Thursday 30th
April 1998
SEARCH ENGINE STOCKS
"HYPERINFLATED"
According to a study by influential
financial magazine Forbes, the
current US stock prices for most of the major listed search engines are
hyperinflated and may take a nosedive if the market loses its passion for
Internet-related shares. "The price-to-sales ratio of the Internet sector
is between 7 and 10. The Standard & Poor 500 is just 1.7," said analyst
Duncan Richardson. "But the average price-to-sales ratio for the four
search engines (Lycos, Excite!, Infoseek and Yahoo) is a whopping 28 times".
Most professional market observers polled by Forbes in the study feel that
current prices all four stocks will take a sharp fall when the latest Internet
bull run ends. "I think paying $125 for something like Yahoo!, which might
earn 40 cents to 50 cents a share is a little over the top," said Glickenhaus'
Jim Glickenhaus. "Yahoo! is probably the best-known brand and it's still
only a marginally profitable operation. Frankly, this seems to be
unsustainable."
Wednesday 29th
April 1998
DISCOUNT STOCK TRADING
ACCELERATES
The future of Australian
stockbroking may be in doubt following the launch of two new electronic
share-trading ventures earlier this week, both of which hope to cash in on
the boom in Internet-based financial trading. One of the new sites -
Equityworld - hopes
to act as a referral point for partner brokers, offering online buy/sell
order messaging through its advertisers, a personal push mechanism for real-time
company announcements and free Java-based performance charts. But the other
- E*TRADE Australia - has
elected to do without traditional brokers altogether, instead offering visitors
a smorgasbord of real-time quotes, charts, ASX company announcements, AAP
newsfeeds and a personalised market page. Recent domestic Internet surveys
have disclosed that 25% of Australians have now visited an online financial
service at least once, and several brokers who launched online ventures 24
months ago are now reaping substantial rewards from their investment at the
expense of others who adopted a "wait and see" approach. Significantly, both
new sites substantially undercut the fees being asked by existing online
trading sites such as the popular Fairfax Trading Room site, further driving
down margins in a vicious spiral that may eventually reduce real-world-only
brokers to an industry rump.
Tuesday 28th
April 1998
AMAZON BOOKS EXPANDS
Amazon
Books - the Internet's best-known booksellers - have embarked on
an ambitious expansion program in an attempt to make the struggling operation
profitable. Amazon announced today that it plans to acquire Bookpages
(the UK's largest online bookseller) and Telebook (Germany's largest
online bookseller) to facilitate its entry into the European online market.
The company has also intimated that it hopes to enter the online music business
by asking visitors to nominate features they'd like to see in "the music
store of your dreams" and has said that it will acquire the Internet Movie
Database in an attempt to enter the online video market as well. Announcing
its latest quarterly loss ($US9.26 million for the March quarter, down from
a loss of $9.33 million in the December quarter), Amazon said that it hoped
to turn a profit "at some time in the future". Despite world-wide publicity
and a stock that has traded as high as $US100 per share, Amazon has yet to
turn a profit.
Monday 27th
April 1998
WE INSTALL A NEW IT
SYSTEM
Australian Cybermalls installed
a new computer system over the last week, increasing our computing capacity
and updating several core processes. However, the upgrade - which was supposed
to have been effected over a 24 to 48 hour period - spun out several days
longer than originally anticipated, preventing daily updates to our site
for the entire week. This affected our daily Australian Cybermalls news service,
the daily Dr Fun cartoon and the prompt processing of emails. We're now fully
back online and will be resuming normal services from today. Our apologies
to any visitor who was inconvenienced by this unexpected and unannounced
down-time.
Friday 17th
April 1998
NAVIGATION, FINDABILITY BEAT DESIGN
- STUDY
According to a small-scale study
by user interface analyst Jared Spool, presented yesterday at San Francisco's
Web Builder conference. Jared found that in a test of 10 3000-page web sites
last year, study participants rated the most expensive site (reputed to have
cost $300 million) the worst and a $10,000 site the best. The study found
that users wanted to find information quickly and easily - but poor site
navigation systems and inadequately descriptive links made this unnecessarily
difficult on large sites. Surprisingly, the study also found that designers
aiming for clarity with lots of white space and sparse text were defeating
their purposes. Users reported that more white space caused sites to be too
complicated, over-detailed, visually confusing, unclear, and "not enticing."
Mistrustful of the results, the researchers tested the effects of white space
five different ways, only to come up with similar results. Another surprise
to come out of the study was that users find that the less "readable" a page
is, the more authoritative, clear, and useful it is - and that users found
animation and movement irritating on a site, though they were attracted to
animation on strip ads.
