Friday
29th June 2001
MICROSOFT WINS APPEAL AGAINST
BREAK-UP
After almost a year, the US
Circuit Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia today unanimously reversed
the break-up of Microsoft,
ruling that trial judge Thomas Penfield Jackson had engaged in "serious judicial
misconduct" by making derogatory comments about the company out of court.
In a 7-0 vote, the appeals court found that Jackson had made inappropriate
comments to the news media and outside the courtroom that gave the appearance
that he was biased against Microsoft, even though it found no evidence of
actual bias in Jackson's handling of the case. The appeals court ordered
that a new judge should decide what penalty the company should face. It also
struck down and altered some of the lower court's findings of antitrust
violations by Microsoft, though it upheld the lower court's central finding
that Microsoft had abused its monopoly power in the market. Microsoft was
originally taken to court by the US Justice Department and 19 US states,
who alleged that the company had used its overweening market dominance to
the ultimate detriment of consumers. Microsoft said that it welcomed the
court's decision and hoped a settlement could now be reached.
Thursday
28th June 2001
EUROPE TO PUT NET IN EVERY
HOUSE
European Union telecommunications
ministers today backed a proposal to introduce a new minimum universal service
provision across the European Union which would guarantee that every house
would be capable of receiving phone, fax and Internet services, no matter
how remote or uneconomic the household might be. A meeting of EU telecoms
ministers, chaired by Swedish minister Bjorn Rosengren, hammered out the
proposal today. When ratified, it will become binding law on all European
telecommunications companies. However, the new proposal only guarantees that
that European telcos will have to provide "functional" Net access to European
households rather than fast broadband (which currently has very low penetration
levels on the continent). According to a study released earlier this month,
four European countries - the UK, Germany, Italy and France - account for
almost 67% of all current European Net access, while the Scandinavian countries
have the highest per-capita penetration. Net access across the remainder
of Europe is currently quite low.
Wednesday
27th June 2001
TRANSISTOR, MONITOR AND
HARD DRIVE BREAKTHROUGHS
The limits of computing have
been extended again, it seems, with announcements of new developments from
IBM and
Maxtor
today that promise quantum improvements in computing power over the next
few years. IBM announced today that it has developed a new silicon germanium
transistor which has the capacity to drive computer chips at 100GHz within
2 years (compared to 1GHz today). The new transistor is also 50% more
energy-efficient than current transistors, and less prone to overheating.
The company also announced that it has developed a new monitor - the T220
- which is capable of displaying up to 9 million pixels on a 22.2-inch screen.
The US$22,000 monitors are expected to find wide use in the medical, finance,
design and engineering fields as they're rolled out over the next few years,
but also seem likely to appear on the desktop before the decade is out.
Meanwhile, disk drive manufacturer Maxtor (in conjunction with Compaq, Microsoft,
VIA Technologies and others) announced its support today for the development
of a next-generation ATA interface standard that will break the current 137GB
barrier for hard drives and allow them to become 100,000 times bigger. Again,
the super-big hard drives are expected to become widely available in the
next few years.
Tuesday
26th June 2001
ONLINE BROKERS SQUEEZE
OFFLINE BROKERS
Online share broking sites
in Australia are beginning to put a serious squeeze on traditional stockbroking
firms, according to new research by
consult.com. In a study of
35,000 Australian Internet users, consult.com estimated that there are were
more than 275,000 online share traders in Australia at the end of September
last year and that and that the volume of business they were transacting
over the Net had grown by 50% between March and September 2000 alone - a
figure likely to be much higher now. Consult.com also estimated that
110,000 of these traders were buying or selling stocks at least once a month
with any of 30 online broking sites, and said this trend could only be expected
to grow as Internet penetration increased and users became more comfortable
with the Net as a trading medium. The firm also found that 75% of online
share traders in Australia were high-income males, and that most of the
popularity of online broking was price-driven. In other news:
Fairfax
and Macquarie Bank announced today that they were "restructuring" their f2
TradingRoom site in the face of lower than anticipated returns.
