Society and business in the 21st Century
I’ve been wondering why the PC Rescue listings in Google Local were performing so badly. Tonight I discovered that sometime in the past I’ve screwed up the keywords.
This would explain why the site fell off the first page on a number of useful searches.
Bugger.
It was a funny week last week. It seems everybody wants to announce Software as a Service websites.
The first SaaS experience I had was over a cup of coffee with Mark from MyWorkSpace on Tuesday. I like to hear what smaller, Australian operations have to offer and this one seems quite good application.
On the Wednesday I went to the Telstra-Microsoft Joint Venture announcement. This was a strange beast as the current T-Suite services are simply managed Exchange and Sharepoint and in that don’t seem to be anything new over what Telstra was reselling from WebCentral until recently.
The main thrust of the press conference was that you’d be able to do this on a mobile phone.
Unfortunately none of the mobile phone manufacturers has had an opportunity to put Telstra’s new application on their Windows Mobile smartphones, which meant we only saw demonstrations and had no opportunity to try it ourselves.
From a distance it appears the mobile service is just the same synchronisation tool you get with a Windows Mobile device setup to use the Telstra servers.
On a positive side, both the MyWorkSpace and the T-Suite applications are reasonably priced and a good deal for smaller businesses, particularly those start ups wanting to save cash.
In my Smart Company column tomorrow l’m explaining what SaaS, cloud computing and Web 2.0 mean.
The funny thing with all of this is everything is new again. We’re going back to the 1970s way of running computers.
Further to Saturday’s post, I’m researching my story on wireless Broadband for tomorrow’s Smart Company column and I find Telstra are still offering the $0 laptop.
I thought it had been dropped. It’s amazing this offer gets no mention at all.
Gee it’s hard to make sense of Telstra’s website.
We’ve heard the promise of delivering TV over the Internet and now the ABC will follow the BBC with an IP TV service.
Coupled with the increased downloads we’ll see from the uptake of smart phones, we’re seeing the end of most Australian ISP’s business model of soaking users with excess use fees.
iiNET has done a deal with the ABC that traffic won’t be counted for their customers using the ABC’s service and you’d have to wonder how long it will be until others offer it.
The interesting thing with IP TV in Australia is just how badly the commercial TV stations are falling behind.
A good example is Channel 7 where their tie up with AOL should have made this easy, but they seem to have lost it. The other two networks have nothing.
Under the current pricing structures it’s difficult to see IP TV taking off in Australia, but this will change. The big question is just how visionary Australian Internet providers are and just how the commercial TV stations will deal with the challenge.
Reports the iPhone has triggered a rise in mobile Internet use in the US raises an interesting question on its effects on the Australian market.
Early this year Three Mobile touted their own report which found Australians were reluctant to do surfing the net on their phones due to the risk of copping a monster bill.
Sadly this belief is quite fair when you see some plans charging up to $3,000 a Gb if you go over a 5Mb monthly allowance.
While Optus has sweetened their plans slightly by offering better usage allowances on their iPhone plans, all the providers have done little to improve their mobile phone data offerings.
This stingy attitude to data by the Australian mobile operators is going to continue to cramp the growth in the Australian mobile Internet market.
Until one of the players drops their restrictive plans and outrageous excess use charges Australians will quite rightly shy away from embracing mobile web surfing.
Last week the proposal to allow a new breed of internet domains triggered talk of another “internet gold rush”. I’m not sure this is going to happen, however it is a timely reminder of the importance of protecting your own business name.
The Global Top Level Domains (gLTDs) are the suffixes such as .com and .net at the end of internet addresses. There are 22 of these and they are controlled by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) which is chaired by an Australian, Dr Paul Twomey.
ICANN has proposed to make new gLTDs available to anyone who makes a suitable application. So somebody can apply to create a .smartcompany or .australia domain to replace the boring old .com or .com.au.
