ePostal News articles from November 2005

ePostal News archives from November 2005

USPS EPM loses out to newcomer.
November 7, 2005... Looks like the US Postal Service and its ain't-cutting-the-mustard Electronic Postmark (EPM) vendor AuthentiDate missed a golden opportunity. America Online and Yahoo, which together represent about 50% of the US consumer e-mail audience,...

RFID watch.
November 7, 2005... trans-o-flex Schnell-Lieferdienst GmbH, the Weinheim, Germany-based transporter of sensitive goods, says that it's going to put more emphasis on using Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) and sensory technology. The company figures it's...

USPS security intact.
November 7, 2005... The USPS brags that despite 316 million unauthorized attempts made against its network assets not a single computer has been compromised. The agency has upwards of 500,000 IP addresses, 12,000 servers, 150,000 desktops and 225,000 users spread...

Japan post pairs with TNT.(TNT Express Worldwide)(Brief Article)
November 7, 2005... Japan Post and TNT NV said Monday that, as expected, they will enter into a strategic joint venture aimed at carving out a leading position in the Asia-Pacific express and logistics market, building on TNT's global network and Japan Post's...

Canada Post Borderfree expands.
November 7, 2005... Canada Post's six-year-old Borderfree operation has opened a second US distribution center in Chicago in anticipation of a 70% increase in cross-border parcels. The original center is in Taylor, Michigan. Six of Borderfree's existing major...

Finland Post adds corporate change-of-address service.
November 7, 2005... Finland Post is offering companies and other organisations a free new change-of-address web service. It says changed address information will become effective within two working days from when it's submitted, which is quicker than a...

FedEx expects e-commerce to tickle holiday deliveries.
November 7, 2005... Despite economist fears of consumer spending fatigue, FedEx is figuring on handling about 8.5 million packages on its busiest day over the holidays, about 400,000 more than last year's busiest day. FedEx' own economist Gene Huang claims,...

Emirates Post moves into financial services.(Wall Street Exchange Centre LLC acquired)(Brief Article)
November 7, 2005... Emirates Post has bought a 60% majority stake in Wall Street Exchange Centre LLC, one of the United Arab Emirates' biggest and oldest foreign exchange and money transfer companies, a part of the Indian multinational House of Patel Group founded...

Katrina aftermath.
November 7, 2005... The USPS is making deliveries, albeit sporadically, to about 38% of its routes in New Orleans.

Microsoft re-jigs its shared source licenses; flirts with GPL.
November 7, 2005... Microsoft, which needs to look less than, well, Microsoft to developers, says it's been suffering from the same kind of license glut that has beset the open source community and so it's revamped the Shared Source licenses that the open source...

Microsoft wins Kai-Fu round.
November 7, 2005... The California judge that Google hoped would trash Microsoft's chances of enforcing the non-compete that its renegade VP-turned-Google exec Kai-Fu Lee signed has sided with Microsoft. In a 12-page ruling, District Court Judge Ronald Whyte...

IBM organizes EMC-free Aperi.
November 7, 2005... Where there were consortia, there are now open source communities. Led by IBM, some of the storage old guard--but noticeably not EMC and HP--say they're going to form an open source community, initially given the project name Aperi,...

Intel's Itanium nightmare continues.
November 7, 2005... Intel's not going get its vaunted next-generation dual-core 90nm Montecito Itanium chip out any time soon, suggesting that it's returning to the screw-ups of the Barrett administration. It's been delayed. And since Montecito's been...

Is Intel screwed?
November 7, 2005... While Intel struggles with its Itanium line, it's also dicking with the Xeon MP. It's up and killed the so-called four-way Whitefield and replaced it with a four-core four-way widget code named Tigerton. The substitution, which may be...

Chip start-up claims 10Fold performance-per-watt advantage.
November 7, 2005... Fabled Alpha and StrongArm chip designer Dan Dobber-puhl's hyper-secretive start-up, PA Semi, two-and-a-half years in incubation with scarecrows pitched outside to ward off the press, finally surfaced at the Fall Processor Forum where it...

