ePostal News articles from October 2008

ePostal News archives from October 2008

Royal Mail Makes Picks for One of Europe's Largest Mobility Deployments.
October 13, 2008... After trying it out, Royal Mail is going with Blackbay's Delivery Connect solution as a real-time mobility solution for most of its tracked products including Special Delivery and Recorded Signed For. The job dispatch, management and...

USPS Considering Layoffs.
October 13, 2008... For the first time ever the USPS is seriously thinking about laying people off, according to the Washington Post. The agency confirmed that with mail volumes down 11% in the fiscal year just ended and a $2.3 billion loss bleeding all over the...

Posten Outsources to EDS.
October 13, 2008... EDS, now an HP satellite after its acquisition, has gotten a contract from Posten, one of the Nordic region's largest messaging and logistics operators, to host its end-user computing environment, beginning next July. Financial terms were not...

Microsoft Moves to Check Red Hat in Russia.
October 13, 2008... Microsoft has moved to prevent Red Hat from running off with all of the Linux-smitten Russia Post. It has cut a deal with the state-run agency aimed at jointly developing and managing a modern information infrastructure for the post. Apparently...

Esker Ups its Spanish Muscle.(Esker Inc. has cut a new strategic partnership with Inforsistem)(Brief article)
October 13, 2008... Esker, the document process automation house, has cut a new strategic partnership with Inforsistem, a 15-year-old outsource services company in Spain specializing in document management. Esker says this new arrangement gives Esker the resources...

Tracking Start-up Launches.(FollowThatPackage.com)(Brief article)
October 13, 2008... A start-up called FollowThatPackage.com, created to help alleviate customer service calls for both the retailers and shipping companies, is offering what it calls a "unique tracking system" to both customers and retailers. Customers enter their...

Prime Vision Offers Scale-up Parcel OCR.(Optical Character Recognition )
October 13, 2008... Prime Vision, which claims it's the only OCR developer around that's focused on the parcel market, has web-enabled its second-generation ParcelVision parcel recognition platform. It calls it a customer-driven development that has evolved as a...

Postal Carriers Recruited for Anthrax Emergency.
October 13, 2008... The US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) has been testing a plan to have volunteer postal carriers, escorted by police, deliver emergency doses of doxycycline door-to-door in case of an anthrax attack. The system has been tested in...

Wincor Nixdorf Upgrades Its Branch Software.
October 13, 2008... PC/E Postal Solution Suite, Wincor Nixdorf's portfolio of software solutions for the branch business of postal services providers, has been upgraded. The software covers all the primary processes in postal branches, both classic postal services...

USPS Preaching Conservation.
October 13, 2008... The US Postal Service, one of America's biggest consumers of energy, has taken to preaching conservation now that things are getting tight. It's telling its people to turn off the lights, close doors, adjust thermostats, report heating and air...

Yahoo-Google Deal Put on Hold.
October 13, 2008... Yahoo's life-saving revenue-enhancing alliance with Google, supposedly set to kick off in a week and substitute for a Microsoft buy-out, has been put on hold while antitrust regulators at the Department of Justice continue their investigation....

Amazon EC2 To Add Windows.
October 13, 2008... Amazon says its Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), currently limited to various Unix and Linux operating systems, will start supporting Windows Server and SQL Server sometime this fall, describing it as "one of our most requested features." It's...

Xenocode Aims To Reshape the Way Software's Delivered.
October 13, 2008... Xenocode, the application virtualization folk from Microsoft, has trotted out some widgetry that it figures will reshape the way software is delivered while reducing development, test and support costs. Developers are supposed to use the shiny...

Wells Fargo Joins the Online Storage Biz.
October 13, 2008... Wells Fargo, one of the biggest of the American banks, has become the first major financial institution to offer online storage - and with a noticeably lack of third-party storage provider. It built the widgetry in-house using its online...

