Small tricks, big business
By Rob O'Neill
December 14, 2004
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Zoran and Sonia Naumovski in their Sydney Boost franchise. Photo: Natalie Boog
Boost Juice has had a stratospheric rise since it began four years ago, starting a mini-revolution in Australian retailing and opening a niche in healthful food consumption.
It owes its success - which will see it with 175 stores by the end of the year - to a timely idea and the hard work of its franchise lessees, who in turn owe much of their success to Boost's IT systems that smooth their business's operations.
When Zoran and Sonia Naumovski plunked down $120,000 to open their two central Sydney Boost Juice bars this year, IT was as important a consideration as brand and location. They are typical of Australia's 54,000 franchise owners, the economy's backbone of mum-and-dad operators, who need efficient IT systems to run a competitive business.
Sonia, who runs the business day-to-day, rates the group's buying power and IT system consistency, which aids training at both sites, as two significant benefits of being part of the Boost franchise. Boost manages the IT system, which includes a company network so franchise partners have access to critical business systems such as human resources, interstore communication and the supply chain.
"Basically (it) allows us to concentrate on the general operation of the business rather than worrying about the IT side of things," says Zoran. "The current set-up means we can just walk into the business from day one and concentrate on running the business in an efficient and profitable manner rather than getting caught up in IT issues. Training and exposure on the point-of-sale system is provided prior to opening day and can also be obtained by communicating with other partners."
Their story highlights the benefits to be gained by those who dream of owning a business and by independent operators considering joining a franchise. These advantages are in scale and access to services, a powerful brand and marketing machine, bulk buying and technology for competitive advantage.
According to the Franchise Council of Australia - which represents three-quarters of Australia's 800 franchise brands and 54,000 franchise workplaces employing half a million workers - IT plays a growing role in assisting marketing and building the brand.
Council chief executive Richard Evans says that in addition to delivering better systems for accounting and other applications, IT plays a big role in the modern franchise in delivering education and training along with facilitating communications.
"As use of the web increases, franchise systems are seeing webpage development as another arm to their marketing approach," Evans says.
The attraction of a franchise's mature IT systems is not just for new operators such as Zoran and Sonia Naumovski; long-time independent operators such as Sydney motel owner David Osborne are also swayed by the logic of plugging into a big IT provider and its marketing generator.
Osborne joined the Best Western franchise in 2002 after his Paramatta motel in Sydney had been operating independently for more than 25 years. A changing market that no longer favoured the go-it-alone approach lay behind his decision. And technology played a significant role.
"We used to operate through the Yellow Pages and the NRMA directory, and that worked quite successfully for many years," he says. "Travelling sales representatives carried the NRMA guide in their glove boxes."
But then cost-cutting businesses began to tender for all-of-business contracts for accommodation, taking the decision out of the hands of their road warriors. Bookings were more often made through global distribution systems (GDSs) and online and customers were increasingly seeking loyalty programs and rewards.
"We needed to become part of a larger group," Osborne says. He chose Best Western after evaluating its IT systems, brand, marketing, and fees.
"Best Western stacked up as the best option overall," he says, along with infrastructure and development in the US backed by a "pool of money" to develop its IT that smaller Australian operators such as his can't match.
The central IT team has delivered applications that make a difference to his business. On top of cost-effective access to systems, the company has developed an application called Best Cheque to manage commissions paid to travel agents.
As an independent operator, such commissions are a nightmare to process, but Best Cheque allows that to be managed centrally by the group. The result is Osborne's property is more attractive to agencies, he gets more bookings and the administrative hassle of managing agency payments is taken off his plate.
"These services offer us a genuine competitive advantage and enable us to overcome many of the shortcomings associated with a smaller independent operator," he says.
The franchise association still allows Osborne to act independently, too. For instance, the company intranet helps his staff to be aware of tender opportunities for accommodation that Best Western Wesley Lodge can respond to locally as an independent business or through the group, whichever is most appropriate.
Best Western's Australian deputy CEO, Michael Kerr, says delivering IT has been one of the company's biggest challenges over the past four years.
"We had to take advantage of new IT products coming onto the market and encourage the operators to take them up," he says. "We can provide IT infrastructure services they could not afford independently."
Each operator has a micro-site within the group site, linking with the main global distribution systems. Kerr says 40 per cent of bookings are now made through the website.
Operators can take part in deals for communications services and hardware. Support and security are also managed by the franchise.
"We have a sophisticated intranet," he says. "If someone spills ink on a carpet, they can find a fix for it there. There's a lot of business support and training."
In addition, the franchise can view inventory online and help operators set rates and manage their yield. This is one area of which Kerr is particularly proud, with the group managing to increase average yields by 20 to 30 per cent in a static market.
"Any increase in the rate goes 95 per cent to the bottom line," he says.
In Sydney, Bondi real-estate agent Ron Bauer is another former independent small-business owner who says he was "floored by the technology and how it is being adopted and promoted" when he joined the Ray White group.
He feels the IT benefits have provided tangible business benefits to his operations. And it's not just the real-estate agent who benefits - Ray White corporate benefits from increased revenue because all commissions are put through the network instead of being kept on paper or reported manually.
At the customer end, the website is more functional and generates more traffic and sales leads, while internally the intranet and other forms of electronic communications are several steps ahead of what Bauer was used to.
The intranet comes in two parts. The first is Infocentral, which is available to everyone in the Ray White network. Bauer says there is a vast amount of information there, including standard documents, contracts and form letters. The system also includes vertical market websites for Ray White's divisions and other businesses.
Then there is the "principals" site, which is security protected and for proprietors only. "I was floored by that," Bauer says. "There's so much in there and I've really only seen the tip of the iceberg."
Joining the franchise has changed the way Bauer does business: "We had our own ideas about how things should work but we are learning that a lot of what we've done could have been done better and more efficiently."
For accounting and monthly reporting, there is a system called Impact, with all data managed from the franchise head office, where back-up and security are also managed to remove one big headache for the local operators.
According to the group manager of IT, Tom White, Impact is to be replaced with a more web-centric system from New Zealand developer Online Solutions Ltd. The system has already been tested in Ray White offices across the Tasman and proved to be a winner. It will enable access from home and also potentially from client premises.
On top of the Impact change, White and his team of 12 IT staff are working on new tools to manage listings, to present marketing material to property vendors and to deliver real-time market data to help franchisees make decisions about growth.
Bauer is also enthusiastic about the franchise customer relationship management system that tracks buyers and sellers and helps match their needs to produce sales.
White, as the force behind the technology at Ray White Real Estate, has a straightforward philosophy for the delivery of IT services.
"We aim to deliver simple, effective tools for both offices and salespeople to serve a wide range of what they do in the market but not to dictate what they do."
Looking after the family
Boost has ridden the health wave, and in just four years grew from one Adelaide shop to 140 stores throughout Australia and New Zealand. According to BRW's Young Rich edition, founder and former fashion model Janine Allis doubled her net worth last year to $36 million. Earlier this year, the company launched a pilot brand extension, the Boost Health Bar, expanding the juice franchise into the health-food market.
For Boost Juice Bars' IT manager Eddie Tucker, hardware and software support and the selection of a point-of-sale system are the priorities.
"We are keen to make the transition as easy as we can for (franchisees) when joining the Boost family," Tucker says.
Boost's IT service is working on a standard telecommunications and internet package for the group.
"We are looking at providing a bundled telecommunications package whereby Boost, through Telstra, will provide a complete end-to-end managed delivery of telecommunications and internet set-up to provide ease of delivery to new and existing franchisees."
As in any significant business, IT plays an advisory role in discussions across the group to help the business reach its goals. Tucker says his department works with the business but is "firm on system standards and ethics".
The scale of the business is also now delivering purchase breaks for franchisees. "Having a popular brand name carries weight with existing and potential vendors which allows for increased services or reduction in purchased unit prices," Tucker says.
To support its international expansion into New Zealand and next year Dubai, the business must ensure point-of-sale and other systems are compliant with foreign retail trading and governance requirements. -- Rob O'Neill
Franchisee's recipe for business reporting
Some franchisees are so big in their own right, they need to implement their own IT systems. That was the case with Melbourne-based KFC and Pizza Hut operator Southern Restaurants, which owns 58 outlets in Victoria and South Australia.
The company needed to find a system to do dual reporting to manage its Australian June 30 year-end and also November 30 for the US-based franchisors. Southern Restaurants' payroll system also had specific requirements, needing to manage 1200 employees and unique requirements for superannuation, allowances and the movement of casual staff between locations.
CFO Michael Corry says the existing systems were not meeting increasingly complex requirements and the need to access information when it was needed and in the form it was needed. Improved response times, scalability and quality reporting were vital.
The company has chosen software from Australian-based software developer Pronto, which has particular strengths in the retail segment.
The Pronto Xi system is providing integrated functionality with Southern Restaurants and also helps manage more than 60 suppliers.
12 December 2004
ONLINE TRAVELER
Ins and outs of finding deals on the Internet
By Darren M. Green
Special to the Tribune
Published December 12, 2004
For those privy to the tricks of the trade, the Web does indeed offer budget-conscious travelers a virtual cornucopia of savings opportunities. Read on to learn the ins and outs of finding travel deals over the Internet.
Hotels
There's no other aspect of travel so fraught with deeply discounted online opportunities. Here's how to do it:
www.quikbook.com--Quikbook combines quantity (searches yield impressive listings), a Web site which is intuitive for beginners, detailed information and photographs, and, most importantly, the best overall average hotel prices in a series of test searches. Honorable mention in this category goes to www.octupustravel.com.
www.hotwire.com--When a specific hotel is not part of the equation, Hotwire gets my nod over its predecessor in this field, www.priceline.com. Enter your parameters (e.g. four-star or better near the river), and Mr. Hotwire spits out a list of heavily discounted options which includes all of the pertinent information except the actual name of the property.
Last-minute deals
According to PhocusWright, an online travel research company, one-third of online travel consumers plan trips within two weeks of departure. The Web sites below offer relief from exorbitant prices for the truant:
www.smarterliving.com--If you're flexible as to date of departure and destination, sign up for the Smarterliving e-mail newsletter, published by one of the true pioneers in discounted online travel. Loads of discounts will find their way to you every week.
www.site59.com--Specializing in package deals for trips booked anywhere from three hours to 14 days prior to departure, Site59 provides the best bang for the buck in finding last-minute online travel specials. Site59 powers the last-minute travel sections for a bevy of 800-pound gorillas in the Internet travel arena (including Yahoo Travel, Travelocity and Orbitz), so they must be doing something right.
www.11thhourvacations.com--The winner of the "best of the rest" category, this Web site, which also offers discounts on cruises and vacation rentals, may be just the ticket if Site59 doesn't cover your particular destination for some reason.
