ePostal News articles from November 2006

ePostal News archives from November 2006

Australia Post performance monitoring strictly RFID now.
November 6, 2006... The Australian Post has been using Radio Frequency Identification Devices (RFIDs) to monitor its performance since January. External monitoring was previously done manually. The old and new systems were run in parallel for six months. The...

PB & NCR to peddle interactive kiosk.
November 6, 2006... Pitney Bowes and NCR have started marketing a jointly developed interactive kiosk for self-weighing, self-posting and self-printing shipping labels. The self-shipping kiosk will be marketed globally to postal authorities, retailers,...

DHL deploys new web tool.
November 6, 2006... DHL has launched DHL Import Express Online, a web tool designed to give customers full control over their imports or third-party (country-to-country) shipments. It lets them prepare and manage their shipments from a PC and currently...

Oracle hijacks Red Hat Linux the open source IP conundrum trips up Red Hat.
November 6, 2006... Evidently Oracle CEO Larry Ellison aims to make Red Hat a red smear in the road. He's doing something he's been threatening to do since April and that's to use open source against Red Hat--which apparently ticked him off royally when it...

Will Red Hat wind up on the block?
November 6, 2006... Some on Wall Street, which has cut its ratings, reckon that Oracle has just painted a great big takeover target on Red Hat's chest and Global Equities Research analyst Trip Chowdhry thinks that, if Red Hat goes down, IBM is a more likely buyer...

Red Hat tries to defend itself.
November 6, 2006... To fend off Oracle's attempt at a wholesale rout of its customers, Red Hat put a short FAQ on its web site under the headline "Unfakeable Linux" that promises "more to follow." The FAQ starts, oddly enough, with the reassurance that despite...

IBM sues Amazon in big bucks patent litigation.
November 6, 2006... IBM, the plaster saint of the open source movement and lately a high-profile critic of software patents given to open sourcing or foreswearing the litigious use of its patents, has filed suit against Amazon claiming that Amazon "has built its...

AMD pockets ATI, plans its future.
November 6, 2006... With ATI Technologies in its pocket and only the $5.4 billion acquisition bill left to pay off, AMD is now supposed to deliver on a broad design initiative code named Fusion that creates a new class of x86 processor that integrates the CPU and...

Microsoft Defender ships.
November 6, 2006... As disgruntled security vendors McAfee and Symantec snipe at it for playing unfair and not providing them sufficient access to its Vista platform to compete, Microsoft announced that Defender, its free anti-spam program acquired when it bought...

Dell's first AMD servers materialize.
November 6, 2006... Dell has wheeled out its Intel heartbreakers, touting the price/performance, performance per watt and simplicity of its first two Opteron servers. The one-time Intel loyalist started selling AMD PCs in September. Dell calls these servers...

Gartner faults Microsoft for Vista's January release plan.
November 6, 2006... With Microsoft now insisting that Vista will come out on schedule in January, Gartner--which swore it would miss and not appear until May--is knocking January as lousy timing, saying that right after the holidays could be "detrimental for the...

Intel & AMD: dividing up the pie.
November 6, 2006... According to the numbers jockeys, both Intel and AMD increased their market share in Q3 apparently because VIA Technologies stopped making some of its x86 chips. Intel is now supposed to have 76% of the overall market, up from 73% in Q2,...

XP SP3 moved to 2008.
November 6, 2006... XP Service Pack 3 has been pushed back to the first half of 2008, a delay of three to six months according to a recent schedule. SP2 came out two years ago August.

AOL expects sales to fall.
November 6, 2006... AOL CEO Jonathan Miller told the German newspaper Die Welt that the company's sales may drop further over the next two years as it gives services away to attract users and advertising. AOL, which is trying to reinvent itself as a free web...

MIT's social revolution pushes forward.(Quanta Computer Inc introduces AMD/Red Hat-based laptops )(Brief article)
November 6, 2006... Five thousand test units of the AMD/Red Hat-based One Laptop Per Child initiative are slated to come off Quanta's production line in early November. Volume production of what is now called the XO is set for next year, with expectations of...

ICANN OKs .asia domain.
November 6, 2006... ICANN has approved an .asia domain for Internet addresses. It mirrors the .eu suffix the Internet overseer previously sanctioned for the European Union.

Firefox 2.0 out.
November 6, 2006... The Mozilla Foundation has released Firefox 2.0, the updated open source competitor to Microsoft's brand new Internet Explorer 7 browser. Microsoft just released IE7.

