ePostal News articles from October 2005

ePostal News archives from October 2005

Katrina pushes start-up into early deployment.
October 3, 2005... Katrina and its sister hurricane Rita have reportedly created the largest stockpile of undeliverable mail in history. So Oregon-based Document Command Inc, far away from the devastated American Gulf coast, has launched its Remote Control...

Hurricane Rita bedevils battered south, USPS.
October 3, 2005... In the wake of Rita, the second hurricane to rip through the poor benighted Gulf coast, the US Postal Service says it is working overtime to reconnect people with their mail. It said it is returning mail operations to normal service where it is...

IBM & Italy cut deal.
October 3, 2005... The Italian post office and IBM have signed a memorandum of understanding covering a new phase of collaboration and say they will establish a work group to develop a plan for disaster recovery and business continuity using IBM on-demand...

CTT to open electronic postboxes for all.
October 3, 2005... CTT, Correios de Portugal, the Portuguese postal service, is reportedly going to open electronic postboxes for every Portuguese citizen. About 12 million electronic addresses will be distributed.

USPS defends direct mail.
October 3, 2005... Armed with a study it had run up, the USPS is claiming that consumers respond better to direct mail rather than email solicitations, and better yet to a combination of both. According to a "Multi-Channel Credit Card Acquisition Study,"...

Japanese winners push postal reform.(Junichiro Koizumi to privatize postal system)(Brief Article)
October 3, 2005... Because of the landslide special election victory he orchestrated, Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi told the country's parliament on Monday that he is determined to push ahead with privatizing the Japanese postal system. He...

Chilean post contracts with software AG.(Correos Chile)(Brief Article)
October 3, 2005... Correos Chile has contracted with Software AG to modernize its infrastructure. The deal is reportedly worth $5 million over five years. SAP indicated that it won't just copy the work it did in Spain, but adapt it to the local situation and use...

Microsoft reorgs.
October 3, 2005... In the name of agility and services, Microsoft has reorganized into three core divisions, each with its own president: a Platform Products & Services Division under Kevin Johnson and Jim Allchin until Allchin retires at the end of next year...

SCO's phoenix is rising.
October 3, 2005... Well now isn't this ironic. It looks like the much demonized SCO Group, which in its short sharp life has aroused more articulated fear and loathing than Microsoft and IBM combined--the company that's widely dismissed as nothing more than...

Oracle's week.
October 3, 2005... Oracle dropped an inch worth of press releases at Oracle OpenWorld. Weeding through the stack, it said: * It will make its all-important SOA/ESB-based Fusion Architecture, which is supposed to link its applications, middleware and grid...

Oracle database sales nosedive.
October 3, 2005... Oracle earned a flat $519 million, or 10 cents a share, in its fiscal first quarter ended August 31 on revenues of $2.77 billion, up 25% thanks to software license renewals and consulting. Earnings would have been 14 cents a share without...

EC investigating new Microsoft complaints.
October 3, 2005... Well, take your pick. Either the European Commission may bring a new antitrust case against Microsoft or not. According to a New York Times-owned International Herald Tribune story, the EC's new antitrust chief Neelie Kroes said in an...

Microsoft buys Alacris.
October 3, 2005... Security-challenged Microsoft has bought small Ottawa-based ISV Alacris Inc, which makes certificate management and identity assurance software, on undisclosed terms. The pair has been working on a password-replacing network access digital...

HP buys Peregrine, AppIQ.
October 3, 2005... Hewlett-Packard is buying Peregrine Systems for OpenView and AppIQ for StorageWorks. Credit Suisse wondered whether the moves portended a plan. It suggested that the buys might mean HP was committing itself to building out its money-losing...

Novell appears to respond to stockholder complaints.
October 3, 2005... Novell, which has been under pressure from stockholders to do something productive with all the money it has in the bank, apparently bowed to complaints and announced a $200 million share repurchase program. Novell is supposed to buy the stock...

Microsoft says the VoIP word again.
October 3, 2005... Microsoft and Qwest Communications say they are going into business together to deliver VoIP to SMBs via the desktop. This while Google starts building out a free Wi-Fi network to take on the telcos and wireless phone people. Microsoft...

SAP buys Triversity.
October 3, 2005... SAP has acquired Triversity, a privately held Canadian provider of point-of-sale retail solutions including inventory management, loss prevention, shared value and backoffice solutions, on undisclosed terms. CIBC World Markets thinks...

Pick your poison.
October 3, 2005... The Firefox alternate browser has nearly double the vulnerabilities of Microsoft's Internet Explorer, according to Symantec's newest Internet Security Threat Report compiled from first-half data, 72% of them deemed "high severity."

