as a resolution urging other POC...

Authentidate losses continue.
May 21, 2007... Authentidate, the publicly held German-American software company that's supposed to lose its exclusive USPS Electronic Postmark (EPM) franchise because of poor performance, lost $3.4 million, or 10 cents a share, in the March quarter on...

SingPost & Hongkong Post sign deal with DataPost.(Singapore Post Private Ltd., DataPost (HK) Pte Ltd )(Brief article)
May 21, 2007... Singapore Post Ltd (SingPost) and Hongkong Post have signed a tripartite cooperation agreement with DataPost (HK) Pte Ltd for provisioning e-post services in Hong Kong. DataPost (HK) Pte Ltd is a wholly owned subsidiary of DataPost Pte Ltd...

Bowe expands its outsourcing arrangement with BASF.
May 21, 2007... Bowe Systec AG and its US subsidiary Bowe Bell+Howell will continue to host all their SAP systems with BASF IT Services' Ludwigshafen data centers in Germany for an unlimited period of time. The deal is worth several million euros. BASF IT...

USPS sticks with Convergys.
May 21, 2007... Convergys Corporation has had its four-year contract with the United States Postal Service extended another two year. Convergys will continue to manage the entire postal customer contact experience across all channels through live agents,...

Group 1 solutions CASS-certified.
May 21, 2007... The latest versions of Group 1 Software's CODE-1 Plus and Finalist address cleansing solutions have been CASS-certified by the USPS for the upcoming Cycle L requirements scheduled to be implemented on August 1. These CASS-certified...

Caixa Galicia & Western Union do deal.(Brief article)
May 21, 2007... Caixa Galicia, one of the leading financial service providers in Spain, and Western Union have reached an agreement to offer Western Union Money Transfer services via Caixa Galicia's offices in Spain. Caixa Galicia now joins the Western...

Mirapoint introduces industry's first secure e-mail appliance.
May 21, 2007... Mirapoint, the secure messaging house, has introduced what it calls the industry's first autonomous e-mail security appliance, designed to reject unwanted messages and enforce centrally managed e-mail policies without relying on any IT...

Red Hat plays the desktop card.
May 21, 2007... Red Hat made some guttural, almost inarticulate, awfully confusing noises from its user-cum-analyst meeting in San Diego when it tried to say that it's finally going to play the desktop card. Red Hat has always been rather, oh, comme ci...

Dell becomes Microsoft-Novell's third wheel.
May 21, 2007... Dell went and stuck its head in the lion's mouth by cutting a deal to buy SUSE server licenses off of Microsoft and redistribute them, making it a third leg in the controversial Microsoft-Novell alliance that moved the keepers of the GPL to...

All of Java that can be open sourced is.
May 21, 2007... Java is now open source as far as Sun is concerned. At JavaOne, Sun released a fully buildable JDK for Java SE to the OpenJDK community under the current GPL 2, remarking that it was delivering on its promise in under a year and pointing...

IBM sticks Novell in the corner.
May 21, 2007... OK, let's sit up and try to follow these moves. So Novell--which got into Linux on IBM's nickel and then stuck its head into what may turn out to be a SCO noose for the Big Boy--has wandered off the reservation and is now hugging Microsoft,...

Sun seeks to cure Java bloat.
May 21, 2007... Remember how complicated and obtuse Java has gotten? Well, there's a thing called JavaFX Script coming, previewed by Sun at JavaOne this week and described as a "radically simple" scripting language for creating rich content and...

Amazon pays off IBM to settle big patent suit.
May 21, 2007... Remember last October when IBM sued Amazon claiming the great dot.com had knowingly built its business model on the back of IBM's patents? Well, the pair patched up their difference the other day outside the courtroom after Amazon paid IBM some...

VMware Workstation 6 hits market.
May 21, 2007... VMware's sixth-generation desktop virtualization software VMware Workstation 6 made it to general availability. This is the stuff that supports Vista and cross-platform paravirtualization as well as such niceties as multiple display...

