ePostal News articles from November 2008

ePostal News archives from November 2008

Swiss Post To Pilot Earth Class Mail.
November 3, 2008... Swiss Post is taking the plunge. Showing incredible foresight and leadership, it's going to pilot Earth Class Mail's online postal mail service, starting in five Western European countries - Switzerland, France, Germany, Italy and Austria. If...

La Poste Takes Major Stake in ISV.
November 3, 2008... France's La Poste Group has acquired a 51% stake in the 16-year-old French document software supplier Sefas Innovation, which operates in both Europe and the US, on behalf of its year-old wholly owned subsidiary Doc@post. There was no hint of...

Unconventional DHL-UPS Deal Up in the Air.
November 3, 2008... DHL may not quite get the redemptive outsourcing deal it's been trying to negotiate for UPS, its great competitor, to handle its North American air freight operations, process its parcels and save it billions in further losses. The economic...

Deutsche Post Cuts Outlook; TNT's Profits Drop with a Thud.(Financial report)(Brief article)
November 3, 2008... Deutsche Post preannounced Monday, cutting its 2008 earnings forecast 17% below guidance and 10% below last year's performance and disavowing completely its projections for next year. It said it now expects its Q3 pretax earnings to drop by 8%...

Deutsche Post Keeps Trademark for Now.
November 3, 2008... Deutsche Post may get to keep its trademark on the word "Post." Germany's top civil court, the Federal Court of Justice, overturned a German Patent Court decision that would have cancelled the trademark and sent the case back to the Patent...

SwissSign Moves To Tickle Certificate Sales.(Brief article)
November 3, 2008... SwissSign AG, the Swiss Post unit in charge of certificate-based identity and IT security solutions, says it's come up with a new order process and certificate management scheme called SSCM, short for SwissSign Smart Certificate. It says...

Norway Post Selects RedPrairie's Transportation Suite To Help Fulfill Its Vision for the Future.
November 3, 2008... Norway Post is going to use RedPrairie's E(2)e Transport Management System (TMS) as a key part of its Transport Distribution Load Planning project (TDLP) for its logistics operations. The TMS solution, meant to ensure goods get to the right...

Intermec Intros New RFID Tag.
November 3, 2008... Intermec has introduced an RFID tag with both edge and normal reading performance designed to support portal and forklift applications and enhance forklift reading performance. The widget is designated the IT67 Enterprise Lateral Transmitting...

USPS Adds Express Mail Hold For Pickup to its Web Site.
November 3, 2008... Express Mail packages can be held at the post office for pickup and now customers can choose the Express Mail Hold For Pickup service through Click-N-Ship on usps.com. Hold For Pickup, previously available for Express Mail purchased at post...

Pitney Sells Kiosks to La Poste.
November 3, 2008... Pitney Bowes has signed a contract to provide 50 standalone postal kiosks to La Poste, France's national postal operator, for some of France's largest cities. Pitney doesn't say what it's worth but it's one of the largest contracts it's ever...

Stamps.com Holds its Own Despite Economy.
November 3, 2008... Stamps.com, the Internet alternative to conventional postage, earned $2.06 million in the third quarter, 10 cents a share, on revenues of $20.2 million, down 1% year-over-year. CEO Ken McBride professed himself happy with the results....

Xerox Dreams Up Mail Shop in a Box for Printers.
November 3, 2008... Xerox has a scheme called Mail Shop in a Box for commercial and quick printers to add mailing services to their business. Xerox also has a collection of new business development tools and services, including web-based sales training and...

USPS Reportedly Eliminating Jobs.
November 3, 2008... The USPS has reportedly cut its headquarters staff by 15%, eliminating 220-250 jobs, some occupied, some not, according to DMNews. The agency is apparently looking to move the people into other slots - abandoned perhaps by those who take the...

Amazon's Cloud Sheds Beta Status, Adds Windows.
November 3, 2008... Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) - it's Linux-based one - has moved to production status after two years in beta and now offers a 99.5% Service Level Agreement (SLA) while a Windows one, running Windows Server and SQL, both 32- and 64-bit,...