HP Buys LeftHand.
October 13, 2008... Dell got its name in the papers late last year when it bought EqualLogic. HP followed suit the other day when it said that it was buying EqualLogic's iSCSI rival LeftHand Networks, the nine-year-old storage virtualization and iSCSI/SAN ISV, for...

Shanghai Due.
October 13, 2008... AMD's first 45nm chip, the Shanghai version of its quad-core Barcelona server processor, is reportedly in full production. The company has reportedly pulled in delivery of two-way and eight-way models from Q1 to any minute now. Shanghai...

Microsoft's Hyper-V Released.
October 13, 2008... Let the games begin. Microsoft's standalone Hyper-V Server 2008, the bare metal hypervisor meant to help it wrest leadership of the virtualization market from VMware, is now available. Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer has been saying that he thinks...

Microsoft's in the Market for European Search Engineers.
October 13, 2008... As should come as no surprise, Microsoft is going to build an enterprise search R&D center in Norway around its Fast Search & Transfer acquisition. It says it will add 50 R&D workers to Fast's ~300 employees. It will be Microsoft's third R&D...

3Tera Beats Amazon to Windows Support.(Amazon.com Inc.)(Brief article)
October 13, 2008... 3Tera, the cloud computing wannabe, has put out its AppLogic 2.4 beta, the so-called grid operating system that supports virtual appliances running Windows Server in all the infrastructure components necessary to run web applications including...

Google Wants $4.4 Trillion To Cut US Energy Dependence.(Google Inc.)(Brief article)
October 13, 2008... In a week of ludicrously large numbers beyond a normal human being's comprehension of what it will cost to barely survive the current economic catastrophe, Google announced that - by its calculations - it will take $4.4 trillion to reduce...

Larry Needs an Angle on Cloud Computing.(Brief article)
October 13, 2008... "The interesting thing about cloud computing is that we've redefined cloud computing to include everything that we already do. I can't think of anything that isn't cloud computing with all of these announcements. The computer industry is the...

VMware Workstation 6.5 Hits Market.
October 13, 2008... VMware's Workstation 6.5, its desktop virtualization widgetry, has hit general availability. The latest upgrade of the nine-year-old software, VMware's original product, can be used to toggle between windows on different virtual machines and...

Appistry Pushes into Public Clouds.
October 13, 2008... Appistry, the ISV with the grid-based cloud application platform that's been focusing on in-house clouds like FedEx' and Lockheed Martin's, is extending its reach to so-called public clouds beginning with GoGrid and SkyTap. Appistry's flagship...

Stallman Condemns Cloud Computing as 'Stupid'.
October 13, 2008... Richard Stallman, the guy who started the free software movement and head of the Free Software Foundation, calls cloud computing "worse than stupidity: it's a marketing hype campaign." Web-based programs are anathema according to what Stallman...

Microsoft To Ship Open Source Library with Visual Studio.
October 13, 2008... Microsoft is going to ship jQuery, the popular open source JavaScript library, as a standard, supported part of its all-important Visual Studio toolkit and ASP.NET, a little 15kb stick of dynamite. Microsoft says it won't screw with it or fork...

Red Hat Delivers Integrated HPC Platform.
October 13, 2008... Red Hat has delivered what it called the industry's first integrated Linux-based High Performance Computing (HPC) platform, otherwise known as the Red Hat HPC Solution, an all-in-one HPC cluster stack that Red Hat and Platform Computing put...

Yahoo's Zimbra Reaches Out to Microsoft.
October 13, 2008... Zimbra, Yahoo's open source messaging and collaboration software company whose fate was unclear if Microsoft had bought Yahoo, says it's got a new open extension framework for its Collaboration Suite (ZCS) that will enable two-way...

White House Asked To Create an IP Czar.
October 13, 2008... The US Congress had trouble passing the "save the world" legislation the White House asked for last week, but it didn't seem to have any trouble sending the White House a bill the White House didn't want - and may veto - that would establish a...