Monday
25th June 2001
MICROSOFT CANS FREE LISTBOT
SERVICE
In what may be an ominous sign
for the future if the company's plans to dominate the Internet through its
.Net initiative come to fruition,
Microsoft announced today that
it is closing down its free ListBot mailing list service in August and that
existing users can either cough up money, accept greatly reduced capabilities
on the company's MSN Communities site or simply get lost if they're
unhappy about it. The service's estimated 90,000 subscribers were told that
ListBot will cease operating on August 6th and they have until August 20th
to either retrieve their data and go elsewhere, or fork out US$149 per annum
to have the company continue to manage their online mailing lists. ListBot
was originally acquired by Microsoft in November 1998 when it purchased
LinkExchange, and was folded into the firm's fee-based bCentral service in
October 1999. ListBot allowed businesses, consumers and hobbyists to create
and manage mailing lists that automatically sent e-mail updates to
subscribers.
Friday
22nd June 2001
NT HACKING INSURANCE COSTS
TO RISE
According to a report in today's
Australian newspaper, companies which operate their web sites on Microsoft's
Internet platforms may soon face rises in their insurance premiums because
of the poor security of the company's products. The paper reports that US
insurance firm J.S. Wurzler is
now applying a 5% to 15% surcharge to insure Windows NT systems against security
attacks and website liability, and that it seems likely most of the world's
insurance industry will follow this lead by 2002 unless the security of Microsoft
products is radically improved. A spokesperson for Wurzler said the premium
was necessary because of the high turnover of NT system administrators and
the need to apply constant patches to Microsoft products as defects were
discovered. Open source software tended to have a much lower turnover of
system administrators, far fewer defects and a much less frequent need for
patching, he said. Footnote: Following the discovery of a fatal security
flaw in NT earlier this week, a similar flaw
was discovered in a Sun Solaris printer daemon today. The company is currently
working on a patch which is expected to be available next month and has advised
users to turn off the function in the meantime.
Thursday
21st June 2001
BUSH BUSINESSES DON'T USE
NET ENOUGH: STUDY
A new study by the
Australian
Industry Group (AIG) and the Commonwealth Bank has found that
Australia's regional manufacturers are performing significantly worse than
their urban cousins - and it appears that the major cause is an unwillingness
to invest in new skills and technologies. The AIG's Industry In The Regions
2001 study found that of the 635 regional firms surveyed, exports accounted
for an average 16.4% of sales against a national average of 25%. The study
also found that less than 2.5% of rural Australian businesses were using
ecommerce to sell over the Net at the present time (against a nationwide
average of 5.6%); that regional industries were also spending less than 3.9%
of turnover on new or upgraded plant and equipment (against a national average
of 4.3%); and that most regional firms were also investing less than the
national average in training (2.5% of total salaries). The AIG study suggests
that the fortunes of rural and regional Australia - and those of the nation
as a whole - could be lifted significantly if rural industries could be
encouraged to lift their level of performance to the same as that of their
city cousins, and to embrace new technology more directly.
Wednesday
20th June 2001
US CRACKS DOWN ON SKYBIZ
SCAM
The US Federal Trade Commission
(FTC) charged four companies today with using the Internet to promote a massive
pyramid scheme and con consumers around the world out of more than $175 million.
SkyBiz.com (based in Tulsa, Oklahoma) and three partner companies had promoted
a work-at-home business on the Net, charging US$125 for an educational software
package and giving participants the opportunity to earn money by recruiting
others to buy the same packages, the FTC said. Skybiz drew recruits - and
complaints - from the USA, Australia, Thailand, India, South Africa and many
other countries. The FTC charged that the SkyBiz companies and their officers
violated US federal laws by creating a pyramid scheme, making false claims
that consumers would earn large incomes and failing to mention that most
people in such schemes actually lose money. The four Oklahoma companies named
in the lawsuit are SkyBiz.com, World Service Corporation, Nanci Corporation
International and WorldWide Service Corporation. Canadian authorities have
brought criminal charges against four of the program's associates in their
country, and an Australian civil case is currently pending against one associate.
The Indian government has also raided local SkyBiz offices in that country
and frozen their assets as well.
Tuesday
19th June 2001
NT FLAW PUTS 20% OF WEB
SITES AT RISK
In what must surely be the
final blow to any remaining credibility the company may once have had in
the web server market, Microsoft admitted today that a newly-discovered fatal
flaw in its NT operating system has put every web site running the firm's
IIS software at risk - or about 20% of all web sites on the Net. The security
hole, first reported by eEye Digital Security, gives an attacker system-level
access to Microsoft web servers and allows them to run any code (including
viruses and programs that copy data, such as customer order files). Microsoft
said the flaw occurs in idq.dll, an IIS component that is loaded by default.