Airfares
While at least partially responsible for the online travel revolution, airfare discount Web sites no longer offer dollar savings to rival those in the above categories. No matter, you may yet squeeze a couple of bucks off the ticket price at these sites.
www.sidestep--The Sidestep comparison engine, which can be downloaded in a couple of minutes, magically appears on the left side of your monitor every time you search for airfares online (be it at an airline Web site, Expedia or another discounter). It takes the search parameters you've entered at your destination Web site and kicks out a list of lowest prices which you can compare to the results generated by the Web site you are visiting. If there's a better deal out there, Sidestep will find it, and all you need to do is click on the relevant link to be transported directly to the purchasing screen at the winning Web site.
www.travelocity.com--Check out the Dream Maps feature if you're simply looking to get away for the cheapest price possible. Enter your airport of departure, and Travelocity will produce a map with the cheapest fare to cities both within and outside of the United States. Simply click on the most interesting fare, and you'll be presented with dates for which such fares are available.
Airline Web sites--While not a very exciting recommendation, it's always worth taking a peek at the airlines' Web sites before booking online.
Packages
Once hailed as the "next big thing" in online travel, this genre hasn't really lived up to its billing. Even though all of the major players have jumped on the bandwagon, evidence of any real savings in booking the whole enchilada at once rather than purchasing flight, hotel and car separately has been difficult to find. Nonetheless, if you count yourself among the legions of time-strapped vacation planners who'd rather click on the purchase link once rather than three times, check out the vacation package tab at www.expedia.com to peruse probably the most impressive listing of allegedly-discounted, all-in-one options.
Cars
Rental cars tend to cost what they cost regardless of where booked, but for those convinced they can beat the system, you may well use www.orbitz.com. Search results are displayed in "matrix" fashion, which makes side-by-side comparison-shopping easier.
Auctions
Yes, auctions. If you just can't seem to find your dream vacation online at the right price, a good last ditch effort is www.skyauctions.com, which lists vacation packages which have sold at auction for as little as $1. Also, www.ebay.com has taken the plunge into the online travel world by offering cruises, vacation packages and loads more to the highest bidder.
Ins and outs of finding deals on the Internet
By Darren M. Green
Special to the Tribune
Published December 12, 2004
For those privy to the tricks of the trade, the Web does indeed offer budget-conscious travelers a virtual cornucopia of savings opportunities. Read on to learn the ins and outs of finding travel deals over the Internet.
Hotels
There's no other aspect of travel so fraught with deeply discounted online opportunities. Here's how to do it:
www.quikbook.com--Quikbook combines quantity (searches yield impressive listings), a Web site which is intuitive for beginners, detailed information and photographs, and, most importantly, the best overall average hotel prices in a series of test searches. Honorable mention in this category goes to www.octupustravel.com.
www.hotwire.com--When a specific hotel is not part of the equation, Hotwire gets my nod over its predecessor in this field, www.priceline.com. Enter your parameters (e.g. four-star or better near the river), and Mr. Hotwire spits out a list of heavily discounted options which includes all of the pertinent information except the actual name of the property.
Last-minute deals
According to PhocusWright, an online travel research company, one-third of online travel consumers plan trips within two weeks of departure. The Web sites below offer relief from exorbitant prices for the truant:
www.smarterliving.com--If you're flexible as to date of departure and destination, sign up for the Smarterliving e-mail newsletter, published by one of the true pioneers in discounted online travel. Loads of discounts will find their way to you every week.
www.site59.com--Specializing in package deals for trips booked anywhere from three hours to 14 days prior to departure, Site59 provides the best bang for the buck in finding last-minute online travel specials. Site59 powers the last-minute travel sections for a bevy of 800-pound gorillas in the Internet travel arena (including Yahoo Travel, Travelocity and Orbitz), so they must be doing something right.
www.11thhourvacations.com--The winner of the "best of the rest" category, this Web site, which also offers discounts on cruises and vacation rentals, may be just the ticket if Site59 doesn't cover your particular destination for some reason.
Airfares
While at least partially responsible for the online travel revolution, airfare discount Web sites no longer offer dollar savings to rival those in the above categories. No matter, you may yet squeeze a couple of bucks off the ticket price at these sites.
www.sidestep--The Sidestep comparison engine, which can be downloaded in a couple of minutes, magically appears on the left side of your monitor every time you search for airfares online (be it at an airline Web site, Expedia or another discounter). It takes the search parameters you've entered at your destination Web site and kicks out a list of lowest prices which you can compare to the results generated by the Web site you are visiting. If there's a better deal out there, Sidestep will find it, and all you need to do is click on the relevant link to be transported directly to the purchasing screen at the winning Web site.
www.travelocity.com--Check out the Dream Maps feature if you're simply looking to get away for the cheapest price possible. Enter your airport of departure, and Travelocity will produce a map with the cheapest fare to cities both within and outside of the United States. Simply click on the most interesting fare, and you'll be presented with dates for which such fares are available.
Airline Web sites--While not a very exciting recommendation, it's always worth taking a peek at the airlines' Web sites before booking online.
Packages
Once hailed as the "next big thing" in online travel, this genre hasn't really lived up to its billing. Even though all of the major players have jumped on the bandwagon, evidence of any real savings in booking the whole enchilada at once rather than purchasing flight, hotel and car separately has been difficult to find. Nonetheless, if you count yourself among the legions of time-strapped vacation planners who'd rather click on the purchase link once rather than three times, check out the vacation package tab at www.expedia.com to peruse probably the most impressive listing of allegedly-discounted, all-in-one options.
Cars
Rental cars tend to cost what they cost regardless of where booked, but for those convinced they can beat the system, you may well use www.orbitz.com. Search results are displayed in "matrix" fashion, which makes side-by-side comparison-shopping easier.
Auctions
Yes, auctions. If you just can't seem to find your dream vacation online at the right price, a good last ditch effort is www.skyauctions.com, which lists vacation packages which have sold at auction for as little as $1. Also, www.ebay.com has taken the plunge into the online travel world by offering cruises, vacation packages and loads more to the highest bidder.
The sweet taste of e-commerce success
By Adam Turner
December 7, 2004
Next
Bert Werden... built his WineStar online wine cellar from the back of a Strathmore bottle shop in Melbourne's north. Photo: Simon Schluter
Tucked away in a suburban bottle shop, Bert Werden is a seven-year e-commerce veteran whose site now turns over $4 million a year.
While well-financed competitors such as Foster's WinePlanet - which collapsed in 2001 - burned cash with no hint of return, Werden quietly built his WineStar online wine cellar from the back of a Strathmore bottle shop in Melbourne's north.
WineStar hosts the most popular wine forum outside the US, receiving a million hits a month. But it was uncorked in 1997 as a five-page website with an order form.
"A guy who used to come in here and buy Jim Beam-and-cola cans said we should go online," Werden says.
"I designed our first website in Excel but we still found people actually using it, which amazed us because we were just piss-farting around at this stage. It went from fortnightly inquiries to weekly inquiries to daily inquiries, so we thought we should look at the full e-commerce bit."
Back then, e-commerce was touted as a business revolution. Anybody, anywhere could sell anything to anyone - eliminating superfluous costs such as shopfronts and sales forces. From the selling of car parts to automotive giants to getting text books into school kids' backpacks, in this electronic grand bazaar anyone could hang out their shingle and be a global player.
Expectations soared with the share prices of the newly listed online retailers (e-tailers) as they built lavish cyber shopfronts for consumers. Online business-to-business marketplaces were also constructed so organisations could screw down their suppliers on the prices of everything from stationery to semiconductors.
No idea was too ambitious, no business plan too sketchy - build it and they will come.
But often, no one came.
An example is winepros.com.au, which is about to be used by wine group Cheviot Bridge for a backdoor listing on the Australian Stock Exchange, five years after the original e-tailer raised $25 million in capital and three years after it went into voluntary liquidation.
Another was Werden's chief competitor, Foster's, which closed down WinePlanet after its bricks and mortar retailers revolted - but not before it dropped nearly $100 million into the venture. It was joined in the same year by bottleshop.com.au, which burned $405,000 in two years.
But it is not all doom. After a hard couple of years Australia's wider business community is embracing the internet after watching the rise and fall of many e-commerce startups.
Half of small business and 40 per cent of medium-sized business are now taking orders online, according to the Sensis 2004 e-Business Report. The past year saw many more shop online - the proportion of small businesses buying goods and services jumped from 45 per cent to 55 per cent and medium businesses rose from 64 per cent to 74 per cent.
Capitalising on this trend, online marketplace corProcure - formed from 14 shareholders including Pricewaterhouse¿Coopers and Telstra - has turned 90 degrees from when it was conceived as a massive buying group for Australia's blue chips. Australia Post bought the flailing online marketplace to be a foundation for its e-commerce platform.
After sifting through the e-commerce graveyard to see where others went wrong, Australia Post's corProcure product manager Karyn Welsh shifted the marketplace's focus from blue chip giants to medium and large-sized companies.
It's a lesson that might have saved corProcure competitor Cyberlynx, which looks set to implode after it emerged last week that five of the seven founding companies will abandon a marketplace that was supposed to generate $9 billion a year in transactions. "The biggest corporates have buying power in their own right, but the medium to large companies don't have so much power and so only by participating in a collective buying group can they achieve similar savings," Welsh says.
corProcure's downfall was a lack of direction, with "14 shareholders pulling it in 14 directions," she says.
"The technology was fine - it was like having a Rolls-Royce motor but no body, so we had to build the body around it."
Fear of missing the e-commerce wave drove the construction of many online marketplaces, but poor management led to their downfall, says Ariba's Asia Pacific managing director, Peter Stavroff.
Ariba builds electronic procurement systems for online marketplaces and itself rode the e-commerce roller coaster but survived by expanding into services and training.
"On paper you'd look at corProcure and say, "That's just got to work', but it was an absolute dud," Stavroff says.
"To get multiple stakeholders to agree on the same thing across multiple businesses is almost impossible - that's really the bottom line. I think a lot of people were blurry-eyed about the hype and there were people making decisions who didn't know what they were doing."
And with in excess of $50 million a year now passing through corProcure, Australia Post's Welsh says e-commerce wasn't a failure, it just failed to match the hype.
At the peak of the e-commerce hype, WineStar was quoted $50,000 to build an e-commerce website. Werden resisted the temptation to build an expensive site in the hope customers would come and instead bought a $200 off-the-shelf e-commerce package. He customised the package himself and also started an online wine forum for customers, which he follows closely to predict sales trends.
Four years after the dotcom bubble burst, and having outlived well-financed competitors, Werden says overcoming the impersonal nature of shopping online is key.
"I think we've succeeded because we've made an impersonal medium quite personal with features such as the forum," Werden says. "Now we need to build on this by winning over the older market - those in their 50s and over who may be comfortable using email and the web but haven't embraced e-commerce."
Despite the demise of so many online business ventures, e-commerce is not a failure and most of those which survived the dotcom mania are turning a profit, says Forrester Research vice-president John McCarthy.
E-commerce rode the wave of dotcom hype and was unceremoniously dumped when it failed to reach unrealistic expectations, McCarthy says.
"I don't think e-commerce failed - like anything else, the people who understood what their target market was and had a viable business plan survived," he says.
"As for the 'Field of Dreams' approach - build it and they will come - that was just crazy. A bad idea is still a bad idea no matter how much money you throw at it."
