Australian Cybermalls News

The US-based Internet Society has backed away from plans announced in August this year to expand top-level domains from the common .com, .mil, .gov, .edu and .mil suffixes, and decided to refer the matter to an international committee for study instead. Under the original announcement, it was planned to expand the domain system to allow up to 150 high-level areas and to recruit organisations to run these on a commercial basis. No reason has yet been given for the change of heart. In other news: Australian Cybermalls suffered continuing problems with our service provider during the last 24 hours, making a total of 48 hours when our server was up and down like a yo-yo. We have been assured that the problem has now been fixed. Once more, we apologise to any visitors inconvenienced by this rare service outage.

Australian Cybermalls was hit by another major service outage yesterday, forcing our server offline for 12 hours. The outage - the second we've experienced in the last fortnight - made our site uncontactable between approximately 7pm and 7am AEST. Although we've yet to receive a full explanation from our service providers it appears that the difficulties are being caused by Telstra's move from Australian-standard ISDN to the more open Euro-standard ISDN and the upgrade work necessary to put the changeover into effect. We sincerely apologise to any visitors who were inconvenienced by this fault and we've been led to understand that the problem will be permanently remedied in the near future. The two outages experienced this month are the first serious difficulties our site has experienced since we opened in April this year.

Further to our story earlier this month, the final new pricing structure for Australian commercial domain names has now been ratified. From November 1st, all Australian businesses who have registered .com.au domains (or desire to) will be required to pay $125 every two years to the new issuing authority, Melbourne IT. Businesses who do not pay the fee by February 1st, 1997 will lose their existing domain name registrations. In return, the issuing authority have agreed to widen the formerly strict terms governing domain name allocations. Although the ban against generic and other dictionary words will remain in force, the new regime will allow abbreviations and/or derivations of names, and the field will be widened to allow businesses to apply which are not registered companies or holders of registered business names. The decision to commercialise domain name issuance resulted from the phenomenal growth of commercial domain name applications, Melbourne IT said. In recent months it has grown to more than 250 requests each week.

In a desperate attempt to catch up to the company its best efforts have so far failed to dislodge, Microsoft have announced that they will release a public beta copy of Explorer 4.0 by the end of March, almost 90 days after betas of Netscape Navigator 4.0 were released for public testing and comment. The new Explorer 4.0 beta is expected to mimic many of the features offered in Netscape's Communicator browser - including the ability to "subscribe" to news channels - but will also include some Microsoft-specific features such as Dynamic HTML, an extension to the prevailing HTML 3.2 standard that Netscape is also considering supporting. Microsoft have also announced that they will be offering both "lightweight" and "full" versions of Explorer 4.0. The lightweight version will have an enhanced shell while the full version will integrate the browser with the Win95 Windows Explorer, Taskbar and Start Menu.

Advance Bank have signed an agreement with Internet commerce firm Digicash and announced that they will now be the first bank in the Asia-Pacific to distribute ecash to their clients and participating merchants. The bank, which pioneered Internet banking in Australia and which is still regarded as the country's pacesetter in the rapidly expanding field, is also expected to announce shortly that it will implement a new a service by the end of 1996 which will allow customers to apply for home loans (and have them approved) across the Internet. Advance Bank is expected to be taken over by the St George Bank in March 1997, but do not believe that this will have any effect on their Internet banking services beyond a change of logo.

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) - the body which sets standards for the Internet - may set up an office in Australia, according to its chief Jean-Francois Abramatic, who visited Australia this week. Established in October 1994 after a proposal from Tim Berners-Lee, the CERN physicist who invented HTML and most of the fundamental algorithms that drive the World Wide Web, the W3C currently operates out of MIT in the United States, but recently set up an Asian office in Japan. It is now considering an Australian office as well. Businesses would need to pay between $5,000 and $50,000 to join W3C, but the advantage to members would be that they could "sit down with the decision-makers" and perhaps influence the development of the Internet.

Is the Net slow today? It is if you're using Microsoft Explorer 3.0, according to software testers KeyLabs, who've just released the first independent speed tests of browser rivals Navigator 3.0 and Explorer 3.0. According to KeyLabs, which subjected both browsers to a large array of exhaustive tests, Explorer 3.0 loads web pages anywhere between 30% and 100% slower than Navigator (a claim Netscape always made, but which Microsoft strongly denied). Netscape is fastest at loading pages with few graphics, the tests show, and performance begins to come close when both browsers have to deal with pages that support very large graphics. However, Navigator 3.0 beat Explorer 3.0 in all tests. The message? If you want to improve your surfing speed, the most inexpensive way to do it is to use a Navigator browser.

The Federal Government has announced that it will spend $4.5 million over the next 5 years on a study into the possible health risks of mobile phones and radio communications after earlier surveys disclosed that concern over the safety of mobile phones and their associated transmission towers is very high in the Australian community. Australia currently has the highest uptake of mobile phones in the world, with more than 4 million users in a population of 18 million. Laboratory studies of transmissions in the 1.8GHz to 1.9GHz frequency - the band most commonly used by mobile phones - have already returned adverse results. However, no long-term studies of the possible health risks associated with mobile telephony are presently available. The $4.5 million project will be jointly handled by the Departments of Communication & Arts and Health & Family Services.