Hotmail emerges from the plastic surgeon's.
May 21, 2007... The next-generation Hotmail, now styled Windows Live Hotmail, is available to anyone who wants the free rebuilt e-mail. Microsoft says 280 million people worldwide use the old service. Now they can have Outlook-like folders for saving e-mail...

Santa Rosa arrives.
May 21, 2007... Santa Rosa, Intel's pace-sustaining contribution to the laptop push, is here at last, pulling in its wake 230 design-wins, by Intel's count, 50 more than the last Centrino outing. Some will be out faster than others and not everybody will...

IBM launches Big Green project.
May 21, 2007... IBM is supposed to spend $1 billion a year to double the energy efficiency of its internal data centers by 2010 without increasing power consumption and make a business of helping major customers save a Watt. It calls the initiative Big...

Third-largest PC maker loses money again.
May 21, 2007... Gateway's position continues to erode. In the first quarter it lost $8.6 million, two cents a share, on revenue of $1.009 billion, down from $1.078 billion a year ago and down from $1.021 billion in Q4. It managed to earn $11.5 million, or...

EMC seeks to create R & D network.
May 21, 2007... Borrowing here and there from the open source movement, EMC is setting up an Innovation Network consisting of its own global R & D resources, university researchers and key customers to explore new technologies and stuff like the Semantic Web,...

SAP buys OutlookSoft.
May 21, 2007... SAP is going to buy privately held eight-year-old OutlookSoft Corporation, maker of what SAP calls Web 2.0-style integrated planning, budgeting, forecasting and consolidation software built on a SOA and aimed at CFOs. The widgetry...

Asia a dynamo for HP.
May 21, 2007... HP Asia is selling PCs at a growth rate of about 36% a year on average, twice the market rate according to what a senior executive told Reuters. The territory includes China, India, Southeast Asia, Japan, Australia and New Zealand. The company...

SAP tells Oracle to start training for a knockdown dragout.
May 21, 2007... Oracle better be ready for a "massive fight" over that lawsuit it filed against SAP and its TomorrowNow support subsidiary for allegedly equally "massive theft" according to what the German's been telling its stockholders. SAP contends that...

Viridian comes up short.
May 21, 2007... VMware and Xen will be delighted. Microsoft is putting its Viridian Longhorn virtualization widgetry through the same slimming exercise that Vista went through to get it out the door. It's not going to have the 64-processor support that pushed...

MySQL goes outside for Four9s high availability.(deal with Austrian ISV Linbit)(Brief article)
May 21, 2007... MySQL has tied up with Austrian ISV Linbit, which supplies high-availability Linux widgetry called DRBD. MySQL is going to support the Four9s LAMP technology directly. It's meant to narrow the gap between MySQL and proprietary databases....

Intel & Ubuntu collaborate on Silverthorn.
May 21, 2007... Ubuntu, Dell's pick for some of its PCs and laptops, is going to try its hand in the mobile and embedded market next and is talking about riding on small handheld Internetenabled tablets powered by energy-efficient Intel chips, the tiny...

Sun supports OpenID, seeks friends.(Sun Microsystems Ltd.)(Brief article)
May 21, 2007... Sun has opened a new initiative in support of OpenID, the decentralized, web-friendly single sign-on mechanism used across different web sites. OpenID is currently limited to facilitating low-risk transactions like blog comments. Sun wants...

Ballmer suggestive.
May 21, 2007... CEO Steve Ballmer told the Software 2007 conference that Microsoft is "open to large acquisitions," raising eyebrows considering those conflicting reports about Microsoft taking another swing at Yahoo to ward off Google. Buying Yahoo could cost...

Solaris wants to look like Linux.
May 21, 2007... Sun is going to try to make Solaris look like, behave and install like Linux to get developers over their adoption rejection. The project is code named Indiana and opens the door to issues of backward compatibility and code sharing.

GPL & Apache make eyes at one another.
May 21, 2007... The Free Software Foundation is talking about bringing its GPLv3 rewrite into compatibility with the more liberal, business-friendly Apache License before it's engraved in stone this summer. Just what that means remains to be seen.