The new Brisbane owners of dStore, one of the darlings of Australia's short-lived dotcom love affair, have taken heed from the lessons of the past four years. In 2001, while in receivership, dStore was bleeding $300,000 a month, which was less than it was losing when it was trading because of a technology and business model that saw the cost of filling an order rise to more than what the consumer paid.
Under HotShed, dStore turned its first profit after only nine months, says HotShed and now dStore chief executive, Andrew Cooper.
"When dStore was launched we looked at it and thought it was amazing but everyone's expectations of e-commerce were far too high," Cooper says.
dStore's downfall was due to a weak technology platform and poor marketing, he says, and HotShed acquired it for the chance to showcase its own e-commerce platform.
"A lesson that we've taken out of dStore is that we gear our advertising towards finding those consumers that do shop online rather than trying to convert consumers into online shoppers," Cooper says.
"dStore is a profitable business now, it's just nowhere as big as the original investors intended it to be."
Similarly, the challenge to resuscitate Melbourne e-tailer Wishlist fell to Australian dotcom veteran Adrian Finlayson.
As the industry went from boom to bust, Finlayson took on the task of turning around Wishlist. He shed almost three-quarters of his 120 staff when it became obvious the world was not beating a path to the door.
"That was certainly a massive low point for the business,'' Finlayson says. "Wishlist got caught up in the hype - there's no doubt about it. In those days the business was building for massive growth and the expectations were set for growth of 200 or 300 per cent per annum."
An e-commerce consultant during the excesses of the late 1990s, Finlayson was snapped up by software developer FreeMarkets in 2000 to run their Australasian operations after a stock market frenzy saw its share price peak at $US370 ($A474).
"People spent too much money building solutions they didn't need; you spend money in a different way when the market throws money at you and expects you to grow quickly," he says.
The most successful businesses now build solutions slightly behind their needs rather than anticipating, he says.
"In today's environment, I don't know of any successful business that builds on the belief that they will come. E-commerce does fundamentally change the way people do business, whether it was back then or now, but now the market has a different perception of the value of that change and of how quickly you should grow within that change."
It is a formula that served WineStar well. It has a growing customer base and Werden has turned his attention to the building phase. Preparing to fight off the next onslaught from online competitors, he hopes to move WineStar from the back room into its own premises and modernise the inventory system.
"Strathmore Cellars and WineStar are getting in each other's way," Werden says.
"The retail giants such as Woolworths and Coles Myer are eventually going to make another big push and that will be our biggest challenge."
Andrew Spicer
chief executive, WebCentral Group, Australia's biggest web host.
Broadband is enabling a second wave because it is more convenient.
The rise of micro-markets - online sole traders akin to the stallholders at weekend markets - on sites such as eBay and Amazon has led to the rise of a new class of entrepreneur. These small, home-operated stores, specialising in categories such as jewellery, are made possible because of the improved quality of shopfront software and mature e-commerce payment security options such as credit-card processing and PayPal.
Women have found goods and services online that appeal, and that broadens the market.
The financial services and entertainment sectors are getting their collective act together. I wouldn't want to be a video store owner with Telstra's video download service letting people people download what they want.
Government is speeding its use of e-commerce providing tenders, documents, forms and other information online.
We will see an acceleration in e-commerce in the next year, but it won't be at the bubble level.
Len Augustine
Marketing director, SAP, business software developer
Integration between the website that the customer accesses and the back-end warehouse is becoming huge. Even small entrepreneurial companies that sold online overlooked how to get the product out of the warehouse and into their customers' hands, but that is much of the cost.
The big challenge in Australia was finding a logistics provider to deliver at a time convenient to the consumer. Businesses are using their relationship with SAP to smooth the process of doing business with each other.
The transport and logistics companies had to put in systems to track pallets, which would often get left in yards at the other ends of Australia.
Radio frequency identification (RFID) tags in 10 years make an amazing difference to the supply chain. You will plan and execute a supply-chain delivery using real-time data. Leaving the RFID chip alive as it enters the consumer supply chain, you can do more interesting things, such as a "smart shelf" that queries the warehouse and then supplier to see if a good is in stock and, if not, how long it will take to get it to the consumer.
Bruce McCabe
Managing director and analyst, S2 Intelligence, independent analysis firm
We will see a steady increase in volumes of online sales, but it's not explosive any more.
The most important driver of change in the online buying experience is as the "semantic web", where contextual information is added to products and services to help us better search for them.
The next is the ability to be able to find things based on their geographic location, such as what Sensis is now attempting to tie together, but that may be more like a 20- to 30-year process.
Another aspect is trust and security, which has developed slower than we would have thought five years ago, because consumers don't understand these issues.
Demographics play a big part, as youngsters who didn't have credit cards five years ago now do and grew up with shopping online.
Over the last year Australian businesses found B2C delivered the most value but next year they are cranking up their B2B projects, improving the ways businesses interact with each other and streamlining their supply channel
By Adam Turner
December 7, 2004
Next
Bert Werden... built his WineStar online wine cellar from the back of a Strathmore bottle shop in Melbourne's north. Photo: Simon Schluter
Tucked away in a suburban bottle shop, Bert Werden is a seven-year e-commerce veteran whose site now turns over $4 million a year.
While well-financed competitors such as Foster's WinePlanet - which collapsed in 2001 - burned cash with no hint of return, Werden quietly built his WineStar online wine cellar from the back of a Strathmore bottle shop in Melbourne's north.
WineStar hosts the most popular wine forum outside the US, receiving a million hits a month. But it was uncorked in 1997 as a five-page website with an order form.
"A guy who used to come in here and buy Jim Beam-and-cola cans said we should go online," Werden says.
"I designed our first website in Excel but we still found people actually using it, which amazed us because we were just piss-farting around at this stage. It went from fortnightly inquiries to weekly inquiries to daily inquiries, so we thought we should look at the full e-commerce bit."
Back then, e-commerce was touted as a business revolution. Anybody, anywhere could sell anything to anyone - eliminating superfluous costs such as shopfronts and sales forces. From the selling of car parts to automotive giants to getting text books into school kids' backpacks, in this electronic grand bazaar anyone could hang out their shingle and be a global player.
Expectations soared with the share prices of the newly listed online retailers (e-tailers) as they built lavish cyber shopfronts for consumers. Online business-to-business marketplaces were also constructed so organisations could screw down their suppliers on the prices of everything from stationery to semiconductors.
No idea was too ambitious, no business plan too sketchy - build it and they will come.
But often, no one came.
An example is winepros.com.au, which is about to be used by wine group Cheviot Bridge for a backdoor listing on the Australian Stock Exchange, five years after the original e-tailer raised $25 million in capital and three years after it went into voluntary liquidation.
Another was Werden's chief competitor, Foster's, which closed down WinePlanet after its bricks and mortar retailers revolted - but not before it dropped nearly $100 million into the venture. It was joined in the same year by bottleshop.com.au, which burned $405,000 in two years.
But it is not all doom. After a hard couple of years Australia's wider business community is embracing the internet after watching the rise and fall of many e-commerce startups.
Half of small business and 40 per cent of medium-sized business are now taking orders online, according to the Sensis 2004 e-Business Report. The past year saw many more shop online - the proportion of small businesses buying goods and services jumped from 45 per cent to 55 per cent and medium businesses rose from 64 per cent to 74 per cent.
Capitalising on this trend, online marketplace corProcure - formed from 14 shareholders including Pricewaterhouse¿Coopers and Telstra - has turned 90 degrees from when it was conceived as a massive buying group for Australia's blue chips. Australia Post bought the flailing online marketplace to be a foundation for its e-commerce platform.
After sifting through the e-commerce graveyard to see where others went wrong, Australia Post's corProcure product manager Karyn Welsh shifted the marketplace's focus from blue chip giants to medium and large-sized companies.
It's a lesson that might have saved corProcure competitor Cyberlynx, which looks set to implode after it emerged last week that five of the seven founding companies will abandon a marketplace that was supposed to generate $9 billion a year in transactions. "The biggest corporates have buying power in their own right, but the medium to large companies don't have so much power and so only by participating in a collective buying group can they achieve similar savings," Welsh says.
corProcure's downfall was a lack of direction, with "14 shareholders pulling it in 14 directions," she says.
"The technology was fine - it was like having a Rolls-Royce motor but no body, so we had to build the body around it."
Fear of missing the e-commerce wave drove the construction of many online marketplaces, but poor management led to their downfall, says Ariba's Asia Pacific managing director, Peter Stavroff.
Ariba builds electronic procurement systems for online marketplaces and itself rode the e-commerce roller coaster but survived by expanding into services and training.
"On paper you'd look at corProcure and say, "That's just got to work', but it was an absolute dud," Stavroff says.
"To get multiple stakeholders to agree on the same thing across multiple businesses is almost impossible - that's really the bottom line. I think a lot of people were blurry-eyed about the hype and there were people making decisions who didn't know what they were doing."
And with in excess of $50 million a year now passing through corProcure, Australia Post's Welsh says e-commerce wasn't a failure, it just failed to match the hype.
At the peak of the e-commerce hype, WineStar was quoted $50,000 to build an e-commerce website. Werden resisted the temptation to build an expensive site in the hope customers would come and instead bought a $200 off-the-shelf e-commerce package. He customised the package himself and also started an online wine forum for customers, which he follows closely to predict sales trends.
Four years after the dotcom bubble burst, and having outlived well-financed competitors, Werden says overcoming the impersonal nature of shopping online is key.
"I think we've succeeded because we've made an impersonal medium quite personal with features such as the forum," Werden says. "Now we need to build on this by winning over the older market - those in their 50s and over who may be comfortable using email and the web but haven't embraced e-commerce."
Despite the demise of so many online business ventures, e-commerce is not a failure and most of those which survived the dotcom mania are turning a profit, says Forrester Research vice-president John McCarthy.
E-commerce rode the wave of dotcom hype and was unceremoniously dumped when it failed to reach unrealistic expectations, McCarthy says.
"I don't think e-commerce failed - like anything else, the people who understood what their target market was and had a viable business plan survived," he says.
"As for the 'Field of Dreams' approach - build it and they will come - that was just crazy. A bad idea is still a bad idea no matter how much money you throw at it."
The new Brisbane owners of dStore, one of the darlings of Australia's short-lived dotcom love affair, have taken heed from the lessons of the past four years. In 2001, while in receivership, dStore was bleeding $300,000 a month, which was less than it was losing when it was trading because of a technology and business model that saw the cost of filling an order rise to more than what the consumer paid.
Under HotShed, dStore turned its first profit after only nine months, says HotShed and now dStore chief executive, Andrew Cooper.
"When dStore was launched we looked at it and thought it was amazing but everyone's expectations of e-commerce were far too high," Cooper says.
dStore's downfall was due to a weak technology platform and poor marketing, he says, and HotShed acquired it for the chance to showcase its own e-commerce platform.
"A lesson that we've taken out of dStore is that we gear our advertising towards finding those consumers that do shop online rather than trying to convert consumers into online shoppers," Cooper says.
"dStore is a profitable business now, it's just nowhere as big as the original investors intended it to be."
Similarly, the challenge to resuscitate Melbourne e-tailer Wishlist fell to Australian dotcom veteran Adrian Finlayson.
