ePostal News articles from September 2006

ePostal News archives from September 2006

China Post picks Teradata warehouse for track-and-trace.
September 4, 2006... The China Post Express Mail Service (EMS) Bureau has selected NEC's Teradata active data warehouse as the foundation for its new track-and-trace system. This is the first time that Teradata is implementing an active data warehouse in...

Estonian Post plays paperboy.(Brief article)
September 4, 2006... Estonian Post Ltd has started a subscription service for periodicals on its web site. According to Kalle Tarien, a member of the company's management board, people used to have to go to the post office to sign up for a subscription through...

Japan Post to introduce vanity stamps.
September 4, 2006... On September 1 Japan Post is scheduled to start selling customized photo stamps a la Stamps.com and Zazzle in the states and Posten in Norway. The post is reportedly using the gimmick to try to beat back the rising e-mail tide. It expects to...

Verid to provide authentication to DocuSign e-signature service.
September 4, 2006... DocuSign has chosen Verid's authentication service to provide third-party identity verification for its electronic signature service. DocuSign, an on-demand, electronic signature service, is using Verid's interactive Knowledge Based...

Tumbleweed gets Common Criteria EAL 3 certification.
September 4, 2006... Tumbleweed Communications Corporation, the e-mail security, file transfer security and identity validation software and appliances house, says that its Validation Authority product suite has achieved Common Criteria Evaluation Assurance Level...

BBH to distribute print stream comparison tool.(Bowe Bell + Howell)(Brief article)
September 4, 2006... Bowe Bell + Howell has become a distributor of CDP Communications' STREAMdiff high-speed print stream comparison tool, which automates the testing of AFP, metacode and PostScript print streams and PDF files. BBH says its customers can use...

TNT sells off its logistic arm.
September 4, 2006... TNT NV is selling off TNT Logistics North America, its low-margin worldwide logistics operation, to Apollo Management LP, an American private equity house, for $1.9 billion to focus on its European postal and global parcel express interests....

Pitney to support Zebra bar code printers.
September 4, 2006... Pitney Bowes has become an on-site service provider for Zebra Technologies Corporation's bar code printers. Zebra Independent Service Providers are authorized and certified to offer flexible printer repair solutions and service contracts to...

Encryption on rise.
September 4, 2006... Zix Corporation, the e-mail encryption house, figures it now encrypts 6.1 million e-mail messages a month for its network of 5.5 million recipients. To date, it has encrypted over 160 million e-mails, up 60% from a year ago. It says its...

Norway Post survives losses in banking & government business.
September 4, 2006... During the first half of 2006, Norway Post increased its operating revenue by 18.1% to $1.8 billion. The group's pre-tax profits came to roughly $90 million, $41 million less than for the corresponding period in 2005--mainly due to the...

Timeline wants to sue Microsoft for patent infringement.(Chronology)
September 4, 2006... Timeline Inc, which sold off its own applications last year to focus on monetizing its IP portfolio, has canceled the 1999 limited license that Microsoft took out and is seeking to add Microsoft to an existing case of patent infringement that...

Sony fire hazard spreads to apple.
September 4, 2006... In what is called the second-largest recall in the history of the computer business--second only to the fire-induced Dell recall--the US Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) said that Apple was recalling 1.8 million Sony batteries used in...

IBM buying spree continues.
September 4, 2006... For the third week in a row, IBM has spent in the neighborhood of a billion dollars on software acquisitions. This time it's the upscale neighborhood of $1.3 billion cash, which is what it intends to lay out for Internet Security Systems (ISS)...

Sun takes back share; Dell drops to fourth place.
September 4, 2006... Sun's share of overall server revenues was bumped up 1.7% year-over-year to 12.9%, according to IDC's second-quarter numbers, while the other four top vendors lost share. Sun edged out Dell for third place in the server line-up behind IBM and...

AMD's sights set on 40% of the server market.
September 4, 2006... TMD told Reuters in Shanghai that it thought it could capture 40% of the global server market as measured by units by 2009. AMD, which has been scoring in the 20 percentile lately, wasn't even in the server business three years ago. The...

