Australian Cybermalls News

Microsoft will officially launch Internet Explorer 4.0 tomorrow. The new browser (which has been in public beta testing for the last six months) will feature push-content broadcasting and - for those who want it - complete integration with the Windows95 desktop. However, most users who want to avoid a lengthy 16Mb to 23Mb Internet download are expected to pay $A9.95 to obtain the browser on CD-ROM direct from Microsoft's Australian offices, or from other Microsoft regional headquarters world-wide. The desktop integration feature of Explorer 4.0 attracted particularly heavy criticism from beta testers and the official release is expected to contain last-minute modifications which allow users to set this function off. The release comes almost a year after the troubled Internet Explorer 3.0, which proved unable to run most common JavaScripts and Java applets. It also arrives more than 5 months behind the much slimmer, faster and relatively bug-free Netscape Communicator 4.0.

The Java Lobby - a new group of 1600 independent Java developers and programmers - has called on Microsoft to stop trying to sabotage the language, even though the large scale success of Java would probably spell the end of Microsoft's dominance of PC software. In an open letter to CEO Bill Gates, the Java Lobby accused Microsoft of trying to fragment the Java initiative by delivering a non-standard, Windows-specific version of the language that would only run properly on Windows-based machines. The group has called on Microsoft to make good on its earlier public promises to support Java. The Java Lobby have also questioned whether the Java compiler to be included in the up-coming Internet Explorer 4.0 release will truly be able to run Java, or only "Microsoft brand" Java.

Australian charities will soon have a permanent home on the Net when a new site called Web:)Aid opens. The new site will host the home pages of several major national charities such as Save The Children Australia and the Victor Chang Cardiac Research Institute, and will include a directory for smaller or state-based charities. Web:)Aid - which is jointly sponsored by Ozemail, Spike, Compaq and Microsoft as a public service - will allow charities to sell merchandise, collect donations and recruit volunteer assistance online.

The popular AAA Matilda Australian multi-lingual search engine is to undergo its third major expansion in the last 18 months. The site - which is mirrored in Georgia, USA - is one of Australia's most popular. But continued traffic growth over the last few months has led to congestion, causing server overloads to become increasingly common at peak times. According to webmaster James Lilburne, another upgrade is now underway and AAA expect to be back to full operational capacity within the near future.

Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu have announced plans to launch a secure Internet-based document exchange system in Australia by the end of the year. The new commercial service - NetDox DoxIT - will use 128-key encryption and end-to-end delivery authentication, and provides a guarantee of up to $US25,000 that each document processed through NetBox is sent to the correct party in a secure way. The new service will allow secure digital transmission of contracts, insurance forms, legal briefs and financial documents over the Internet world-wide. Deloittes say they have been developing the system for the last two years and intend to price it below traditional courier costs.

Julie Oliver's Australian Cross-Stitch Patterns has become the first Australian Cybermalls site to receive a facelift as part of our gradual site-wide conversion from HTML 2.0 to HTML 3.2. The new site, unveiled today, makes use of fault-tolerant JavaScript that is unlikely to cause problems for users of Internet Explorer 3.x (which has notorious difficulties rendering JavaScript-enhanced pages, amongst many other well-documented defects). Over the last 13 months Julie Oliver's site has drawn over 45,000 visitors and gradually become one of the most popular cross-stitching sites in the world (and certainly the biggest of its kind in Australia). Australian Cybermalls will be unveiling significantly enhanced versions of many of the current sites we host, along with several new sites, over the next few months.

According to a study the the Gartner Group, the analog modems used by most home users today will continue to be the dominant method of getting online for both business and consumers over the next 5 years. By 2002, Gartner predict that analog modems will account for approximately 45 percent of the most frequent business remote access connections in the U.S.A and that no other alternative-higher-speed access method will achieve dominance as a next-generation technology in public access points within that time. Even beyond 2002, Gartner believe that analog modems will maintain a large and stable niche market share due to their importance to traveling users

The Australian grocery industry - manufacturers and retailers - have announced an ambitious plan to use high technology to revolutionise the industry's distribution mechanisms, lower operating costs and free up working capital currently held in large inventories. The medium-term plan, which has been hammered out at a series of breakthrough meetings between otherwise fierce competitors over the last two months, calls for manufacturers, wholesalers and retails to move towards an integrated "just in time" manufacturing model which would become the most advanced of its type in the world. Estimated savings from the high-tech realignment are expected to be at least $1.1 billion per annum.

