Paul Montgomery

The Australian federal government has finally passed the Electronic Transactions Bill, which will give legal equivalence to digital documents in Commonwealth public sector agencies’ transactions. However, the Government has not tabled legislation on privacy which it has been promising for some time, and has come under fire from privacy advocates. The Electronic Transactions Bill passed […]

The joint venture between Web measurement firms AC Nielsen and NetRatings, called ACNielsen eRatings.com and marketed under the name Nielsen/NetRatings, has launched in Australia. The company, which is 80 per cent owned by AC Nielsen and 20 per cent by NetRatings, will introduce the first panel service for Australian, New Zealand and Singaporean Web users […]

Melbourne IT is about to follow Telstra’s lead by cashing in on the Australian Stock Exchange (ASX) on its de facto monopoly on domain name registration for names ending with “com.au”. The company will profit to the tune of AUS$85 million (US$54 million). The company’s core business is selling domain names, in particular those ending […]

The race to deliver Internet content to mobile wireless devices in Australia has taken an unexpected turn, with Cable & Wireless Optus looking like beating Telstra to the punch with a service by the end of the month. C&W Optus, which is majority owned by UK telecommunications carrier Cable & Wireless, had been thought to […]

Business intelligence vendor CorVu, which started in Sydney but has moved to the US, has announced that it will merge with an Internet start-up in its new home to help raise funds on the NASDAQ stock exchange. CorVu will undergo a “reverse takeover” with Minnesota American, a small company worth less than AUS$8 million (US$5 […]

Enterprise resource planning giant SAP has officially launched its mysap.com enterprise information portal initiative in the Asia/Pacific region at the Singapore version of its Sapphire user conference. Calling the new interface to the 4.6 version of the SAP suite an “enterprise management portal”, co-chairman and CEO Henning Kagermann used his keynote address to urge Asian […]

The Australian subsidiary of America Online has launched a bid to capture the family market through a bundling deal with IBM and video rental company Video Ezy. The AOL EZY Home Entertainment package will offer an IBM Aptiva PC, two years of membership to AOL Australia, and eight video rentals per week for a two […]

Brazin, the proprietor of the Australian bricks-and-mortar music retailing stores called Sanity, has launched an online version to combat the increasing number of e-tailers in the music business. Chaos Music Market has lead the charge in an Australian industry which now includes Spike Radio and CDStar, which launched last week, but the Sanity.com site will […]

US-based ISP Asia Online has continued its buying spree in the Australian ISP industry by acquiring mid-size providers in three different states. Brisbane Internet Technology (BIT), Sydney-based The Message eXchange (TMX) and Dove, which operates in the South Australian city of Adelaide, have now been added to Asia Online’s September acquisitions of Internet Access Australia […]

IBM has joined its competitors in the e-commerce software market by releasing a standards-based digital wallet in the hope to reduce the phenomenon of potential Web site buyers walking away from transactions midstream. The new 2.1 version of the Consumer Wallet is intended to “reduce the buyer abandonment rate”, according to Brod Brennan, e-commerce segment […]

Australian newspaper publisher John Fairfax Ltd. has launched its own city guide, despite the ongoing project to produce regional Australian portals in conjunction with US-based Ticketmaster Online-CitySearch. melbournetoday.com.au includes entertainment guides to movies and restaurants, free e-mail, breaking news from Fairfax’s Melbourne Age newspaper, weather reports, electronic bill payment, events calendars, and chat communities. However, […]

Australian telecommunications carrier AAPT has consolidated its e-commerce and ISP divisions into one entity in an effort to combat rising competition between Australian telcos in the Internet industry. AAPT will combine its e-commerce division, which until a recent buy-out had been owned by American telco AT&T under the name of AT&T EasyLink Services Australia, with […]