As the industry went from boom to bust, Finlayson took on the task of turning around Wishlist. He shed almost three-quarters of his 120 staff when it became obvious the world was not beating a path to the door.
"That was certainly a massive low point for the business,'' Finlayson says. "Wishlist got caught up in the hype - there's no doubt about it. In those days the business was building for massive growth and the expectations were set for growth of 200 or 300 per cent per annum."
An e-commerce consultant during the excesses of the late 1990s, Finlayson was snapped up by software developer FreeMarkets in 2000 to run their Australasian operations after a stock market frenzy saw its share price peak at $US370 ($A474).
"People spent too much money building solutions they didn't need; you spend money in a different way when the market throws money at you and expects you to grow quickly," he says.
The most successful businesses now build solutions slightly behind their needs rather than anticipating, he says.
"In today's environment, I don't know of any successful business that builds on the belief that they will come. E-commerce does fundamentally change the way people do business, whether it was back then or now, but now the market has a different perception of the value of that change and of how quickly you should grow within that change."
It is a formula that served WineStar well. It has a growing customer base and Werden has turned his attention to the building phase. Preparing to fight off the next onslaught from online competitors, he hopes to move WineStar from the back room into its own premises and modernise the inventory system.
"Strathmore Cellars and WineStar are getting in each other's way," Werden says.
"The retail giants such as Woolworths and Coles Myer are eventually going to make another big push and that will be our biggest challenge."
Andrew Spicer
chief executive, WebCentral Group, Australia's biggest web host.
Broadband is enabling a second wave because it is more convenient.
The rise of micro-markets - online sole traders akin to the stallholders at weekend markets - on sites such as eBay and Amazon has led to the rise of a new class of entrepreneur. These small, home-operated stores, specialising in categories such as jewellery, are made possible because of the improved quality of shopfront software and mature e-commerce payment security options such as credit-card processing and PayPal.
Women have found goods and services online that appeal, and that broadens the market.
The financial services and entertainment sectors are getting their collective act together. I wouldn't want to be a video store owner with Telstra's video download service letting people people download what they want.
Government is speeding its use of e-commerce providing tenders, documents, forms and other information online.
We will see an acceleration in e-commerce in the next year, but it won't be at the bubble level.
Len Augustine
Marketing director, SAP, business software developer
Integration between the website that the customer accesses and the back-end warehouse is becoming huge. Even small entrepreneurial companies that sold online overlooked how to get the product out of the warehouse and into their customers' hands, but that is much of the cost.
The big challenge in Australia was finding a logistics provider to deliver at a time convenient to the consumer. Businesses are using their relationship with SAP to smooth the process of doing business with each other.
The transport and logistics companies had to put in systems to track pallets, which would often get left in yards at the other ends of Australia.
Radio frequency identification (RFID) tags in 10 years make an amazing difference to the supply chain. You will plan and execute a supply-chain delivery using real-time data. Leaving the RFID chip alive as it enters the consumer supply chain, you can do more interesting things, such as a "smart shelf" that queries the warehouse and then supplier to see if a good is in stock and, if not, how long it will take to get it to the consumer.
Bruce McCabe
Managing director and analyst, S2 Intelligence, independent analysis firm
We will see a steady increase in volumes of online sales, but it's not explosive any more.
The most important driver of change in the online buying experience is as the "semantic web", where contextual information is added to products and services to help us better search for them.
The next is the ability to be able to find things based on their geographic location, such as what Sensis is now attempting to tie together, but that may be more like a 20- to 30-year process.
Another aspect is trust and security, which has developed slower than we would have thought five years ago, because consumers don't understand these issues.
Demographics play a big part, as youngsters who didn't have credit cards five years ago now do and grew up with shopping online.
Over the last year Australian businesses found B2C delivered the most value but next year they are cranking up their B2B projects, improving the ways businesses interact with each other and streamlining their supply channel
09 November 2004
Nano-based products starting to have consumer impact
By Linda A. Johnson, Associated Press
TRENTON, N.J. — For a science that's about manipulating substances at the molecular level, nanotechnology is starting to bring big profits to many consumer product makers.
Gaze deeply into the tennis ball held by Harris A. Goldberg, president and chief officer of InMat; it has an interior nanotech coating.
Mike Derer, AP
Already, nanoscience has produced stain- and wrinkle-resistant clothing, self-cleaning windows, glare-reducing and fog-resistant coatings for eyeglasses and windshields, dramatically increased computer memory, better sports equipment, improved cosmetics and sunscreens, and lighter, stronger auto components.
What's next? More user-friendly cell phones, longer-lasting batteries, lighter car tires that retain air longer, better imaging techniques for diagnosing disease, drugs more precisely targeted to limit side effects, faster consumer electronics, perhaps even cheaper beer made with "nano yeast," experts say.
Fortune 500 companies from General Electric, Johnson & Johnson, Merck & Co. and IBM to Motorola, Sony, DuPont and 3M are making big investments in nanotechnology to improve medicine, computer components, electronic toys, microelectronics, photovoltaic systems, cosmetics and flat-panel displays for TV and video screens. Some products are already on store shelves.
"Nanotechnology is in the process of revolutionizing consumer technology," said Dave Bishop, president of the New Jersey Nanotechnology Consortium. "It's really a transformational technology, like transistors were."
Nanotechnology takes its name from the nanometer — one-billionth of a meter — about 80,000 times less than the diameter of a human hair. By manipulating substances from one to several hundred nanometers thick, scientists and manufacturers can take advantage of magnetic, electronic or optical properties not present at normal size.
But unlike the nanotechnology done in "clean room" labs, where devices are sometimes assembled atom by atom under electron microscopes, manufacturers basically use the principles of chemistry, aided by careful control of conditions such as temperature and pressure, to make molecules assemble themselves precisely, yet economically, with desired attributes.
"This is something with huge revenue potential," predicted Bishop, who heads nanotechnology research at Bell Labs, the research arm of telecom gear maker Lucent Technologies Inc. of Murray Hill, N.J.
Estimates of nanotechnology's financial impact range from about $20 billion to $50 billion in revenues today, jumping to as much as $1 trillion by 2010 and more than $2 trillion by 2015.
Lux Research, a New York consulting company focused on nanotechnology, forecasts products incorporating nanotechnology by 2014 will account for $2.6 trillion worth of products — 15% of global manufacturing output.
"There are really a lot of products out there. People just have a low awareness of them," said Matthew Nordan, vice president of research at Lux.
"What (companies) want to focus on is the end benefit to the consumer," such as improvements to cars or fabrics, said Gretchen McNeely, research manager for publisher Small Times Media, which covers the business of micro and nanoscale technology.
While some consumer advocates have questioned nanotechnology's safety, David Luzzi, co-director of The Nanotechnology Institute in Philadelphia, and Clayton Teague, director of the National Nanotechnology Coordination Office, say there's no evidence of serious danger for the general public. People have been encountering nano-sized particles for years in the form of exhaust from cars, furnaces and power plants, toner particles from copier machines, even molecules containing the active ingredients of drugs, they said.
Most nanotechnology applications are not seen to pose a risk, but that is being carefully studied by federal, academic and industrial researchers, Teague said.
Nanotechnology began showing up in consumer products, notably cosmetics and sunscreens about 10 years ago, McNeely said. But it technically dates to decades before. For example, catalytic converters, put on cars since the 1970s, use platinum-rhodium particles to convert pollutants into safe gases.
Fast-forward a few decades, and now nanoparticles are in a broad range of consumer products, from food packaging to sporting goods.
At Chicago-based Wilson Sporting Goods, the nCode — "n" for nanotechnology — line of high-end tennis rackets launched in June already is the top new racket in the world, said Wilson spokesman Jon Muir. Injecting silicon oxide particles into voids in the graphite frame makes it stronger.
"It adds stability and it also enhances the life of the frame" and adds power to each stroke, Muir said.
In 2002, Wilson came out with "Double Core" tennis balls, now the top-selling balls in Europe. Inside is an ultrathin coating of a clay composite material, made by InMat Inc. of Hillsborough, N.J., to make balls retain air better, giving a more consistent bounce and longer life, said company president Harris Goldberg.
InMat has developed variations with other potential applications, including chemical protective gloves and food packaging to keep out oxygen so products like meat and cheese stay fresh longer.
"These are all water-based coatings, so there's no environmental hazard," Goldberg said.
BASF of Mount Olive, N.J., uses nanotechnology to deliver on its motto, "We make a lot of products you buy better," said spokesman Timothy Fitzpatrick.
Its most popular nanotech-based products include high-SPF ultraviolet absorbers for sunscreen and for fibers for clothing, high-durability pigments for plastics and coatings, and polymer dispersions for exterior paints, coatings and adhesives, he said.
Clothing maker Levi Strauss & Co. of San Francisco in fall 2002 came out with Dockers pants that use DuPont Teflon stain defender to keep spills out of the fabric, said spokeswoman Andrea Corso.
"Since then, everybody has it out, all the way up to high-end designers," including Prada, she said.
Corso said about 40% of Dockers women's and men's classic and premium clothes now have stain defender or other nanotechnology, such as the Perspiration Guard line that draws moisture from the body and spreads it across the fabric to dry out faster.
Nano-Tex of Greensboro, N.C., makes nanotech-based textile treatments that resist spills, dry synthetic fabrics quicker or give synthetics the look and feel of cotton. Spokesman Dan Stevens said more than 20 million garments using its treatments have been sold this year. Major customers include Gap, Eddie Bauer, Nordstrom, Brooks Brothers, Nike, Old Navy, Perry Ellis and Tommy Hilfiger.
At IGI in Buena, N.J., a maker of fat-based microcapsules to enclose moisturizers and other ingredients, about 75% of its $3.6 million annual revenues comes from its nanotech "Novasome" capsules, which can deeply penetrate skin and don't degrade while on the shelf. Chief executive Frank Gerardi said top customers include Johnson & Johnson, for its Neutrogena skincare line, Estee Lauder, for Renutriv, Resilience and other product lines, and Chattem, which buys menthol Novasomes to cover its IcyHot Sleeve pain relievers to make them work hours longer.
According to a May 2004 National Science Foundation report, a survey of manufacturers found 28% already were selling nanotechnology products late last year and another 15% expected to introduce commercial products within a year.
By Linda A. Johnson, Associated Press
TRENTON, N.J. — For a science that's about manipulating substances at the molecular level, nanotechnology is starting to bring big profits to many consumer product makers.
Gaze deeply into the tennis ball held by Harris A. Goldberg, president and chief officer of InMat; it has an interior nanotech coating.
Mike Derer, AP
Already, nanoscience has produced stain- and wrinkle-resistant clothing, self-cleaning windows, glare-reducing and fog-resistant coatings for eyeglasses and windshields, dramatically increased computer memory, better sports equipment, improved cosmetics and sunscreens, and lighter, stronger auto components.
What's next? More user-friendly cell phones, longer-lasting batteries, lighter car tires that retain air longer, better imaging techniques for diagnosing disease, drugs more precisely targeted to limit side effects, faster consumer electronics, perhaps even cheaper beer made with "nano yeast," experts say.