IBM Starts Hosting Lotus Notes.
November 3, 2008... IBM has turned Lotus Notes into a fluffy hosted service called Lotus Notes Hosted Messaging as it's been threatening to do. The move sorta catches IBM up to Microsoft with its $10-a-head-a-month Exchange Online. Big Blue is targeting its new...

Rackspace Arms To Take On Amazon.
November 3, 2008... Rackspace Hosting, maybe the last company to go public for God knows how long into the future, is anteing up $12 million in cash and stock - with another $16 million in payouts possible - to buy Slicehost and Jungle Disk so it can chase the...

Microsoft's Crystal Ball Not as Gloomy as Feared, Not That Gloomy At All.
November 3, 2008... Microsoft, bless its heart, didn't go all weak in the knees when it posted its earnings and looked into its crystal ball and didn't add to the general panic. Yes, it's expecting weaker results this quarter than Wall Street was predicting, who...

Sun Co-Founder Goes to Start-up Full-Time.
November 3, 2008... Sun will be seeing the back of its co-founder Andy Bechtolsheim for a second time. He's easing out as the company's chief architect to work full-time at Arista Network (ne Arastra), a start-up he bankrolled that's built a cheap,...

Sun's Books Bleed; Company Plans To Write Down the Value of its Business.
November 3, 2008... Rather than wait for Halloween to scare its remaining stockholders silly Sun announced its September results early. It said it's going to lose 25-35 cents a share (GAAP) on revenues of $2.95 billion-$3 billion, down from $3.2 billion this time...

HP Adds Desktop Virtualization Widgetry.
November 3, 2008... HP, which is chasing the hardware side of virtualization, is peddling a new high-performance thin client and a blade workstation that can replace a desktop PC complements of client virtualization. The Xeon-based workstation, designated the...

ThinkFree Aims Office Software at Netbooks.
November 3, 2008... ThinkFree, one of the many Office wannabes and an arm of the Korean Haansoft, claims to have remade its productivity solution for Atom-based netbooks, optimizing its word processing, spreadsheet and presentation apps for the small screen and...

VMware Beats Expectations.(Financial report)
November 3, 2008... VMware, the beaten-down-like-a-tent-peg virtualization leader, reported financial results for the third quarter and put $472 million in revenues on the table, up 32%, a number that's slightly better than its seriously lowered guidance. At...

Microsoft's VMM RTMs.
November 3, 2008... Microsoft's shiny new Virtual Machine Manager (VMM) now wending its way to market - it's RTM'd and should be available the first of November - will cost $1,304 to start, about a third of what VMware's VirtualCenter costs. It can manage both...

Citrix Earnings Down 19%, Ups Guidance.
November 3, 2008... Citrix, one of the virtualization wannabes, said its Q3 earning were down 19% to $49.1 million, or 26 cents a share ($80 million or 43 cents non-GAAP) on revenues up 14% year-over-year to $399 million. This time last year income was $60.7...

The Cloud's Silver Lining.(Brief article)
November 3, 2008... IDC says spending on the cloud will reach $42 billion by 2012, up threefold, and accounting for 9% of revenues in five key market segments. It also figures that the cloud will capture 25% of IT spending growth in 2012 and nearly a third of...

Yahoo To Can 1,500.(Financial report)(Brief article)
November 3, 2008... Yahoo's net profits were down 64% in Q3 to $54.3 million, four cents a share. This time last year it realized $151.3 million, 11 cents a share. Revenues were up 1.1% to $1.79 billion, excluding TAC it was $1.325 billion, short of the $1.37...

Centrify Suites Up.
November 3, 2008... Centrify, the folks with Active Directory savvy clever at using it on non-Microsoft platforms, is moving out Centrify Suite 2008, an integrated family of Active Directory-based auditing, access control and identity management solutions that...

