Australian Cybermalls News

Australian Cybermalls has been hit with several minor service outages over the last 48 hours. The outages have been caused by unexpected glitches in the final stages of implementing our conversion from a T1 to a T3 line. These glitches have caused our site to be off air for between one and two hours at a time (mostly very early in the morning US time/late in the afternoon Australian time) on five occasions over the last two days and we sincerely apologise to any of our visitors who've been inconvenienced by this. We believe that these last-minute hiccups have now been overcome and our site should now be fully operational again - and much quicker to access. Thankyou for your patience while we get this right.

The Australian branch of the Microsoft Network was hit by a daring credit card spam fraud on Friday. According to The Australian newspaper, hackers broke into the MSN files, secured the email addresses of all subscribers and then sent them an email demanding that they forward their credit card numbers, bank name, address and other confidential details to a source claiming to be the "MSN Credit Department". The email claimed that MSN had lost the information that linked each user's account sign-on name and password to their billing account and requested that recipients provide the requested details immediately, promising that if they did they'd receive a 50% discount on their next monthly bill. MSN claim they have no idea where the email originated or how the fraud was perpetrated but acted quickly to stamp it out once alerted by issuing an Australia-wide warning to all MSN subscribers.

Researchers at the Royal Adelaide Hospital have established a link between digital mobile phones and cancer in laboratory rats for the first time. In a ground-breaking study, scientists at the Hospital's Institute for Veterinary Science have been able to demonstrate that prolonged exposure to the radio-frequency electromagnetic fields emitted by digital phones caused a 50% increase in immune system cancer in mice which were bred with a genetic predisposition towards developing lymphoma. Under normal conditions, 22% of the special mice would usually develop lymphoma but after prolonged exposure to RF fields over 18 months the scientists were able to increase this to 43% in the test animals. The researchers stress that a connection between cancer in rats and humans has yet to be established. Australia currently has one of the highest per-capita mobile phone usage rates in the world. In October last year the Federal Government committed $4.5 million over 5 years to look at the possible health risks the devices may pose.

According to Adobe Software, Apple have lost almost half their former market share in graphics and desktop publishing applications over the last 24 months, prompting the company to downgrade the importance of Macintosh software releases in their upgrade schedule. Apple were formerly dominant in this field but Adobe says that Macintosh software now accounts for only 50% of its sales of leading-edge products like PhotoShop, PageMaker, Freehand and Illustrator. This is down from 75% in 1995. As a result, Adobe intend to release simultaneous Windows and Mac versions of its new product upgrades this year. Any further decline in Macintosh market share will force the company to reappraise its future release plans, Adobe says.

The next version of Windows will support the new High-definition Digital Television standard following an agreement between Microsoft, Intel and Compaq. The new HDO standard has been designed to allow both PCs and televisions to receive high-definition digital TV broadcasts - but it's also likely that the new standard will be widespread on computers well before it appears on household televisions because of the enormous world-wide investment that TV broadcasting companies have made in existing standards. According to Microsoft, between 10 and 20 million PCs will be able to support DTV by 1998, and by the year 2000 all PCs are expected to be shipped with DTV receivers. The first prototypes of the new standard are expected to be shipped by the end of this year. DTV, coupled with new video compression standards which are expected to appear on the market later this year, will pave the way for the introduction of videophones on PCs.

Less than a week after rival chip-maker AMD announced the launch of its new 233MHz K6 Pentium Pro clone chip, Intel have Intel have unveiled plans to release a stunning new line of chips which will boast clock speeds as high as 500MHz. The first of the new Pentium II chips (which will run at 233MHz to 266MHz) will be unveiled in May, and over the next year Intel said it plans to gradually ramp clock speeds up to between 366MHz and 440MHz in advanced of its 64-bit Merced chips, due to be released onto the market in 1999. Intel is also planning to move from pin-based chips to chips mounted in cartridges to make CPU upgrades easier for ordinary people to carry out and to allow it to include "additional technology" in the chip packages. This is likely to include much larger caches and parallel processing chips to maximise processing speeds.

As if to prove the adage that nothing succeeds like dominant market share, Microsoft and Intel have both stunned stockmarket analysts by posting record profits for the most recent quarter. In separate announcements, Microsoft let it be known that it made $1.04 billion in profit for the March 1997 quarter and that profits accounted for almost 33% of sales revenues. Intel, meanwhile, reported a profit of $US1.98 billion but generated a slightly smaller proportion of it from sales revenues - around 31%. Both companies noted that despite gloomy economic conditions, each had experienced a considerable growth in sales in the most recent quarter. Microsoft attributed this to the release of its Office97 range of software, whilst Intel attributed its buoyancy to the Pentium Pro and new MMX chips lines. Both companies believe profits will remain stable or grow slightly over the next 12 months.