EC Regulators Tell Slovakia To Clean Up Its Act.
October 20, 2008... The European Commission's regulators have decided that recent amendments to Slovakia's postal legislation infringe EC Treaty antitrust rules. They have given Slovakia a month to re-open hybrid mail services to competition. The regulators said...

UPU Finds Parcel Volumes Continue To Grow, Letters Stable - Well, Collectively Speaking at Any Rate.
October 20, 2008... According to the latest figures, the Universal Postal Union says mail and parcel volumes defied predictions and collectively speaking remained buoyant over the past five years, With 6.5 billion items sent in 2007, domestic parcel volumes...

RFID Trial Over.
October 20, 2008... Qatar Post, a member of Universal Post Union's Quality of Service Project Group Steering Committee, recently concluded a trial with the Emirates Post and Saudi Post in which both passive and semi-active RFID was deployed and tested. It was...

Portugal Gets Registered Mail by Phone.
October 20, 2008... The Portuguese CTT has launched a new Service Alert or Alert SMS, a registered mail service that indicates when and where the delivery of an SMS phone message was made. It's said to be a step in integrating the physical and digital.

ABOL Offers SaaS eVS-Compliant Widgetry.
October 20, 2008... ABOL Software, which sells transportation solutions for business-to-consumer shippers, has announced the general availability of a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) solution that it calls the first eVS-compliant vendor solution. Customers can...

Kenya Post Told To Modernize or Lose the Market.(Brief article)
October 20, 2008... According to local press reports the Communication Commission of Kenya (CCK), the industry's regulator, has told the Postal Corporation of Kenya (PCK) to adopt technology or lose the market to more innovative competitors. CCK director of...

Crawford Technologies Launches Enterprise IMB Unique ID Generator.
October 20, 2008... Crawford Technologies Inc, the TransPromo and transactional document and mailing ISV, has launched the Enterprise IMB Unique ID Generator, software designed to enable the systems-wide implementation of unique mail piece identifiers for the new...

India Switching to Electronic Postal Orders.
October 20, 2008... India's Department of Posts has switched over to the electronic transmission of money orders to make remittance faster. It won't cost the customer any more, but will reduce the paperwork and provide for a centralized information system on the...

US Chief Made Head of All DHL.
October 20, 2008... Deutsche Post World Net has made Joe Phelan CEO of DHL Global Mail, a move akin to telling DHL US "you broke it, you fix it." Phelan has been president & CEO of DHL's massively money-losing Americas business division as well as a member of the...

Goodmail Brags.
October 20, 2008... Goodmail Systems, the CertifiedEmail people, said the other day that it delivered a record 3.1 billion CertifiedEmail messages in September from more than 500 leading brands including KeyBank, PETCO, Hewlett-Packard and About.com. This monthly...

USPS Workers Told To Clutch the Dim & Distant Past.
October 20, 2008... For the first time in history the American Postal Workers Union, one of four separate postal unions, is not just endorsing a presidential candidate, it's telling its members to vote for the Democrat, Barack Obama, for fear Senator John McCain...

AMD Spins Manufacturing Off into a Joint Venture with Abu Dhabi.
October 20, 2008... AMD finally pulled the "asset lite" ripcord like it's been threatening to do for over a year and said it's spinning its manufacturing off into a joint venture with the oil-rich sheikdom of Abu Dhabi. The transaction, aimed at making the...

Is the AMD Deal Legal?
October 20, 2008... Intel claims it doesn't know whether AMD's life-saving spinout of its manufacturing operations into a new joint venture and its sale of close to 20% of itself to a third party is legal. AMD of course says it is. See, AMD is only in the x86...

Amazon Cuts S3 Prices.(Brief article)
October 20, 2008... Amazon will be cutting the price of its S3 hosted storage service come November 1. Pricing will be tiered from now on and favor heavier users. The company's entry-level price of 15 cents a gigabyte a month in the US will remain in place but...

