ePostal News articles from May 2008

ePostal News archives from May 2008

Belgian Post Goes Virtual.
May 5, 2008... The Belgian Post Office has gone over to NetApp for its data backup and archiving, switching to a virtual infrastructure developed by NetApp in combination with conventional physical tape to manage this data. By doing this, the post office says...

DHL's Borderlinx Deal Promises To Improve Global e-Commerce.
May 5, 2008... DHL has cut a five-year deal with Borderlinx, a UK-based provider of cross-border e-commerce solutions that will let shoppers outside the states order products from any US Internet retailer. According to DHL only a small percentage of the top...

Pitney Intros Custom Postage on its Own Nickel.
May 5, 2008... Pitney Bowes has expanded its customized postage for consumers and small businesses with the introduction of Stamp Expressions Personal Postage. Users can create their own postage using photographs or images. Pitney first started pushing this...

HayPost Signs with Microsoft.
May 5, 2008... Microsoft and HayPost, Armenia's postal operator, have signed a so-called enterprise agreement meant to move HayPost's modernization forward. HayPost is new to Microsoft, which has been putting new effort into recruiting posts, and the vicar at...

Russia Post Tests Open Source Software.
May 5, 2008... Russia Post has started testing automated systems solutions and inter-departmental networking, based on open source software. The agency said in March that it was going to introduce Red Hat's Linux operating system and other unnamed open...

PhotoStamps Remains a Problem for Stamps.com.
May 5, 2008... It looks like Stamps.com did better in the first quarter than in the December quarter, beating the Street and tickling its stock price. However, it also downgraded its guidance a bit and said it now thinks it'll earn 58 cents-68 cents this year...

UPS Earnings Down, Blames US Economy.
May 5, 2008... UPS earnings were down 12% in the first quarter, a fact it blamed on the US economy and high fuel costs, and with no change it sight, the company said, it cut its Q2 and 2008 earnings guidance. UPS CEO Scott Davis said in a statement that "US...

FedEx Expands its Use of Solar Power.
May 5, 2008... FedEx Freight has installed a solar-electric system in Whittier, California, and is nearing completion on a similar solar-powered facility in Fontana, California. It says the systems will provide a substantial portion of the facilities' peak...

Earth Class Mail Up for Awards.
May 5, 2008... Earth Class Mail, the start-up threatening to make all postal mail digital, has been nominated for two World Mail Awards, the Oscars of the $900 billion global postal industry. It is up for both the Innovation and E-Commerce categories. The...

FedEx Finds Small Business Likely To Spend Through Downturn.
May 5, 2008... FedEx released the results of its national "Signs of the Times" small business survey, which found that 89% of the small business owners polled was moderately to very concerned about the economy's impact on their business. But they are equally...

Microsoft's 'Big Sync' Goes 'Live'.
May 5, 2008... Remember that Mesh stuff that Microsoft chief architect Ray Ozzie was hinting around about a few weeks ago? Well, Microsoft's new contribution to the cloud, what we called "the Big Sync," is now Live Mesh, a preview Web Service that, as...

Start-up Tempts Biggies into Providing DaaS.
May 5, 2008... Harry Ruda, the guy who sold Softricity, the application virtualization start-up, to Microsoft two years ago, is now flogging the virtualized desktop-as-a-service, DaaS so-called, a logical extension to Softricity when you stop and think about...

EC Asks Questions about IBM's Mainframe Business.
May 5, 2008... IBM may be starring down the barrel of an EC investigation of its precious mainframe business, significant to its bottom line. According to both Bloomberg and Dow Jones, the commission has sent Big Blue a questionnaire asking for details about...

Microsoft-Yahoo Deal Up in the Air.
May 5, 2008... Time ran out on Microsoft's deal-or-else ultimatum to Yahoo. Yahoo didn't move off the dime Saturday and Microsoft Monday remained silent about whether it'll try taking the place by force, lowering its rejected $31-a-share bid in the process -...

Microsoft Disappoints; Windows Sales Off.
May 5, 2008... After three strong quarters and against a backdrop of heady expectations, Microsoft came in with lighter-than-expected fiscal Q3 revenues of $14.45 billion, earnings of $4.38 billion, or 47 cents a share, and operating income of $4.41 billion....

