ePostal News articles from September 2008

ePostal News archives from September 2008

Norway Post Launches its New Brand Name Strategy.
September 15, 2008... The Norway Post will market itself in the Norwegian and Nordic business markets under the new name of Bring. The post office network and daily postal delivery in Norway will keep the Posten name and get a new logo. Having spent roughly $892...

Isle of Man Post Office Goes with Track & Trace Parcel Service.
September 15, 2008... The Isle of Man Post Office, the largest postal and courier service on the island in the Irish Sea, has installed a full track and trace managed service from Skillweb, a mobile computing solution company for the logistics industry, to capture...

CipherLab Reseller To Upgrade ECT's Logistics Infrastructure.
September 15, 2008... Empresa Brasileira de Correios e Telagrafos (ECT), the Brazilian Post and Telegraph Corporation, will be deploying the CipherLab 9400 Industrial Mobile Computer in upwards of 3,000 regional branches. Compex Tecnologia, CipherLab's official...

USPS Rents Post Boxes via the Internet.
September 15, 2008... The USPS has started renting post boxes over the Internet. The new PO Boxes Online service lets customers find, apply for and rent a Post Office Box by going to www.usps.com/poboxes instead of making a trip to a post office. They can use...

Swiss Post Upgrades Print & Send.(Swiss Post International)(Brief article)
September 15, 2008... Swiss Post has updated its Print & Send online service so customers can transmit standing orders to the post electronically. The application can also be used to send letters with proof of delivery. The widgetry automatically enters addresses...

Austrian Post Buys Another Hungarian Firm.
September 15, 2008... Austrian Post has acquired the Hungarian company Cont Media Hungary kft. It already owns feibra Hungary, the local leader in unaddressed direct mail. Cont Media is number two, giving Austrian Post a 60% market share and roughly another 10...

Deutsche Post Watch.(Brief article)
September 15, 2008... While Deutsche Post says negotiations with UPS are progressing, the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, because of job losses, has scheduled a congressional hearing into DHL's deal to have UPS haul its packages in the US and...

Active Data Services OEMs Pitney Widgetry for Production Intelligence Solutions.
September 15, 2008... Active Data Services is going to OEM critical hardware and software from Pitney Bowes for its outsourcing solutions. Active Data has developed a comprehensive software platform and a suite of services for what is called relational management...

Browser War III Starts; Battle Heads to the Cloud.
September 15, 2008... Google has come out from behind the Firefox browser that it's been pumping money into - and profiting royally from - to take direct aim at Microsoft with a browser of its very own. The widgetry is called Google Chrome and Google Chrome,...

Red Hat Buys Qumranet.
September 15, 2008... Red Hat never did like Xen. It liked it even less after Citrix bought XenSource a year ago and Microsoft cuddled up with Citrix, Virtual Iron and Novell, Xen's first Linux promoter. Among other things, it didn't have control of the technology....

Dell Unveils its Nettop.
September 15, 2008... Dell has finally trotted out its widely anticipated nettop, giving it what HP and Asustek already have. Dell calls its 1.6GHz Atom-based widget the Inspiron Mini 9 and is selling the thing at www.dell.com in the US, Canada, Japan and some...

Microsoft Claims a Million Workspace Registrations.
September 15, 2008... Microsoft claims that a million people have signed up for the beta of the Office Live Workspace in the six months it's been available. Since Microsoft's branding is so utterly God awful, we'll remind you that that's the free, web-based,...

HP Designs Blade To Host Virtual Machines.
September 15, 2008... HP has built what it calls the first server blade designed specifically to host virtual machines out of quad-core Opteron 2300 chips. Its name is the ProLiant BL495c. According to Jim Ganthier, director of marketing and solutions for HP's...

Citrix To Deliver XenApp 5.
September 15, 2008... Citrix has delivered XenApp 5, its next-generation application virtualization solution, a rev of its old rechristened Presentation Server, a k a MetaFrame, claiming the new release breaks performance and operating cost barriers. However the...