The idq.dll contains an unchecked buffer in a section of code that handles
input URLs. The flaw affects all versions of IIS running under Windows NT,
Windows 2000 and a beta version of Windows XP. The company
released
a patch today which it has urged all customers to install immediately
- the latest in a seemingly unending array of serious security holes that
afflict all the company's web software. Worryingly, many Australian Government
sites and several Australian banks use the company's web technology to provide
online services.
Monday
18th June 2001
ACCC CALLS FOR CYBERSQUATTING
BAN
The
Australian Competition and Consumer
Commission (ACCC) has called for cybersquatting to be outlawed
world-wide. The call was made in a submission to the World Intellectual Property
Organisation, which is currently looking at ways of countering bad faith,
misleading and abusive domain name registration and related issues.
"Cybersquatting can be a significant impediment to consumer confidence in
the online world", ACCC Commissioner Dr David Cousins said. "Unless users
know who they're dealing with, they can never be certain that their dealings
will be what they anticipate. This is a problem that has been around for
a number of years and it's time it was solved once and for all. The Net is
no longer a fledgling medium.... it's now an established part of business
and everyday life. Users have a reasonable expectation to participate in
online commerce and other activities knowing that a particular domain name
identifying the site they are visiting will take them where they expect to
go, and present them with the content they expect to see". In Australia,
tough domain registration rules which have forced users to justify their
right to a domain have largely prevented cybersquatting.
Friday
15th June 2001
6% OF WORLD NOW
ONLINE
A
new study by Ipsos-Reid (IR) has confirmed estimates
earlier this month that approximately 6% of
the world's population are now online - but has also found that in developed
nations up to a third of people who could go online currently choose not
to. For the study, IR interviewed non-Internet users in 30 countries. They
found that 40% still felt they had no need for the Net, while a further 33%
said they didn't have a computer and 25% said they had no interest in the
online world. Another 16% said they hadn't gone online because they didn't
know how to, 12% remained offline because of the cost, and 10% said they
didn't have time to use the Internet. The situation was somewhat different
in the developing world, however, where more people wanted to go online than
currently have Internet access. IR found that in these countries the majority
of potential new users were barred by poverty and/or lack of infrastructure.
IR estimate that truly global use of the Net is likely to take more than
a generation to come about.
Thursday
14th June 2001
NETSCAPE RELEASES 6.1
BETA
AOL Time Warner's
Netscape
Communications released a Netscape 6.1 beta today - the latest version
of the browser that once held a commanding 85% of the browser market. The
new 6.1 release is the product of a 32-month engineering project that harnessed
the Mozilla open-source programming effort, and the first new iteration since
a 6.01 bugfix several months ago. Netscape 6.0 drew criticism for its lateness,
lack of stability and software defects when it debuted last year, but the
new 6.1 release is reputed to be faster and much more stable than its
predecessor. Other changes include a new cache for storing frequently accessed
files, an upgraded mail program, new search functionality and drop-down
auto-completion for web page forms. The browser also has a somewhat different
look and feel. AOL Time Warner are reportedly de-emphasing Netscape's role
as a browser manufacturer, but some analysts believe the company is simply
waiting for the final outcome of Microsoft's anti-trust case before relaunching
a full-blown assault on the browser market.