IBM Moves To Calm Earnings Fears.
October 20, 2008... IBM got a jump on what people fear may be a nasty earnings season and pre-announced its Q3 results. It said its income would be up 20% to $2.8 billion on revenues up 5% to $25.3 billion. It also reaffirmed its full-year earnings projection of...

Symantec Makes Aggressive $695m Bet on SaaS.
October 20, 2008... Symantec is buying MessageLabs, the privately held UK-based online message archiving and security house, for about $695 million in cash, a mix of sterling and dollars, to advance its position in Software-as-a-Service (SaaS). Symantec intends...

SAP Takes Sales Hit, Blames Credit Crisis.
October 20, 2008... SAP has confessed that the bottom suddenly fell out of its sales in the last two weeks of September as the economy tanked and the company found it increasingly hard to sign contracts. CEO Henning Kagermann blamed liquidity and financing issues...

Bull Moves To Advance its HPC Ambitions.(Bull Inc. has acquired science + computing AG)(Brief article)
October 20, 2008... Bull wants to be king of the HPC hill in Europe and so it's buying science + computing AG, an HPC solutions and services house in Germany, which happens to be the largest HPC market in Europe. What it's paying is a secret but the acquisition...

Unisys Hires Ex-Gateway Boss as CEO.
October 20, 2008... Unisys, the old computer dinosaur struggling to turn into a service provider, has turned to former Gateway chief Edward Coleman for a turnaround, hiring him as both chairman and CEO, effective immediately. Coleman, who has IBM and CSC chevrons...

The Sky over Armonk is Thick with Clouds.
October 20, 2008... IBM said it's going full bore at cloud computing and launching a company-wide initiative to fill the cloud with new software and services. Amazon and Google have something of a first mover advantage with SMBs and ISVs; anyway IBM's vision is...

Unisys Rolls Out New Mainframe-y Big Iron.
October 20, 2008... Unisys, for all its service ambitions is still in the mainframe-class server business - well, at least for now - its shiny new CEO may have other ideas but not before it rolls out some new cloud-fit Unisys-created ClearPath machines that meter...

Fujitsu To Field Virtualization Manager.(Fujitsu America Inc.)(Brief article)
October 20, 2008... Fujitsu is coming into North America with the widgetry it's been selling in Japan that gives users control of both physical and virtualized blade servers through a single management interface. The stuff is called RCVE, Resource Coordinator...

eBay Layoff Rumors True.
October 20, 2008... Those rumors about eBay making layoffs proved true. It's kissing 1,600 people good-bye, 10% of its workforce. The move, which will save $150 million a year, isn't supposed to stem from the punk economy, which is admittedly hurting business,...

NTT Sticks Money in EnterpriseDB.
October 20, 2008... EnterpriseDB, the four-year-old Postgres open source database start-up, is sure hanging with the big dogs these days. Six months ago, IBM invested in the company, an odd thing for IBM to do on the face of it considering it has its own DB2...

Red Hat Tickles Open Source SOA.
October 20, 2008... The company said the new revs feature cooperative support and allow for remote monitoring and management of open source SOA deployments. Red Hat's SOA strategy is centered on driving down cost and complexity. The lightweight JBoss Enterprise...

AOL & Yahoo Reportedly Close.
October 20, 2008... TechCrunch claims - based on what it's heard from the proverbial "sources close to the negotiations" - that there could be a Yahoo-AOL deal this month. It says Yahoo would get AOL sans dial-up and Time Warner would kick in a few billion...

Sounds More Like Rocks than Clouds.
October 20, 2008... There's speculation that what Steve Ballmer called Windows Cloud and said was a placeholder name might be called Windows Strata. Seems a blogger found the name in a list of sessions set for Microsoft's upcoming Professional Developers...

Facebook Launches Windows Live Search.
October 20, 2008... Facebook has put Windows Live Search on its site like it said it was gonna do a few months ago. Users can search the web without leaving the site or they can search the site itself. Remember, Microsoft has money in the joint.