Sony bows sitting down.
November 6, 2006... Sony has made it clear that nobody in the company is going to fall on his sword over this battery business--even if it's negatively impacted Sony's results--and when its executives formally apologize for it they bowed sitting down, a widely...

HP to use PayPal.
November 6, 2006... HP is gonna start taking PayPal payments at its Home & Home Office Store. Some 122 million people or concerns have PayPal accounts.

DHL Germany expands Internet postage.
November 13, 2006... DHL has started offering Internet postage to all comers. Customers can directly print and pay for stamps for small packets and parcels. DHL says no special franking software is required. Payment is made through online transfers via...

Navteq to be USPS' 'mapmaker'.
November 13, 2006... Navteq Corporation, whose satellite-guided digital maps are used by Google Maps, Yahoo Maps and the GPS system going into high-end cars, is going to be the map data provider in the RouteSmart Technologies' Carrier Optimal Routing (COR) solution...

IronPort buys PostX.
November 13, 2006... IronPort Systems Inc, the Internet gateway security house, is buying privately held PostX Corporation and its enterprise-level e-mail encryption technology for stock. The value of the transaction wasn't disclosed. IronPort claims that...

Correos awards contract to Bull Spain.(Correos y Telegrafos)(Brief article)
November 13, 2006... Correos, the Spanish Post Office has let a modernization contract to Bull Spain valued at 4.68 million euros that includes 3,800 new PCs and servers, LANs and 1,000 bar code readers. It will also renovate 1,500 printers. Meanwhile, the...

Pick your poison.
November 13, 2006... According to a study done at the University of Georgia and published in the Journal of Interactive Advertising, people are more irritated and feel more intruded on by spam than direct mail. Spam is more intrusive because it makes it harder...

Siemens gets another USPS contract.
November 13, 2006... The United States Postal Service has awarded a $109.4 million contract to Siemens Postal Automation for additional mail sorting equipment. The agency wants an additional 211 Delivery Bar Code Sorters installed by next December.

Saints alive, Microsoft teams with Novell on Linux.
November 13, 2006... Did you feel that? That really was the ground moving beneath your feet. Microsoft has gone and done the unthinkable and teamed up with Novell. It will help sell SUSE Linux along with Windows, recommending SUSE to customers with an irrepressible...

IBM bitten by the thin client bug.
November 13, 2006... Remember when CEO Sam Palmisano said IBM was going to swap out its Windows desktops for Linux? Well, now it's talking about swapping out desktops for thin clients. There are already 4,000 of them deployed internally and Patricia...

Oracle buys Stellent.
November 13, 2006... The ever-acquisitive Oracle has now bought business content management house Stellent Inc for $440 million or $13.50 a share, a 27% premium. Stellent customers use it to deploy multiple line-of-business applications--such as web sites,...

On Halloween, Google says 'boo!' again to Microsoft.
November 13, 2006... On Halloween Google made another one of those moves that's supposed to scare the bejesus out of Microsoft and get everyone else wondering what it's up to. It bought another baby company, a 27-man two-year-old PaloAlto, California...

Office Live on runway.
November 13, 2006... Office Live is officially due out in the US on November 15 followed by betas in France, Germany, the UK and Japan. The Basic ad-supported stuff, which gives small businesses a way to create web sites with 25 company-branded e-mail accounts,...

Advocacy groups file big brother complaint with the FTC.
November 13, 2006... The Center for Digital Democracy (CDD) and the US Public Interest Research Group (US PIRG), two public interest advocacy groups, have filed a complaint with the Federal Trade Commission asking the agency to investigate online advertising. They...

Neoware replaces CEO with ex-president of SAP America.
November 13, 2006... Caught in a cycle of declining revenues, Neoware, the thin client house, has replaced its CEO with ex-SAP America president Klaus Besier, leaving incumbent Michael Kantowitz as executive chairman. Besier has been president of Neoware since...

eBay a counterfeiter's paradise: Microsoft.
November 13, 2006... Microsoft has filed 55 criminal and civil suits in 11 countries against people selling allegedly pirated copies of its software on eBay. Action was taken in the US, Germany, the UK, Holland, France, Belgium, Australia, the Argentine,...

Dell starts selling AMD laptops.
November 13, 2006... Without any fanfare, even a press release, Dell has started selling AMD-based laptops. The company's Inspiron 1501 notebook can be configured with a range of AMD chips from the low-end Sempron through to the dual-core Turion 64 X2. Prices...