In the face of strong and highly vocal protests from the Australian ISP Industry, Communications and Arts Minister Senator Richard Alston has reaffirmed the Federal Government's opposition to timed Internet calls. Alston and representatives from the Internet Industry Association of Australia held several meetings last week, and on Friday the Minister confirmed in writing that the Federal Government and his own Department will prevent any move by Telstra to introduce "B-party charging" - that is, timed calls to Internet Service Providers. According to Alston, the Government had intended to enshrine the ban in the recent Telecommunications bills but because of a tied vote in the Senate the attempt failed. However, he moved to reassure INTIAA representatives that B-party charging is not on the agenda, even without legislative protection.

Australian Cybermalls has upgraded our bandwidth for the fifth successive time in 12 months as a result of increased traffic flows to our site. We're now using a T3 connection to the Internet through MCI/Sprint in place of the multi-threaded T1 line we've been using since late January this year. Our new T3 connection should improve our site's speed for most visitors and help reduce any congestion caused by the doubling of our traffic volume over the last several months. MCI are one of the largest bandwidth suppliers in the USA.

AMD has launched a new 233MHz chip - the K6 - which outperforms Intel's fastest Pentium and Pentium Pros yet is fully compatible with standard Pentium chip sockets and all Wintel software. The new K6 also incorporates the 57 extra multi-media instructions of MMX chips but will sell for 20% less than Intel's 200MHz Pentium chips. AMD, which first rose to fame as an alternate supplier of inexpensive 286 and 386 chips under licence to Intel in the late 1980s (and which merged with rival chip designers NexGen in 1995) claim that they've invested more than 5 years of research into the K6 and - for the first time in the company's history - produced a product that is demonstrably superior to Intel's line. Large international computer manufacturers have already evaluated the K6, AMD says, and the new chips are being rolled out of the company's Texas plant right now to meet major orders. The first bulk shipment is due to arrive in Australia on April 28th.

High-speed 56kbps modems from Rockwell, US Robotics/3Com and Texas Instruments are faltering, according to reports from the manufacturers. The lack of an international standard for ultra-high speed modems and an unexpected rash of bugs which have plagued the technology since its introduction are leading to low sales and high levels of buyer dissatisfaction. According to derivative manufacturers in Australia who are licensing the competing x2 and K56 high-speed technologies, current 56kbps modems are delivering levels of performance that are significantly below the levels promised, and some are currently so bad that they perform at a lower standard than 33.6kbps V.34 modems (though software patches are expected to be released soon which will correct some of the worst flaws). An international standard for 56kbps modems which may well embrace parts of both the competing x2 and K56 technologies is not expected until early 1998.

Microsoft and Intel expect that the 486 PC will become an obsolete computing platform later this year when Microsoft release the next version of their Windows95 operating system. The new Windows97 is expected to continue to make PCs easier to use and will carry an expanded number of features including built-in support for MMX, a full 32-bit operating system, support for infra-red connectivity and very large hard drives - but the price will be significantly greater RAM and processing requirements. Windows97 is likely to require a minimum of a Pentium processor and 16Mb of RAM, but a high-end Pentium and 32Mb of RAM will probably become the standard. Users who elect to stay with Windows 3.x or Windows95 on 486 machines rather than upgrade their hardware will find themselves increasingly isolated in 1998, Microsoft says.

Australian Cybermalls is celebrating its first birthday this week. Our site began broadcasting test transmissions on the 29th of March 1996 but storefront counters and full site implementation didn't commence until mid-April. So our birthday (for all intents and purposes) falls across the next several days. During the past year we've grown from a small 20-page site to the more than 500 pages we host today and we've been delighted to receive 204,555 unique visitors during that time. In our first week of operations we received 718 visitors but this steadily increased month by month to the point where - over the most recent 7 days - we hosted 12,771 visitors, equivalent to an annual growth rate of approximately 1675% For those who have an interest in these sorts of things Australian Cybermalls now transmits an average of 60,000 pages of information every week and consumes approximately 50 Gigabytes of bandwidth a year. Because of the highly graphical nature of our site, this translates into close to 500,000 hits on our sever every seven days. Over the coming 12 months we look forward to hosting anywhere between 600,000 and 750,000 visitors and doubling in size again. We'd like to thank everyone for their whole-hearted support during the last 12 months - it only encourages us to try to do even better in the future.

Australian Democrats Senator Lyn Allison will introduce a private member's bill into the Senate shortly to prohibit timed local data calls. The move follows the Government's recent failure to insert a similar prohibition into the amended Telecommunications Act, which will come into force on July 1st this year. In the meantime, an online petition against timed Internet calls containing more than 26,000 signatures will be presented to the Senate very soon as well. The petition is intended to bolster the private bill and alert the Senate to widespread community mistrust of Senator Richard Alston's recent assurances that an explicit prohibition of timed local Internet calls was "not necessary". The petition has been organised by the newly-formed Australian Internet Alliance. The AIA is a coalition of 100 smaller ISPs who fear that Telstra's monopoly of the Australian Internet will allow it to use timed calls to raise dial-up rates and force many private ISPs out of business later this year.