Fortune 500 companies from General Electric, Johnson & Johnson, Merck & Co. and IBM to Motorola, Sony, DuPont and 3M are making big investments in nanotechnology to improve medicine, computer components, electronic toys, microelectronics, photovoltaic systems, cosmetics and flat-panel displays for TV and video screens. Some products are already on store shelves.
"Nanotechnology is in the process of revolutionizing consumer technology," said Dave Bishop, president of the New Jersey Nanotechnology Consortium. "It's really a transformational technology, like transistors were."
Nanotechnology takes its name from the nanometer — one-billionth of a meter — about 80,000 times less than the diameter of a human hair. By manipulating substances from one to several hundred nanometers thick, scientists and manufacturers can take advantage of magnetic, electronic or optical properties not present at normal size.
But unlike the nanotechnology done in "clean room" labs, where devices are sometimes assembled atom by atom under electron microscopes, manufacturers basically use the principles of chemistry, aided by careful control of conditions such as temperature and pressure, to make molecules assemble themselves precisely, yet economically, with desired attributes.
"This is something with huge revenue potential," predicted Bishop, who heads nanotechnology research at Bell Labs, the research arm of telecom gear maker Lucent Technologies Inc. of Murray Hill, N.J.
Estimates of nanotechnology's financial impact range from about $20 billion to $50 billion in revenues today, jumping to as much as $1 trillion by 2010 and more than $2 trillion by 2015.
Lux Research, a New York consulting company focused on nanotechnology, forecasts products incorporating nanotechnology by 2014 will account for $2.6 trillion worth of products — 15% of global manufacturing output.
"There are really a lot of products out there. People just have a low awareness of them," said Matthew Nordan, vice president of research at Lux.
"What (companies) want to focus on is the end benefit to the consumer," such as improvements to cars or fabrics, said Gretchen McNeely, research manager for publisher Small Times Media, which covers the business of micro and nanoscale technology.
While some consumer advocates have questioned nanotechnology's safety, David Luzzi, co-director of The Nanotechnology Institute in Philadelphia, and Clayton Teague, director of the National Nanotechnology Coordination Office, say there's no evidence of serious danger for the general public. People have been encountering nano-sized particles for years in the form of exhaust from cars, furnaces and power plants, toner particles from copier machines, even molecules containing the active ingredients of drugs, they said.
Most nanotechnology applications are not seen to pose a risk, but that is being carefully studied by federal, academic and industrial researchers, Teague said.
Nanotechnology began showing up in consumer products, notably cosmetics and sunscreens about 10 years ago, McNeely said. But it technically dates to decades before. For example, catalytic converters, put on cars since the 1970s, use platinum-rhodium particles to convert pollutants into safe gases.
Fast-forward a few decades, and now nanoparticles are in a broad range of consumer products, from food packaging to sporting goods.
At Chicago-based Wilson Sporting Goods, the nCode — "n" for nanotechnology — line of high-end tennis rackets launched in June already is the top new racket in the world, said Wilson spokesman Jon Muir. Injecting silicon oxide particles into voids in the graphite frame makes it stronger.
"It adds stability and it also enhances the life of the frame" and adds power to each stroke, Muir said.
In 2002, Wilson came out with "Double Core" tennis balls, now the top-selling balls in Europe. Inside is an ultrathin coating of a clay composite material, made by InMat Inc. of Hillsborough, N.J., to make balls retain air better, giving a more consistent bounce and longer life, said company president Harris Goldberg.
InMat has developed variations with other potential applications, including chemical protective gloves and food packaging to keep out oxygen so products like meat and cheese stay fresh longer.
"These are all water-based coatings, so there's no environmental hazard," Goldberg said.
BASF of Mount Olive, N.J., uses nanotechnology to deliver on its motto, "We make a lot of products you buy better," said spokesman Timothy Fitzpatrick.
Its most popular nanotech-based products include high-SPF ultraviolet absorbers for sunscreen and for fibers for clothing, high-durability pigments for plastics and coatings, and polymer dispersions for exterior paints, coatings and adhesives, he said.
Clothing maker Levi Strauss & Co. of San Francisco in fall 2002 came out with Dockers pants that use DuPont Teflon stain defender to keep spills out of the fabric, said spokeswoman Andrea Corso.
"Since then, everybody has it out, all the way up to high-end designers," including Prada, she said.
Corso said about 40% of Dockers women's and men's classic and premium clothes now have stain defender or other nanotechnology, such as the Perspiration Guard line that draws moisture from the body and spreads it across the fabric to dry out faster.
Nano-Tex of Greensboro, N.C., makes nanotech-based textile treatments that resist spills, dry synthetic fabrics quicker or give synthetics the look and feel of cotton. Spokesman Dan Stevens said more than 20 million garments using its treatments have been sold this year. Major customers include Gap, Eddie Bauer, Nordstrom, Brooks Brothers, Nike, Old Navy, Perry Ellis and Tommy Hilfiger.
At IGI in Buena, N.J., a maker of fat-based microcapsules to enclose moisturizers and other ingredients, about 75% of its $3.6 million annual revenues comes from its nanotech "Novasome" capsules, which can deeply penetrate skin and don't degrade while on the shelf. Chief executive Frank Gerardi said top customers include Johnson & Johnson, for its Neutrogena skincare line, Estee Lauder, for Renutriv, Resilience and other product lines, and Chattem, which buys menthol Novasomes to cover its IcyHot Sleeve pain relievers to make them work hours longer.
According to a May 2004 National Science Foundation report, a survey of manufacturers found 28% already were selling nanotechnology products late last year and another 15% expected to introduce commercial products within a year.
26 August 2004
By Alan Kohler
Analysis
August 24, 2004 - 3:51PM
Over the weekend we learnt that Rupert Murdoch thinks the next media revolution will be personal video recorders, which are basically a cross between VCRs and computers, in which the TV programs are recorded on a big internal hard drive instead of videotape.
One always is inclined to pay attention to Rupert Murdoch's musings on the future of the media, but perhaps the most interesting thing about PVRs is that we can't buy them, even though they have been on sale in America for four years.
Murdoch's Foxtel plans to introduce them next March - a total delay of about five years, if it's the first to sell them.
Why the hold-up? Answer: PVRs have been kept out of Australia by a TV network conspiracy.
That's because they allow advertisements to be easily skipped, either when you are recording or playing back.
They also improve the efficiency of recording TV in general by using electronic program guides (EPGs) to help preset the recorder weeks ahead, but the main thing is ad-skipping. "Ad-free TV" is the promise.
In the US, TV networks were unable to prevent PVRs. A device called TiVo has become a cult product and is selling well for $US99.99 ($A138).
In Australia the networks have blocked them. TiVo has been trying to get into the Australian market but failed. Go to the local Harvey Norman or JB Hi-Fi and you won't find a PVR.
To operate effectively, PVRs need electronic program guides so they can hunt for shows you want to record; without EPGs they are just VCRs with more storage.
The TV networks control who gets program guides in Australia because the courts here apply a different copyright law to that in America. A seminal case called Telstra v Desktop Marketing, in which Telstra prevented that company reusing the White Pages, has resulted in copyright in Australia applying to raw data.
In America, thanks to a case called Feist v Rural Telephone, there needs to be creative addition for copyright to apply.
A Sydney-based listed company called HWW Ltd, controlled by Stephen Wall, has a licence to distribute electronic versions of TV guides in Australia. Its contracts with the TV networks explicitly prevent it from selling the guides to anyone who plans to use them in PVRs. In the contracts, the networks assert copyright over the guides, although this has not been tested in court.
Chief executive Paul Marshall says he gets at least five requests a month to use the program guides in PVRs. He refuses them all.
Another company in Sydney, Faulconbridge, using the brand name ICE and run by Peter Vogel, believes it has found a way around this.
Vogel collects TV guide information from a variety of public sources, including newspapers and websites, and is planning to launch a service for PVR owners in two weeks' time, providing EPGs over a wireless data network for $2 a week.
He says his legal advice is that copyright does not attach to his EPG, but he is preparing for a big legal battle anyway. He believes, with good reason, that the TV networks will move heaven and earth to stop him.
But the thing they really want to stop is not so much his EPG service, which might actually get people to watch more TV, but his fiendish added extra: for $1 a week Peter Vogel will also notify your PVR, using the wireless data network, when the ads start and finish.
This means that when the PVR is recording a program, it can stop recording during the ads (this is what TiVo machines do in the US). When you play it back - no ads!
The implications of this for TV networks are obvious. In the US, TiVo has produced a trend towards product placement in TV shows instead of traditional ads, because so many people are zapping them. There are some who believe that the only viable long-term television business model is now subscription (which is why Rupert Murdoch is excited).
Even without Peter Vogel's ad-notification service there is trouble for the networks.
I found a business in Melbourne called DVRs Direct, run by Nigel Trinca, selling digital PVRs through a website. He sells 14 brands from Korea and Taiwan at $500 to $1500.
Most of them, says Trinca, can be programmed to automatically skip the ads, but he doesn't want to take on the networks. Instead, his machines fast-forward in 30-second jumps. So you press it five times for five 30-second ads, which takes about five seconds, and the ads are gone.
Yesterday I went into a JB Hi-Fi store. There were a few hard-drive video recorders for sale (they're not PVRs without EPGs) that have varying ad-skipping abilities. One fast-forwards very quickly; another goes in 10-second jumps. All of them are more efficient at zapping the ads than any VCR.
And that's the basic problem for the networks: the principle of fast-forwarding is no different to the VCRs we are all used to, and the recordable DVDs that are on the market now.
It's just that PVRs are much better at it, and can do it automatically, while they record.
Foxtel and Rupert Murdoch, meanwhile, have an interesting decision to make with their own PVRs next March: what sort of fast-forward/ad-skipping do they allow? (Five per cent of Foxtel's revenue comes from ads and Kerry Packer owns 25 per cent of the business.)
Will it be just the usual rolling fast-forward, or 10-second skips, or 30-second skips, or automatic ad-zapping?
I asked Foxtel this question yesterday - a spokesman said it hadn't decided yet. But he understood the significance of the decision.
If Peter Vogel wins his forthcoming battle and other PVRs have the full ad-skipping function, anything less from Foxtel would make its PVRs less attractive to the market, but threaten 5 per cent of revenue.
The networks and Foxtel have done well to hold back the tide for four years, but they can't do it forever.
Whoops, I forgot - this is Australia. Maybe they can.
This story was found at: http://smh.com.au/articles/2004/08/24/1093246514861.html
Analysis
August 24, 2004 - 3:51PM
Over the weekend we learnt that Rupert Murdoch thinks the next media revolution will be personal video recorders, which are basically a cross between VCRs and computers, in which the TV programs are recorded on a big internal hard drive instead of videotape.
One always is inclined to pay attention to Rupert Murdoch's musings on the future of the media, but perhaps the most interesting thing about PVRs is that we can't buy them, even though they have been on sale in America for four years.
Murdoch's Foxtel plans to introduce them next March - a total delay of about five years, if it's the first to sell them.
Why the hold-up? Answer: PVRs have been kept out of Australia by a TV network conspiracy.
That's because they allow advertisements to be easily skipped, either when you are recording or playing back.