Two months after the launch of Internet Explorer 3.0 and a massive marketing campaign that saw Microsoft virtually pay people to use its new browser, Netscape have ceded 5% of their former market share to the Gates empire. In a number of recent press statements, Netscape's chief executives now claim that their browser holds 80% of the market, slightly down from the 85% market share the company held prior to Explorer 3.0's release. However, Netscape officials claim that it really doesn't matter to them because "there's no money in browsers anyway". The company's real interest lies in setting up corporate intranets, they now say, where Netscape already have an overwhelming market share and where Microsoft currently have no position at all.

Australian Cybermalls' server has been hit by random service outages over the last 48 hours. The outages - generally of 30 minutes duration - have been caused by Telstra, who are upgrading our ISDN lines. Telstra are moving from their previous Australian-only ISDN standard to a new, much cheaper European ISDN standard as part of the national ISDN infrastructure upgrade, and the hiccups have been unavoidable while the changeover is being effected. We apologise to any of our visitors who have been inconvenienced during this transition. Telstra will be announcing their new pricing structure for Euro- standard ISDN services on November 1st.

The Australian-built WebSource search engine now holds the URL's of more than 8,000 Australian web sites, according to its developers. In addition, it has another 2,000 sites in its files waiting to be reviewed and is currently receiving more than 100 new URLs every week for inclusion. The engine, which made a quiet debut in April this year and which has been advertised both on and off the Internet since June, is much faster than most other search engines due to innovative indexing techniques. In a similar fashion to Yahoo, each site listed in WebSource is categorised into one of 10 primary groupings, and then sub-categorised even further within each grouping, allowing visitors to "drill down" very rapidly to find the type of sites they're interested in. However, keyword searching facilities are also provided. According to WebSource, between 40% and 45% of all current visitors to the site come from overseas, and major interest is being shown in sporting and tourism-related sites.

The US National Consumer League has warned of 5 major scams currently being perpetrated across the Internet, based on complaints received by online users in recent months. These are pyramid schemes (of all types), fake web design services (where users are promised design work or hosting if they pay up front, but receive nothing when they do), computer hardware scams (where users are promised terrific deals on top-grade goods, but are later delivered much lower-grade goods or nothing at all); fraudulent business opportunities (of all types); and many work-at-home opportunities where consumers are told they can make money converting graphics files or doing word-processing. And according to the Internet Scambusters newsletter, the latest scam in the USA involves people receiving an urgent message via email and being asked to call an (809) number. These numbers turn out to be toll-lines in the Caribbean, and users discover some months later they've been billed $25 to $50 for a brief phone call.

In an effort to come to grips with the increasingly bloated nature of search engines, a new breed of Internet software - intelligent agents - are set to debut before the year's end. The new software will learn about what a user likes (or does not like) by asking users to rate the pages they visit on the Internet according to number of criteria. The agents will then scour the Net to locate pages that users are likely to want to see, based on the information the agent has collected. As time passes, the agents learn more and become progressively smarter about the web sites they retrieve. Developers of the new breed of software believe that intelligent agents will significantly reduce the frustration many users experience with search engines, relegating their use to "one-off's" for searches outside a user's normal scope of interests.

Telstra have now opened an Australian mirror of Digital's acclaimed AltaVista search engine. The mirror, located on Telstra's Yellow Pages site, reflects the full content of the US site but broadcasts results from a site in Australia - ensuring much faster response times for local users. The Australian mirror features Australian advertisements and hyperlinks to Telstra's White and Yellow pages, but is otherwise identical to the main US site. The Australian mirror is the first in a chain of international Alta Vista mirrors that Digital hope to establish over the next twelve months.

Fulfilling a long-standing promise to have a version of Navigator available for every major computer platform, Netscape have just released beta 2.02 of their browser for OS/2 users. The new browser allows users to view Web pages featuring Java, Javascript, frames, tables and HTML 3.0 extensions and frees OS/2 users from the need to use IBM's own inadequate Web Explorer browser. The full-blown product is expected to ship free of charge to OS/2 users later this year. At the same time, the new browser helps cement the growing relationship between Netscape and IBM, who have agreed to collaborate on several Internet projects in the near future which are aimed at defusing Microsoft's attempts to "own" the Internet.

Taxation offices in Australia have formed an alliance with their counterparts in the USA, Canada, Britain and Japan in an effort to stem the rapidly growing tide of Internet commerce. The offices, fearing that the quick spread of the Internet and global commerce will make transactions effectively untraceable, have begun a concerted approach to work together so that they can track wealthy individuals operating in several taxation jurisdictions and bring them to account. By working together, the taxation bodies hope to begin to stem trans-national taxation rorts. "The Internet is probably the biggest threat to the sovereignty of taxation collections we've ever seen," a spokesman from the Australian Taxation Office said. "If we don't start doing something now this problem will become much, much worse in only a few years and could ultimately lead to the breakdown of taxation systems in most of the developed world."