Salesforce.com to evaluate Google Ads.(Brief article)
September 4, 2006... Wall Street darling Salesforce.com has integrated with Google in a new on-demand mashup service called plainly enough Salesforce for Google AdWords. The thing is supposed to manage and gauge of the value of paid bid-for-placement Google ads...

Microsoft hits back at Google-MySpace alliance.
September 4, 2006... Thanks to a quicky overnight deal, Microsoft is going to be the exclusive provider of banner ads and sponsored links on Facebook, one of those chi-chi social networking sites with a reportedly nine million registered users, the seventh most...

Dell defends its CEO.
September 4, 2006... Dell has had to defend its CEO Kevin Rollins and say Rollins has Michael Dell's "full support." The Wall Street Journal has reported that large institutions like Fidelity Investments and OppenheimerFunds were bailing on Dell because of the...

Microsoft mulls Vista discount.
September 4, 2006... Microsoft may offer Christmas shoppers discounts on Vista, which isn't due until after Christmas--January at the earliest. Microsoft has confirmed that it's been talking to OEMs and retailers about a number of holiday promotions. Gartner...

IE7 hits RC 1.
September 4, 2006... After three betas, Microsoft has made a feature-complete Internet Explorer 7 Release Candidate available for download. The final version is due in Q4 as a high-priority security update for XP and is supposed to be in the peek-a-boo Vista.

Microsoft's Dutch auction fails.
September 4, 2006... Microsoft's novel $20 billion Dutch auction approach to buying back its stock has pretty much fallen flat on its face, suggesting that people don't want to part with their shares. It only picked up 155 million shares, 20% of total number it was...

Lenovo raids Dell again.(Lenovo Services appoints Christopher Askew, former CEO of Dell)(Brief article)
September 4, 2006... Lenovo has been having a high old time raiding Dell's demoralized, stock-under-water executive ranks, That's how it got its CEO, the president of Lenovo Japan and the head of its Asia-Pacific operation. Now it's drafted the head of Dell...

AOL dumps its CTO over privacy breach.
September 4, 2006... AOL has accepted the resignation of its CTO Maureen Govern because of that gigantically stupid flub that saw 20 million searches made by 650,000 AOL users between March and the end of May posted to a new publicly accessible AOL research site a...

Surge in old-fashioned postal orders traced to online shopping.
September 18, 2006... Great Britain's Royal Mail Group says online shopping will boost the sale of postal orders to a record $194 million (104 million [pounds sterling]) this year as eBay use doubles. According to the post nearly one in three postal orders sold...

Stamps.com creates new service out of two existing ones.
September 18, 2006... Stamps.com, the publicly owned Internet postage house now under a certain amount of Wall Street pressure--the Street complains of slower-than-expected growth and anticipates higher-than-expected subscriber churn next year--has come up with a...

Kenya post flaunts court order to switch ISPs.
September 18, 2006... According to press reports out of Kenya, the government has ditched the satellite communications provided by US-based Universal Satspace of North America and engaged local mobile network operator Safaricom to provide Internet links to Postal...

Emirates Post replaces stamps with barcode on registered mail.
September 18, 2006... The Emirates Post has started putting barcodes on registered mail instead of postage stamps to automate and speed up registered mail. Customers have been given until the beginning of next month to familiarize themselves with the system....

Finland Post disappears Elma inside Itella Finland.(Elma Electronic Trading )(Brief article)
September 18, 2006... Finland Post Group is apparently disappearing its B2B commerce unit Elma Electronic Trading inside its information logistics subsidiary, Itella Finland Ltd. Elma was already part of Itella but the post says that as of September 1 the two...

BBH intros JETVision Express.(Bowe Bell & Howell Co.)(Brief article)
September 18, 2006... Bowe Bell + Howell has brought out a new low-end member of its family of vision technologies, JETVision Express, described as a simple, inexpensive, easy-to-install solution with a wide range of uses in document production. BBH says...

UPS completes the launch of its Billing Analysis Tool.
September 18, 2006... UPS has completed the launch of its Billing Analysis Tool, a global expense management technology for customers that converts transactional billing data into a solution for analyzing and managing global transportation costs. The company's...