The winnowing of the file sharers.
October 3, 2005... Well, fancy that. A Taiwan court has convicted the operators of kuro.com, Taiwan's largest file-sharing P2P networks, of criminal copyright infringement and slapped them--and one of Kuro's users--with jail time and fines. It's the...

AOL moves to CA Mojo.
October 3, 2005... AOL has switched spyware horses, trading in Aluria Software technology for stuff based on Computer Associates' PestPatrol to protect its Internet subscribers. Of course EarthLink is buying Aluria. AOL said CA's widgetry is faster, slicker, more...

Dell snubs UPS for USPS.
October 10, 2005... Dell, whose vaunted direct sales model, competitive prices and sometimes free delivery has made it the powerhouse it is, is going to stop delivering low-end gear to the homes of its many consumer customers on October 10 unless they pay extra....

New Zealand Post tries personalized stamps.(Brief Article)
October 10, 2005... While the US Postal Service is letting third-parties experiment with selling PC-based customized postage--and despite the fact that few countries have successfully implemented such technology--the New Zealand Post has started offering the...

USPS to bring IT in-house.(United States Postal Service)(information technology)(Brief Article)
October 10, 2005... According to the USPS' shiny new Strategic Transformation Plan 2006-2010 just approved by its board of governors, the agency will cut costs and streamline operations by bringing responsibility for its IT infrastructure in-house and eliminating...

UPS to mind its mileage.
October 10, 2005... In the face of rising gas prices, UPS has installed a computer system at its Sacramento distribution center that's supposed to map out shorter delivery routes. The so-called package-flow technology involves using scanned UPS labels to plot...

Danish Post to buy into Belgian Post.(acquisition)(Brief Article)
October 10, 2005... Post Danmark AS and Britain's CVC Capital Partners, which owns 22% of Post Danmark, are close to buying 49% of the Belgium postal services De Post-La Poste, according to local press reports that quoted Post Danmark chairman Fritz Schur. ...

Vietnam Post to lose monopoly.
October 10, 2005... Vietnam is supposed to open its postal market to all comers, foreign and domestic, by 2007. Word has it that foreign competitors will be able to set up foreign-owned businesses.

Dixie mail still drying out.(Brief Article)
October 10, 2005... Where e-mail and cell phones, the appurtenances of modern society, failed, the mail is still trying to slog its way through the rubble that used to be Dixie. Postal workers still report storing as much mail as they deliver not knowing where to...

Uh-oh, the PTO says the Eolas patent is valid.
October 10, 2005... Wn a move likely to send a shockwave through the World Wide Web--and rudely unsettle Microsoft--the US Patent and Trademark Office has changed its mind again about the now-famous Eolas patent and said it was filing a so-called "Notice of Intent...

UK Post gets its own credit card.
October 10, 2005... The UK Post Office has now got its own credit card complements of its joint venture with the Bank of Ireland, according to the Financial Times.

MIT & the $100 Linux Laptop.
October 10, 2005... The US has told the United Nations to take a hike. It ain't gonna run the Internet. Apparently American intransigence could derail the World Summit on the Information Society in November. That's where MIT Media Lab and its co-founder...

ClearSpeed Watch.(ClearSpeed Technology Ltd.)(Brief Article)
October 10, 2005... ClearSpeed Technology, the Anglo-American start-up that's been promising to make desktops and even laptops into 150GFLOPS hummers, servers into 300GFLOPS dynamos and common COTS-based HPC clusters into 100TGFLOPS wonders by dint of its...

AMD burns Sun.
October 10, 2005... AMD has cut the ground out from under its buddy and good customer Sun Microsystems. Sun figured to dine out on the fact that it had the fastest Opteron boxes in town. That boast has been good for all of two weeks and now Sun has had...

Intel delivers last single-core Xeons.
October 10, 2005... Intel has announced its last planned single-core Xeon. Kinda the end of an era. It's all dual-core from here on out beginning with the awaited Paxville placeholder, which is still unannounced but out in Opteron-defensive pilot boxes...

Can Palm & Microsoft crush RIM?
October 10, 2005... Palm and Microsoft have announced that strategic alliance we said was coming and will have Palm put the Windows Mobile 5.0 operating system on Treo smartphones. It's Palm first move off of its native Palm operating system and could deliver...

Sony suffers a Betamax-like loss.
October 10, 2005... The Wintel duo Microsoft and Intel have decided to back Toshiba's high-definition DVD format, sending Sony off to replay tapes of its historic Betamax loss. Sony had aspirations of seeing its Blu-ray technology, also backed by Samsung and...