Nominations for the second annual Australian Financial Review/Telstra Internet Awards will close within two weeks. The awards - which are designed to encourage the growth of the Australian Internet by recognising outstanding sites - have already attracted a record number of new entries in over 23 categories ranging from education through to commercial, government, entertainment and commercial sites. Nominations for the awards close on September 30th and preliminary judging to select finalists will occur in early October, with the ultimate winners announced towards the end of the year. Nominations are open to all Australian Internet sites, whether they are physically hosted in Australia or not.

The Federal Government today added "Information Economy" to the portfolio responsibilities already held by Communications and Arts Minister Senator Richard Alston. In its first response to two major reports it commissioned into IT industries earlier this year, the Government also announced that it would create a National Office for the Information Economy which will be established within Alston's portfolio to develop and co-ordinate policy relating to the regulatory, legal and physical infrastructure for online activity and the Government's use of new technologies. However responsibility for development and investment in information industries themselves will remain with Alston's fiercest critic, Industry Minister John Moore, and the Office of Government Information Technology - which is responsible for coordinating the Government's use of IT - will continue to be overseen by Finance Minister John Fahey.

Stung by widespread negative feedback to beta versions of its upcoming Internet Explorer 4.0 release, Microsoft has announced that the product will undergo radical last-minute surgery over the next two weeks before its official launch. The company said it believes that the last-minute modifications, which will bury many of the new features seen in early betas (such as single-click navigation and the ability to use Web pages as wallpaper) under menus or other settings that the user has to "turn on", will allay much of the annoyance that testers have expressed about the product. Explorer 4.0 will debut in minimum, standard and full versions. The standard version of the product is expected to weigh in at around 16 Mb which will require ISPs to distribute the product to their customers on CD-ROM.

In what must be one of the most unusual about-faces of 1997, Microsoft has challenged Sun Microsystems to hand oversight of the Java programming language it developed to an international standards organisation. Microsoft - in conjunction with long-time allies Intel, Compaq and Digital - argue that Sun has too much control over Java development. Last week the group issued an open letter which challenged Sun to relinquish its control over the future growth and development of the "universal programming language". Yet less than two months ago Microsoft strenuously opposed Sun's attempts to have have Java turned into a standard language with the International Standards Organisation (ISO). The surprise challenge follows recent market research studies which show that Java is now increasing its penetration into many areas beyond the Internet - particularly in the corporate and financial services areas. Microsoft's own proprietary Active-X technology, which the firm hailed as an alternative to Java when it was first released last year, has not enjoyed similar success.

The Australian Telecommunications Users Group (ATUG) has slammed both Telstra and Optus for their poor management following record writedowns in the annual results of both companies. ATUG has calculated that Telstra's writedowns amount to $112 per customer and its "dividend" to the Government at $414 per customer. "The losses and writedowns of both companies have had a devastating impact on the provision of affordable services," ATUG managing director Allan Horsley said. "This is an industry of excessive prices with little focus on customers." Meanwhile, British Telecom Australia has announced that it, too, will be seeking over $650 million dollar damages settlement from Telstra following a collapsed contract with the NSW State Government which BT alleges was due to Telstra's interference, and the Australian Shareholders Association has called on Telstra to justify its figures prior to its impending public float, questioning just how much its books have been "cooked" to make the company appear attractive to investors.

According to a recent US study by Gallup, small businesses are adopting the Internet much more slowly than large corporations despite the fact that the costs of adding an online connection are literally petty cash. According to Gallup's survey, more than 77% of US businesses with fewer than 100 staff now have at least one a computer but less than 40% of these companies are online. The figure dips even lower in businesses with less than 25 staff, with only 19% having an Internet email address. The study also found that the growth of PC penetration into the small business market also appears to have maxed out with the number of small businesses having at least one computer rising only 2% between 1994 and 1997 - less than half the growth rate of the previous three-year period. Based on the figures, Gallup believe that the average penetration of the Internet in the US small business community is now 25%.

Optus have launched an action in the Federal Court against rival Telstra alleging that the former monopolist has used its enormous market power to cross-subsidise its pay-TV operations, pushing Optus' own operations deeply into the red and keeping the company out of the local call market. Telstra has denied the allegation. The announcement of the legal action comes only weeks before Telstra's $12 billion partial privatisation. Meanwhile, Federal Finance Minister John Fahey has issued a "please explain" notice to Daiwa Securities, the Japanese stockbroking firm who will act as lead manager of the Telstra float in the Asian region following allegations in Tokyo yesterday that the firm illegally transferred $A568,000 to compensate a corporate racketeer for trading losses. If the firm cannot adequately explain its actions the Government may sever Daiwa's connection with the float.