IBM Creates Cloud Box.
May 5, 2008... IBM claims to have created new species of custom-built, industry-standard, Linux-based rack server for Web 2.0 and Cloud Computing companies with massive data centers and tens of thousands of servers, like online gaming, social networks, search...

Sun Pushes To Make Solaris Apps SaaSy.(Brief article)
May 5, 2008... Sun is now offering a new virtualization service that will let ISVs run their Solaris apps in a multi-tenant on-demand environment without having to rewrite any code. The trick is in Solaris' Containers virtualization and its xVM widgetry....

Microsoft Experiments with Subscription-Based Office.
May 5, 2008... Microsoft is going to experiment with subscription-based software that as near as we can figure out won't be on-demand or web-based - or even available as a download - so it's hardly a retort to Google Apps and its ilk like people thought....

NetSuite, SugarCRM Get BT Reselling Their 'Cloudware'.
May 5, 2008... BT is going to distribute and support both SugarCRM, the commercial open source CRM people, and its rival NetSuite, Larry Ellison's other company. Both companies are competing against salesforce.com, the brainchild of former Ellison lieutenant...

Microsoft Goes After Salesforce.com.
May 5, 2008... Microsoft has pushed its Dynamics CRM Online out into general availability in North America and into competition with Salesforce.com. Microsoft is doing the hosting with accessibility through a browser or Office and Outlook and claims to...

Apple Buys PowerPC Chip House, Confusing Everybody.
May 5, 2008... Apple has finally bought PA Semi, the fab-less low-power PowerPC start-up that supposedly swooned when Apple switched from the PowerPC Intel. What Apple's going to do with it now become fodder for the speculators. The iPhone uses an 32-bit...

XP SP3 Nigh.
May 5, 2008... Microsoft has finally released the Vista-delayed XP SP3 to manufacturing and will be sending the code to PC makers. It supports the Network Access protection and Peer Name Resolution Protocol (PNRP) used in Vista so XP apps can communicate...

VMware Revenues Up 69%.(Financial report)
May 5, 2008... VMware has reported first-quarter revenues, up 69% year-over-year to $438 million, better than the $422.4 million Wall Street expected. The market has been down on the company out of fear it will be trumped by the increasing competition,...

Why the EPA Pulled the Trigger on IBM.
May 5, 2008... The Legal Times has been poking around IBM's misadventure with the Environment Protection Agency (EPA) and how it was briefly barred from doing any new business with the United States government a few weeks ago, and it says, paraphrasing Robert...

Amazon Offers Cloud Support.(Amazon.com Inc.)(Brief article)
May 5, 2008... Amazon is now offering two premium support levels for application developers using its cloud computing services, to wit its S3 storage service, its EC2 computing service and SQS application messaging service. It's got Silver support, priced at...

Hardy Heron Takes Flight.
May 5, 2008... Ubuntu's first "Long Term Support (LTS)" rev in almost 23 months has been pushed out the door along with the promise that another LTS rev would follow every two years from now on out and in between there would be point releases first at the...

OLPC's Founder Ready To Climb in Bed with Microsoft.
May 5, 2008... One Laptop Per Child, the effort to put technology in the hands of third-world kids, has lost its number two guy Walter Bender, who was president, software and content until last month when he was shifted to head of deployment although not many...

Whoops.
May 5, 2008... Word documents generated by the current version of Office 2007 don't conform to ISO/IEC 29500, the OOXML file format draft standard Microsoft moved heaven and earth to get ISO to accept. At least that's what Alex Brown, the guy in change of...

Ballmer on Vista.
May 5, 2008... "Windows Vista - a work in progress." - Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer at a conference with 1,700 Microsoft Most Valuable Professionals. Microsoft is being pressured and petitioned to keep selling XP past its June 30 termination date.

DOJ Keeps its Eye on Yahoo & Google.
May 5, 2008... The Justice Department has reportedly been asking antitrust kinds of questions of Yahoo and Google stemming from Yahoo's experiment outsourcing some ad placement to Google.