VMware's Hypervisor Gets Microsoft Stamp.
September 15, 2008... VMware's ESX hypervisor has become the first third-party hypervisor accredited under Microsoft's months-old Server Virtualization Validation Program (SVVP). The validation applies to VMware ESX 3.5 update 2 (ESX 3.5u2) and means VMware...

IBM Claims New Blade Server Cuts Security Threats.
September 15, 2008... IBM claims its new intelligent blade server will reduce security threats - such as Denial of Service (DoS) attacks and viruses - while helping server providers manage network traffic better. It says consumers are using advanced communications...

Microsoft Buying Greenfield Online.
September 15, 2008... Microsoft is buying Greenfield Online, an Internet market research company, for $486 million after the Connecticut firm rejected an offer from Quadrangle for $60 million less. Microsoft is supposed to dump Greenfield's online surveys on an...

OOXML Standardization Naysayers Apparently Throw in the Towel.
September 15, 2008... Representatives of the state IT organizations of Brazil, South Africa and Venezuela, three of the four countries that protested ISO's standardization of Microsoft's Office Open XML (OOXML) file format, have apparently throw in the towel on...

Adobe Picks Alfresco for its Cloud Infrastructure.(Adobe Systems Inc.)(Brief article)
September 15, 2008... Adobe is using Alfresco's open source ECM software as the file repository in Acrobat.com, a set of free online services - file sharing and storage, PDF conversion, online word processing and web conferencing - that can be used to create and...

Novell Results Mixed.
September 15, 2008... Novell lost $15.1 million, or four cents a share, in its fiscal third quarter - up from $3.7 million, or a penny, last year - on revenues up 3.5% to $245.2 million, better than the $241.4 million generally expected. Its operating margin was...

Sony Recalls Laptops.
September 15, 2008... Sony is recalling 438,000 Vaio laptops for fear some errant wires will cause a short and set the things on fire. The problem affects the VGN-TZ100, 200, 300 and 2000. It's unclear what the promised repairs will cost. A couple of years ago Dell,...

Egenera To 'PAN' VMware.
September 15, 2008... Egenera is about to preview a new joint capacity-on-demand solution that's supposed to provide VMware VirtualCenter users with direct access to Egenera's PAN Manager processing widgetry. With capacity-on-demand, users can automatically deploy...

Do Regulators Matter in the Google-Yahoo Deal?
September 15, 2008... While at the Democratic National Convention, Google CEO Eric Schmidt, a Barack Obama technology advisor, told Bloomberg Television that Google's deal with Yahoo will start in October, suggesting it didn't much matter what regulators in the US...

Cloud Watch.
September 15, 2008... Microsoft is building its fourth big data center in Iowa. It's got one in the state of Washington, another in Texas and a third in Chicago.

Royal Mail Figures It's Found a Direct Mail Winner.
September 22, 2008... Royal Mail has launched a new advertising and communications solution called Matter that's literally supposed to put brands into consumers' hands. Matter is a box that fits the standard dimensions of a UK household letterbox, containing a range...

USPS Using Transportation Modeling To Save Money.
September 22, 2008... Apparently a piece of optimization software, the Highway Corridor Analytic Program (HCAP), has helped the United States Postal Service save over $5 million this year on transportation costs. The widgetry was developed by the USPS and IBM using...

Earth Class Mail Names COO.
September 22, 2008... Earth Class Mail has hired Sarah Carr, the president and COO of Print Inc prior to its sale to Pitney Bowes, as its chief operating officer, responsible for enterprise, government & military, retail and inside sales, marketing, operations and...

E-Commerce Tickles Brazil Post Into Going Multi-Lingual.
September 22, 2008... In response to the spread of e-commerce, Brazil Post has unveiled an English version of Post Online, its 10-year-old virtual agency at www.correios.com.br/colinternational. Spanish will be next. The post says the numbers justify the move; the...

Diebold Gets USPS Security Contract.
September 22, 2008... The United States Postal Service has hired Diebold Security to implement and manage a nationwide, technologically advanced video security program involving more than 40,000 sites. The initial contract with Diebold will run three years but could...

DHL Looks to the Orient for Salvation.(DHL Airways Inc.)(Brief article)
September 22, 2008... DHL says it expects to get 25% of its revenues from Asia-Pacific by 2010, up from 23%. The company figures the region will grow 13% this year, down five points from its performance between 2000 and 2007. It's currently depending on the US,...