Google reworks mobile Gmail.
November 13, 2006... Google is taking another crack at sending Gmail email messages to cell phones and unchaining users from their desktops and their Blackberries. In this particular case Yahoo and Microsoft are ahead of it. A previously clumsy and...

HP intros its first dedicated storage blade.
November 13, 2006... Hewlett-Packard (HP) has announced its first dedicated storage blade. The company says the StorageWorks SB40c can add a maximum 876GB of direct attached RAID storage to each blade in an HP BladeSystem c-Class enclosure. It's using...

Microsoft cozies up to PHP.
November 13, 2006... Microsoft has taken up with Zend Technologies, the open source PHP commercialer that wants PHP to be a de facto standard in web development. PHP, remember, is an integral part of the open source LAMP stack, the Windows alternative....

Google Kvetches to EC.
November 13, 2006... Google has been complaining to the European Commission about Vista and its search, joining, let's see, McAfee, Symantec and Adobe. Seems Google is keeping a watching brief on any perceived antitrust missteps Microsoft may make. It's unclear...

Indian City loses its brand.(Brief article)
November 13, 2006... Bangalore, India's thriving and increasingly famous tech hub, isn't Bangalore any more. Nope, the name has gone the way of Bombay, Madras and the Raj along with other anglicanizations. Now it's called Bengalooru, which we're told derives...

One Laptop Per Child for the rest of us.(Brief article)
November 13, 2006... Quanta, which is making the MIT One Laptop Per Child box, wants to use the platform to make cheap stripped-down ~$300 laptops for Europe and the US too. The Financial Times quoted an analyst at Taiwan's Institute for Information Industry...

NetDespatch creates home delivery system for TNT post.
November 20, 2006... UK-based NetDespatch, which services express carriers, courier companies and logistics networks, has developed what it considers a "groundbreaking" home delivery management system for TNT Post. Using the latest web technology, it's called...

USPS reg enforcement promises complications for offshore mailers.
November 20, 2006... As of next July, the United States Postal Service intends to enforce a new regulation that requires all commercial incentive mail destined for the US to be run through CASS, Delivery Point Validation (DPV) and the new proprietary LACS software...

USPS Shipping Assistant ugraded.
November 20, 2006... The United States Postal Service has upgraded its Shipping Assistant, the desktop software underlying the part of its site where folks can print labels and manage package delivery. The software, targeted at small and mid-sized businesses...

Direct mail often a waste: QAS.
November 20, 2006... The average business could be wasting $180,000 a year sending out direct mail that isn't relevant to the addressee or doesn't reach the intended recipient, according to research commissioned by QAS, the address data quality software people. ...

Asian wholesaler develops drop-shipping service.
November 20, 2006... Hong Kong-based Asia-Product.com, reputedly one of the largest online wholesale sites, has officially launched a new drop-shipping module that provides an automatic and reportedly easy-to-use drop-shipping service to online shops owners and...

Tumbleweed develops new anti-spam technology.
November 20, 2006... Tumbleweed Communications, the messaging security house, has introduced Adaptive Image Filtering (AIF) technology designed to combat the ever-increasing amount of image spam. In recent tests, Tumbleweed's Message Protection Lab has found...

Romanian post extends its VPN.
November 20, 2006... The Romanian Post has extended its virtual private network to a half-dozen more offices. The VPN offers services outside the traditional postal services providing computerized financial services such as online money orders, Western Union...

Deutsche Post anticipates job cuts.
November 20, 2006... Deutsche Post may have to cut 16,000-32,000 jobs when the German market is fully opened to competition in mail in 2008, according to the Dow Jones Newswires, which caught Deutsche Post CEO Klaus Zumwinkel on a flight from Columbus, Ohio to...

Vista is finished ... done ... ready ... finally.
November 20, 2006... The long march to Windows Vista is over. Microsoft released the operating system to manufacturing. An hour later it got on the horn to tell the press that business would have the thing "on or before" November 30, the last possible day for...

Office 2007 sent to manufacturing.
November 20, 2006... Office 2007 is in the can as they used to say in Hollywood. Microsoft has confirmed that the software had been released to manufacturing (RTM) after a second beta involving more than 3.5 million people. Starting December 1 Microsoft...

Microsoft to pay novell $348m less the $40m novell pays redmond.
November 20, 2006... Novell has skimmed a beaker or two off the ocean of ambiguity that everybody's been swimming in since the Microsoft-Novell axis was announced five days before. It outlined the financial terms of its pact with the devil in an SEC filing and...