Google makes threatening noises in Microsoft's direction.
September 18, 2006... Google has started the second phase of its push into Microsoft's desktop turf. It's wrapped up its Gmail e-mail, Google Talk instant messaging, Google Calendar and WYSIWYG Google Page Creator web page publisher in a free, ad-based, highly...

Mischief makers unite.
September 18, 2006... Google CEO Eric Schmidt and Apple CEO Steve Jobs, two fully paid-up charter members of the He-Man Microsoft Haters Club, Silicon Valley Division, are teaming up. Schmidt has accepted a rare invitation to join Apple's board, where he will find...

Intel intros Tulsa, its best shot to retake the high end.
September 18, 2006... Tulsa, the last NetBurst Xeon, now officially designated the Dual-Core Xeon 7100, has arrived en masse. There are eight of them, suggesting that Intel, which has been sucking AMD's wind at the high end, is expecting to do a bang-up business in...

Amazon pre-sells Vista.
September 18, 2006... Well, at least somebody's confident that the consumer version of Vista in all its sundry editions will be out in January even if the smart money thinks it won't surface before next spring. Amazon has started taking orders for the thing on...

Merom's out.
September 18, 2006... Intel's Merom next-generation dual-core mobile chip was finally officially recognized as shipping. Intel now has 64-bit Core 2 Duo chips across-the-board for servers, desktops and notebooks. It said Merom or rather the Centrino Duo has gotten...

EBay and Google cut deal.(contract between ebay Inc and Google Inc)(Brief article)
September 18, 2006... eBay and Google have signed an exclusive multi-year revenue-sharing deal that will let Google put text ads on eBay's auction sites outside the US. Yahoo already has the exclusive in the US with a PayPal-promotion component. Google has a...

Massachusetts' aggressive ODF plans hang on a plug-in.
September 18, 2006... The Commonwealth of Massachusetts, or rather its Information Technology Division (ITD), has come up with a plan for switching over to the Open Document Format (ODF) and leaving Microsoft's proprietary formats behind without deviating from its...

Novell checks books for backdating; posts only preliminary Q3 results.
September 18, 2006... Novell has only been able to post preliminary fiscal third-quarter results because it's hired outside legal counsel to review its past stock option practices for indications of backdating, so the results it put out, it said, don't reflect any...

SAP Jive.
September 18, 2006... Jive Software's Java-based Jive Forums community collaboration software is going to be in NetWeaver under a multi-year OEM pact with SAP. Financial arrangements were not disclosed. Jive will let SAP users locate information, find subject matter...

Orphans no more.
September 18, 2006... Microsoft is going to start selling support for legacy products. It's restructured its Custom Support Agreement (CSA) program so customers can extend legacy support while migrating, giving slowpokes some latitude if they're constrained by...

Blackout curtains pulled across Symantec v Microsoft suit.
September 18, 2006... It looks like we're going to miss the best parts of the Vista/Long Horn-threatening Symantec-Veritas Volume Manager patent, copyright, trade secrets and breach of contract suit against Microsoft. According to a in CNET the federal court in...

Verizon to offer Windows Live.
September 18, 2006... Starting next year, Verizon is going to offer Windows Live to its broadband customers under an expanded agreement with Microsoft that will provide a co-branded search page, a Live toolbar, e-mail, Live Messenger and OneCare security. The pair...

Toshiba to make the Zune.
September 18, 2006... As has been noised about, Toshiba is going to be making Microsoft's potentially iPod-rattling Zune player. Toshiba told the FCC in a filing that the gadget is supposed to have a 30GB hard drive, a three-inch TFT LCD screen, an FM tuner,...

QEII loses her head to internet postage.
September 25, 2006... In a move that set off a flap over its lese majeste, the Royal Mail Tuesday plumped for Internet postage that does away with the traditional stamp altogether. The new service, which will let the British public to buy and print their...

Italy's Postecom goes with Cybertrust PKI certification.
September 25, 2006... Postecom SpA, which is part of the Poste Italiane Group, has selected a UniCERT public key infrastructure (PKI) certification solution from Cybertrust, the information security people, to ensure the secure transfer of sensitive and confidential...