Economies Outside US Weakening: FedEx.
September 22, 2008... FedEx has toted up its sums again and now says that it should see earnings of $1.23 a share for the quarter ended August 31, not the 80 cents to a buck it had been saying. However, it still thinks it can only do $4.75-$5.25 for the year as...

Deutsche Post To Sell Piece of its Postbank Position.
September 22, 2008... Deutsche Post will be selling over half its stake in its retail bank to Deutsche Bank, Germany's biggest bank. The move is supposed to let Deutsche Post focus on its core logistics business. Deutsche Post owns 50% plus one share in Postbank,...

Pitney Launches New Mailstream Productivity Series.
September 22, 2008... Pitney Bowes has introduced a new Mailstream Productivity Series, a new generation of ultra high-speed production mail systems that's supposed to take performance to a new level, running 18,000-26,000 mail pieces an hour with fewer stoppages...

NComputing & its Disruptive $70 PC.
September 22, 2008... IDC doesn't recognize the company that claims to be the leading thin client house on the planet as a through and through thin client company. Seems two-thirds of it doesn't fit IDC's standard definition of what a thin client should be....

Novell To Sup as Guest at the Hyper-V Table.
September 22, 2008... The industry's resident odd couple, Microsoft and Novell, announced a joint virtualization solution for customers running mixed-source environments, promoting it as "the first complete, fully supported and optimized virtualization solution to...

Microsoft Matches VMware's Zero Price Tag.
September 22, 2008... Matching VMware tit for tat, Microsoft cut the anticipated price of its standalone, OS-detached, hypervisor to zip, zero, nada. When released sometime in the next 30 days, Hyper-V Server 2008 will be free for the download and can be used to...

Jerry Brown Piles On Yahoogle.
September 22, 2008... California's own Attorney General Jerry Brown has decided that his office ought to investigate the proposed monopoly-enhancing Yahoo-Google revenue-sharing ad deal too. Brown's letting the Justice Department do his legwork and is reviewing...

Google Kinda Sorta Makes Privacy Concessions.
September 22, 2008... Sick of trying to justify its data retention policies to the privacy police, particularly the European privacy police, Google's lawyers said on the company's official blog that it was cutting the time it holds user-identifiable information from...

HP Claims To Break the 24-Hour Battery-Life Barrier.
September 22, 2008... Describing it as the Holy Grail of mobile computing, HP says it has developed an ultra-capacity battery that can run for 24 hours on a single charge and has put it, as an option, in a new XP-only EliteBook 6930p notebook. However, HP warns...

Sun Adds to the Free Hypervisor Heap.
September 22, 2008... With a ranking Microsoft ideologue dancing attendance, Sun Wednesday trotted out and open sourced xVM Server, its promised Xen-based bare-metal hypervisor, and xVM Ops Center 2.0, its management update. It will sell support, including patches...

Apple & Microsoft Face a 'Warrior Rabbit'.
September 22, 2008... Canonical has nicknamed the future Ubuntu 9.04 Jaunty Jackalope, a jackalope being an imaginary creature said to be a cross between a jackrabbit and an antelope. Picture a bunny rabbit with antlers like the star of "Boundin." Canonical CEO Mark...

Adobe AIRs Numbers.
September 22, 2008... Adobe says there have been more than 25 million installations of applications deployed on AIR in the six months since its release. It counts AOL, eBay, Nasdaq and the New York Times as users. Atlantic Records and DirecTV are joining the list.

Amazon To Sell One Laptop's XO.(Amazon.com Inc.)(One Laptop Per Child )(Brief article)
September 22, 2008... One Laptop Per Child is going to resuscitate that Give One Get One scheme it tried last Christmas to boost the number of XO machines that Quanta was making. But this year Amazon is going to be handling sales and distribution to eliminate last...

Berners-Lee Faults IE.
September 22, 2008... W3C director Tim Berners-Lee, the creator of the World Wide Web, doesn't usually go around knocking people's products but he made an exception of Microsoft the other day when he talked to the AP and told the news service that Internet...

