ePostal News articles from October 2006

ePostal News archives from October 2006

Esker opens up FlyDoc to developers.(launch of web services)
October 2, 2006... Esker has opened up its FlyDoc widgetry to developers. It says the new Web Services will let application and web developers integrate the automatic delivery of mail, fax and e-mail with their own solutions. FlyDoc is an online document...

Arcot claims Adobe integration makes digital signing practical & ubiquitous.
October 2, 2006... Arcot Systems Inc., the secure e-payment, strong authentication, credential management and digital signature ISV, is collaborating with Adobe to enable a new option for digital signing in Adobe's Acrobat 8 software and the Adobe Reader 8 using...

Yodlee promises to tickle online bill paying.(launch of BillPay Account Accelerator service)
October 2, 2006... Yodlee wants to encourage people to pay their bills electronically so it's come up with BillPay Account Accelerator, a new service that, it says, removes the hassles of canceling an existing bill pay service and setting up payments all over...

USPS get exclusive on promising online shipper.
October 2, 2006... The US Postal Service says it's going to be the exclusive international shipper of eFashionSolutions, which it describes as one of the fastest growing Internet-based companies in the country has fashioned an arrangement. eFashionSolutions...

NFL gets its own PhotoStamps.
October 2, 2006... Stamps.com has cut a licensing deal with the NFL to put the team logos and helmet designs of all 32 NFL football teams on PhotoStamps Internet stamps. To promote the venture, the company is offering customers who order the NFL PhotoStamps...

UK postmasters fret over new internet postage.(United Kingdom Post Office launches species of Internet postage stamps )(Brief article)
October 2, 2006... In the UK, where the Royal Mail just introduced a controversial species of Internet postage that substitutes a barcode for a stamp and does away altogether with the Queen's image, sub-postmasters are reportedly fretting that the innovation will...

Teradata moves its data warehouse to Linux.
October 2, 2006... Teradata has shipped an enhanced version of its Teradata database on Novell's 64-bit SUSE Linux Enterprise. It's available globally for enterprise-class data warehouses. It has the same functionality as Teradata on Windows or NCR's own UNIX...

DHL implements real-time shipment tracking.
October 2, 2006... DHL has kicked off a next-generation global shipment management system known as Quality Shipment Monitoring System (QSMS) across 10 countries in its Asia-Pacific network. The widgetry was tested for 12 months to determine its operational...

One-time American icon descends into HPgate.(Hewlett-Packard Co.'s chairman Patricia Dunn resigns, chief ethics officer Kevin Hunsaker fired)
October 2, 2006... In an exercise in crisis control, the HP board asked for and got the unwilling resignation of its chairman Patricia Dunn last Friday, suggesting that she was responsible for the company's lapses in judgment and ethical standards during its...

USPS laptop goes missing.(United States Postal Service)(Brief article)
October 2, 2006... It seems the US Postal Service can be added to the lengthening list of organizations that have been careless enough to lose a laptop with active account data on it. According to the Palm Beach Post, the USPS has notified 4,500 businesses and...

Oracle & SAP trade barbs after Oracle posts Q1 results.
October 2, 2006... Oracle got to pull SAP's nose and its boss Larry Ellison got to look right about his consolidation strategy when the company posted its latest results. In its first fiscal quarter ended August 31, usually never its best time, earnings shot...

AMD to try to establish common server socket.
October 2, 2006... AMD, in a novel twist that's never been tried before, is going to license its Opteron processor pin-outs to third parties hoping that industry heavyweights like Sun and IBM take it up on its offer. Licensees would be able to put their own...

Neelie denies EC has it in for Microsoft.
October 2, 2006... In a letter to the Financial Times, the head of the European Commission's antitrust unit Neelie Kroes denied "pursuing a vendetta against Microsoft" and also denied that the "Commission may seek to prevent Microsoft from improving the...

EMC wades deeper into security.
October 2, 2006... On the day it closed its $2.1 billion seemingly out-of-character acquisition of RSA Security, storage hardware maven EMC announced that it had also bought Network Intelligence, another security software house, for roughly $175 million in cash....

Now Toshiba recalls Sony batteries.(product defect and recall)(Brief article)
October 2, 2006... The Sony battery recall that hit Dell and Apple has now spread to Toshiba, which is recalling 340,000 Sony-made batteries used in its laptops. After the Dell and Apple recalls of 5.9 million laptop batteries, Sony swore that was it, but this...