Australian Cybermalls' offices have been swept by the first Australian 'flu epidemic of the autumn. Coupled with the recent Easter break, this has severely disrupted our regular updating schedules for Dr Fun, the daily news, the Free Software Store, the Free Graphics Store, Motorcare 4WD, Julie Oliver's Cross-Stitch Patterns and several of our other popular sites. We apologise to any of our many thousands of visitors who've been inconvenienced by this and we hope to resume normal transmission schedules within the next 72 hours. "Get well" messages (including "Get well fast - I'm impatient!") can be sent by clicking here.

Australian Cybermalls has won several new awards in the last few weeks. To our delight, we found that Looksmart have made as an editors choice in their online shopping category and Lycos have listed The Free Software Store as one of their famous "Top 5%" sites. South Africa's Tudogs have listed The Free Graphics Store as one of their top 5% sites as well and NetGuide have also made us a selection in recent months - several times. These awards add to our slowly-growing collection which already includes The Australian's Site Of The Week, Sofcom's Pick Of The Net, Cool Site Of The Hour, Telstra's inaugural Pick Of The Clicks and AAA's Most Popular Australian Site in 1996. We will add the awards to our awards page in few days. Thankyou. We're humbled.

According to a survey by international marketing consultants Booz-Allen & Hamilton, online banking is poised to take off and consumers will have access to as many as 3,000 online banks within the next 3 years. B-A&H predict that up to 1,000 of these sites will be full-service retail banks and over 700 will be corporate Internet banks, and that the number of individuals using online banks will rise to between 20% and 30% of all consumers within the next 5 years. Lower transaction costs will fuel the move, B-A&H say. The cost of processing a transaction through the Internet is up to 85% cheaper than processing the same transaction across the counter, and 35% cheaper than transactions processed through ATM machines or EFTPOS. The B-A&H survey examined responses from 382 banks in 42 countries.

Australia's National Crime Authority, which was due to be wound up later this year under a 10-year sunset clause in the authority's enabling legislation, is likely to have its life extended by special Federal legislation later this year so that it can tackle electronic fraud and money laundering on the Internet. The Federal Government recently came to agreements with a number of foreign governments about co-operatively sharing tax information in order to help stem the leakage of tax revenues that is beginning to occur as e-commerce heats up. An extension of the NCA's life and a modification of its role are part of a range of Government measures now being put in place in an attempt to regulate and control commercial traffic on the Internet.

According to a report from the Magazine Publishers of America, less than 20% of online publishers are making money from their web sites. At least part of the reason for this, the report suggests, is that most publishers are using their Internet presences to promote their offline titles. Furthermore, the printed titles were the source of up to 70% of the content carried in online magazines so most online publishing sites offer little that can't be obtained in paper-based versions. Most publishers who are making money are generating most site revenue from advertising sales, the report says, with a further 22% of revenues coming from line production services for advertisers and customers and about 5% from magazine subscription sales.

Sausage Software have launched a new electronic commerce product called eVend which will allow Internet sites to introduce pay-per-view charging schemes. The new Java-based product, which works directly in conjunction with Sausage Software's server in the USA, allow users to transfer cash via credit card to pay for the content they view on a site. So far site-charging schemes have failed on the Internet, but Sausage hope that their new software solution may change that. Sausage are best-known for their Hot Dog web editor.

Telstra's attempt to introduce timed local calls for Internet access has failed - for the present. New telecommunications laws passed in Parliament late last week enshrine the right of Australian consumers to untimed local calls. However, the new laws still leave the way open for Telstra to introduce timed business data calls at "some future time". Although the company denies that it plans to introduce these fees and Communications Minister Senator Alston has said that the Federal Government would block any moves by Telstra to introduce timed charges on incoming calls, the ISP industry is still concerned that at "some future time" Telstra could significantly raise Internet access prices in Australia using the powers the new law gives it.

The number of sites on the Australian Internet more than doubled last year according to our monthly Australian Internet Growth Index, which has been measuring the number of Australian sites on the Internet for the last 14 months. In April 1996 there were around 10,250 Australian sites. Although all capitals showed a fall in active sites during March 1997 as search engines and ISPs pruned "ghost sites" off their servers, our statistics show that the overall number of Australian sites expanded to approximately 25,500 during the course of the last year - a 150% increase. The April 1st 1997 figures (with April 1996 figures in brackets) are:

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

Brisbane - 2,542 (762)
Sydney - 7,678 (2,491)
Melbourne - 5,996 (2,100)
Adelaide - 2,338 (897)

Perth - 2,209 (691)
Hobart - 981 (358)
Canberra - 1,905 (861)
Darwin - 1,785 (N/A)

During March 1997 Australian Cybermalls displayed 34,087 storefronts to an average of 1099 visitors every day. This represented a traffic increase of 42% over February 1997 when we hosted an average of 776 visitors every day.

Australian Cybermalls are also celebrating our first birthday this month. During the last year our weekly traffic has expanded from 718 visitors per week (April 16-22 1996, the first week we installed counters and logs) to around 10,000 visitors per week today. Our site will be hosting its 200,000th visitor some time around the middle of this month when we blow on our candles and we look forward to receiving more than 600,000 visitors during our second year. Thankyou everyone for your support!