Wednesday
13th June 2001
ONLINE CONSUMERS DISLIKE
SHIPPING COSTS
More than 63% of consumers
say they don't complete purchases at US online retail sites because they
distrust the way the majority of companies treat shipping and handling charges,
according to a new study by Jupiter Media
Metrix (JMM). JMM found that fewer than 10% of US consumers believed
that the price or size of their order should determine the shipping and handling
costs they were being asked to pay but that an amazing 54% of US online retailers
charged this way. Instead, 46% of consumers believed that shipping costs
should be based on the weight of their order - something that only 30% of
US retailers actually did. As a result of the majority of US retailers attempting
to make a profit on their shipping charges, JMM found that 73% of online
consumers now evaluate the total price of an order - including the shipping
costs - before deciding whether or not to go ahead with a purchase. And they
advise online retailers who'd like to generate more business to treat shipping
as a "break-even" service rather than a profit centre [NB: In Australia,
most retailers traditionally treat shipping as a break-even service. This
philosophy has largely translated to Australian ecommerce sites]
Tuesday
12th June 2001
NET AUDIENCE = 429
MILLION
The Internet audience has now
grown to more than 429 million people, according to a new study by
Nielsen/Netratings
(NN). NN announced the figure in its latest Global Internet Trends
report, which measures 27 countries in North America, Europe, Africa, the
Middle East, Asia and Latin America. NN found that the USA and Canada still
account for 41% of the total Net audience. Europe, Africa and the Middle
East make up 27%, the Asia Pacific region 20% and Latin America 4%. However,
NN note that North American dominance of the Net is steadily waning with
another 9% of European households and another 12% of Asia Pacific households
expecting to go online over the next 12 months. NN also found that the spread
of the Net is very uneven in both Europe and the Asia Pacific. In Europe
the UK, France, Germany and Italy account for more than 67% of all Internet
households combined - and in the Asia-Pacific, South Korea, Taiwan and Australia
account for more than 86% of all people with home Internet access. NN also
found that Australia has one of the highest levels of at-work use of the
Net (though not the highest) and that Australians and New Zealanders are
becoming increasingly comfortable about researching and buying online.
Monday
11th June 2001
MOST PREFER NET
ANONYMITY
67% of Internet users will
abandon a web site that asks for personal information and more than one in
five of those who don't will simply lie to gain access, according to a new
study by
Statistical
Research Inc. (SRI) In their "How People Use the Internet 2001"
annual report, SRI found that most users value their online privacy highly
and continue to distrust intrusive sites. Over half of those polled said
they were very concerned about the misuse of credit card information given
online, the selling or sharing of personal information by site owners and
the prevalence of cookies that track online activity - and while experience
with the Net tended to dilute these feelings slightly over time, the difference
wasn't especially significant. SRI also found that surfers were more likely
to trust the online sites of stores they physically shopped at, but that
prominent privacy statements and sites with upfront credit card anti-fraud
guarantees could appease between 25% and 28% of visitors who were asked to
volunteer information about themselves.
Friday
8th June 2001
AVERAGE WEBSITE PROFITABLE
IN 2 YEARS
According to a new study of
500 US and international web sites by
ActivMedia
Research, the average commercial web site is now profitable within
2 years - and amongst the 66% of web sites in the study group that were launched
as for-profit ventures, 54% are already profitable and a further 28% expect
to reach profitability before the end of the year. ActivMedia found that
34% of the sites it surveyed were never intended to be profitable. Instead,
they'd been launched simply for publicity purposes (23%) or as a means to
reduce communications costs (11%). But of those that were launched with the
intention of making a profit, sites which insisted on maintaining margins
- even at the expense of rapid growth - tended to reach positive cash flow
and profitability the quickest, whilst those which pursued aggressive promotion
and rapid growth at any cost (the classic "dot.com strategy") took the longest
to reach a positive cash flow position, if at all. ActivMedia suggest that
the Net is currently undergoing a shake-out of "get rich quick" merchants
and that a newer, far more businesslike breed of web site operators is steadily
taking their place.
Thursday
7th June 2001
CORPROCURE LOSES CEO, TOP
STAFF
Less
than a year after 14 of Australia's largest companies announced their
intention to form an online electronic marketplace called CorProcure
(with the unstated but obvious aim of squeezing suppliers to bid for their
business), it was announced today that CEO Len Hodge and 8 senior staff are
to leave the company and the business is to be "restructured" to "more closely
align the business's cost structure with expected revenue flow". The news
has heightened speculation that the future of B2B electronic marketplaces
- once hailed as a "sure fire" Net success - may turn out to be just as bleak
as most retail dot.com ventures have proven to be, largely because the lack
of standards in corporate procurement systems makes them a nightmare to
implement. In Australia, three such marketplaces (MySAP.com, Telstra Business
eXchange and Metiom) have either recorded significant losses and failed,
or simply failed to launch during the last month.
In September
last year Internet research firm IDC warned that emarketplaces were
"largely hype" and prophesied that the rosy predictions being made for most
emarketplaces at the time would likely founder.
