SUMMARY OF AUSTRALIAN MARKET - Rated (Per-Captita) as one of the fastest populations to adopt new technology. Not overall supportive of their own products and services - tendency to see imports as being of superior quality. A lot of work needs to be done with both the public and press perception of shareware. While there is a reasonable acceptance it is often seen as being of lesser quality to "Shelfware".

LANGUAGE - English is spoken by almost all Australians, there is a strong preference for Australian English - which has tended to become a mixture of UK English and US English peppered with colloquialisms. The second most prevalent language would be Greek and Italian.

CURRENCY - Australian Dollars. Exchange rates tend to make US Dollar purchases unatractive. Very little support from the banking sector for e-commerce and where it exists it is prohibitively expensive. Tend to be quite unaware of the existance of, and relative exchange rates for, foreign currencies and will assume that a US dollars price is the same in Australian Dollars.

HOLIDAYS - The following list of holidays affect normal business operations- all other holidays are typically observed on Sundays, or do not heavily impact business operations for the whole country.. Full Holidays
January 1 - New Years Day
January 26th - Australia Day
March 25 - ANZAC Day Easter - Good Friday, Easter Sunday, Easter Monday
June 26 - Queens Birthday
First Tuesay of November - Melbourne Cup Day
December 25 - Christmas
December 26 - Boxing Day

A plethora of state based holidays (Melb Cup Day is an exception as it tends to affect the whole nation at least for part of the day).

COMMON FORMS OF ACCEPTED PAYMENT - The following are common forms of payment accepted in the Australia. Cash Credit Cards - Visa, MasterCard, Bank Card and American Express Cheques (Checks) - Corporate Cheques, Bank Cheques, Money Orders Purchase Orders - Wire Transfers - (Very expensive)

TAXES - Each State's laws may vary. All products sold within Australia to Australians are subject to the GST (Goods and Services Tax). The impact of this on E-Commerce is still pretty much undefined. Australian

BUSINESS LINKS - Links that are business related Australian Tax Office (ATO) http://www.ato.gov.au Australian

SHAREWARE SITES - Very few. Currently - http://www.aquarian.com

DOMAINS - Below are the most common domain extensions

com.au (company) - by far the most popular extension.
only available to ASC *registered* Australian business.
.net.au (networks) - only for ISP's
.org.au (organizations) - ASC registered non-profit only
.edu.au (educational) - reserved for educational institutions only

This page was created and is credited to Scott Kane of Micronexus Software Australia

We're happy to announce today the release of fastWhoIs. If you've every been confronted with the task of scanning through a long list of domain names, endlessly searching to try to find the owner's contact details, phone numbers and email addresses you'll know that it can take a while. The problem is made worse by the fact that most websites that provide these details show them as an image which means even more laborious typing.

fastWhoIs is excellent at getting domain name information fast and effortlessly. You can load a list of domain names to scan, and save the results automatically to files. You can choose which server the WhoIs details comes from, or choose to query multiple servers for complete information. Whether you're looking at purchasing multiple domains, or searching for industry contacts, there's no faster way.

The software is available on trial download and can be purchased for $19.50. Feel free to download and give it a test run.

For less than $15, you can buy a cell phone loaded with minutes. You can buy more as you go whenever those minutes run out. Best of all, you are not locked into a long-term contract.

But in South Florida, New York, California, Georgia, Texas and elsewhere, traffickers have figured out they can make big profits by purchasing thousands of these low-cost phones and tweaking the software so that calls can be made on any cell network. The altered phones are then sold all over the world — costing the phone companies tens of millions of dollars.

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Starting today you can find our own Roger Thomasson at the Software Industry Conference in Boston. Unfortunately I couldn't make it this year, but if I promised to buy you a drink I'm sure Roger will oblige for me!

You can spot Roger as he's the one in the blue Bits Du Jour T-Shirt.

The cost of sending a text message from the bar or the beach when mobile phone users are outside their home state in the European Union will be cut by 70 percent from next year under new plans, an EU source said.

EU Telecoms Commissioner Viviane Reding will announce outline plans on Tuesday that include extending price caps on roamed voice calls for another three years, the source added.

Pope Benedict XVI took a new hi-tech road to spreading his message Tuesday, sending a mobile phone text to pilgrims attending World Youth Day celebrations in Australia, organisers said.

Young friend, God and his people expect much from u because u have within you the Fathers supreme gift: the Spirit of Jesus - BXVI. Was the first message sent.

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Washington Nationals fans soon will be able to text in charity donations during a game, thanks to a partnership between the team, MLB.com, and the Mobile Giving Foundation. During the July 13 game against the Houston Astros, fans will be invited to text the word NATS to 90999 to give $5 to support the work of the Childrens National Medical Center to fight pediatric diabetes.

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Ringtone Media Studio is the best way to create your personalized ringtones from your mp3s and CDs, mobile movies from your video collection, and picture slideshows or mobile wallpapers from your photo collection. No subscriptions, no contracts, no pay-per-download. Create as many ringtones, wallpapers and movies as you want.

Ringtone Media Studio is 50% off for only 24 hours!

The American Civil Liberties Union and the Electronic Frontier Foundation are suing the Department of Justice to obtain official records concerning the U.S. governments possible use of cell-phone-tracking technology to spy on individuals without first obtaining a court order based on probable cause.

In a complaint filed in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, the civil-liberties groups said the DOJ failed to provide an adequate and timely response to a records request filed last year under the Freedom of Information Act.

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Google Suggest!

ASP and other groups have no 'lobbiest' power! Digital River, e-commerce providers?

Thanks. For the fix and the comment. Feel free to blog about this SiteAdvisor thing. I'm trying to kick up a stink. As it stands at the moment, any software developer whose product happens to confuse McAfee's scanner into thinking it contains malware could end up having their site red-flagged like this, and they might not know about it for weeks if they haven't installed the SiteAdvisor plugin. It's a real threat to ISVs.

Julian Moss
Tech-Pro.net

http://blog.tech-pro.net/entry/48/Now_Yahoo_is_libelling_us