UPU Puts Out .Post RFI.(Universal Postal Union )
September 29, 2008... The Universal Postal Union (UPU) has put out a long-awaited Request for Information (RFI) seeking proposals on the management and operation of the .post Top-Level Domain. It's looking to scare up one or more entities that would develop and...

USPS' Business Shrinks by Nine Billion Mail Pieces.(United States Postal Service)(Brief article)
September 29, 2008... Citing crazy oil prices, inflated paper costs, the mess in the financial markets, the shift of communications to the Internet and questions about mail's environmental impact US Postmaster General John Potter said mail volumes declined by nine...

Itella Signs E-Commerce Pact with Major Retailer.
September 29, 2008... Kesko, the big Finnish-based retailer with 2,000 stores handling everything from groceries to RVs, and Itella, the Finnish post, have cut an "extensive cooperation agreement" for developing electronic business operations. The aim of the still...

CertiOne Reportedly Sees Uptick in Commercial User.(Brief article)
September 29, 2008... Five-year-old Certipost, the Belgian Post's electronic document house, claims to have more than 500,000 consumers on its CertiONE e-communication platform, a milestone that puts it ahead of its business plan and past the early adopter phase, it...

FedEx Earnings Fall 22%; Prices to Rise.
September 29, 2008... FedEx returned earnings of $384 million, $1.23 a share, for the quarter ended August 31, down 22% year-over-year, but pretty much what was expected what with all the warnings of slackening US sales and high fuel costs. Revenues were up 8% to...

USPS Web Site Gets Facelift.
September 29, 2008... The USPS web site has gotten a facelift. The interface is supposed to be less cluttered with easier-to-find links to the products and services like online shipping, package pickup and shipping supplies and graphics highlighting the most popular...

Melissa Teams with Maponics.(Melissa Data has teamed up with Maponics LLC)(Brief article)
September 29, 2008... Melissa Data, the data quality, mailing and marketing solutions developer, has teamed up with Maponics LLC, the postal mapping people recommended by the USPS, to provide direct marketers with a free mashup that will let businesses visualize...

Deutsche Post's VAT Exemption on the Line.
September 29, 2008... It looks like Deutsche Post may lose the VAT exemption that competitors claim gives it an unfair advantage. The tax break is supposed to subsidize the post's cost of delivering mail to outlying regions but Germany's Finance Ministry, under...

Deutsche Post Denies It Will Abandon DHL US.
September 29, 2008... Deutsche Post has denied a local press report that it will abandon the US, where the post's express arm DHL has taken a withering beating. Handelsblatt, a German business paper, said Deutsche Post, which has previously embarked on a two-year $2...

Group 1 Unveils MAIL360.
September 29, 2008... Pitney Bowes Group 1 Software has unveiled MAIL360, calling it the most comprehensive solution to leverage the United States Postal Service's Intelligent Mail technology. MAIL360 is supposed to increase business efficiency while ensuring...

VMware to Microsoft: Choke on My Dust.
September 29, 2008... Microsoft built virtualization on top of its operating system - which supposedly gives it something of an edge - at least on the cost side. So now VMware, under serious competitive pressure because of its envied market leadership - and needing...

Fujitsu Apes HP/EDS.
September 29, 2008... Evidently HP's acquisition of EDS persuaded Fujitsu that there's money to be made in the services sector because it's combining its US product and service businesses under one roof to drive revenue growth and help it compete against IBM and HP....

Google CEO Says Yahoo-Google Deal's a Go.
September 29, 2008... In the absence of the regulators investigating the proposed Yahoo-Google deal saying either "aye" or "nay," Google CEO Eric Schmidt told the press that Google will start putting search ads on Yahoo's sites on or about October 11, the...

Things are Getting Worse, Dell Says.
September 29, 2008... Adding to the Galveston-like carnage that is Wall Street, Dell recalled its warning of only - note only - three weeks ago when it posted its earnings-frayed Q2 results that the lousy American economy was spreading to Western Europe and parts of...