Dell & Symantec ally.
October 2, 2006... Dell has tied up with Symantec touting an Exchange-based end-to-end hardware, software and service package called Secure Exchange that is supposed to put a harness on "out-of-control" e-mail at mid-sized companies. There's nothing...

European software patents boxing match: round 2.
October 2, 2006... Europe's anti-software patent brigade thinks that the propatent contingent, whose software patents bill was overwhelming voted down in the European Parliament at the eleventh hour last year, is aiming to make an end run around its defeat and...

Red Hat creates JBoss stack.(Red Hat Inc acquires JBoss Group LLC)(Brief article)
October 2, 2006... Red Hat has integrated JBoss, which it acquired 90 days ago, into Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) and put the resulting Red Hat Application Stack (RHAS) up for sale as a new subscription possibility. The new stack comes with the JBoss...

Dell may come up short again.
October 2, 2006... ThinkEquity suspects that Dell may turn up short again this quarter and pre-announce in mid-October. It bases its suspicions on tittle-tattle about rapidly declining PC units and profitability that it's heard from Dell's supply chain in Asia....

Google flouts Belgian court.(copyrights cases)(Brief article)
October 2, 2006... A Belgian court has ordered Google to stop reprinting stories from the Belgian press without paying for it on pain of being fined $1.27 million a day. Google is erasing the copy from its database but now it refuses to post the text of the...

Backdating watch.(The Nasdaq Stock Market Inc. issues delisting notice to Novell Inc.)(Brief article)
October 2, 2006... Novell has gotten a delisting notice from the Nasdaq and a notice of default from Wells Fargo on $600 million worth of debentures all because it hasn't filed its 10-K covering the July quarter and hasn't any idea when it will because it's in...

Intel enlists the aid of the Gods of Madison Avenue.
October 2, 2006... Intel has kicked off a branding campaign dubbed "Multiple" on behalf of its Core 2 Duo desktop and mobile chips, its biggest marketing blitz, it said, since the Centrino launch on which it spent a reported $300 million. Print ads are...

Dell threatened with delisting.(The Nasdaq Stock Market Inc. issues delisting notice)(Brief article)
October 2, 2006... My how the mighty have fallen. The Nasdaq is now threatening to delist Dell because it hasn't filed its secondquarter 10-Q and it hasn't been able to file its 10-Q because of the three investigations of its books that are going on by the SEC,...

Siemens to modernize the USPS Remote Encoding System.
October 16, 2006... The United States Postal Service has awarded Siemens a $45.3 million development contract to update its existing video processing system for letter mail. The contract will culminate in field trials of the system and runs through October...

Finland Post expands sorting contract.
October 16, 2006... Syslore Ltd and Finland Post Group have extended their existing mCorrection licensing agreement. mCorrection Intelligent Address Lookup technology has been used since 2005 in a read rate upgrading project for Finland Post's existing Optical...

Hasler introduces new digital mailing system.(Hasler introduces WJ PRO inline digital mailing system )
October 16, 2006... Hasler has introduced the WJ PRO inline digital mailing system saying it will help production mailers meet high-volume demands while reducing equipment downtime. The WJ PRO is described as offering fast, continuous mail processing for the...

Fairrington to enhance its clients' mail tracking capabilities by interfacing to GrayHair's services.
October 16, 2006... Fairrington Transportation Corporation has cut what it calls a strategic partnership with GrayHair Software Inc that will merge data from both entities so their clients can predict and manage in-home delivery dates more accurately. The...

Will Europe's postal monopolies finally come to an end?
October 16, 2006... Later this month the European Commission is to release a directive aimed at enforcing the end of any remaining national postal monopolies by 2009, a cause that started in 1997. It needs approval from member states and the European Parliament...

Endicia celebrates billion-dollar milestone.(Brief article)
October 16, 2006... Endicia says a billion dollars worth of postage has been printed through its Internet Postage service since it debuted in 2000. Along the way, the company calculates that users have saved over $65 million on delivery and signature confirmation...

Somebody's gonna have a very Merry Christmas.
October 16, 2006... Estimates project the US consumer spending $12.5 billion online this holiday season.

Vista RC2 lifts off.
October 16, 2006... Microsoft released a Vista Release Candidate 2 last Friday, saying it would be the last test version before final release. If RC2 passes muster, Vista is supposed to go to production by the end of the month. Microsoft is supposed to deliver...