Microsoft to try to commoditize BI.
November 7, 2005... Under threat from such as OpenOffice and a topped-up market, Microsoft is moving to protect its mighty $11 billion Office franchise by spicing up the widgetry with business intelligence features in search of new uses and new markets. On...

IBM opens all its patents to some.
November 7, 2005... IBM has pledged royalty-free access to all of its huge patent portfolio of 45,000 patents to designated folks in standards bodies developing healthcare and education software built around Web Services, Xforms electronic forms and...

Microsoft irritates judge.
November 7, 2005... Well, the European Commission isn't the only antitrust authority miffed at the state and pace of Microsoft's compliance. Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly, who oversees the company's settlement with the US government, isn't any too thrilled...

Neoware buys Maxspeed.
November 7, 2005... Continuing its shopping spree, Neoware is buying Maxspeed Corporation for $24 million cash, marking its entry into Asia since the privately held supplier of customized thin clients has sales and development offices in Beijing and Shanghai. ...

Sayonara, MBF.
November 7, 2005... Microsoft has killed off the Microsoft Business Framework (MBF), at least as a standalone product. MBF was originally designed to be a new software framework that could be layered onto the .NET platform. Now the company is proposing to...

VMware betas a player.(Brief Article)
November 7, 2005... VMware has come up with a VMware Player, free new beta software that lets anyone run, share or evaluate software in a virtual machine on a Windows or Linux PC. It basically reads 32- and 64-bit virtual machines. It installs like a standard...

Intel turns storage contender.
November 7, 2005... Intel has a new extensible storage platform, the SSR212MA, a hardware/software combo that's supposed to make it cheaper and easier for SMEs to build a full-featured SAN and have disaster recovery and backup. The Xeon-based platform...

W3C set up office in India.(World Wide Web Consortium)(Brief Article)
November 7, 2005... In a bow to the sub-continent's status as everybody's favorite site to outsource software, W3C has set up an office in Noida, India at the Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC), a scientific institution under the Ministry of...

IBM sticks it to JBoss.
November 7, 2005... Although it won't be available until later this year, IBM has announced its expected J2EE-certified Apache Geronimo-based WebSphere Application Server Community Edition (WAS CE), which includes technology from Gluecode Software, which IBM...

Here comes Paxville MP.
November 7, 2005... Intel announced the dual-core Paxville MP Xeon on Tuesday, its first dual-core, hyper-threaded platform for servers that run four or more processors. The widget, dubbed the Xeon 7000 sequence and good for up to 3GHz, is supposed to boost...

Intel's chipset outreach.
November 7, 2005... Intel, which had been suffering from a capacity-induced shortage of desktop chipsets--with no immediate relief--is reaching out to third-parties like ATI to fill the void. Intel has never used other people's chipsets on its own motherborads...

Whoops.
November 7, 2005... The co-president of Dell's Chinese operations, Foo Piau Phang, has up and retired perhaps because the company's market share in Asia in Q3 dropped a point to 7.8%, according to IDC.

Ruettgers resigns as chairman.
November 7, 2005... EMC CEO and president Joe Tucci will become chairman as well in January when Mike Ruettgers resigns. Ruettgers will continue as a senior advisor to the board and management. EMC also approved the designation of a lead director, effective...

Pitney-Firstlogic deal comes unglued.
November 21, 2005... Pitney Bowes ain't going to be taking over Firstlogic Inc, the enterprise information quality ISV, like they planned. The two said Monday that they verbally agreed not to extend their merger agreement when it expired November 15. As of...

Logistics battle brewing.
November 21, 2005... US antitrust officials cleared Deutsche Post's $6.7 billion acquisition of Britain's Exel Plc the other day, a move that will let Deutsche Post double its logistics business over night. Meanwhile, a private German investor by the name of...

USPS settles on EDI solution.
November 21, 2005... The US Postal Service has gone with MessageWay Solutions' flagship B2B software MessageWay to consolidate its electronic commerce environment. The post office is using the high-volume EDI solution to manage the exchange of domestic as well...