I have to admit my first reaction was “this was just a revenue grab” by ICANN but Twomey, in an interview on ABC Local Radio last Friday morning, stated the expected “low six figure sum” for registering a gTLD will only recover ICANN’s costs.
Those costs are going to be substantial as the ICANN announcement indicates there is going to be quite a rigorous evaluation before any are approved.
The cost and evaluation process means we won’t get a repeat of the mess we have seen in spaces like the .com domain where the low cost and ease of obtaining an address has meant many opportunistic registrations.
Because of this, I doubt there will be a “gold rush” as the barriers for entry are too high. The business model of registering hundreds or thousands of potentially valuable names in the hope someone will offer big dollars for a few of them doesn’t work when each registration costs over a hundred thousand dollars.
I also suspect the branding aspect is overplayed. The cost and time of buying, setting up and establishing the new top level domains will put even some of the bigger brands off unless there’s a compelling business case for doing so. Many will simply defend their brands through the disputes system.
In his interview on ABC Radio, Twomey indicated this will probably be a similar process to the existing domain dispute mechanism – which only makes the risks for cybersquatters even greater.
At the moment, it’s cheap to register a name but expensive to dispute it. This works to the cybersquatters’ advantage as most business owners will pay $10,000 to buy the domain rather than $25,000 in legal costs to dispute the ownership.
Under the ICANN proposal, the legal costs will still be high, but not as high as the cost of registration. This means speculating on global Top Level Domains becomes a very risky proposition and probably beyond the resources of most speculators.
Another aspect working against a gold rush are the popularity of the current suffixes. Of the 21 existing gTLDs most haven’t worked; when was the last time you saw a .coop, .pro or .jobs internet address?
If you did see one of these addresses, did you automatically type .com or .com.au the first time you tried to use it?
This is the big problem for any new domain; internet users are already conditioned to identify .com, .com.au and similar suffixes as internet addresses. So any new domain owner is going to have to spend a lot of money and time convincing the community to use the new address.
Long time Crikey subscribers will remember Stephen Mayne’s struggle to remind radio interviewers to include the .au at the end of the Crikey web address. All too often it was back announced as crikey.com which sent potential subscribers to the personal website of a Seattle based British expat.
To overcome this confusion I suspect brands that do grab their own gTLD will also retain the equivalent .com addresses and point those to their new domains. So for instance were Gucci to obtain the .gucci domain they would arrange that when customers type in gucci.com it automatically resolves to the .gucci address.
Where I think the new names will be successful is in large corporations where it’s relatively easy for the system administrators to setup the entire company’s computer network to use the domain.
For instance Telstra would get the .telstra domain then have internal addresses like sales.mobiles.telstra or servicecentre.ballarat.telstra. These addresses could be exposed to the wider public internet when necessary.
Most businesses though will find these domains have limited effect. It may be that buying a new address on a domain like .shop or .sunshinecoast will be worthwhile, but registering your own global Top Level Domain is overkill and beyond the means for all but the biggest corporations.
Where business may be affected by this is with trademark infringements. So this is another reminder to protect your enterprise’s most import asset; its name.
For the moment, it’s not worth worrying about the new names, especially given they won’t be around until at least the end of 2009. In the meantime, stick with your existing internet addresses and make sure you are protecting your brand names.
Telstra’s new bundled plans offering a free laptop with their wireless plans is a good move to improve take up of wireless Internet.
It’s surprising none of the providers haven’t offered these deals sooner given entry level laptops are cheaper than mobile phones and these plans have proved an resounding success in the mobile industry.
As with all these deals, the devil is in the small print. You may be getting a “free” laptop but the cost of the wireless broadband will easily make up for this. The total price of the plan over the 36 month contract is $3,564 which would buy you a lot of laptop.
36 months is a long contract and we can expect to see prices drop and better deals appear as the other companies respond.
Also, a $700 laptop is a pretty basic beast many business users will find doesn’t meet their needs.
Overall, this is an interesting deal that’s going to radically change the business market. However I’d recommend most users sit and wait to see what other deals become available.