'HP Five' charged.
October 16, 2006... California's Attorney General Bill Lockyer has made good on his threat and brought criminal charges against former HP chairman Patricia Dunn and four HP investigators. HP CEO Mark Hurd was not charged. Neither was former HP general counsel...

Microsoft to pin a telltale 'Scarlet Letter' on counterfeit & unlicensed copies of Vista.
October 16, 2006... Microsoft claims to have come up with a way to put a crimp in what is basically rampant software piracy and says it'll deploy it in Vista first and--when it gets here--the Long Horn Server. It also says it'll eventually wend its way into other...

McAfee says Microsoft's locked it out of Vista.
October 16, 2006... McAfee took out a full-page ad in the Financial Times to complain about Microsoft and Vista within hearing of the European regulators, who have already got their knickers in a twist about the new operating system. The open letter to...

MySQL gets its own backup.
October 16, 2006... Zmanda, the year-old California start-up, has run up an enterprise-grade open source backup and recovery solution specifically for MySQL databases called, pointedly enough, Zmanda Recovery Manager (ZRM) for MySQL. It is based on the...

IBM to splurge on modernizing mainframes.
October 16, 2006... IBM is going to spend $100 million over the next five year making the mainframe easier to program, manage and administer. The company called the initiative a "cross-company effort" and said it wants development and deployment to be more...

Sony battery recall to go global.
October 16, 2006... With all the major vendors except HP recalling the Sony batteries in their laptops, Sony has quit trying to contain the situation and has issued a global recall of certain species of its tainted lithium ion packs. It's still unclear how many...

Microsoft appeals latest EC fines.
October 16, 2006... Microsoft has filed its appeal of the $356 million fine that the European Commission levied on it in July for producing crappy documentation on those communications protocols that the company was ordered to share with its rivals. Microsoft...

AOL reaches out to multi-taskers.(America Online Inc introduces OpenRide browser for broadband )(Brief article)
October 16, 2006... To stem defections, AOL has released OpenRide, a free browser optimized for broadband that's partitioned into four multi-tasking windows and will let users e-mail, instant message, search the web and watch video, listen to music or look at...

IBM expands open source contributions in the name of Web 2.0.
October 16, 2006... IBM is making new contributions to the open source movement in support of Web 2.0 technologies, according to the company's CTO for emerging Internet technologies David Boloker. Boloker describes Web 2.0 as a "perfect storm" for enabling...

Google moves into Code Search.
October 16, 2006... Among the many things it searches, Google is now going to search software code. It's got a thing called Google Code Search that searches publicly available source code that programmers can learn from and theoretically reuse. Google says it...

Microsoft to roll out internet kiosks in India.
October 16, 2006... Microsoft India and Hughes India have paired up to roll out 5,000 satellite-based broadband-enabled rural kiosks in 200 small towns and regions across the country. They are to be operated on a franchisee basis for e-commerce, education and...

EC has enough to charge Intel with antitrust violations.
October 16, 2006... The European Commission reportedly has enough evidence to lodge formal antitrust charges against Intel. The EC has written a draft statement of objections and conducted to a sort of moot court to see if the case could be shot down. The...

Belgium Post arm wants piece of Nascent SaaS market.(Asterion uses Esker's FlyDoc online document delivery technology )
October 23, 2006... Asterion, a Belgium Post subsidiary that processes and handles enterprise documents, will be using Esker's FlyDoc hosted online document delivery technology to develop an on-demand mail service called Clic'doc. The strategic partnership...

UPU registers Spike in parcel mail; draws link to e-commerce.
October 23, 2006... The Universal Postal Union (UPU) says the number of ordinary parcels sent last year spiked in contrast to the volume of domestic letters leveling off. It counted six billion parcels being sent worldwide, up 11% year-over-year, an average...

Parascript to piggyback on Moscow automation deal.
October 23, 2006... Elsag, the Italian company, has cut a deal that will bring US-based OCR technology house Parascript LLC in on its contract to supply a mail automation solution to the Moscow Automated Postal Center, the first automated center in Russia. ...

ProfitLine to handle USPS blackberries.
October 23, 2006... ProfitLine, which provides telecom expense management (TEM) to Fortune 1000 companies, has expanded its existing TEM relationship with the United States Postal Service (USPS). The current contract has been modified to include mobility devices....

What they're wearing this season in technology.
October 23, 2006... Symbol Technologies Inc, the Long Island company that Motorola's gonna buy, has introduced a new wearable mobile computer and scanner system for high-performance computing in extreme environments that it figures includes logistics tasks like...