EC takes reading.(European Commission)(Brief Article)
November 21, 2005... Between now and January 27 the European Commission is going to be polling people on the future of the European Union's postal sector to understand, it says, the changing needs of consumers and businesses, the potential social and economic...

DHL launches virtual warehouse for US importers.
November 21, 2005... DHL has launched DHL Danzas Air & Ocean Consolidated Distribution Service (CDS), a new service that's supposed to cut brokerage fees and shorten delivery times for US imports from Asia, Europe and Latin America. Taking a page out of Dell's...

USPS proposes expanding use of e-manifests.(United States. Postal Service)(Brief Article)
November 21, 2005... The US Postal Service is proposing to require the use of an electronic manifest produced by the Electronic Verification System (e-VS) for postage manifesting and payment of all Parcel Select mailings. In other words all standard mail machinable...

e-Boks subject of e-government deal.(Denmark's Road Safety and Transport Agency signs a deal with Postal Department)(Brief Article)
November 21, 2005... Denmark's Road Safety and Transport Agency (Faerdselsstyrelsen) and Post Danmark have cut a deal whereby the agency will tuck an e-mail in your e-Boks saying that your car has to be inspected instead of writing you a letter. Almost half a...

Military mail tracked.(internet service launched)(Brief Article)
November 21, 2005... Military families can now track the status of Express Mail sent to loved ones stationed around the world through a new tracking service on usps.com that can confirm when their mail pieces arrives at Military Post Offices anywhere in the world...

UK Post Office to launch Novel credit card.
November 21, 2005... Thanks to the Bank of Ireland and Georgia-based TSYS, the UK Post Office has launched a new credit card that lets customers treat certain transactions as installment loans. With a so-called "2-in-1" feature, customers can designate up to...

Australia Post selling airline tickets.
November 21, 2005... To the protests of private business interests, which don't much like the government poaching on what they consider their terrain, the Australia Post has started selling tickets on behalf of low-fare airline Jetstar. The Australian Post is...

Trading stamps.
November 21, 2005... Stamps.com, the Internet postage pioneer, says it's moved 75% of its unprofitable $4.99-a-month Simple Plan customers, roughly 100,000 accounts, over to its pricier $15.99-a-month Pro Plan, suggesting that it's getting down to the immovable...

Uh-oh, here comes another Oracle wannabe.(Company Profile)
November 21, 2005... Told ya so. Told ya so. Told ya CA was gonna divest Ingres. Okay, okay, so it took 'em five months to admit it--reportedly there was a misunderstanding of the terms and the deal had to be revisited--but as we prophesied, Garnett & Helfrich...

Microsoft to move into grids.
November 21, 2005... Bill Gates keynoted at Supercomputing this week and showed off Windows Compute Cluster Server 2003, basically marking Microsoft's move into grid computing, a bleeding-edge segment currently dominated by Microsoft's mortal foe, Linux. ...

Maffei to run Liberty Media.
November 21, 2005... Greg Maffei is going to run Liberty Media, the plum job he left Oracle for last week. He is now CEO-elect and will serve an apprenticeship until the second quarter of next year when John Malone steps down and Maffei is made president and...

Microsoft seeks to prove it gets the Google challenge: Microsoft opens its bible & ponders the end of the world as it knows it.
November 21, 2005... Microsoft leaked an internal Bill Gates e-mail dated October 30 to the press underscoring the fact that the company has to build out the software-as-services model or get swept aside by the coming great "services wave" of applications. ...

Geac & Infor to create new ERP entity.
November 21, 2005... Golden Gate Capital, the San Francisco private equity firm, is going to acquire Canada's Geac Computer Corporation for $11.10 a share, roughly a billion dollars cash, a 27% premium. The deal, financed through a combination of equity from...

Microsoft: better late than never.
November 21, 2005... SQL Server 2005, aka Yukon, Microsoft's first major database upgrade in five years, its Visual Studio 2005 toolbox, aka Whidbey, and a beta BizTalk Server 2005 are now officially announced and a reproach to anything resembling timely...