Red hat slips indemnification clause into its defenses.
November 20, 2006... In response to the new Microsoft, Novell, Oracle front it's facing, Red Hat quietly slipped an indemnification clause into its defenses. After the Microsoft-Novell rapprochement, Red Hat posted a FAQ adding indemnification to its...

Why Microsoft-Novell?
November 20, 2006... Rumor--underscore rumor--has it that Microsoft did the Novell deal because Novell threatened it with IP, which might explain why Microsoft is paying Novell $108 million under their "patent agreement." As a side benefit, Microsoft gets to...

Oracle Linux dissed.
November 20, 2006... "This is a prototype that was cobbled together by a handful of people and tossed out there to support Larry's latest visionary thing. It does not have the stability behind it that customers can use in production."--Hapoalim Securities USA...

Adobe gives aid and comfort to Firefox.
November 20, 2006... Adobe, which has got a bone or two to pick with Microsoft, has teamed up with the open source Mozilla Foundation in what can only be described as a browser platform play. Adobe is giving Mozilla and its Firefox browser the source code for...

Dell delivers first Intel quad Xeons & first AMD business desktop.
November 20, 2006... Dell may have abandoned its Intel purity but it's apparently still got dibs on Intel's first quad-core Xeon chip or simply took the liberty of getting out first--the chips weren't formally introduced. That didn't happen until Tuesday. ...

EC to create open source repository.
November 20, 2006... The European Commission has tapped a consortium led by Unisys Belgium to set up and run an Open Source Observatory and Repository (OSOR) to promote the use of open source in the public sector. The Repository is supposed to extend the EC's...

HP teams with VMware on desktops.
November 20, 2006... Having passed Dell in PCs, HP is now suggesting that companies don't overprovision and trotted out a Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) that consolidates physical desktop PCs onto a single server that's centrally hosted and managed in the...

Lenovo quarter disappoints.
November 20, 2006... Lenovo, third behind HP and Dell in PCs with Acer pushing up its rear, is finding it hard to become an international player. Its Q2 earnings were off 16% year-over-year at $38 million on revenues up 1.3% to $3.7 billion. It blamed slow...

XenEnterprise close.
November 20, 2006... XenSource says that XenEnterprise, its virtualization platform for both Windows and Linux, will be released next month for Windows Server 2003, XP and Linux. Support for Windows 2000 will come along in Q1. Pricing will start at $488...

IBM wants to own the cluster space.
November 20, 2006... IBM, currently number three in clusters behind HP and Dell, is determined to be number one by the end of 2008, according to Wendy McGee, program director of its Cluster Solutions Brand & Business Unit. Bearing down on its mark, IBM has...

Big doings at Dell: BusinessWeek.
November 20, 2006... BusinessWeek says that Michael Dell is doing some headhunting, looking first for a new services boss and then some new blood willing to come on board to fill other strategic trouble spots in the company, contemplating what the book was told...

Microsoft rummages in Ma Bell's old trunk for a new outfit.
November 20, 2006... In Tokyo for a Microsoft conference, CEO Steve Ballmer said Microsoft would be seriously going into the VoIP market the beginning of the year--not just dabbling with it like it has been--and incorporating the widgetry into all its operating...

IBM seeks to separate Mercury customers from HP.
November 20, 2006... Now that HP has taken Mercury Interactive over, IBM is dangling potentially 25% license discounts in front of Mercury and OpenView customers to get them to move to Rational and Tivoli, claiming HP has decided to focus on proprietary...

HP entrusts its software future to Mercury.
November 20, 2006... HP has closed on its big Mercury Interactive acquisition and will be creating a new HP Software operation meant to make HP a leader in business technology optimization (BTO). Scuttlebutt claims Mercury personnel are getting all the plum...

NTP moves on to Palm.
November 20, 2006... NTP, the Blackberry gadfly that ultimately stung Research in Motion for $612 million for patent infringement, is now suing Palm and its Treo for the same thing seeking some unspoken amount of damages. It claims Palm won't negotiate. NTP doesn't...

Universal Music to collect bounty on every Zune sold.
November 20, 2006... Microsoft is going to pay Universal Music an undisclosed fee on every $250 iPod-targeting Zune digital music player it sells. IPod owns 80% of the market and only pays royalties on the music it sells, not the hardware. Universal wants to...

Mediachase Instant Business Network deployed at USPS.
November 27, 2006... Mediachase Ltd has deployed the ATLAS Management System (IBN-AMS), which is built on and runs on the Mediachase Instant Business Network (IBN) platform, at the United States Postal Service. IBN is Mediachase's flagship product meant to...