CD & DVD mailings at risk.
October 23, 2006... BMG Columbia House, reputedly the world's largest direct-to-customer distributor of music and movies, has complained to the United States Postal Service that its contemplated new rates "will make it impossible for us to remain in the business...

BBH teams with Sefas to improve Bowe One.
October 23, 2006... Bowe Bell + Howell (BBH), the maker of document processing and postal solutions, has entered into a strategic partnership in North America with Sefas Innovation, which writes integrated software solutions for designing and producing business...

Spanish post plans continued overhaul.(Brief article)
October 23, 2006... Correos Spain is contemplating putting almost 250 million euros into infrastructure, new automation and management equipment and business processes next year, and diversifying into alternative lines of online business. It anticipates an...

EC gets Microsoft to blink.
October 23, 2006... Microsoft said last Friday that it has made changes in Vista intended to keep it out of the antitrust courts in either Europe or South Korea, both of which claim its bundling is anticompetitive. At the same time, Microsoft reiterated its...

Salesforce wants to be a platform like Microsoft & Oracle.
October 23, 2006... Software-as-a-service pioneer Salesforce.com will be introducing a Java-like on-demand programming language and all-purpose platform that's supposed to make it possible for users and partners to share the company's multi-tenant development...

How Nouveau Riche. Google buys YouTube for $1.65b.
October 23, 2006... Google is buying YouTube Inc, the unprofitable, 19-month-old, social networking-style, homemade videofeaturing start-up site with $11.5 million in financing in its jeans from Sequoia Capital, for an incredibly frothy $1.65 billion in stock,...

Google bundles Writely with spreadsheets.
October 23, 2006... Well, the inevitable has happened. Google barely had time to give Microsoft the finger between it's chomping down on YouTube and spitting out an Office-wannabe version of its Writely web-based collaborative word processor bundled with its...

OneCare made Vista-compatible.
October 23, 2006... Microsoft released a free 90-day Vista-compatible 1.5 beta of its Windows Live OneCare security software, saying it had been internationalized, featured unified anti-virus and anti-spyware filtering and had been outfitted with more backup...

HP sound bites.
October 23, 2006... "None of the normal business reasons apply. I know that. There were no improprieties. There were no ethics issues. So I can only conclude that it was personal in some way. Certainly, the way it was done was personal."--Ousted HP CEO Carly...

EMC & Microsoft expand alliance.
October 23, 2006... EMC and Microsoft have struck a new ECM alliance to push Microsoft tools and applications in the EMC infrastructure. ECM is supposed to introduce new content and archiving products that enable tighter integration between EMC's Documentum ECM...

Gadhafi reportedly Bellies up for MIT laptop.(One Desktop Per Child)(Brief article)
October 23, 2006... Libya is going to buy enough laptops to supply its 1.2 million schoolchildren by June of 2008 from One Desktop Per Child (ODPC), according to the New York Times. The $250 million deal will put a server in every school and provide...

Oracle's PeopleSoft acquisition gets a tad more expensive.
October 23, 2006... Oracle is going to have to pay a $98.5 million fine to settle charges that its $10.3 billion PeopleSoft acquisition overcharged the federal government between 1997 and 2005 by submitting false pricing information. The fine is the largest ever...

Starter edition at 1m copies.
October 23, 2006... Microsoft says a million copies of its XP Starter Edition have been supplied to the Third World. There are now 35 language versions of the thing and it's being sold in 139 countries.

Pajama sales likely to spike.
October 23, 2006... IDC says that 70% of the US workforce will be telecommuting by 2009.

USPS Looks for new e-Postmark peddlers.
October 30, 2006... After repeatedly telling Authentidate Holding Corporation that it wasn't cutting the mustard, the United States Postal Service is looking for someone else to handle its Electronic Postmark (EPM) service. Authentidate was subcontracted to...

eCourier gets its first institutional investor.
October 30, 2006... eCourier, the London-based on-demand same-day messenger service that got started a couple of years ago on a shoestring and credit cards, has picked up $3.7 million (2 million pounds sterling) in funding from Swiss-based VC LogiSpring...

Cougar Mountain Software automates electronic statements.
October 30, 2006... Cougar Mountain Software has introduced PDF-eXPLODE e-Doc Generator, a program that creates and e-mails electronic documents such as invoices, purchase orders and financial statements. The Boise, Idaho company claims to make postal costs...

