Marie Jones

IBM says its Cloud services are increasingly being adopted by businesses across the world, including the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) and Zoo and Aquarium Association of Australia.

Following recent IDC research showing worldwide spending on Cloud services will grow almost threefold, reaching $44.2 billion by 2013.1, IBM announced two new partnerships for its LotusLive email, Web conferencing, social networking and collaboration cloud service.

The company is to work with Ariba and SugarCRM to help its clients take advantage of social commerce and customer relationship management (CRM) in the Cloud.

As well as the ABS and Zoo and Aquarium Association of Australia, new clients include C&D Foods, Crawford & Company, FIDM/Fashion Institute of Design & Merchandising, General Milling Corporation and General Motors Components Holdings.

“With the increased interest and adoption, businesses across the world are embracing IBM’s public Cloud services for easy-to-use collaboration tools to connect with colleagues, partners and suppliers quickly,” the company said in a statement.

Additionally, according to a recent IBM survey of more than 2,000 midsize companies, there’s growing adoption of Cloud computing among midsize firms, with two-thirds either planning or currently deploying cloud-based technologies to improve IT systems management while lowering costs.

Organisations including the Australian Bureau of Statistics and the Zoo and Aquarium Association of Australia have adopted LotusLive Engage to drive increased collaboration across geographically distributed teams.

The ABS adopted LotusLive across its 3,200 person organisation for increased project collaboration with other international statistical agencies. 

LotusLive Engage allows its international project teams to quickly share skills and intellectual property and assets, design and co-develop statistical standards and applications — all within a secure, cost-effective environment that LotusLive provides.

Additionally, the Zoo and Aquarium Association of Australia integrates more than 90 zoos and aquariums across Australia, New Zealand and the South Pacific in a network for wildlife conservation, environmental education and wildlife research. 

Its main activity is the Australasian Species Management Program (ASMP) which has a mission “to plan and manage animal collections cooperatively, in ways that promote sustainability and contribute to species conservation.”

The Association has adopted LotusLive Engage as its collaboration platform to support more than a 100 species programs that involve teams implementing best practice policy across the region.

The Association says it has found the platform to be secure and easy to use and a good way of disseminating current information and collecting feedback.

New rules came into effect this week that will allow VoIP Services to charge customers for use of the service based on geographic areas.

ACMA (the Australian Communications and Media Authority) said it has changed the geographic numbering rules, such as those with 02, 03 or 08 area codes, which will now be issued to customers using outbound VoIP services.

The move removes limitations on outbound only services (including VoIP) and provides a framework governing the use of geographic numbers when used for services outside their normal area.

‘The introduction and uptake of new services such as VoIP has challenged the relevance of parts of the Numbering Plan, which dated back to 1997, to meet industry and consumer needs,’ said ACMA Acting Chairman, Mr. Richard Bean.

‘The implementation of these amendments represents a small but important step in regulatory transition for VoIP and other converged services. It will support innovation in the new telecommunications services being offered to Australian consumers,’ he said.

While VoIP services have been available in Australia for some time, the new rules give VoIP providers more certainty about how numbers can be used and what information they must provide to consumers if the geographic numbers are issued to customers out of area.

ACMA is currently examining a range of emerging numbering issues and has already released two issues papers, most recently customer location information and numbering data.

Increasing pressures on numbering include the dominace of mobile phones and the move by consumers  to move away from fixed lines to dynamic services.

The growth of IP-based voice services, and widespread use of alternative communications which don’t use numbering at all, including chat and social network services, is having an impact on location data required by emergency services.

One of ACMA’s challenges is in finding out how the numbering plan could be used to provide accurate and dynamic location information to emergency services in an all-IP environment.

What’s in a name? Quite a lot it seems, as companies rush in to the mis-spelt arena buying up domain names that look vaguely similar to their own.

According to Smh.com.au, big Australian companies such as Qantas, Westpac, Woolworths and Australia Post are buying up mis-spelled domain names in an effort to stop others from making money from their brands.

Domain registrations including qantas.com.au spelt with a ‘u’, woolworths.com.au spelt without the ‘s’, or a missed ‘r’ in australiapost.com.au have been snapped up by Qantas, Woolworths and Australia Post to enable their customers to get access to their website and prevent ‘typosquatters’ from getting their first.

The SMH report claims the Internet regulator, Australian Domain Name Administrator (auDA), has a list of more than 1900 domain names on its List of Prohibited Misspellings including bigpong.com.au, fightcentre. com.au, kommbank.com.au and wirlpoo.com.au., which can net illicit ‘domainers’ $20 per click from advertisements that are run on the sites.

Savvy companies like Zoupon, a group buying website, have also just paid $100,000 for the domain name deals.com.au because its 400,000 customers have issues with the name Zoupon when trying to access a website that offered deals, according to the Daily Telegraph.

The auDA recently sought public comment on a range of policies relating to the management and operation of the Internet in Australia, including whether restrictions on registrants being Australians should remain in place.

Google has updated its Street View website in what appears to be a bid to quell the disquiet over privacy issues which erupted last year when the company’s StreetView cars were involved in tapping into WiFi networks of homeowners in several countries.

The revamped website gives more of an insight into how Street View cars, trikes and snowmobiles are operated in capturing images from around the world as well as highlighting some of the more exotic imagery and history of its ‘pegman’ icon.

A slideshow greets visitors to its homepage, and visitors are also now directed to a gallery of landmark sites, including UNESCO World Heritage Sites.

The site also gives a background of the technology used to capture its imagery. Google said: “After several iterations of the car and camera technology, the latest car has 15 lenses taking 360 degrees of photos. It also has motion sensors to track its position, a hard drive to store data, a small computer running the system and lasers to capture 3D data to determine distances within the Street View Trike.

While Street View cars were first introduced in capturing images of five US cities in May 2007, the site has now expanded its 360 degree panoramic views to incude locations on all seven continents.

It now also uses a bicycle baed camera system on  a Trike, a snowmobile to explore locations in Whistler and a Trolley system which takes its technology through some of the world’s greatest museums around the world.