HTC Counts Androids.
October 20, 2008... HTC, which makes T-Mobile's G1 smartphone, the first of the Android phones to be out, has been whispering to Taiwanese press that it could sell 500,000 of the things this quarter and 1.5 million-2 million through '09.

HP & MySpace Team Up.
October 20, 2008... HP and MySpace intend to integrate printing capabilities across MySpace photo sections, personal profiles, blogs, comments and messages but particularly photos. There are some four billion images on MySpace and HP's going to supply an...

Parcel Price Hikes Bad News for E-Commerce.
October 27, 2008... With the economy flagging and demand down, UPS says it's going to increase its shipping rates come January 5 by 5.9% for ground deliveries and 6.9% for all air and US-origin international deliveries. It also said it'll lower its fuel surcharge...

Earth Class Mail Goes Counter-Culture, Adds Capacity.
October 27, 2008... While other tech firms are downsizing in the teeth of the global recession Earth Class Mail, the folks that deliver postal mail over the Internet, says it is adding capacity because of increased demand from Fortune 500 and government customers....

USPS Assembles Arguments Against Threats to the Status Quo.
October 27, 2008... The United States Postal Services has dumped a pile of paper on the desk of the Postal Regulatory Commission in an attempt to preserve its statutory monopoly and silence any further talk about privatizing the agency or giving outlanders like...

Romanian Post Opens Offices in Spain.(Brief article)
October 27, 2008... The Romanian Post National Company (CNPR) has opened six post offices in five cities in Spain where there are large Romanian communities - Barcelona, Valencia, Castellon, Mallaga and two in Madrid. CNPR operational executive director Mihai...

Microsoft Sues DHL.
October 27, 2008... Microsoft is suing DHL for the loss of or damage to 21,000 Xboxes in a train derailment last October while they were en route from Texas to California bound for Flextronics in Hong Kong. The suit, filed in federal court in Seattle, claims DHL...

La Post Buys Experian Arm.
October 27, 2008... Doc@post, the year-old document services arm of La Poste Group, is buying credit-checking firm Experian's 12-year-old outsourcing business process outsourcing activities in France and creating a subsidiary called Extelia. Experian is getting...

USPS Struggles to Rightsize.
October 27, 2008... In an effort to cut costs by rightsizing its huge 800,000-man workforce as mail volumes drop, the money-losing USPS has embarked on a second round of early retirement offers, targeting 67,000 letter carriers, headquarters staff and motor...

Japan Post To Deliver Parts to Eastern Europe.
October 27, 2008... According to a Japanese press report, Japan Post Service Company, the reconstituted monopoly's mail and express arm, figures to deliver automotive and electronic parts to Japanese-owned plants in Eastern Europe and use the distribution network...

Ozzie Taxpayers Benefit from Australia Post.(Financial report)(Brief article)
October 27, 2008... Having scored record profits on the back of the best spurt in letter volumes since 1999, up 2%, the government-owned Australia Post will be sending an extra (Aus) $150 million to the federal government this year taking its contribution to close...

Royal Mail Claims Direct Mail Reinforces Search & TV Ads.
October 27, 2008... Britain's Royal Mail argues that advertisers that combine direct mail with Internet search activity are more successful at branding. It's had a study run up examining the role of posted material in the media mix whose findings claim direct...

Group 1 Releases Aura Address Automation Solution.
October 27, 2008... Pitney Bowes Group 1 Software has released Aura, a new solution to automate the process of correcting addresses on customer records. It says it "drastically" cuts the time it takes to update customer address data. In any given year, 14% of the...

ShopSite Revs its E-Commerce Shopping Cart System.
October 27, 2008... ShopSite has released a rev of its e-commerce shopping cart and catalog software for SMEs. ShopSite 10 has new features including an HTML editor and integration with Doba's drop-ship service. The software lets merchants display shipping rates...