Australian commercial domain names (ie .com.au) - which until now have been issued free - are soon expected to cost $75 per annum. Melbourne IT, a commercial subsidiary of the University of Melbourne, plan to begin implementing the charges as soon as the issue is given a final review by an industry advisory group comprising members from INTA, AUUG, ECA and AIIA. It is expected the new pricing scheme will come into effect on November 1st, 1996. Funds raised from the annual registration fee will be used to pay for staff to carry out a dedicated bureau service. Up to now, commercial domains on the Australian Internet have been handled on a voluntary basis by Mr Robert Elz of the University of Melbourne's computer science department. The staggering growth of commercial domain name registrations over the last year has imposed great demands on his time and great strains on the speedy issuance of names, and the the new system is designed to put domain name registrations on a more professional footing.

Telstra have announced plans to unbundle all their retail stores and offload almost 800 staff. At the same time, the company has yielded to pressure from the Federal Government to accelerate the introduction of ISDN throughout the country, promising that that up to 93% of Australia's population will have access to digital exchanges by mid-1997 and that entire process will be completed by the end of 1998 - three years ahead of schedule. Telstra told T-Shop staff of its decision to move out of the retail sphere at a special meeting last week, and is currently seeking a large company to take over the operations as an "affiliate dealer". The Communications, Electrical and Plumbing Union which represents Telstra employees is concerned with the news and has already announced that it intends to take Telstra to the Arbitration Commission so that it can seek proper negotiations with senior management on the T-Shop issue.

The world's largest software company IBM has declared war on Microsoft, deciding to throw its weight behind Sun's Java technology rather than Microsoft's competing Active-X and partnering with Netscape in several forthcoming developments aimed at dealing a blow to Bill Gates' software empire. Announcing the impending international release of OS/2 4.0 last week, IBM said that it intended to launch a three-pronged attack on the operating system market by retaining existing OS/2 accounts and attempting to win new business in the corporate and SOHO areas, where Microsoft has assumed a dominant position over the last 36 months. IBM claim that OS/2 4.0 is much easier and much more reliable to use than Windows95, and because the new operating system already includes inbuilt voice dictation and speech recognition technology, Java technology and Lotus Notes mail, that it is considerably more advanced than Windows95 as well.

Readers Digest will unveil a new search engine later this month which they are already hyping as "one of the biggest events in Web history." The new LookSmart engine, which has been developed as part of a secret Java project by a team of 40 programmers in Melbourne, Australia over the last 12 months will be supported by a massive marketing budget and will be pitted head-to-head against leading search engines such as Alta Vista, HotBot, Infoseek and Yahoo. Readers Digest will own a 70% stake in LookSmart, while the developers will own the remaining 30%. Although the developers are unwilling to say much before the official unveiling, it is known that LookSmart will depart from the traditional keyword search approach, breaking the Web down into 6,000 categories instead; that the engine will have a very different interface, and that it will offer a higher editorial content. It is expected to debut with reviews of over 85,000 web sites.

Following in the wake of last month's announcement of $95-a-month 10Mbps cable modem Internet connections, Telstra is expected to announce a major re-pricing of Australian ISDN services shortly - possibly by the end of the month. Although Telstra refuse to directly comment about the mooted On Ramp ISDN service, it is known that the corporation plans to bring out a 3-tier pricing structure and that the lowest tier is expected to be cheaper than the current $70-per-month Microlink service. The middle tier of the pricing structure will be aimed at SOHO users and the top tier at large corporations. At present Australian ISDN services are the most expensive in the world, but the introduction of cable modems and mooted future introduction of ADSL and 56kbps modems is expected to lead to an ISDN price collapse.

According to research by Jupiter Communications, advertising on the Internet soared by 83% to $US71 million in the first half of 1996 and is set to rise even further in the second half of the year, ballooning to a year-end total of $US312 million. Within 3 years, Jupiter estimate that total advertising expenditure on the Internet will rise to $US5 billion, at which point it will begin to bite into traditional media spending patterns. The firm noted that at present the major firms using Internet advertising are still high-tech companies, and that consumer companies are still poorly represented.

The Australian Internet expanded by around 9% during September, according to our monthly Australian Internet Growth Index. The survey, which has been carried out by Australian Cybermalls since February this year, also shows that the rate of growth has been relatively uniform throughout Australia and that there are now around 22,000 sites on the Australian Internet. The October 1st figures (with September 1st figures in brackets) are:

Australian Internet Growth Index September 1996
(Figures Show Estimated Sites)

Brisbane - 2178 (2004)
Sydney - 6731 (6146)
Melbourne - 5294 (4858)
Adelaide - 2104 (1937)

Perth - 1884 (1709)
Hobart - 904 (822)
Canberra - 1743 (1628)
Darwin - 1542 (1407)

During September Australian Cybermalls displayed 14,730 storefronts. This represents a 16% increase over August 1996 when we displayed 12,721 storefronts. Australian Cybermalls displayed 3,220 storefronts during our first full month of operations (April 1996) so total traffic volume through our site over the previous six months has grown by 357% The average number of visitors through our site during September was 492 a day - roughly one person every three minutes.