Netscape and Silicon Graphics have announced a joint project called Everest to produce "super-servers" which will deliver Web content at least 10 times faster than current servers are capable of doing. The new servers are expected to be on the market within 2 years and will lead to significant improvements in average Internet speeds once the machines come into widespread use, delivering content from busy sites at close to real-time speeds. The super-fast servers will use a combination of Netscape's web and directory software along with SGI's Irix operating system, a variant of Unix. The partnership is the latest in a line of joint ventures undertaken by both companies since 1994 and the Everest servers will be primarily targeted at very large sites and ISPs. If successful, the venture could seriously erode the server software market shares currently held by Apache and Microsoft.

In a complex "stalking horse" deal designed to fool both competitors and market analysts, AOL has emerged as the surprise buyer of ailing veteran online service Compuserve, which originally thought it was being bought out by WorldCom. In a complex deal which has only been unravelled today, Compuserve was purchased by WorldCom from its previous owners H&R Block for close to $US1.2 billion in stock. WorldCom then immediately onsold the company to AOL, disclosing as it did so that AOL had been the ultimate purchaser all the time and that its own interest was purely peripheral. AOL - who have close to 9 million subscribers and are now the largest ISP in the world - have announced plans to integrate many of Compuserve's features into their own online offerings. The company have also announced that they are interested in opening a branch of AOL in Australia "within the near future" and competing head-to-head with domestic ISPs.

WebTV will not appear in Australia for at least another 12 months, according to Microsoft's Internet strategist Mike Olsson. Speaking at a ComTech forum in Queensland this week, Olsson said that there was no exact launch date set, but he didn't see WebTV happening in Australia for at least a year. Microsoft spent $US400 million buying out WebTV earlier this year from its inventors, only to see promising early sales of the technology slowly wither away. WebTV allows home users to receive the Internet on their TV screens via a special black-box connection. It is aimed primarily at blue-collar households who don't have a PC at home but are likely to have a television. However, it doesn't allow downloads and the level of interaction is limited to email.

After apparently surmounting technical problems that held average dial-up speeds down to 40kbps or less, the push to introduce standardised 56kbps modems has run into another snag: patent infringement. According to a search of foreign patents by the International Telecommunication Union (ITU), which was scheduled to meet next month to begin drafting a global 56kbps standard, the basic patents on the technology behind 56kbps modems are owned by Townsend Computer Tools, a small company in Silicon Valley. The immediate fallout of the discovery is that hopes of arriving at a 56kbps standard by January 1998 now appear to be derailed, and fully interoperable 56kbps modems may now be delayed by at least another 12 months.

The Australian Tax Office has recommended that Internet taxation schemes should be investigated as part of any future reform of the tax system. Saying that it didn't see the Net pose any serious threat to its current tax revenue base over the next 2 years, the ATO nonetheless said it believes that future growth in Internet commerce may change this rapidly. If so, the ATO wants to have a mechanism set in place so that it can begin drawing taxes from Internet businesses as soon as possible. Measures the ATO would like to institute are taxes on software downloaded off the Net, compulsory registration of Internet businesses and virtual hosts, and compulsory display of ACN numbers and similar stamps on all sites.

Yahoo, the Internet's oldest and largest hierarchical search engine, has opened a mirror in Australia. The local site offers the ability to limit searches to Australian and New Zealand sites only (much the same as the competing ANZWERS) but is in all other respects largely the same as its US parent. The new Yahoo site covers approximately 14,000 Australian and New Zealand sites. The "missing" 16,000 to 20,000 sites will appear over time as the engine is updated. Yahoo are partnering the site with The Australian (who will provide news feeds), Village Roadshow (who will provide entertainment news) and computer publishing group APN, who hold the local rights for Ziff-Davis content.

The number of Australian Internet sites increased by around 1% during August 1997 according to our monthly Australian Internet Growth Index, which has been measuring the number of sites on the Australian Internet for the last 20 months. Most capitals registered a small gain in August, but Brisbane, Adelaide and Hobart all showed slight falls as the flow of new content failed to eclipse the closure of old sites. The September 1st figures (with August 1st figures in brackets) are as follows:

Australian Internet Growth Index August 1997
(Figures Show Estimated Sites)

Brisbane - 3,331 (3,344)
Sydney - 10,786 (10,547)
Melbourne - 8,180 (8,112)
Adelaide - 3,180 (3,190)

Perth - 3,198 (3,136)
Hobart - 1,223 (1,234)
Canberra - 2,994 (2,988)
Darwin - 2,672 (2,622)

During August Australian Cybermalls displayed 59,477 storefronts, an increase of 4,000 on our July visitation figures of 55,441. This required our server to deliver more than 270,000 pages of information and we used close to 7 GBytes of bandwidth to do it. The August figures equated to an average of 1,918 visitors per day. For comparison, 12 months ago in August 1996 we displayed 12,721 storefronts to an average of 410 people a day.