Android Open Sourced.
November 3, 2008... Google's Android 1.0 widgetry, based on Linux 2.6.25 for ARM, was put online and open sourced under the commercial-leaning Apache License when the first of the $179 Android phones appeared. Google is calling it an "end-to-end software...

Russian Antitrust Police Shoot Down Local Google Deal.
November 3, 2008... It remains to be seen whether the US Justice Department puts the kibosh on Google's Yahoo deal, but Russia's Federal Anti-Monopoly Service (FAS) has nixed its plans to buy the AdSense-like ZAO Begun online contextual ad network from the Russian...

Google CEO Stumps for Obama.(Brief article)
November 3, 2008... Google CEO Eric Schmidt, who missed out on being in Al Gore's cabinet when Gore lost to Bush eight years ago, has been campaigning for Barack Obama starting with a panel on the economy in Florida at which both appeared. Schmidt's been an Obama...

The Cloud Ain't Perfect.
November 3, 2008... Google's Gmail went down again for 24 hours or more. Apparently the situation wasn't as bad as last time. In August millions of people were affected. This time Google claimed it was limited to "a small number of users." This is one of the nasty...

Bull Opens Storeway Center.(Brief article)
November 3, 2008... In partnership with EMC, Bull has opened a StoreWay Solution Center dedicated to data protection and virtualization technologies at its Advanced Competency and Services Center in Grenoble, France. According to a Bull-sponsored IDC survey of 100...

Deutsche Post Pulls DHL Out of US Domestic Market.
November 17, 2008... Deutsche Post said Monday that DHL, which has lost billions of dollars, would abandon the US domestic market by the end of January at the cost of 9,500 jobs. It said it has already terminated 5,500 people for a total loss of roughly 15,000...

S&T Implements a 3G Network for the Montenegro Post.
November 17, 2008... S&T System Integration & Technology Distribution AG, the Vienna-based IT consultancy, has connected the headquarters of the Montenegro Post with 72 branches across the country via a modern backbone network that is unique in Montenegro. The...

Best Buy Goes to Canada Post for ePay.
November 17, 2008... Best Buy Canada Ltd has entered into an agreement with Canada Post to offer online ePay services to more than 22,000 Best Buy and Future Shop employees across Canada and at its corporate headquarters in Burnaby. Using Canada Post's epost and...

USPS Uses GIS To Fight Crime.
November 17, 2008... The United States Postal Service's Bank Service Act (BSA) Compliance Office is using ESRI geographic information system technology to monitor millions of money order transactions across the country and detect fraud. GIS maps show where...

French Reportedly Back-Burner Privatization.
November 17, 2008... One of French President Nicholas Sarkozy's advisers Henri Guaino said on radio that plans for the partial privatization of La Poste have been put on hold because of economic conditions globally and the state of the stock market specifically. He...

Ex-Deutsche Post CEO Charged with Tax Evasion.
November 17, 2008... The former head of the German Post Office Klaus Zumwinkel has been formally charged with tax evasion. It was his arrest - and a televised raid on his house - in February that led to his resignation and an investigation of hundreds of Germans...

RR Donnelley Launches ECoM.
November 17, 2008... RR Donnelley & Sons' Global Document Solutions (GDS), a provider of outsourcing services for customer communications management, has launched ECoM, short for Enterprise Communications Management. It's a multi-service solution that provides a...

E-Signatures Take to the Cloud.
November 17, 2008... Drawloop Technologies, a provider of on-demand document creation services, and DocuSign, the electronic signature and online contract execution services supplier, say that Salesforce.com customers can now automate document creation and routing...

Salesforce Pushes To Be an End-to-End Cloud.
November 17, 2008... As a software-as-a-service pioneer Salesforce.com has always been fluffy, but it got even cloudier, so to speak, when it introduced Force.com Sites, an extension of its SaaS platform, offering to let its customers build their public-facing web...

NetSuite Hurls Stone at German Goliath.(Financial report)(Brief article)
November 17, 2008... NetSuite, Larry Ellison's other company, the on-demand one usually seen as a foil for Salesforce.com and its CEO, ex-Ellison lieutenant Marc Benioff, has started directing its attention to Larry's great hereditary enemy, SAP. It's got a new...