Oracle's Earnings Soar.(Oracle Corp.)(Financial report)
September 29, 2008... Oracle drew the short straw and posted its Q1 results amid the Wall Street wreckage. It immediately described its exposure to banks as "immaterial" and to financial institutions on the ropes as "de minimis" even though it's supposed to get ~12%...

Intel Releases its Six-Headed Monster Chip.
September 29, 2008... Intel has formally announced its six-core 45nm Dunnington chip, officially christening it the Xeon 7400 and claiming it sets a new standard in virtualization performance. AMD doesn't have anything like it. The company said a full-blown...

NEC & Unisys Produce First Identical Machines.
September 29, 2008... NEC and Unisys have produced their first common platform three years after they bound themselves to do it, using as its base Intel's new four- and six-core Dunnington chip. The pair is pressing the chip to its outer limits in a mainframe-y...

VMware Spawns Banks of Clouds.
September 29, 2008... VMware has whistled up outside support for its newfangled vCloud Initiative, collecting upwards of 100 partners such as BT, Rackspace and Verizon Business, it said, for the push to deliver enterprise-class cloud computing by federating compute...

AppSense Claims To Be VDI's Sine Qua Non.
September 29, 2008... UK-based AppSense Ltd claims to be the only show in town that can automatically personalize standardized virtual desktop environments. It turned up at VMworld this week with AppSense Environment Manager 8.0 in tow. The software, which now...

RightScale Goes Multi-Cloud.(RightScale working with FlexiScale clouds )(Brief article)
September 29, 2008... RightScale, the Santa Barbara cloud management start-up, has gone multi-cloud. Besides Amazon's EC2, where its users reportedly have hundreds of thousands of instances running, RightScale widgetry now works on GoGrid and UK-based FlexiScale...

Citrix Joins the Cloud Race.
September 29, 2008... Citrix took its virtualization widgetry, repackaged it, and went into the cloud business the other day, announcing a new Citrix Cloud Center (C3) product family targeted at the would-be hosted cloud services that are chasing both consumers and...

NEC Pioneers the Virtual Desktop.
September 29, 2008... NEC, it appears, has rolled out one of the world's largest implementations of VMware virtual desktops, cutting TCO by an estimated 46% over the next three years. It's got a mere three people supporting the 12,000 thin clients in production so...

IBM Claims VDI Breakthrough.
September 29, 2008... IBM, the company that invented virtualization back in the mainframe's Pleistocene period, claims it's made a breakthrough that will accelerate the spread of the virtual desktop by slashing VDI storage requirements by as much as 80%. The...

OVF 1.0 Standardized.
September 29, 2008... The Distributed Management Task Force (DMTF) says the Open Virtualization Format 1.0 (OVF), developed by Dell, HP, VMware, XenSource, Microsoft and IBM for packaging and distribution a virtual appliance, is now officially a standard. It's part...

Tim Berners-Lee Kicks Off W3 Foundation.(World Wide Web Foundation)(Brief article)
September 29, 2008... World Wide Web inventor Tim Berners-Lee is starting a World Wide Web Foundation, set to launch early next year, to "advance a web that is open and free" and find a way to introduce that 80% of the world's population still enjoying normal,...

Sun Backs Data Warehouse Start-up.
September 29, 2008... Sun has kicked in on Infobright's $10 million C round, joining existing investors Flybridge Capital Partners and RBC Venture Partners in backing the MySQL-integrated analytic data warehouse start-up. Infobright just went open source and the...

Wyse & Novell Deliver Thin Client OS.
September 29, 2008... Wyse and Novell are delivering the promised Wyse Enhanced SUSE Linux Enterprise, an operating system designed for thin computing. It will be available only on Wyse devices starting with Wyse's X50L mobile thin clients in Q4. The pair quotes...

Upstart Seeks To Overthrow OpenOffice.
September 29, 2008... Softmaker Software GmbH, a German Office wannabe, has taken out after open source darling OpenOffice, saying it's not good enough to score against Microsoft and proposing its own widgetry as a substitute. The company has just put out a public...

eBay Layoffs Rumored.
September 29, 2008... There's talk, picked up by Barron's, of eBay laying off 10% of its 15,000 people because business is falling off.