Intel SSD Unleashes the True Performance of its CPUs.
October 27, 2008... Intel is giddy with delight to be shipping its new high-performance solid state drive (SSD) into the server, workstation and storage markets. So are its customers, who came to testify at its launch. Great things are expected of the X-25E...

Intel Takes the EC to Court.
October 27, 2008... Intel has formally objected to the way the European Commission is conducting the antitrust case against it, appealing to the Court of First Instance in Luxembourg to force the EC to consider a line of defense that the regulators have repeatedly...

Google Shares its Blankey.(Financial report)(Brief article)
October 27, 2008... On another day of hysterically wild swings - when the stock market - as a proxy for the global economy - badly needed a comfort blanket - Google gave it one. It came in with Q3 net earnings of $1.56 billion, or $4.92 a share (non-GAAP), up...

Ballmer Puts Yahoo in Play.
October 27, 2008... When Yahoo rolled out of bed its stock was at an abysmal $11.75. Then it lost another 40 cents in early trading as the market plummeted again. At lunchtime, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer threw it a lifeline. On stage at Gartner's gathering in...

Worldwide PC Market Up 15% in Q3: Gartner.(Industry overview)
October 27, 2008... Come out from under the bed for a minute. Despite the horror of September Gartner says worldwide PC shipments hit 80.6 million units in Q3, up 15% year-over-year. The way Gartner counts the number includes desktops, mobiles and x86...

Apple Only Gives an Inch on Price.(Brief article)
October 27, 2008... It took the global economy falling off a cliff for Apple to bring out a sub-$1,000 notebook and it's only a buck under a grand at that - a hundred bucks cheaper than its last entry-level model - disappointing onlookers who wanted tags more like...

Citrix Releases Kensho Preview To Push Portable VMs.
October 27, 2008... Citrix has released a technology preview of Project Kensho, its toolkit for developing and deploying portable virtual machine appliances in enterprises and clouds. First announced in July, the widgetry is described as a multi-hypervisor...

Intel Admits its Crystal Ball is Foggy.
October 27, 2008... Despite tales elsewhere of sales evaporating toward the end of September, Intel plunked down its Q3 results and declared them to be "the best third-quarter revenue in its history." It was shooting for somewhere between $10 billion and $10.6...

So 7 It Is Then.
October 27, 2008... Microsoft is going to use the code name Windows 7 as the official moniker of its next-generation operating system. Microsoft has never done that with Windows before. But, according to a blog by Mike Nash, corporate VP of Windows product...

NComputing Wins 50,000-Seat Deal in India.(Brief article)
October 27, 2008... NComputing, a comer in low-cost computing run by the guy who started eMachines, has picked up a deal to supply 1.8 million kids in 5,000 schools in Andhra Pradesh with computer access. Andhra Pradesh is the largest and most populous state in...

Microsoft Releases Silverlight 2.
October 27, 2008... Microsoft's Silverlight 2, the latest plank in the company's rich Internet applications development platform, has made its formal debut. Although Silverlight is only a year old, Microsoft claims one in four consumers has access to a computer...

Virtualization & Clouds Top Strategic Technologies: Gartner.
October 27, 2008... Gartner singled out virtualization as the top strategic technology for 2009 at its Symposium/ITxpo, restating what it said six months ago when it identified virtualization as the highest-impact trend changing infrastructure and operations...

OpenOffice 3.0 Out after Breech Birth.
October 27, 2008... One gets a bit suspicious when an operation like OpenOffice.com reports that its servers were swamped and knocked offline for days by the pressing demand for the first formal release of its native open source application suite for Mac OS X. It...

Zoho Offers Offline E-mail.
October 27, 2008... Zoho Mail, the start-up latest feather in its peacock-like tail, has left private beta and is being offered around free for up to 10 users - $50 a head a year after that. Zoho will host the e-mail and handle the back-end storage. The widgetry,...