Google Walks Out on Yahoo Deal.
November 17, 2008... Under threat of a suit by the Justice Department Google terminated its controversial, widely feared revenue-sharing advertising agreement with Yahoo. Google lawyer David Drummond made this announcement on Google web site: "After four months...

DOJ Takes Credit for Shooting Down Yahoogle Deal.
November 17, 2008... The Justice Department made it crystal clear that if Google hadn't abandoned its controversial ad deal with Yahoo, like it did, the companies would have found themselves hauled in court. It's the first time Google has blinked and, safe to say,...

Jerry Yang, The 40-Year-Old Virgin.
November 17, 2008... Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang's signal distinction right now is being the only man in the industry to have both Microsoft and Google, both potential partners, walk out on him - and in the space of only six months. That's gotta be some kind of record....

Ballmer to Yang: 'Chuckle, Chuckle, Stew in Your Own Juice, Buddy'.
November 17, 2008... Jerry Yang's pants are down around his ankles. He's got no Google deal. And he can't tease Microsoft into taking another run at Yahoo. After Yang publicly asked Microsoft to take another shot, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer returned this volley...

Fujitsu To Buy Out Siemens.(Brief article)
November 17, 2008... Fujitsu is going to buy out its antsy partner Siemens for 450 million euros (currently a bit over $575 million) and take control of Fujitsu Siemens Computers BV come next April 1 when the joint venture will be integrated into the greater...

IBM & Sun Take Another Swipe at Microsoft Office.
November 17, 2008... IBM and Sun, like ODF drug dealers trying to poison Microsoft Office, have launched the OpenDocument Format Toolkit Union, a new open source software community project to spread the toxin to business, the main Office constituency and source of...

IBM Spreads Symphony Around.
November 17, 2008... IBM said that its free Office-wannabe ODF-supporting Lotus Symphony software is now running on Apple and Ubuntu Linux. Symphony first appeared as a public beta a year ago September and is now available in beta for the increasingly popular Mac...

Sun Serves a Filet of GlassFish, Not the Whole Thing.
November 17, 2008... Well, Java Platform Enterprise Edition 6 isn't ready yet - and won't be until the middle of next year - but Sun's got a thing called GlassFish Enterprise Server v3 Prelude that's meant to show off some of EE 6's features. The widgetry's a...

Oracle Sucks Up Tacit Software.
November 17, 2008... Oracle has bellied up to the buffet table again and sucked up the IP assets of Tacit Software for its Beehive enterprise collaboration platform. Tacit's SaaS and on-premise automated profiling technology helps uncover new collaboration...

Sony Recalls More Batteries.
November 17, 2008... Sony's back to recalling batteries. This time 100,000 lithium-ion battery packs, made in 2004-05, that went into HP, Dell, Toshiba, Lenovo and Acer laptops. Again for overheating and starting fires. In 2006 it recalled nine million batteries...

Otellini: 'It's Ugly Out There'.
November 17, 2008... Paul Otellini told the Web 2.0 Summit Thursday that this is probably the deepest recession he's ever seen, that it should last two-three quarters in the US and that unemployment will be really nasty and linger past a return to growth.

Obama & High Tech.(Brief article)
November 17, 2008... Barack Obama has named Internet doyen-cum-VC Julius Genachowski, who went to law school with the president-elect, to the transition team that's picking members of his administration. It suggests to the Washington Post that high-tech policy...

Engineer Charged with Stealing $1b Worth of Intel Secrets.
November 17, 2008... That Intel engineer, Biswamohan Pani, 33, who was charged over the summer with stealing Intel trade secrets before going to work at AMD allegedly downloaded a billion dollars worth of "top secret" Intel R&D documents according to a new...

UPS Expects Little Widget To Save a Tidy Sum.
November 24, 2008... UPS is deploying a new combination scanner and paperless printing device from HP that will print millions of sorting labels directly on packages. It is supposed to cut the delivery company's operational costs and slash its consumption of paper,...