Google shows its Trajan complex.(Brief Article)
October 10, 2005... Like the great emperors of Rome, Trajan and Hadrian, Google apparently has a building complex. It's going to construct a million-square-foot research complex/corporate campus at the NASA Ames Research Center in Mountain View and collaborate...

Red Hat to Novell: eat your heart out.
October 10, 2005... Red Hat has come in with unseasonably strong fiscal second-quarter earnings posting revenues of $65.7 million, up 42% year-over-year and up 8% sequentially, making $16.7 million on it, up 42% year-over-year and up 35% sequentially. EPS worked...

JasperSoft releases JasperReports 1.0.
October 10, 2005... JasperSoft Corporation, the open source reporting maven, has made JasperReports 1.0 generally available. The stuff is supposed to have 750,000 downloads and 10,000 commercial deployments. The company, which says it's quadrupled its...

Red Hat up for common criteria eval.
October 10, 2005... Beltway supplier Trusted Computer Solutions Inc (TCS), Red Hat and IBM just got Red Hat Enterprise Linux v.5 into Common Criteria evaluation on a range of IBM eServer systems so it can be declared fit for assured information sharing in and...

AuthentiDate saved from near-death experience--for now.
October 24, 2005... AuthentiDate Holding Corporation, the USPS' contracted Electronic Postmark (EPM) supplier, has gotten a third notice from the United States Postal Service saying that AuthentiDate continues to fail to attain the performance metrics required by...

Danish post buys 50% less one share of Belgian Post.
October 24, 2005... So the deal they were reportedly doing got done. A consortium led by Post Danmark and backed by CVC Capital Partners, which owns 22% of the Danish Post, is going to invest in De Post-La Poste as part of the plan to modernize the Belgian Post...

Japanese Prime Minister gets his way.
October 24, 2005... After fighting back from the stinging defeat of his reform agenda in the Diet this summer at the risk of his career and his party's continued control of the country, Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi's postal privatization package...

USPS lends a hand in vote by mail.
October 24, 2005... The US Postal Service says it has developed an online resource to help election officials navigate the rules and regulations that allow citizens to vote by mail. The agency says it consulted with election officials across the country and...

Emirates Post sells e-Dirhams.(Brief Article)
October 24, 2005... Sales of e-Dirham by the Emirates Post has reportedly been fairly brisk, since it started on October 8, following an agreement between United Arab Emirates' Ministry of Finance & Industry and Emirates Post. People used to have to go to...

Certipost changes chief executive.(Erik Weytjens, Stijn Vander Plaetse)(Brief Article)
October 24, 2005... There's been a change at the top at Certipost, the three-yearold 50/50 electronic certificate and identity joint venture of Belgian Post and Belgacom. Erik Weytjens is out as CEO succeeded by Stijn Vander Plaetse, an economist who once worked...

Flat Stanley joins Canada Post.
October 24, 2005... The Canada Post has recruited the children's book character Flat Stanley, who got squashed paper-thin flat by a falling bulletin board and now travels the world in an envelope, for Postal Planet (www.postalplanet.ca), the web resource that...

Swiss Post brands get their own addresses.
October 24, 2005... The Swiss Post has given each of its six brands its own separate Internet address: www.poste.ch, www.postlogistics. ch, www.postecolis.ch, www.expresspost.ch, www. postmail.ch, www.carpostal.ch and www.postfinance.ch. Their pages are duplicated...

E-mail takes its toll on Australia Post.(sales and earnings)(Brief Article)
October 24, 2005... E-mail ands SMS are being blamed for slashing the 2004-2005 profits of Australia Post's letter division by $57 million (Australian) to $248.3 million. Letter mail used to be a big contributor to the post's P&L but the sector has only been...

New Orleans coming back.
October 24, 2005... The US Postal Service says it has re-established mail services for every ZIP Code in New Orleans, the area hardest hit by Hurricane Katerina. Postal carriers are making street deliveries where possible and over-the-counter service is available...

Melissa data says it can find where your Web visitors are coming from.
October 24, 2005... Melissa Data, a provider of software and services for the direct marketing industry, has released IP2Location, a database product that lets web sites identify the geographic location of their visitors using IP addresses. Melissa got the...

JP Morgan backs UPS.
October 24, 2005... JP Morgan is going down a path counter to Morgan Stanley, which has been touting the market share potential of the United States Postal Service of all things against UPS. Morgan has boosted its rating on UPS to overweight from neutral, saying...