They also improve the efficiency of recording TV in general by using electronic program guides (EPGs) to help preset the recorder weeks ahead, but the main thing is ad-skipping. "Ad-free TV" is the promise.
In the US, TV networks were unable to prevent PVRs. A device called TiVo has become a cult product and is selling well for $US99.99 ($A138).
In Australia the networks have blocked them. TiVo has been trying to get into the Australian market but failed. Go to the local Harvey Norman or JB Hi-Fi and you won't find a PVR.
To operate effectively, PVRs need electronic program guides so they can hunt for shows you want to record; without EPGs they are just VCRs with more storage.
The TV networks control who gets program guides in Australia because the courts here apply a different copyright law to that in America. A seminal case called Telstra v Desktop Marketing, in which Telstra prevented that company reusing the White Pages, has resulted in copyright in Australia applying to raw data.
In America, thanks to a case called Feist v Rural Telephone, there needs to be creative addition for copyright to apply.
A Sydney-based listed company called HWW Ltd, controlled by Stephen Wall, has a licence to distribute electronic versions of TV guides in Australia. Its contracts with the TV networks explicitly prevent it from selling the guides to anyone who plans to use them in PVRs. In the contracts, the networks assert copyright over the guides, although this has not been tested in court.
Chief executive Paul Marshall says he gets at least five requests a month to use the program guides in PVRs. He refuses them all.
Another company in Sydney, Faulconbridge, using the brand name ICE and run by Peter Vogel, believes it has found a way around this.
Vogel collects TV guide information from a variety of public sources, including newspapers and websites, and is planning to launch a service for PVR owners in two weeks' time, providing EPGs over a wireless data network for $2 a week.
He says his legal advice is that copyright does not attach to his EPG, but he is preparing for a big legal battle anyway. He believes, with good reason, that the TV networks will move heaven and earth to stop him.
But the thing they really want to stop is not so much his EPG service, which might actually get people to watch more TV, but his fiendish added extra: for $1 a week Peter Vogel will also notify your PVR, using the wireless data network, when the ads start and finish.
This means that when the PVR is recording a program, it can stop recording during the ads (this is what TiVo machines do in the US). When you play it back - no ads!
The implications of this for TV networks are obvious. In the US, TiVo has produced a trend towards product placement in TV shows instead of traditional ads, because so many people are zapping them. There are some who believe that the only viable long-term television business model is now subscription (which is why Rupert Murdoch is excited).
Even without Peter Vogel's ad-notification service there is trouble for the networks.
I found a business in Melbourne called DVRs Direct, run by Nigel Trinca, selling digital PVRs through a website. He sells 14 brands from Korea and Taiwan at $500 to $1500.
Most of them, says Trinca, can be programmed to automatically skip the ads, but he doesn't want to take on the networks. Instead, his machines fast-forward in 30-second jumps. So you press it five times for five 30-second ads, which takes about five seconds, and the ads are gone.
Yesterday I went into a JB Hi-Fi store. There were a few hard-drive video recorders for sale (they're not PVRs without EPGs) that have varying ad-skipping abilities. One fast-forwards very quickly; another goes in 10-second jumps. All of them are more efficient at zapping the ads than any VCR.
And that's the basic problem for the networks: the principle of fast-forwarding is no different to the VCRs we are all used to, and the recordable DVDs that are on the market now.
It's just that PVRs are much better at it, and can do it automatically, while they record.
Foxtel and Rupert Murdoch, meanwhile, have an interesting decision to make with their own PVRs next March: what sort of fast-forward/ad-skipping do they allow? (Five per cent of Foxtel's revenue comes from ads and Kerry Packer owns 25 per cent of the business.)
Will it be just the usual rolling fast-forward, or 10-second skips, or 30-second skips, or automatic ad-zapping?
I asked Foxtel this question yesterday - a spokesman said it hadn't decided yet. But he understood the significance of the decision.
If Peter Vogel wins his forthcoming battle and other PVRs have the full ad-skipping function, anything less from Foxtel would make its PVRs less attractive to the market, but threaten 5 per cent of revenue.
The networks and Foxtel have done well to hold back the tide for four years, but they can't do it forever.
Whoops, I forgot - this is Australia. Maybe they can.
This story was found at: http://smh.com.au/articles/2004/08/24/1093246514861.html
15 August 2004
VoIP gaining ground, despite cost concerns - Computerworld: "oIP gaining ground, despite cost concerns
Users see benefits in the networking technology
News Story by Matt Hamblen
AUGUST 13, 2004 (COMPUTERWORLD) - Interest in voice-over-IP projects at U.S. businesses remains keen, according to analysts, and several companies are moving ahead with plans to install such systems.
For example, The Boeing Co. said last month that it plans to install 150,000 VoIP phones and related networking equipment from Cisco Systems Inc. (see story). In March, IBM outlined plans to provide VoIP phones to about 400,000 of its employees and contractors over the next five years using gear from Avaya Inc., Cisco and Siemens AG (see story). And SouthTrust Bank in Birmingham, Ala., has installed a VoIP system, based mainly on Cisco gear, in 825 branches in the Southeast over the past three years. The system has saved the bank millions of dollars and has reduced annual communication costs by 30%, said Stanley Adams, SouthTrust's group vice president of network services."
Users see benefits in the networking technology
News Story by Matt Hamblen
AUGUST 13, 2004 (COMPUTERWORLD) - Interest in voice-over-IP projects at U.S. businesses remains keen, according to analysts, and several companies are moving ahead with plans to install such systems.
For example, The Boeing Co. said last month that it plans to install 150,000 VoIP phones and related networking equipment from Cisco Systems Inc. (see story). In March, IBM outlined plans to provide VoIP phones to about 400,000 of its employees and contractors over the next five years using gear from Avaya Inc., Cisco and Siemens AG (see story). And SouthTrust Bank in Birmingham, Ala., has installed a VoIP system, based mainly on Cisco gear, in 825 branches in the Southeast over the past three years. The system has saved the bank millions of dollars and has reduced annual communication costs by 30%, said Stanley Adams, SouthTrust's group vice president of network services."
20 June 2004
BBC NEWS | Technology | Online newspapers tempt readers: "Online newspapers tempt readers
Peter Feuilherade
BBC Monitoring staff in Istanbul
In Russia newspaper circulation has doubled in two years
The number of newspaper websites around the world has doubled since 1999, a study has found.
There has been a tremendous boom in the consumption of online editions.
Timothy Balding, director general of World Association of Newspapers said web audiences for newspapers have grown by 350% over the last five years.
He was addressing editors and executives from hundreds of newspapers who are meeting for the society's annual congress in Istanbul this week.
Global circulation
The past year was a challenging one for the world's newspapers, said Mr Balding.
Total global circulation was down slightly for the year in the 208 countries surveyed by the Paris-based association, which represents 18,000 newspapers.
But over the last five years, newspaper sales worldwide went up by 4.75%.
NEWSPAPER CIRCULATION
China: 85 million
India: 72 million
Japan: 70 million
USA: 55 million
Well over one billion people now read a newspaper every day.
Europeans are buying fewer newspapers. Circulation fell in 13 of the 15 'old' European Union countries, excluding the new members who joined in May. The biggest drop was in Ireland, followed by the UK.
But although sales have declined in many mature markets, some developing markets are still strong. Newspaper sales were up by over 4% in China, the world's biggest market, and by an impressive 9% in India.
China has the largest total daily circulation of any country in the world, with more than 85 million copies sold, followed by India, Japan and the USA.
In Russia, the number of dailies published has almost doubled in two years.
The growth in new free commuter dailies is also expanding the reach of the written press to a younger generation, said the association's Timothy Balding.
The number of free dailies has shot up, with a 16% increase in 2003 from a year earlier, and a 24% increase in the past five years in countries for which data exists.
Spending on ads
Newspaper advertising revenues increased globally by a modest 2% last year.
In China, they were up by more than 11%. Newspapers' share of the world media advertising pie fell.
But they are still the second largest advertising medium, after television, which took 38% of global media ad-spend in 2003.
The rapid growth of broadband in many countries means people are spending less of their leisure time watching television, preferring to surf the web instead.
This led to more visits to newspaper web sites, according to research by the World Association of Newspapers and ZenithOptimedia presented at the Istanbul gathering.
The migration of classified advertising from the print media to the web continues slowly. Currently, just over 2% of newspaper ad revenues comes from the web.
Challenges
The combination of financial constraints, falling circulation, ceaseless technological change and the need to redefine relations with readers pose a threat to the press worldwide, according to the association.
Picking out some future trends for the newspaper industry, Timothy Balding predicted more colour, new editorial concepts, and experiments in new formats and design.
In their fight to maintain or boost circulation, many broadsheet papers have shown a resurgence of interest in the tabloid format. At least 20 of the world's respected broadsheets have made the move to tabloid.
The digital revolution is constantly changing the ways in which newspapers collect, produce and distribute information.
For editors and journalists, the challenge is to identify what aspects of this revolution they should invest in, and what is potentially dangerous for the profession, speakers at the WAN congress agreed."
10 June 2004
British women fed up with 'dull and gruelling' lifestyles - World - www.smh.com.au: "June 10, 2004 - 1:41PM
More than half of the women in Britain are fed up with their dull treadmill lifestyles, a new survey has found - and 40 per cent would rather live abroad in dream locations such as Australia.
The Female Lifestyle Survey of Great Britain 2004, released today, said 81 per cent wanted to escape punishing work and household roles with spiralling debts, rubbish sex and social lives and the pressures of having a perfect body.
Health magazine Top Sante reported that 67% of the 2,000 women polled felt they were on a treadmill and 60% thought life was easier for men.
The experience of a mundane and tiring existence was driving women to hit the bottle and raid the fridge in an attempt to de-stress: 59% admitted to drinking alcohol and 74% confessed to comfort eating to relax and unwind.
Nine out of 10 women who work full-time said they still do most of the household chores and 77% said they take the lion's share of responsibility for looking after the children.
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Six out of 10 (59%) blamed a poor sex life for making them miserable while a similar number (58%) cited an unfulfilling social life.
Lack of cash is another issue with 78 per cent saying they find life in Britain financially draining, 52% saying their finances are haphazard or out of control, 49% admitting they spend more than they earn and 55% who are saddled with credit card debts.
In fact more than four in 10 women (44%) are so fed up with life in Britain they would rather live abroad. The top 10 dream boltholes were Australia, Spain, America, France, New Zealand, Canada, Italy, Greece, Portugal and Cyprus.
One of the top causes of the female blues, according to the poll, was the quest for a perfect body.
Nine out of 10 surveyed said they were unhappy with their looks and 85% of women said they thought about their size and shape every day.
Three-quarters of women thought their life would be better if they were happy with their body and 26% said they were prepared to go under the knife to improve their looks.
Cosmetic procedures women were most likely to have, were breast enlargement, breast reduction, botox injections, liposuction, tightening of the jaw line, tummy tuck, lines around the eyes and a half face lift.
Celebrity role models Victoria Beckham, Jordan and Cherie Blair were the most disliked and were not helpful to ordinary women, 56% said.