USPS Layoffs May Be Inevitable.
November 24, 2008... The USPS is going down the same road as FedEx and UPS and increasing its shipping prices an average of 5% on January 18. FedEx said Friday that it will increase the price of FedEx Ground and FedEx Home Delivery an average of 5.9% on January 5....

US Postmaster General Under Investigation.
November 24, 2008... Remember when Countrywide Financial Corporation, one of the eyes of the sub-prime mortgage tsunami, hit the wall and we said USPS Postmaster General John Potter was on the list of prominent government types to have gotten special treatment?...

UPS Stops Believing in Santa Claus.
November 24, 2008... UPS won't be issuing any pre-Christmas peak shipping volume forecast this year. It says it can't get a fix because of the economic crisis; things like the 2.8% drop in retail sales in October unnerved it. The peak has always inevitably been in...

DHL May Need To Make a New Friend.
November 24, 2008... Reuters says that talks between Deutsche Post and UPS have "stalled" and that Deutsche Post may look to cooperate with other companies in the US. Deutsche Post CEO Frank Appel told the wire service the post didn't have a replacement in mind....

Earth Class Mail Gets Heavy Hitter as Advisor.
November 24, 2008... Earth Class Mail, the folks who deliver postal mail via the Internet with a Swiss Post pilot in their back pocket, has named former New Zealand Post and Royal Mail executive Elmar Toime to its board of advisors. Toime, currently an independent...

Post Liechtenstein Goes to QuoVadis for PKI Technology.(Brief article)
November 24, 2008... Post Liechtenstein has picked QuoVadis to provide the Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) technology underneath its new LIEzertifikat widgetry, which provides the accredited digital certificates that securely identify users online and create...

USPS Wants eSourcing SaaS.(Brief article)
November 24, 2008... The USPS is looking for a single, commercial off-the-shelf (COTS), Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) solution for procuring supplies, services, equipment and facilities. It wants the eSourcing solution to support its cost reduction targets. It...

Austrian Post Jobs Threatened.(Brief article)
November 24, 2008... The Austrian daily Kronen Zeitung claims to have seen a "top secret" document saying the Austrian Post is planning to cut 9,000 of its 25,800 workers and close 1,000 of its 1,300 post offices. The layoffs are supposed to be completed by 2015....

Sun Lays Off 5,000-6,000.
November 24, 2008... In an effort to head off its disappearance below the horizon, Sun is going to lay off 5,000-6,000 people, 15%-18% of its workforce, and restructure its software business, never a great money maker. Among the first to go is the head of software...

In a Major Move VMware Expands into Mobile.
November 24, 2008... VMware, the bruised and bloodied virtualization leader, is going into the mobile business with a high-end real-time cell phone hypervisor called MVP, short for Mobile Virtualization Platform. The move, called "significant," is VMware's first...

Intel Says Business Stinks.
November 24, 2008... Intel didn't wait for its scheduled mid-quarter update on December 4. It came out the other day and said business stinks. And that was after the market in New York fell another 400 points. Intel took down its fourth-quarter projections. The...

Sun & Microsoft Cut Web Search Distribution Deal.
November 24, 2008... Who says the age of miracles is past? Sun, which loathes Microsoft, is going to distribute Microsoft's search toolbar with its Java Runtime Environment. Nope, it's not April fool's. More like Sun and Microsoft slurping out of the Obama...

AMD's Shanghai Chip a Go.
November 24, 2008... The day after Intel slashed its guidance and told the press that "orders just died," AMD, a company laboring under a really bad karma, said it's started selling Shanghai, its first 45nm quad-core Opteron chip, plunk in the middle of an economic...

Shrike Dies the Death of a Thousand Cuts.
November 24, 2008... Some people were harboring the notion that AMD might push up its move to 32nm. Well, it's not. The widgets should ramp in 2001 as expected but AMD is killing off Shrike (a k a Fusion), which has died the death of a thousand cuts, so to speak....