Oracle vp becomes CEO of Borland.
November 21, 2005... Besides losing its CFO to Liberty Media, Oracle has lost its senior vice president of marketing and global sales support Tod Nielsen, another ex-Microsoft guy, to Borland. Only at Oracle for eight months, Nielsen has been named president...

HP updates its PC blade solution.
November 21, 2005... HP, as expected, has updated its year-old PC blade solution, the stuff it calls Consolidated Client Infrastructure (CCI), and, as expected, replaced its Transmeta blades with an AMD Athlon 64 widget, a thing called the bc1500 blade PC, based,...

W3C moves on Semantic Web.(Brief Article)
November 21, 2005... W3C director Tim Berners-Lee announced the formation of the Rules Interchange Format (RIF) Working Group. The mission is to produce a standard means of exchanging rules on the web. Rules are key to the Semantic Web, allowing integration,...

Dell appears to back off $80b bogie.
November 21, 2005... Dell came with earnings of 39 cents, off 28%, on revenues of $13.9 billion after a charge of $422 million due to restructuring, product rationalization, facilities closing and a bum capacitor in one of its PC lines and for the first time in a...

AMD gaining.
November 21, 2005... At 67.7% market share, AMD topped Intel in selling chips into retail-bound desktop PCs in the US in October according to the numbers compiled by market researcher Current Analysis, which says the situation is fluid and could change again in...

Microsoft ruling by spring.
November 21, 2005... Bo Vesterdorf, the president of the Court of First Instance that's supposed to hear Microsoft's appeal of its antitrust conviction by the European Commission, is making noises about having a decision "in early spring--hopefully before April."

Microsoft research builds a prototype OS from scratch.
November 21, 2005... Because of Windows' myriad vulnerabilities--and the fact that it's showing its age--heck, its underpinnings are pre-Internet--Microsoft Research decided to throw out all the old dependencies and try its hand at building a brand new operating...

Db4objects implements native queries.
November 21, 2005... Db4objects, the open source embedded object database start-up that Veritas founder Mark Leslie chairs, is about to become the first company to implement native queries for Java, C Sharp and Visual Basic.NET to increase developer productivity....

Novell loses SuSE founder.
November 21, 2005... Without explaining exactly why SuSE founder Hubert Mantel resigned from Novell, announcing his departure to the SuSE mailing list. He said it was "too late" for him and complained that "This is no longer the company I founded 13 years ago."...

Linux worm circulating.
November 21, 2005... Linux Web servers have been under attack from a worm that McAfee has dubbed Lupper that's looking for boxes hosting vulnerable PHP/CGI scripts. McAfee says it's a derivative of the Linux/Slapper and BSD/Scalper worms and infected computers...

Christians 1, lions up a tree.
November 21, 2005... Grokster, the once-popular IP-flouting file-sharing site, is dead. It's posted a message reading, "The United States Supreme Court unanimously confirmed that using this service to trade copyrighted material is illegal. Copying copyrighted...

The SAP angle in Oracle's Innobase move.
November 21, 2005... So SAP has been paying MySQL a reportedly not insubstantial amount of money to make the MySQL database enterprise-worthy. (Remember that deal two years ago where MySQL got SAP DB and the two were supposed to build a next-generation MySQL based...

AOL watch.
November 21, 2005... Quoting two anonymous sources involved in the negotiations, the New York Times described Microsoft as the "front-runner" in the AOL race, something our woman's intuition suspects is true simply because it's important to Microsoft in its jihad...

Gnome it is then.
November 21, 2005... To simplify things in its hour of need, Novell is reportedly going to default to Gnome from now on. Apparently Open-SuSE will still support KDE. Gnome is more enterprise.

Intel, Dell & Schlumberger collaborate on box.
November 21, 2005... Intel, Dell and Schlumberger are working a new workstation for the oil and gas industry, their contribution to the energy crisis. The widget is supposed to be endowed with superior data throughput, computation performance and 3D graphical...

Samsung to spend $45b on R&D.
November 21, 2005... Samsung, which is already lauded as a chi-chi brand, is planning to spend $45 billion on R&D over the next five year to ensure its technological lead. It also intends to recruit some 30,000 new R&D staff by 2010. The money is supposed...