USPS on tear over breakage.
October 24, 2005... In June and August, the US Postal Service used the Electronic Mail Improvement Reporting (eMIR) process to focus on bundle breakage in a selected group of sites around the country. Well, it started another so-called "eMIR Bundle Breakage...

IBM & Zend to aim PHP at .NET.
October 24, 2005... IBM would like nothing more than to nail .NET's little web feet to the floor like a pate-bound goose, according to Zend Technologies CEO Doron Gerstel. IBM had hopes of J2EE running interference and blocking .NET from sweeping into corporate...

Microsoft abandons per-processor licensing for virtualization.
October 24, 2005... In an inevitable sacrifice of revenue, Microsoft put its shoulder behind virtualization and announced a new Windows Server licensing scheme that's supposed to be more cost-effective, flexible and simplified for virtual machine environments. ...

Microsoft & Yahoo IMs to interoperate.
October 24, 2005... The world shrunk a bit the other day when Microsoft and Yahoo said they will knock down the wall between their free consumer instant messaging systems in Q2 of '06 and let their users IM one another, something they've been pressured to do for...

DOJ slaps Samsung with monster fine for price-fixing.
October 24, 2005... Korea-based Samsung Electronics and its US subsidiary Samsung Semiconductor have agreed to plead guilty and pay a $300 million fine for participating in an international conspiracy to fix DRAM prices, the US Justice Department's Antitrust...

Microsoft & RealNetworks settle.
October 24, 2005... Microsoft has settled with RealNetworks, which means it's finished mopping up the last of the major private antitrust suits that it was hit with after it was found guilty of monopoly maintenance in the Justice Department's suit against it. ...

Intel announces Paxville DP.
October 24, 2005... Intel has announced its first, moved-up, catch-up, hyperthreaded, dual-core Xeon processor for dual-processor servers, a k a the 90nm Paxville, good for 2.8GHz. The part isn't expected to do much volume--it's more of a technology evaluation...

Microsoft may find security insecure.
October 24, 2005... Symantec has denied that it has formally filed a complaint with the European Commission against Microsoft and its intentions to bring the so-called Windows OneCare to market, the subscription-based consumer firewall widgetry to fend off viruses...

Fujitsu Siemens leverages Opteron to combine scale-out & scale-up.
October 24, 2005... Fujitsu Siemens, which when last seen was OEMing boxes from Egenera, announced what it called a major enhancement of its Dynamic Data Center, a so-called Primergy Advanced Blade Ecosystem. It says the architecture, based on the Primergy...

Kazeon kicks off with NetApp deal.
October 24, 2005... Kazeon, the start-up with $17 million in funding and an enterprise appliance that claims to manage unstructured data, hit market this week clenching an OEM agreement with Network Appliance between its teeth. NetApp is supposed to integrate...

Oracle buys open source company to Harry MySQL.
October 24, 2005... Well, IBM has one so naturally Oracle wanted one. An open source acquisition I mean. Both moves were made to harry an open source rival, IBM to bother JBoss, Oracle to bother MySQL. Oracle bought 10-year-old Finland-based Innobase OY, a...

IBM, Novell cut price of SuSE on BladeCenter.
October 24, 2005... IBM and its little buddy Novell have cut the price of running SuSE Linux Enterprise Server 9 on IBM's market-leading BladeCenter. IBM doesn't have a similar deal with Red Hat. Instead of charging per-blade, they've thought up a new flat...

Oasis forms new RF-on-RAND WS-transaction committee.
October 24, 2005... There is now a new Oasis Web Services Transaction (WSTX) technical committee meant to define a set of protocols for coordinating the outcome of distributed application actions. It will refine and finalize a set of specifications based on...

AMD looks for paper trail.
October 24, 2005... As expected, AMD, the reason for Intel's hurry-up dual-core launch, has served almost two dozen companies with subpoenas searching for documentary evidence of monopoly-maintaining bullying for the antitrust lawsuit it filed against Intel in...

Novell launches the Better Desktop Initiative.
October 24, 2005... Novell has launched what it calls the Better Desktop initiative, a new component of the openSUSE project that's supposed to give open source developers the usability testing data and resources to improve the quality of the Linux desktop. ...

IBM seeks to make eclipse rational.
October 24, 2005... IBM said the other day that it has contributed about 15% of its Rational Unified Process (RUP) platform, a set of project planning and management tools based on the unified modeling language (UML), to the Eclipse Foundation for a prospective...