The perfect woman was identified as having the face and breasts of Catherine Zeta Jones, the hair of former Friends star Jennifer Aniston, Kylie Minogue's bottom and Victoria Beckham's legs.
Other female headaches revealed in the poll included irritation at the cost of housing (77%), the level of violent crime (71%), the state of the National Health Service (60%) long working hours (51%), the climate (48%), the quality of education (37%), the sex-soaked society (33%) and status anxiety (37%)."
More than half of the women in Britain are fed up with their dull treadmill lifestyles, a new survey has found - and 40 per cent would rather live abroad in dream locations such as Australia.
The Female Lifestyle Survey of Great Britain 2004, released today, said 81 per cent wanted to escape punishing work and household roles with spiralling debts, rubbish sex and social lives and the pressures of having a perfect body.
Health magazine Top Sante reported that 67% of the 2,000 women polled felt they were on a treadmill and 60% thought life was easier for men.
The experience of a mundane and tiring existence was driving women to hit the bottle and raid the fridge in an attempt to de-stress: 59% admitted to drinking alcohol and 74% confessed to comfort eating to relax and unwind.
Nine out of 10 women who work full-time said they still do most of the household chores and 77% said they take the lion's share of responsibility for looking after the children.
AdvertisementAdvertisement
Six out of 10 (59%) blamed a poor sex life for making them miserable while a similar number (58%) cited an unfulfilling social life.
Lack of cash is another issue with 78 per cent saying they find life in Britain financially draining, 52% saying their finances are haphazard or out of control, 49% admitting they spend more than they earn and 55% who are saddled with credit card debts.
In fact more than four in 10 women (44%) are so fed up with life in Britain they would rather live abroad. The top 10 dream boltholes were Australia, Spain, America, France, New Zealand, Canada, Italy, Greece, Portugal and Cyprus.
One of the top causes of the female blues, according to the poll, was the quest for a perfect body.
Nine out of 10 surveyed said they were unhappy with their looks and 85% of women said they thought about their size and shape every day.
Three-quarters of women thought their life would be better if they were happy with their body and 26% said they were prepared to go under the knife to improve their looks.
Cosmetic procedures women were most likely to have, were breast enlargement, breast reduction, botox injections, liposuction, tightening of the jaw line, tummy tuck, lines around the eyes and a half face lift.
Celebrity role models Victoria Beckham, Jordan and Cherie Blair were the most disliked and were not helpful to ordinary women, 56% said.
The perfect woman was identified as having the face and breasts of Catherine Zeta Jones, the hair of former Friends star Jennifer Aniston, Kylie Minogue's bottom and Victoria Beckham's legs.
Other female headaches revealed in the poll included irritation at the cost of housing (77%), the level of violent crime (71%), the state of the National Health Service (60%) long working hours (51%), the climate (48%), the quality of education (37%), the sex-soaked society (33%) and status anxiety (37%)."
07 June 2004
Voice over IP (VoIP) Telephony Solutions | Quintum Technologies: "The Tenor has a patented SelectNet™ technology that will transparently move an active call from IP to the PSTN, assuring voice quality ALL THE TIME."
04 June 2004
The partner shuffle - National - www.smh.com.au: "The partner shuffle
By Lisa Pryor
June 4, 2004
In today's throwaway society get ready for the throwaway household.
Increasingly, Australians are setting up home not once, but several times in a lifetime, and will be doing a lot more of it in the future, Bernard Salt, a demographer, forecasts.
'I speculate that by 2050 we will have three partners in life, like we have three jobs,' Mr Salt said. 'It prompts the demand for household goods because with every change there's this tendency to say, 'I had that bedroom suite when I was with so-and-so. I don't want it any more - it reminds me of him.''
Mr Salt, a director of property at KPMG, believes Australians will start out with a 'fun' relationship in their early 20s, someone 'for travelling, for fun, for sex'.
Then will come the 'building' relationship, with marriage, mortgage and children, in the early 30s. Then comes the 'wind-down', when we find a soulmate to share a sea change.
At the heart of this shift was the rising spending power, confidence and independence of women who were marrying later than ever, Mr Salt told a Mortgage Industry Association of Australia conference yesterday.
'The reason why she is getting married later is because of a value shift,' Mr Salt said. 'She wants tertiary education, she wants to pay off HECS, travel overseas, establish and develop a career.
'She trials a number of relationships throughout her 20s then commits to marriage at 29, mortgage at 30 and children, perhaps, at 31 or indeed any time over the following decade.'
But the director of the Centre for Population and Urban Research at Monash University, Bob Birrell, paints a different picture of women moving from relationship to relationship.
It was women without a tertiary education who were most likely to experience marriage breakdown, he said. One reason was that they were more likely to be married to men who were employed casually or part-time, causing economic stress.
'For degree-qualified women, the rate of marital breakdown has actually stabilised over the last few years,' Dr Birrell said.
Mr Salt attributed the tendency to delay marriage to the culture espoused by Friends, the US TV comedy about a group of young people sharing a flat in Greenwich Village, New York.
That culture had been embraced by a young, urban, chic generation in areas such as South Sydney, Chapel Street in Melbourne, and Fortitude Valley in Brisbane.
Like the location of Friends, South Sydney had a high proportion of women aged 25 to 34 who had never married - 69 per cent - compared with 40 per cent for the rest of Sydney. In Greenwich Village the figure is 70 per cent, according to the US 2000 census.
This group would drive demand for an inner-city lifestyle, Mr Salt said.
'If you don't have a mortgage until 30, you need to be within a $15 cab fare of all the hottest clubs in the inner-city.'"
By Lisa Pryor
June 4, 2004
In today's throwaway society get ready for the throwaway household.
Increasingly, Australians are setting up home not once, but several times in a lifetime, and will be doing a lot more of it in the future, Bernard Salt, a demographer, forecasts.
'I speculate that by 2050 we will have three partners in life, like we have three jobs,' Mr Salt said. 'It prompts the demand for household goods because with every change there's this tendency to say, 'I had that bedroom suite when I was with so-and-so. I don't want it any more - it reminds me of him.''
Mr Salt, a director of property at KPMG, believes Australians will start out with a 'fun' relationship in their early 20s, someone 'for travelling, for fun, for sex'.
Then will come the 'building' relationship, with marriage, mortgage and children, in the early 30s. Then comes the 'wind-down', when we find a soulmate to share a sea change.
At the heart of this shift was the rising spending power, confidence and independence of women who were marrying later than ever, Mr Salt told a Mortgage Industry Association of Australia conference yesterday.
'The reason why she is getting married later is because of a value shift,' Mr Salt said. 'She wants tertiary education, she wants to pay off HECS, travel overseas, establish and develop a career.
'She trials a number of relationships throughout her 20s then commits to marriage at 29, mortgage at 30 and children, perhaps, at 31 or indeed any time over the following decade.'
But the director of the Centre for Population and Urban Research at Monash University, Bob Birrell, paints a different picture of women moving from relationship to relationship.
It was women without a tertiary education who were most likely to experience marriage breakdown, he said. One reason was that they were more likely to be married to men who were employed casually or part-time, causing economic stress.
'For degree-qualified women, the rate of marital breakdown has actually stabilised over the last few years,' Dr Birrell said.
Mr Salt attributed the tendency to delay marriage to the culture espoused by Friends, the US TV comedy about a group of young people sharing a flat in Greenwich Village, New York.
That culture had been embraced by a young, urban, chic generation in areas such as South Sydney, Chapel Street in Melbourne, and Fortitude Valley in Brisbane.
Like the location of Friends, South Sydney had a high proportion of women aged 25 to 34 who had never married - 69 per cent - compared with 40 per cent for the rest of Sydney. In Greenwich Village the figure is 70 per cent, according to the US 2000 census.
This group would drive demand for an inner-city lifestyle, Mr Salt said.
'If you don't have a mortgage until 30, you need to be within a $15 cab fare of all the hottest clubs in the inner-city.'"
29 May 2004
About Xcelsius Standard: "Using a simple point and click interface, you can create an interactive report based on an Excel spreadsheet and export it as a Macromedia Flash (SWF) file, making it available to over 97% of web users!
Xcelsius 3.0 is a simple and easy to use stand-alone application that is designed to bridge the gap between data analysis and visual presentation. It allows users to create easily deployable visually stunning, interactive reports. Xcelsius requires no programming and offers tight integration with existing Microsoft Office products. Xcelsius is very flexible, allowing users to create interactive reports that can be used for a variety of applications.
• 42 robust components including 9 charts, optimized for dynamic simulations
• Flexible alert functionality for performance measurement
• One click export to Microsoft PowerPoint and Outlook
• Ability to import images as well as Macromedia Flash (SWF) files
• Save results of what-if analysis back to Excel
• Quickly create alternative visuals to your reports with Global Styles
• Generate reports with live database connectivity (Pro Edition only)
Requirements:
• PC with Pentium 3 or equivalent processor with 128 MB of RAM (recommended)
• Microsoft Windows 2000 or Windows XP
• Microsoft Office 2000, Office XP or Office 200"
Xcelsius 3.0 is a simple and easy to use stand-alone application that is designed to bridge the gap between data analysis and visual presentation. It allows users to create easily deployable visually stunning, interactive reports. Xcelsius requires no programming and offers tight integration with existing Microsoft Office products. Xcelsius is very flexible, allowing users to create interactive reports that can be used for a variety of applications.
• 42 robust components including 9 charts, optimized for dynamic simulations
• Flexible alert functionality for performance measurement
• One click export to Microsoft PowerPoint and Outlook
• Ability to import images as well as Macromedia Flash (SWF) files
• Save results of what-if analysis back to Excel
• Quickly create alternative visuals to your reports with Global Styles
• Generate reports with live database connectivity (Pro Edition only)
Requirements:
• PC with Pentium 3 or equivalent processor with 128 MB of RAM (recommended)
• Microsoft Windows 2000 or Windows XP
• Microsoft Office 2000, Office XP or Office 200"
27 May 2004
Elanza Technologies Inc. - Web Phones: "ElanzaWeb-VideoPhone™
The ElanzaWeb-Videophone™ would be a further improvement on the existing convergence through the ElanzaWebphone™, the difference being that a video conferencing camera running on the WIN CE NET (4.0) will be an integral part of the product. The product is expected to be widely accepted for video-conferencing requirements both by individuals, corporates and other institutions.
Video-conferencing is currently in huge demand but high costs of usage time and technology, has made it inaccessible to a lot of small and medium sized companies and even individuals. With the ElanzaWeb-Videophone™, users will be able to video-conference using the internet as a medium. This product is likely to be the first WIN CE based video-conferencing technology, and Elanza is working towards a launch in October 2004.
ElanzaWeb-Videphone™ would provide total convergence for voice, data and video, and comes with a 10.4' display for improved clarity and resolution of the video images.
"
The ElanzaWeb-Videophone™ would be a further improvement on the existing convergence through the ElanzaWebphone™, the difference being that a video conferencing camera running on the WIN CE NET (4.0) will be an integral part of the product. The product is expected to be widely accepted for video-conferencing requirements both by individuals, corporates and other institutions.