Australia post dumped EDS.
October 30, 2006... It appears from local press reports that Australia Post quietly canceled its contract with EDS to plan and migrate its NT4.0 servers and workstations to more modern fare five months after it signed the agreement last year. Then it went and...

EchoSign intros e-signature service for Blackberry.(Brief article)
October 30, 2006... EchoSign has introduced an e-signature service for BlackBerries and Treos so users can authorize documents while away from the office without waiting for paperwork to make it back through the fax machines or overnight mail. This new web-based...

Royal Mail ties catalogs to Internet spending.
October 30, 2006... The Royal Mail says its research indicates that catalogs are fueling an online shopping boom across the UK with consumers spending an average of 609 pounds each on goods online so far this year. It found that three-fifths (61%) of UK...

So much for simple technology.(United States Postal Service plans to replace 23,000 stamp machines by 2010)(Brief article)
October 30, 2006... The United States Postal Service wants to decommission all of its 23,000 stamp machines by 2010. Many of them are 20-years-old and replacement parts are either hard to get or pricey and changes made in making currency harder to counterfeit have...

OutBound recertified.
October 30, 2006... OutBound Shipping, a provider of automated carrier certified shipping software and solutions, has gotten Manifest Analysis and Certification (MAC) recertification from the United States Postal Service. The USPS MAC certification program...

Polish & Bulgarian Posts join Eurogiro.
October 30, 2006... Both the Polish Post and the Bulgarian Posts have joined Eurogiro, the Western Union-like cooperative for sending and receiving money--only cheaper. It will make cross-border transactions easier. Eurogiro has something like 60 connections now...

McAfee Calls Microsoft a liar.
October 30, 2006... Microsoft's days-old pledge to open Vista to third-party security vendors is going to take a long time to realize and may create a new raft of problems for Microsoft with the European Commission. Microsoft has promised to give security...

Browser war 2.0 can now officially start.
October 30, 2006... Microsoft has released Internet Explorer 7 for XP, its first browser update in five years, hoping it slaps Firefox back into line. The two-year-old open source descendent of Netscape now claims 11.5%-12.5% of the market depending on who's...

eMachines co-founder back in the game.(John Hui)(Brief article)
October 30, 2006... eMachines co-founder John Hui, who sold eMachines to Gateway, is back in the game. When last spotted some weeks ago, Hui was trying to buy Gateway's retail business for $450 million and got the back of Gateway's hand. Now he's gone...

Quad watch.
October 30, 2006... Intel's first quad chips--and Intel's already quietly selling quads--are supposed to be officially announced in mid- November. The two due are the Conroe-based 2.66GHz desktop Kentsfield, to be called the Core 2 Extreme QX6700, and the...

Massive battery recall burns Sony.
October 30, 2006... Because of what it will cost to replace what Sony now estimates will be 9.6 million laptop batteries coupled with the losses in its PlayStation unit, which has been plagued by product delays and price cuts, Sony has lowered its fiscal year...

Sun brings new meaning to the expression 'forklift computing'.
October 30, 2006... Sun is using your garden-variety 20-foot shipping container as its latest form factor, managing in the process to stumble on a new way to deface the landscape. It's building an instant-on modular data center in the thing and calling it...

Microsoft extends its Open Spec promise.
October 30, 2006... Microsoft has extended its month-old Open Specification Promise (OSP) to cover its virtualization format technology OSP is Microsoft's "irrevocable" pledge not to press any patent claims against anybody in the distribution chain using some 35...

MySQL re-rigs its flagship.(Brief article)
October 30, 2006... MySQL has itself is a new commercial Enterprise flagship. The company has never labeled any of its code "enterprise" before. The widgetry is in beta with some of the company's more advanced customers, according to CEO Marten Mickos, and is...

Dell loses PC numbers game.
October 30, 2006... HP and Dell might have statistically tied for first place in the 9.8 million PCs they each shipped worldwide in Q3, but according to IDC Dell limped along with only 3.6% growth, while HP grew 15.1%. Actually HP was ahead by 28,000 units the way...

Dell should make Macs: Gartner.
October 30, 2006... Proving that Gartner has a sense of humor, it's circulating a position paper that says Apple should quit the hardware business, concentrate on writing software and license the Mac to Dell so that Apple benefits from wider distribution, Dell...

IM converges in France.
October 30, 2006... France Telecom will be putting Microsoft's Windows Live instant messaging system on mobile phones in France in December and in Spain and Britain next year. The move is described as the first convergence between PC-based and mobile-based IM...