Thursday 16th
April 1998
MAGAZINER PROPOSES NET
TAX
Although US President Clinton
promised "no new taxes" for the Internet last year, it appears he did not
rule out Net taxes altogether. Clinton's Internet advisor Ira Magaziner
today unveiled a plan to introduce a global consumption tax to the Internet
by the year 2000. Under the Magaziner plan, all credit card purchases made
over the Net would automatically attract the tax, which would be added to
the sales total, deducted from the consumer's credit card and remitted to
the local taxing authority direct from the credit card company. If implemented,
the burden of collecting and paying tax would pass from businesses to consumers
and the world's credit card companies would become defacto tax collectors.
Magaziner said that he hopes to obtain global agreement on the idea as early
as October this year, and to have a planet-wide treaty in place by 2000.
Wednesday 15th
April 1998
OZEMAIL MOVES TO
SATELLITE
Australia's largest ISP
OzEmail, fed up with the
high bandwidth charges levied by Telstra and Optus for
trans-Pacific Internet access, yesterday unveiled a new deal it's struck
with AAPT to send and receive overseas Internet access via satellite,
effectively bypassing both telcos and removing OzEmail's vast traffic flows
from the international cable networks that connect the Australian Internet
to the rest of the world. OzEmail took the wraps off a new satellite dish
at their St Leonards' head office in Sydney to mark the occasion, announcing
that they'd invested several million dollars to purchase the necessary hardware
to run the T3 trans-Pacific connection via AAPT's PanAmSat2 satellite. OzEmail
also said that they'd had the system under testing for a month and were happy
with it. Additional dishes will now be unfurled at the company's other offices
in Melbourne, Brisbane and Auckland over the next two months. OzEmail currently
provides dial-up access services for 150,000 Australians.
Friday 10th
April 1998
WE TURN 2 YEARS OLD!
Australian Cybermalls will turn
two years old over the coming Easter weekend. Our site began operations on
29th March 1996 but we were unable to get our first counters operating until
a few weeks later on April 12th. As a result, we've regarded the 12th as
our "official" birthday ever since. During the last 24 months we've been
visited by close to 800,000 people; have steadily expanded from three sites
to over twenty, and increased our bandwidth from 64K ISDN to T3 to handle
the increasing traffic across our doors. We've also been delighted (and often
surprised) by the many awards that have been kindly bestowed on us and the
extremely positive comments that have come to us via email from our friends
all across the planet. Over the coming year Australian Cybermalls will continue
to expand and many of our sites will be fully refurbished to bring them into
line with contemporary browser capabilities. We'll be having a slight break
(to celebrate, and to accommodate the Easter holiday) and will return on
Wednesday, April 15th. Thankyou everyone - and have a happy Easter too!
Thursday 9th
April 1998
YAHOO: 32.4 MILLION VISITS A
MONTH
According to Internet research
agency Relevant
Knowledge, Yahoo/Four11 was the world's busiest Internet site in
March 1998, drawing an estimated 32.4 million visitors over the age of 12
during the 27-day survey period. Next busiest were Netscape (23.4 million),
Excite/Webcrawler (19.3 million), Microsoft (18 million) and AOL (17.7 million).
Relevant Knowledge were announcing their list of the "Top 25 Web Properties".
A comparative list of the Top 25 .COM domains prepared for the same survey,
however, discloses that Yahoo leads Netscape, Microsoft, AOL and Excite.
The fastest-moving sites during February/March 1998? Relevant Knowledge ascribe
the biggest growth to Kelly Blue Book (400,000 to 909,000 visitors over the
survey period), followed by United Media (495,000 to 932,000) and the University
of Washington (411,000 to 721,000).
Wednesday 8th
April 1998
WE RATE IN US TOP 100!
Australian Cybermalls was the
83rd most popular Australian site for US audiences in August 1997, according
to 100HOT, who released their
.AU survey findings today. To our great surprise we came in immediately below
the excellent OzEmail-Inktomi ANZWERS Search Engine and a few points below
the world-famous QANTAS site. According to 100HOT, the most popular Australian
destination for US visitors was OzEmail's home page, along with the home
pages of more than 22 other Australian ISPs. Australian academic sites also
polled strongly, with over 20 university and government sites in the list.
Purely commercial sites (excluding ISPs) accounted for only 44 of the top
100, with miscellaneous sites the remainder. According to the caches 100hot
analyses, the busiest commercial site from a US perspective was the Australian
Stock Exchange (at #3), with the Sydney Morning Herald (#4) and The Age (#8)
both polling strongly.
Tuesday 7th
April 1998
NET "MOST IMPORTANT MEDIA" TO
USERS
According to an online survey
conducted by Yahoo!, most
Australian Internet users would give up magazines, newspapers, TV and radio
before they'd sacrifice online access. When asked to select the media they'd
dispense with if they had to give one up, 33% said they'd forgo magazines;
24% said newspapers; 20% opted for TV; 17% for radio; and only 6% said that
turning off the Internet would be their first choice. The survey also found
that 44% of respondents spend 10 hours or more online each week (with 19%
logging more than 20 hours online each week) and that 33% of respondents
were female. Further, the survey disclosed that more than 40% of respondents
were between 30 and 49 years old and that a "significant proportion" of users
had already used the Internet to purchase products, reflecting a broadening
of the user base towards general population demographics and the increasingly
mainstream penetration the Net is assuming in Australian households.