Video-conferencing is currently in huge demand but high costs of usage time and technology, has made it inaccessible to a lot of small and medium sized companies and even individuals. With the ElanzaWeb-Videophone™, users will be able to video-conference using the internet as a medium. This product is likely to be the first WIN CE based video-conferencing technology, and Elanza is working towards a launch in October 2004.
ElanzaWeb-Videphone™ would provide total convergence for voice, data and video, and comes with a 10.4' display for improved clarity and resolution of the video images.
"
25 May 2004
USAToday's Hotspot Directory - So You Want to Be a Hotspot : Do It Yourself: "The Schlotzsky's Story
Austin-based Schlotzsky's Delis, a nationwide chain of franchised sandwich shops, has made both Wi-Fi and free in-store computer stations available to customers in some 30 stores, including all of its 13 Austin locations. The company, tested its first Wi-Fi hotspots over a year ago in company-owned stores, plans to bring the service to as many of its 650 stores as possible, depending on acceptance among franchise owners. Schlotzsky's Director of Communications, Monica Landers, credits Schlotzsky's CEO John Wooley with conceiving of Wi-Fi as a way of integrating Schlotzsky's restaurants into their communities. It was Wooley who insisted the service be free.
'It does great things for the restaurant and costs a lot less than other things we do, like repainting,' said Landers.
Landers also points out the company's mounting of a high-gain Wi-Fi antenna on the roof of a store near a University of Texas dormitory, providing access to the store's 'Cool Cloud' network for residents. And in downtown Austin, Schlotzsky's Wi-Fi signal splashes into the busy Sixth and Congress intersection at the heart of the city, and is accessible from the bar of the Intercontinental-Stephen F. Austin hotel, a block away, says Landers proudly.
But there's certainly more than good will in Schlotzsky's embrace of free wireless. Both Wooley and Landers have been frequent panelists at industry trade shows, and articles about the Cool Cloud have appeared in Wired, USA Today, The Wall Street Journal and other publications. All of this has raised Schlotzsky's profile in the crowded casual dining/fast food restaurant market.
For customers, Wi-Fi, along with a row of public access Apple iMacs available for use by those without laptops, is both a destination and a distraction. Besides a turkey sandwich or a pizza, customers find coffee, cookies and other baked good at Schlotzsky's, all of which, the company hopes, will go well with a little time on the Web. Landers says computer users typically spend around 30 minutes in the store, a statistic that has warmed initially skeptical franchise owners. -- By Shelly Brisbin"
Austin-based Schlotzsky's Delis, a nationwide chain of franchised sandwich shops, has made both Wi-Fi and free in-store computer stations available to customers in some 30 stores, including all of its 13 Austin locations. The company, tested its first Wi-Fi hotspots over a year ago in company-owned stores, plans to bring the service to as many of its 650 stores as possible, depending on acceptance among franchise owners. Schlotzsky's Director of Communications, Monica Landers, credits Schlotzsky's CEO John Wooley with conceiving of Wi-Fi as a way of integrating Schlotzsky's restaurants into their communities. It was Wooley who insisted the service be free.
'It does great things for the restaurant and costs a lot less than other things we do, like repainting,' said Landers.
Landers also points out the company's mounting of a high-gain Wi-Fi antenna on the roof of a store near a University of Texas dormitory, providing access to the store's 'Cool Cloud' network for residents. And in downtown Austin, Schlotzsky's Wi-Fi signal splashes into the busy Sixth and Congress intersection at the heart of the city, and is accessible from the bar of the Intercontinental-Stephen F. Austin hotel, a block away, says Landers proudly.
But there's certainly more than good will in Schlotzsky's embrace of free wireless. Both Wooley and Landers have been frequent panelists at industry trade shows, and articles about the Cool Cloud have appeared in Wired, USA Today, The Wall Street Journal and other publications. All of this has raised Schlotzsky's profile in the crowded casual dining/fast food restaurant market.
For customers, Wi-Fi, along with a row of public access Apple iMacs available for use by those without laptops, is both a destination and a distraction. Besides a turkey sandwich or a pizza, customers find coffee, cookies and other baked good at Schlotzsky's, all of which, the company hopes, will go well with a little time on the Web. Landers says computer users typically spend around 30 minutes in the store, a statistic that has warmed initially skeptical franchise owners. -- By Shelly Brisbin"
14 May 2004
Aljazeera.Net - Rivals eye prize in private space race
: "Wednesday 12 May 2004, 18:42 Makka Time, 15:42 GMT
Likely winner, Spaceship One, must reach an altitude of 100km
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A $10 million prize for the first private company to put a craft into space may soon be won.
Peter Diamandis, the Ansari X-Prize Foundation chairman, expects to pay up within five months – though the winner is likely to have spent far more on the spaceship's development.
Speaking at the recent 41st Space Congress, held at Cape Canaveral in Florida on Wednesday, Diamandis backed aerospace pioneer Burt Rutan as the favourite to win.
And although a total of 26 teams are competing, some have already started to look at what they might do after the main challenge has been met.
"
08 May 2004
Live365.com - PRO Broadcasting: "PRO Broadcast
What is Professional Broadcasting?
Professional Broadcasting is the easiest and most inexpensive way to broadcast audio content from your organization to the world. Professional Broadcasting is a commercial-free service that is intended to help organizations like yours get their message out, share your perspectives and points of view, attract new customers or members, and build your community.
Is Professional Broadcasting right for us?
All groups have something that they would like to share with the world (or at least some of its inhabitants!) … music, lectures, sermons, news, training or educational information, sports, speeches, meetings, events, or just good old-fashioned shameless self-promotion, it’s up to you … and Professional Broadcasting is the easiest, cheapest, fastest, and best way to do it. There’s no need to buy extra bandwidth, pay expensive server-licensing fees, or out-source your audio broadcast to expensive vendors. You will not find a better way to broadcast your audio over the Internet, in real-time or with archived content."
What is Professional Broadcasting?
Professional Broadcasting is the easiest and most inexpensive way to broadcast audio content from your organization to the world. Professional Broadcasting is a commercial-free service that is intended to help organizations like yours get their message out, share your perspectives and points of view, attract new customers or members, and build your community.
Is Professional Broadcasting right for us?
All groups have something that they would like to share with the world (or at least some of its inhabitants!) … music, lectures, sermons, news, training or educational information, sports, speeches, meetings, events, or just good old-fashioned shameless self-promotion, it’s up to you … and Professional Broadcasting is the easiest, cheapest, fastest, and best way to do it. There’s no need to buy extra bandwidth, pay expensive server-licensing fees, or out-source your audio broadcast to expensive vendors. You will not find a better way to broadcast your audio over the Internet, in real-time or with archived content."
Live365.com - PRO Broadcasting: "PRO Broadcast
What is Professional Broadcasting?
Professional Broadcasting is the easiest and most inexpensive way to broadcast audio content from your organization to the world. Professional Broadcasting is a commercial-free service that is intended to help organizations like yours get their message out, share your perspectives and points of view, attract new customers or members, and build your community.
Is Professional Broadcasting right for us?
All groups have something that they would like to share with the world (or at least some of its inhabitants!) … music, lectures, sermons, news, training or educational information, sports, speeches, meetings, events, or just good old-fashioned shameless self-promotion, it’s up to you … and Professional Broadcasting is the easiest, cheapest, fastest, and best way to do it. There’s no need to buy extra bandwidth, pay expensive server-licensing fees, or out-source your audio broadcast to expensive vendors. You will not find a better way to broadcast your audio over the Internet, in real-time or with archived content."
What is Professional Broadcasting?
Professional Broadcasting is the easiest and most inexpensive way to broadcast audio content from your organization to the world. Professional Broadcasting is a commercial-free service that is intended to help organizations like yours get their message out, share your perspectives and points of view, attract new customers or members, and build your community.
Is Professional Broadcasting right for us?
All groups have something that they would like to share with the world (or at least some of its inhabitants!) … music, lectures, sermons, news, training or educational information, sports, speeches, meetings, events, or just good old-fashioned shameless self-promotion, it’s up to you … and Professional Broadcasting is the easiest, cheapest, fastest, and best way to do it. There’s no need to buy extra bandwidth, pay expensive server-licensing fees, or out-source your audio broadcast to expensive vendors. You will not find a better way to broadcast your audio over the Internet, in real-time or with archived content."
07 May 2004
Australian IT - Digital radio clears hurdles (Vincent Blake, APRIL 06, 2004): "Digital radio clears hurdles
Vincent Blake
APRIL 06, 2004
THE age of digital radio has arrived and a large-scale trial of the technology in Sydney has the organisers, Commercial Radio Australia, excited.
Test transmissions of the CD-quality signals of 12 radio stations began in Sydney in December.
The L-band and VHF band III transmissions have cleared their main hurdles and CRA chief executive Joan Warner says tests can now move on and involve consumers.
The main snag was to overcome interference with television (analog and digital) and FM radio signals from the same Willoughby tower.
Consumers will get to see what all the excitment is about later this month when a special display will be opened in Harvey Norman's Auburn store.
See it they will, because digital radio offers at least two or three lines of scrolling text that can display the song title, its lyrics, and other material related to the broadcast.
The system handles text, GIF, JPG and HTML files, and streams MPEG4 video, although there are as yet no receivers to support that feature.
Warner says Australia has come into the digital age at the right time, despite the long delay in getting the trial going.
Digital radio has been broadcasting in Britain for almost a decade, giving broadcasters and receiver manufacturers time to develop their offerings."
Vincent Blake
APRIL 06, 2004
THE age of digital radio has arrived and a large-scale trial of the technology in Sydney has the organisers, Commercial Radio Australia, excited.
Test transmissions of the CD-quality signals of 12 radio stations began in Sydney in December.
The L-band and VHF band III transmissions have cleared their main hurdles and CRA chief executive Joan Warner says tests can now move on and involve consumers.
The main snag was to overcome interference with television (analog and digital) and FM radio signals from the same Willoughby tower.
Consumers will get to see what all the excitment is about later this month when a special display will be opened in Harvey Norman's Auburn store.
See it they will, because digital radio offers at least two or three lines of scrolling text that can display the song title, its lyrics, and other material related to the broadcast.
The system handles text, GIF, JPG and HTML files, and streams MPEG4 video, although there are as yet no receivers to support that feature.
Warner says Australia has come into the digital age at the right time, despite the long delay in getting the trial going.
Digital radio has been broadcasting in Britain for almost a decade, giving broadcasters and receiver manufacturers time to develop their offerings."
"Digital Radio is the next generation of radio. It is a new way of broadcasting radio via a network of terrestrial transmitters. It has the capacity to provide listeners with more services, clearer reception and sound quality and a range of other features, including text information and graphics.
We're yet to see how Digital Radio will be rolled out in Australia. Current Digital Radio trials in Sydney and Melbourne are designed to assist the Federal government and radio broadcasters to decide on the right digital broadcasting systems for our particular population and geographic needs."
Digital Radio:
We're yet to see how Digital Radio will be rolled out in Australia. Current Digital Radio trials in Sydney and Melbourne are designed to assist the Federal government and radio broadcasters to decide on the right digital broadcasting systems for our particular population and geographic needs."
Digital Radio:
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