Cell has another taker.(Mercury Computer Systems Inc. develops Linux-run dual-Cell blade)(Brief Article)
October 24, 2005... The fabled Cell chip created by Sony, Toshiba and IBM for PlayStations and televisions has found another customer. Mercury Computer Systems has announced a Linux-run dual-Cell blade, based on IBM's Cell BE (Broadband Engine) processor and IBM's...

M'soft & AOL reportedly back at it; Google & Comcast possible spoilers.
October 24, 2005... First the Wall Street Journal said that Microsoft and Time Warner are talking again about combining AOL's web content with Microsoft's nascent search widgetry. Then it reported that Google and Comcast were in "serious discussions" with...

China wades into HD-DVD-Blu-ray debate.
October 24, 2005... China is talking about developing its own incompatible version of the HD-DVD format that Intel and Microsoft are backing against Sony's competing Blu-ray widgetry to break the hold of foreign domination and avoid paying licensing fees. It...

The coming fashion in addresses.
October 31, 2005... Toronto-based NAC Geographic Products Inc says Hong Kong, New Zealand, Singapore and Taiwan have joined the countries and areas digitized with Universal Addresses and so-called Natural Area Codes (NACs), raising the number of Universal...

RFID start-up gets funding.(ThingMagic)(Brief Article)
October 31, 2005... ThingMagic, a privately held Cambridge, Massachusetts company full of MIT PhDs that got started five years ago and eschewed venture capital until now, has taken in a $15 million first round from The Tudor Group, The Exxel Group, Morningside...

Australia fights fire with fire.
October 31, 2005... The Australia Post, which complains that electronic substitution is killing its letter mail business, is fighting fire with fire with a service called Mail2Day. The post is using e-mail and SMS alerts to inform post office box holders "You...

Japan starts down road to privatization.
October 31, 2005... The Japanese government has named the first clutch of folks to plan the holding company that will own the four companies that Japan Post will be divided into according to the privatization plan that was finally passed by the Diet earlier this...

India Post wants more computers.(Brief Article)
October 31, 2005... India's Minister for Communication and IT Dayanidhi Maran said he has asked the prime minister and the Planning Commission for the money to computerize all of the 26,000 post offices across the country. He is quoted as saying, "The...

BCC claims to sidestep USPS costs.
October 31, 2005... BCC Software, a BOWE BELL + HOWELL company that develops software for professional mailers, has released Truck Direct Mail, an online logistics engine that generates free, no-obligation quotes for mailings drop-shipped to Destination Entry...

Kids. Just like other people.(survey of Generation X and Generation Y)
October 31, 2005... The USPS commissioned a study on attitudes of Generation X and Generation Y towards mail and found that over three-quarters of them read and respond to mail just like Boomers. The Gen X generation was born between 1965 and 1972, and makes...

DHL to hit high street.
October 31, 2005... DHL is reportedly going to put one billion euros into creating a chain of 30,000 retail outlets across Europe like Mail Boxes Etc and Kinko's in the US aimed at small and medium-sized shippers that will function as drop-off points that offer...

Abacus claims to simplify mail campaigns.(Brief Article)
October 31, 2005... Abacus, an Atlanta-based supplier of data and services for catalog, specialty retail and B-to-B direct marketers, has released FastPath, widgetry designed to remove the complexities associated with traditional multi-list mailings by delivering...

USPS order momentum picking up for ID Systems.
October 31, 2005... The USPS will be deploying ID Systems' Wireless Asset Netpowered industrial vehicle management system at nine additional USPS facilities. The order increases the number of USPS facilities deploying the Wireless Asset Net to 22. Under the terms...

Azerbaijan to modernize.
October 31, 2005... Thanks to the World Bank and a planned investment of $12.25 million, Azerbaijan's postal system is supposed to be renovated and modernized to provide Internet access, banking, postal transfers and payments, even micro-credits.

UPU-Emirates Post formalize plans.(Universal Postal Union)(Brief Article)
October 31, 2005... The Universal Postal Union (UPU) and Emirates Post have signed an agreement formalizing the arrangements for organizing the 2006 UPU Strategy Conference in the United Arab Emirates and defining the responsibilities for the event. The...

Start-up to make Linux work with Windows.
October 31, 2005... There's a little company called Centeris Corporation that lives down the road from Microsoft in Bellevue, Washington, and has more than its fair share of ex-Microsoft people working for it. It got started a year ago on a $5 million check...

Microsoft's nasty old habits die hard.
October 31, 2005... Microsoft pulled back from contractually restricting iPod-competitive device makers from distributing other people's media players after it was ratted out by an unnamed competitor, according to the AP. The Justice Department reportedly...