Regulator Says Royal Mail Is Doomed, Needs Privatizing.
May 26, 2008... While the US considers moving to digital mail like Earth Class Mail provides, Postcomm, the UK's postal regulator, figures the only way Royal Mail can be saved is to "radically transform its structure and governance" - by at least partially...

Pitney Hires Corel CEO To Run Strategy.
May 26, 2008... Pitney Bowes executive chairman Michael Critelli says he will retire at the end of the year. He stepped down as CEO last year in favor of Murray Martin, who is putting his own stamp on the place. He has dumped Critelli's strategy guy in favor...

Big Brown Now a Triple Crown Contender.
May 26, 2008... The bay colt named for UPS and carrying the company's colors as part of a new undetailed marketing agreement won the Preakness in a walk Saturday, putting him in line to be the first horse to win the Triple Crown in 30 years. The fortuitous...

Zoovy Teams with Insurer.
May 26, 2008... Zoovy, an e-commerce ISV, has teamed with U-PIC Insurance Services to help alleviate the high cost of carrier insurance, it said. U-PIC insures packages shipped through most major carriers, and its discounts can reportedly range up to 80% off...

Swiss Post Lobbies To IPO.
May 26, 2008... Eyeing pending deregulation legislation that it wants amended, Swiss Post says it needs to be a public company in which the federal government holds a majority stake to compete in a completely open market and still be able to deliver a...

Certipost Up 25%.(Financial report)(Brief article)
May 26, 2008... Certipost says the number of customers using its electronic document exchange jumped 25% in Q1 to 39,000 companies. Certipost credits the ConnectONE program developed to help clients roll out their project. It said it's let thousands of...

UN Agencies To Count Post-Created Greenhouse Gases.
May 26, 2008... The United Nations Environment Program (UNEP) and the Universal Postal Union (UPU) are supposed to work together to slash the CO2 emissions caused by the postal sector. UNEP will help the UPU calculate the volumes of greenhouse gases generated...

PARC Experiments with Reusable Paper.(Brief article)
May 26, 2008... The great Xerox PARC research center, responsible for the PC's graphical user interface among other breakthroughs, is experimenting with a type of paper and a printer that would produce documents that fade away after 16 to 24 hours, according...

DHL Reportedly Looking for a Friend.
May 26, 2008... Deutsche Post is looking to FedEx or the US Postal Service to stop the American arm of its DHL courier service from hemorrhaging money, according to Euro am Sonntag. Failing that it is reportedly prepared to have DHL operate key hubs in the...

Accenture To Buy AddVal.
May 26, 2008... Accenture is buying AddVal Technology Inc, a privately owned developer of end-to-end shipment management products and services to global freight management and airline cargo companies. AddVal is in California and has a software development...

Danes Give Hope to Luddites Everywhere.(Brief article)
May 26, 2008... A Post Danmark study done by Tranberg Marketing found that Danes prefer getting a physical letter despite the availability of e-mail, e-Boks (the electronic mailbox), online banking and SMS and web site information. Danes were asked how they...

USPS Expects its Package Business To Jump 10%.
May 26, 2008... The United States Postal Service's COO and Deputy Postmaster General Patrick Donahoe told Reuters that it expects its package delivery business to increase by 10% this year, which will bring tears to the eyes of FedEx, UPS and DHL if it comes...

Kinko Appointment Made Permanent.
May 26, 2008... FedEx has made Brian Philips' interim appointment as president and CEO of FedEx Kinko permanent. He had been COO before being named acting CEO on March 31 when Ken May stepped down. Kinko, which offers copying and digital printing as well as...

Microsoft's Back with a New Yahoo Proposal.
May 26, 2008... Microsoft issued a short, murky statement Sunday afternoon saying it had suggested a limited alignment with Yahoo. It did not explain its proposal. Perhaps it's thinking along the lines of the deal Yahoo is supposed to be negotiating with...

Icahn Moves To Force Microsoft & Yahoo Together.
May 26, 2008... Corporate raider Carl Icahn has started his proxy fight for control of Yahoo, beginning with the classic Icahn opening, the letter of reproach to the Yahoo board telling them they have acted "irrationally and lost the faith of shareholders and...