Wednesday
6th June 2001
NET DEFAMATION LAW GETS
NEW TEST
Almost two years to the day
after Justice Carolyn Spencer of the NSW Supreme Court ruled that online
defamation is deemed to occur
at a web server's
location, Australian businessman "Diamond" Joe Gutnick is attempting
to have the law reinterpreted so that defamation is instead deemed to occur
at the place where a web page is viewed. In a defamation action against US
publishers Dow Jones currently being heard in the Victorian Supreme Court,
Mr Gutnick's solicitors are arguing that an article published about him on
the Net last year (as well as in a Dow Jones magazine) defamed him in Victoria
because it could be accessed online there, and that the case should therefore
be tried there. Dow Jones, by contrast, argue that their article was written
in the USA for US audiences and republished on their web server in New Jersey,
and should therefore be tried under US law in New Jersey. International barrister
Geoffrey Robertson QC, appearing for Dow Jones, argued that if the court
accepts the Gutnick interpretation, web publishers could potentially be subject
to 190 different legal jurisdictions which all have differing defamation
laws. The case is still continuing.
Tuesday
5th June 2001
4 COMPANIES CONTROL 50%
OF ALL TIME ONLINE
The Net is undergoing a period
of rapid consolidation according to a new study by
Jupiter
Media Metrix (JMM). JMM report that 50% of all time spent online
in the USA now occurs at the sites of just 4 companies - down from 11 only
two years ago. Even more surprisingly, 60% of all US time online is spent
at just 14 sites (down from 110 two years ago). The Net's 4 major "content
controllers" are now the AOL Time Warner Network (32% of all minutes spent
online), Microsoft (7.5%), Yahoo (7.2%) and Napster Digital (3.6%). JMM speculate
that the consolidation is occurring partly because a slew of mergers and
acquisitions in the last two years have created new media behemoths (eg:
AOL-Time Warner) and partly because the dot.com collapse has steadily wiped
out many early traffic leaders with unsustainable business models. JMM also
report that the total amount of time spent online in the USA appears to have
more than doubled in the last two years, rising from an estimated 50 billion
minutes/month in March 1999 to 107 billion minutes/month in March 2001.
Monday
4th June 2001
CONSUMER PACKAGED GOODS
SALES STRONG: STUDY
A
new study by Information Resources Inc (IRI) has found that online
sales of consumer packaged goods (defined as healthcare, vitamin, beauty
care, food and beverage, perishable, frozen food, household supplies, baby
care and pet food products) are surprisingly strong in the USA and set to
rise this year - but also that most online retailers don't really understand
why consumers are buying from their web sites. In a study of 7,900 primary
shoppers carried out between November 2000 and February 2001, IRI found that
23% had bought CPG online and 99% will maintain or increase their spending
in the coming year. However, when consumers were asked to define their most
common reasons for shopping online, they rated convenience and time-saving
features as the most important; and the most common barriers as delivery
costs and the inability to see and touch products in person. IRI found that
online retailers believed all of these reasons were far less important than
consumers did. They also found that most retailers thought the main barrier
to sales was gaining consumer trust when - in fact - only 11% of CPG buyers
rated this as an issue at all.
Friday
1st June 2001
AUSTRALIAN NET BREAKS 100,000
SITE BARRIER
There are now more than 104,000
Australian sites on the Internet, according to our monthly
Australian Internet Growth
Index. The AIGI showed an average nationwide increase of 5.7% in
the number of web sites during the last month, a rise on the previous month's
5.6% growth rate. However, growth was once again less than uniform ranging
from -1.5% in Canberra and slim 0.5% in regional sites to a high of 16.5%
in Perth, 10.5% in Brisbane and 10.1% in Sydney. The June 1st figures (with
May 1st figures in brackets) are as follows:
Australian
Internet Growth Index May 2001
(Figures Show Estimated Live Sites) |
-
Brisbane - 9,519
(8,615)
-
Sydney - 35,629
(32,361)
-
Melbourne - 27,637
(26,422)
-
Adelaide - 6,651
(6,505)
|
-
Perth - 7,819
(6,712)
-
Hobart - 2,762
(2,674)
-
Canberra - 7,954
(8,076)
-
Darwin* - 6,705
(6,672)
|
NB: The Darwin figure includes
rural Australian sites |
|
During May 2001 Australian
Cybermalls hosted 62,525 visitors, a slight rise on April's 61,884.
Our visitors viewed 302,653 page displays from our servers, which in turn
consumed 13.67 Gb of bandwidth. Our May 2001 traffic summary
can be viewed
here.
|