Monday 6th April
1998
ANTISPAMMERS GO ON
STRIKE
In what may prove a seminal
point in the ongoing war against spam, the 30 voluntary antispammers who
block spam messages appearing on usenet newsgroups declared an indefinite
strike today with the idea of encouraging small and medium-sized ISPs to
get "very, very serious" about installing anti-spam mechanisms on their systems.
Although most large ISPs now do this as a matter of course, many smaller
and medium-sized ISPs have ignored the issue according to Chris Lewis,
one of the strike's organisers, relying on the unpaid work of the antispammers
to keep most newsgroup services under control. As a result, they've never
had to grapple with the reality of how spam will cripple their systems if
the antispammers weren't cancelling spam messages before they were posted.
"They'll start seeing the results tomorrow," Lewis said. "There will be at
least some ISPs who were relying on us to control spam who will roll over
and explode. Others will have a meltdown as the week progresses. We don't
like doing this and we know it will inconvenience a lot of people - but ideally,
the strike will force ISPs to see the extent of the problem and start taking
measures to prevent it." In other news: Australian Cybermalls' News
has been delayed the last few days due to illness. We apologise to all our
regular visitors. Normal transmission resumes today.
Friday 3rd April
1998
INTEL MAY OPEN AUSTRALIAN CHIP
PLANT
Intel
may open a chip fabrication plant in Australia if the Federal Government
will meet the tax deduction and investment incentives offered by competing
Asian countries who want Intel to site its planned new Asia-Pacific plant
on their home soil. The news was unveiled today following a visit to Australia
by Intel president and CEO-elect Mr Craig Barrett, who was visiting Sydney
to firm up a joint-venture deal with the Channel 7 network (which wants to
broadcast a rival site to the Microsoft-Channel9 NineMSN) and to meet with
senior Government Ministers and officials. Intel, the world's largest
semi-conductor manufacturer, have a world-wide chain of chip fabrication
plants - and the company's investment in Ireland has been widely seen as
a seminal point in the rapid evolution of the Irish economy during the 1990s.
During the meeting, Mr Barret also said that he would be prepared to look
favourably on using some of Intel's massive venture-capital funds for Australian
projects.
Thursday 2nd
April 1998
INSURERS BACK AWAY FROM Y2K
LOSSES
Australian insurance companies
are taking the first steps towards preventing losses from the Y2K bug - by
telling customers that unless they take steps to ensure all their systems
are Y2K compliant the Australian insurance industry will wash its hands of
Y2K liability claims. Insurance Council of Australia chairman Alan
Mason, speaking at an industry conference, said it was "unreasonable
to expect insurers to meet the consequences of companies not modifying their
systems to take account of the known consequences of a known event. Insurance
is designed to protect against the consequences of unpredictable and
unforeseeable events ". He blamed the failure of a significant number of
companies to come to grips with the Y2K issue as "a failure of management
generally and a failure of IT management in particular". Mason was also highly
critical of hardware and chip manufacturers who have been producing non-Y2K
compliant chip sets until relatively recently. "Y2K was known about before
the first computer was invented. Why then were computer systems developed
that clearly would not be capable of working at the millennium?"
Wednesday 1st
April 1998
AUSTRALIAN NET BACKSLIDES
10%
The Australian Internet took
another sudden nosedive over the last month according to our monthly
Australian Internet Growth Index (which has been measuring the approximate
number of Australian sites on the Internet since January 1996). The search
engines we regularly poll to construct the AIGI all showed a decline of
approximately 10% in the number of Australian sites listed for the
month - a turnaround that may be partly attributable to the collapse of several
Australian ISP's during March and the culling of "dead" sites by ISPs reviewing
annual hosting contracts. The April 1st figures (with March 1st figures in
brackets) are as follows:
Australian
Internet Growth Index March 1998
(Figures Show Estimated Live Sites) |
-
Brisbane - 2,046
(2,275)
-
Sydney - 8,108
(8,829)
-
Melbourne - 6,156
(6,732)
-
Adelaide - 2,515
(2,984)
|
-
Perth - 2,046
(2,435)
-
Hobart - 1,027
(1,155)
-
Canberra - 2,348
(2,606)
-
Darwin - 2,046
(2,435)
|
|
During March Australian Cybermalls'
traffic declined slightly to 49,274 from February's 53,535 visitors.
At least part of this was attributable to a site slowdown which occurred
when a planned one-day changeover to a new, fast Sun UltraSparc server took
a week.
|