LCD Companies Plead Guilty to Price Fixing.
November 24, 2008... LG, Sharp and Chunghwa have pled guilty to charges of fixing the price of LCD panels in defiance of the Sherman Antitrust Act and have agreed to pay $585 million in fines, the Justice Department said. LG will pay $400 million, the...

Scared but Still Got Amazon-Envy? See Cassatt.
November 24, 2008... Cassatt, the company started by BEA founder Bill Coleman, is redirecting its data center widgetry into creating internal clouds comparable to Amazon or Google out of infrastructure customers already have in-house. Coleman observed that most IT...

HP Backs into the Cloud.
November 24, 2008... HP has said it doesn't want to be in the cloud business itself - merely sell gear to cloud makers - but it's lined up with little Salesforce.com rival NetSuite - owned mostly by Larry Ellison - to offer NetSuite's SaaS CRM and ERP applications...

Clouds Need Big Closets: EMC.
November 24, 2008... EMC has unveiled its massively scalable cloud storage, the stuff that it's been working on for a long time now under the code names Hulk and Maui, Hulk for the hardware and Maui for the software, branding the whole megillah Atmos as it moved...

Sun Claims To Revolutionize Storage.
November 24, 2008... Storage has been like a penitential chain around Sun's neck and it's left unspeakable gouges. Sun's $4.1 billion acquisition of StorageTek was one of the reasons the company wrote off $1.4 billion of its business in the September quarter....

Citrix Claims To Cut Enterprise Web Apps Delivery Costs.
November 24, 2008... Citrix has upgraded its NetScaler web application delivery appliance with a welter of 350 new features whose biggest trick is configuring each web application automatically and optimally. This new NetScaler 9 facility is supposed to cut the...

Clouds & Friends Need Honking Big Routers: Cisco.
November 24, 2008... Cisco has got a new "close to the user" edge router that can push 250,000 songs or 200 feature films a second. (Figure 6.4 terabytes a second.) The widget, which starts at $80,000 and reportedly took $200 million to develop, is called the...

Lotus Goes into the Hardware Business.(Brief article)
November 24, 2008... IBM has found something else to do with Linux. Its Lotus software operation is going into the hardware business - geez, first Oracle, now Lotus. It's concocted a Linux-based server appliance for e-mail, calendaring and its OpenOffice-based...

Qualcomm Launches Low-Cost PC Alternative.
November 24, 2008... Qualcomm figures it's got a PC alternative for emerging markets and the reference design to go with it. The widgetry is code named Kayak and leverages the widespread availability of 3G wireless broadband to bring Internet connectivity to...

AMD Prays Acid Rain Falls on Atom.
November 24, 2008... AMD can't quite muster an Atom smasher but it still wants to harness the fallout. So it's going to proposed Yukon as a netbook alternative to Intel's Atom chip. Well, okay, maybe not exactly a netbook, maybe more of an ultraportable with more...

Microsoft Offers 0% Financing.
November 24, 2008... Because of the credit crunch, Microsoft is offers 0% financing for 36 months to new credit-approved Microsoft Dynamics ERP and Dynamics CRM customers willing to buy $20,000-$1 million worth of software right now. The promotion is available in...

Google CEO Nixes Political Appointment.
November 24, 2008... In an interview with fawning CNBC pundit Jim Cramer, Google CEO and Barack Obama transition economic adviser Eric Schmidt said he wasn't interested in the job of US CTO, a position Obama might make into a cabinet-level post. Whoever's named is...

Lenovo Takes 78% Earnings Hit.(Financial report)(Brief article)
November 24, 2008... Lenovo's profits dropped 78% in the September quarter to $23 million, down from $105 million last year, on the back of $4.3 billion in sales because of slower sales to corporates, a problem rolling out new products and lower margins. Analysts...

There are Bug Trackers and Then There are Bug Trackers.(Brief article)
November 24, 2008... Google has added free voice and video conversations to Gmail and launched a free web service developed with the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to track the flu. It's based on the number of searches made about the flu. Apparently...