The USPS doesn't know its own ZIP codes: critic.(e-Merges.com developed an application competing United States Postal Service)(Brief article)
November 27, 2006... Maryland-based e-Merges.com, a specialist database firm, claims that its new Congressional District Identifier application beat a USPS application in a side-by-side accuracy runoff. e-Merges says that when citizens try to contact elected...

UPU meets.(Universal Postal Union)(Conference notes)
November 27, 2006... The Universal Postal Union (UPU), the United Nations operation, held its 2006 Strategy Conference in Dubai last week, the first time the quadrennial summit has even been held outside of Switzerland, UPU's home base. The issues and trends...

New Zealand Post mulls special web site.
November 27, 2006... The New Zealand Post is considering setting up a special web site to stimulate exports by New Zealand SMBs while perking up the post's own parcel business, according to the breaking news site Stuff. The site would showcase local products...

DHL cuts deal with Vietnam Post.
November 27, 2006... Deutsche Post's express mail arm, DHL, is forming a joint venture with Vietnam Post & Telecommunication. As part of the deal, DHL will put $14 million into upgrading its local infrastructure and expanding its services. DHL will own 51% of the...

Deutsche Post as bottling plant?
November 27, 2006... Deutsche Post World Net AG may get into shampoo bottling according what one of its executive board members, Frank Appel, told Dow Jones Newswires. He said some of the post's clients are interested in outsourcing some of their production...

Royal Mail turns spotlight on Internet 'work shopping'.
November 27, 2006... The Royal Mail has done some research and found that Friday lunchtime is the most popular time for people to do what's called "Work shopping" and take advantage of the Internet access at their office to go online and browse. Nearly...

Russia post privatization raises objections.
November 27, 2006... Russia's IT and communications ministry has come out against the privatization of the state-owned postal monopoly before 2012, pointing to the USPS, which remains a subsidized government agency, and the unsuccessful attempts of other countries...

Correction.(Correction notice)
November 27, 2006... Two weeks ago in the November 13-15 issue (No. 326), we incorrectly identified DHL Germany's latest Internet postage technology venture, DHL Online Postage, as a derivative of parent company Deutsche Post's STAMPIT widgetry. No. No. No. No. No....

Sun starts open sourcing its Java implementations.
November 27, 2006... The open sourcing of Java--an admittedly flawed process--has begun. But as everybody has observed, at six million lines of code, it will be one of the biggest open source contributions ever, representing a shift in thinking by a company...

Israeli SaaS start-up closes down so founders can go work for Google.
November 27, 2006... Money-starved Israeli start-up iROWS, a browser-based spreadsheet company that kicked off in January, is going to shut down on December 31 because Google has sucked up its two founders to beef up the internally developed Spreadsheets widgetry...

Microsoft broadens interoperability plans beyond Novell.
November 27, 2006... Fresh on the heels of its eyebrow-raising interoperability pact with Novell and Novell's brand of Linux, Microsoft kicked off an Interop Vendor Alliance with two-dozen other companies in the name of making their products work better with...

TV guy to head AOL.
November 27, 2006... Time Warner has replaced AOL CEO Jonathan Miller with NBC's second-ranking executive, the president and COO of NBC Television Network Randy Falco four months into AOL's remake as a free ad-based service using programming as a come-on. Ad...

EC finds Microsoft documentation still lacking.
November 27, 2006... Microsoft might have to dig out that checkbook it uses to pay whopping great antitrust fines. The European Commission said in a statement that--surprise, surprise--Microsoft has still not satisfied the EC's order to produce "complete and...

HP produces yeoman-like results.
November 27, 2006... HP produced yeoman-like results in its fourth quarter, earning $1.7 billion, or 60 cents a share, up from $416 million, or 14 cents a share, last year when it had to take a $1.1 billion hit for restructuring. Revenues came to $24.6 billion,...

Intel's quads arrive.
November 27, 2006... Intel is out with its first two quad-core processors, the Xeon 5300, a k a Clovertown, for servers and the Core 2 Extreme Quad-Core, a k a Kentfield, for desktops. Intel, which preens that it's ignited the quad core era, puts two dual-core...

Office live out & about.
November 27, 2006... Office Live, Microsoft's collection of web-based tools and services for businesses with no more than 10 employees, has emerged from beta in the US. It's reportedly had 190,000 businesses using it for accounting, building web sites, tracking...