Trackmymail rushes into new barcode.
September 25, 2006... Trackmymail.com has begun processing mailings using the new 4-state barcode. It used the widgetry to track a mailing for industrial inkjet maker MCS Inc on the first day that the Postal Service made the new barcode available. The...

SteelCloud to be USPS subcontractor.
September 25, 2006... Lockheed Martin has selected SteelCloud Inc, an integrator of network centric and embedded computing solutions, to be a sub-contractor on its $17.4 million contract to improve automated parcel-sorting systems at the US Postal Service's bulk...

Pitney lays out growth path.
September 25, 2006... Pitney Bowes, which has agreed to pay the IRS roughly $1.1 billion in taxes over the next six months, has provided investors with a roadmap for delivering revenue and earnings growth over the next five years. The company has offered a...

Ipswitch unveils new exchange-alternative server.
September 25, 2006... Ipswitch Inc, a Massachusetts-based developer of messaging, network management and file transfer solutions, has announced the worldwide availability of Ipswitch IMail Server Plus 2006.1, the newest addition to its line of messaging and...

Comergent software underneath Pitney internet postage printer.
September 25, 2006... Come to find out that the software underlying that little 17-ounce DYMO-rivaling Stamp Expressions printer that Pitney Bowes started peddling in June came from Comergent Technologies Inc, the California ISV. The $99 widget, which also...

Motorola buys symbol.
September 25, 2006... Motorola is going to buy Long Island-based Symbol Technologies, which deals in RFID, mobile data computing and bar code scanners, for $3.9 billion cash, intending to make it the cornerstone of its networks and enterprise business. Symbol...

EC & Microsoft locked in Vista stalemate.
September 25, 2006... Despite the God awful crisis created by Windows' inherent vulnerabilities--and despite the European Commission's utter failure in designing software--remember the ill-fated "didn't-sell-a-lick" Windows N, when it made Microsoft drop the Media...

Microsoft pledges not to press patents.
September 25, 2006... Microsoft has made a so-called Open Specification Promise (OSP) "irrevocably" pledging not to press any patent claims against people using, selling, importing or distributing SOAP and a large swat of the WS- * Web Services specifications that...

Oh, God, HP ...
September 25, 2006... In a series of whipsaw revelations over a period of 10 days--on which more ink seems to have been spent than Enron got--it has come to light that HP's non-executive chairman Patricia Dunn, who is supposed to be one of the most powerful women in...

Google cuts strategic pact with another Microsoft enemy.
September 25, 2006... Intuit, the company that successfully resisted getting snapped up by Microsoft years ago, is going to put Google widgetry in its ubiquitous QuickBooks accounting software, the stuff that's so popular with small companies. Financial...

Well, now, exactly how much trouble is Dell in?(Securities and Exchange Commission's investigations)
September 25, 2006... Staid old Dell, which unlike its erstwhile image has turned into a regular trouble magnet, HAS said that it wouldn't be filing its second-quarter 10-Q on time--the one that covers the period when revenues plummeted 51%--because of that...

IBM claims it's broken the code on protecting data.
September 25, 2006... IBM has been claiming that it's broken the code, so to speak, on how to protect data. This after 90 million consumers have been notified in the last 18 months that their personal information may have been breached. What IBM calls the...

Intel takes in its belt a couple more notches.
September 25, 2006... Intel is selling off another one of its communications product lines in an attempt to right size so it can focus on its core business and tilt more effectively with AMD over market share where Intel has been losing its shirt. The news...

Microsoft's live search goes, well, live.
September 25, 2006... MMicrosoft has officially launched its Windows Live Search engine. It will replace MSN Search, try to put up a better fight against Google and Yahoo, who have been eating Microsoft's lunch in web search, and corral some of the ad dollars its...

Google can't get 'em all.
September 25, 2006... Snubbing Google, Acer, the fourth-largest PC maker, has signed up to bundle Yahoo's search as the default on its machines. The deal, described as strategic, includes a co-branded web browser toolbar. Terms were not disclosed.