Katmai to redeem some of the old lost vision.
May 21, 2007... Katmai, Microsoft's next version of SQL Server, now part of its BI vision, is supposed to manage any kind of unstructured data--like images and geographic information--not just the typical relational stuff, and so use something called...

UK Post Office to launch broadband service.
May 28, 2007... The British Post Office is going to launch a broadband service later this year in a strategic partnership with BT Wholesale. The agreement, worth 750 million pounds sterling to BT Wholesale--its largest single contract ever--marks a key...

Stamps.com launches presorted first-class PhotoStamps.(Brief article)
May 28, 2007... Stamps.com, which according to its latest financial report needs to boost the number of the PhotoStamps it sells, has launched presorted first-class mail PhotoStamps, a new feature that will let qualified businesses use discounted first-class...

Pitney & Belgian Post in talks.(Asterion acquired by Pitney Bowes Inc.)(Brief article)
May 28, 2007... Pitney Bowes is in negotiation to buy a French document handling and storage business called Asterion from the Belgian Post. The business deals with statements of account, invoices, pay-rolls, notices to pay, tariffs and catalogs, in other...

Greek post goes to Wincor Nixdorf for IT systems.(Brief article)
May 28, 2007... Wincor Nixdorf and its Greek partner Unisystems have won a contract to deliver IT equipment for the counter positions in 416 branches of the Greek postal system (ELTA). All 1,280 systems--consisting of Beetle iSprint PC and extensive...

Group 1 upgrades data flow data integration solution.
May 28, 2007... Group 1 Software Inc, the Pitney Bowes unit, has announced the latest version of its Data Flow data integration solution, with 64-bit support to handle larger customer data sets better. The Data Flow data integration solution is supposed to...

DST pioneers inkjet printing.
May 28, 2007... DST Output, a statement and billing output provider, says it has been implementing its advanced high-speed color printing and inserting platform called Digital Press Technology or DPT for the last two years and claims to be the largest of the...

Affordable high-speed Internet a must for developing countries: UPU.
May 28, 2007... The Universal Postal Union says it needs more reliable telecommunications systems offering reasonably priced services in developing countries to extend its postal financial network throughout the world. As a founding partner of the...

Microsoft opens Pandora's box.
May 28, 2007... Microsoft has let loose the Furies. It would love the three terrible winged goddesses in charge of avenging wrongs to bring open source to book but it seems inevitable that Microsoft will get entangled in their serpentine hair. It's a...

HP looks like it whupped Dell big time.
May 28, 2007... Somebody somewhere ought to give HP's ousted CEO Carly Fiorina some credit. In the hands of her successor Mark Hurd HP returned $2.1 billion, or 65 cents a share, up 27% year-over-year, on revenues of $25.5 billion, up 13%, in its April...

Oracle spends another $495m in its arms race with SAP.
May 28, 2007... While SAP fills in the missing beads on its necklace with what looks like penny-ante purchases, Oracle, the great consolidator, has gone and bought Agile Software, laying out another $495 million in cash in its race to catch up with SAP, a...

AMD breaks out a quad desktop chip.
May 28, 2007... In the wake of Intel's Santa Rosa notebook release, AMD trotted out a four-core desktop version of the widely anticipated Barcelona server quad on which its future rests. It said it hopes the desktop chip will be shipping in systems by the end...

Vista at 40m sold.
May 28, 2007... Rebutting the Linux huggers who contend that Vista sucks and Microsoft is on the ropes, Bill Gates said from the WinHEC that Vista sold 40 million copies its first 100 days, twice as fast as XP, making it Microsoft's fast-selling operating...

Microsoft christens Longhorn.
May 28, 2007... Microsoft has confirmed that the Vista-generation Longhorn Server is officially going to be called Windows Server 2008, a name indicative of when it will come out. The company already admitted that the Viridian virtualization widgetry...

Google & the search for the right answer.(Brief article)
May 28, 2007... Google says it's taking its first step toward what it calls "universal search" and will introduce an updated home-page and new navigation features that make it faster and easier to find what you're looking for. Universal search breaks down...