Mark Hurd's Teflon Coating Chips.(Company overview)
May 26, 2008... HP CEO Mark Hurd has finally done something that Wall Street didn't like - he's buying EDS, the IT infrastructure outsourcing outfit founded in 1962 by one-time presidential hopeful and outsourcing pioneer Ross Perot, for around $13.9 billion...

HP Signs Up for DaaS.
May 26, 2008... Desktone, the start-up with the desktop-as-a-service (DaaS) vision, has signed up Hewlett-Packard to deliver virtual desktops as a service. Desktone is already supposed to have Verizon, IBM, Softbank and Deutsche Telekon interested - and...

AMD Whistles Up New Champions To Slay its Dragons.
May 26, 2008... AMD has kissed Mario Rivas good-bye and turned processor development over to Randy Allan, the head of its star-crossed server and workstation business, reporting to president and COO Dirk Meyer. Allan is now the new head of AMD's Computing...

Microsoft Appeals EC Fine.
May 26, 2008... Microsoft has filed the papers appealing the record $1.39 billion (899 million euros) fine that the European Commission slapped it with in February claiming the prices it had been charging for its interoperability protocols were so high it...

Sun Finally Gets its Barcelona Boxes Out.
May 26, 2008... Sun, which lost some traction selling x86 servers when AMD flubbed the Barcelona - and had to run hurry up and pull some Intel quad-based machines together last year - finally got to announce its first AMD quad machines in the shadow of HP and...

IBM & Microsoft Follow SAP to the Blackberry.
May 26, 2008... IBM is following SAP down the BlackBerry path. It's putting Cognos' BI software on the widget. It says the $300-a-user Cognos 8 Go! Mobile software is the industry's first business intelligence solution designed specifically for the BlackBerry...

Verizon Becomes a Counter-Android Linux Convert.
May 26, 2008... Verizon Wireless is snubbing Google's Linux-based Android initiative to go with the LiMo Foundation's mobile Linux spec for its next wave of mobile phones expected next year. Along with Verizon, Mozilla signed up - giving the consortium its...

Brits Bitch to EC about Microsoft.
May 26, 2008... Becta, the British Educational and Communications and Technology Agency, has taken its gripes against Microsoft's allegedly "anti-competitive" licensing policies for schools and the "interoperability impediments" in Office 2007 to the European...

NYSE Runs on Red Hat.(Brief article)
May 26, 2008... Red Hat is sporting a feather in its chapeau. It's got the mighty NYSE Euronext using its operating system for its mission-critical trading platform and purring compliments like "Red Hat is almost like water, it's pervasive within our...

Skype Drops GPL Appeal.
May 26, 2008... Skype has thrown in the towel on its appeal of the German court conviction last year that it violated the GPL by not furnishing GPL2-covered source code with a Linux-based SMC Networks VoIP phone. The case was brought by Harald Welte of the...

Google Passes Yahoo Traffic.
May 26, 2008... Among Yahoo's other problems, Google has just shot past it to become the most trafficked web site in the US, according to comScore. Still Google is only ahead by a nose - 466,000 unique monthly visitors. In April Google's traffic was up 18% to...

XP SP3 Bewitched.
May 26, 2008... Apparently installing the new XP SP3 sends some PCs - AMD ones, it looks like - into an endless reboot loop. The delayed service pack was just released the other day after being held up by a late-appearing incompatibility with Microsoft's...

French Start Their Own Wikipedia.
May 26, 2008... Larousse, the great French encyclopedia and dictionary house, has launched a French online encyclopedia and is inviting people to contribute on the facing page, separate and not commingled. Unlike Wikipedia contributions have to be signed and...

I'm Greener. No, I'm Greener.(Brief article)
May 26, 2008... Dell is going to try to cut the energy consumption of its laptops and desktops by up to 25% between now and 2010 to avoid millions of tons of CO2 emissions, comparing its pledge to HP's, which is supposed to cut relative its 2005 levels. It...

Tour the Universe.
May 26, 2008... Go to http://www.worldwidetelescope.org/. Microsoft Research has tapped into several orbiting and land-based telescopes to show us what's out there. It's really something.