opinion If there is one thing which maverick Australian entrepreneur Dick Smith is good at, it is causing controversy.

From Australian manufacturing to population control, from environmentalism to freedom of speech, from terrorism to civil aviation, if Australia is debating an issue, then Dick Smith is likely to have an opinion on it, and all it will take for that opinion to spill forth is a quick call from a journalist. Ten minutes later, Bob — or maybe Dick — is your uncle and the media has a new, sensationalist and usually apocalyptic quote from an Aussie icon to slather all over itself, in big gooey, slightly radioactive globs.

Last night proved no exception.

For reasons which I have been unable to ascertain, given that he sold his flagship electronics chain to Woolworths 30 years ago (almost before the Internet was even invented, and at a time when it predominantly sold black and white TVs and bits of wire), the ABC’s normally excellent discussion show The Drum called on Smith to proffer his expertise on the issue of online retailing. How might Australia’s supposedly ailing retail industry take itself forward with vim and vigour, The Drum’s host Tim Palmer wondered out loud, with the ominous threat of the Internet hanging over every cash register, siphoning transactions daily from the great wheel of commerce?

And of course Dick had the answer.

As I — and no doubt, countless others — watched, aghast, the 67-year-old Smith sequentially shut down every other member of the panel discussion of which he was just one part, and proceeded into an epic nationally broadcasted rant about economic protectionism, Gough Whitlam, the cost of Australian wages, the ongoing complaints by retailers like Gerry Harvey about online GST collection and why politicians should “tell the truth” about jobs going offshore.

In one memorable moment, Smith claimed that if international online retailers weren’t charged the “$600 million” worth of GST he claimed they should be paying, Australia wouldn’t be able to pay decent wages for our police forces or even fund the ABC, and that the retail industry for items with a value less than $1,000 would eventually cease to exist as Australians bought everything online.

As rants go, it was fantastic. My blood pressure rose several points as I fought an overwhelming urge to throw my dinner at the television screen, and Dick was successful in drawing the entire focus of The Drum’s panel discussion into a shouting match between him and normally impeccably behaved commentators like the ABC’s Annabelle Crabb and the Institute of Public Affairs’ Tim Wilson. To put it nicely: Our Dick was on fire.

I recommend you watch the entire segment to catch the Aussie icon at his finest; the debate starts here at the 29 minute mark.

Now, I wouldn’t describe Smith’s rant as entirely coherent; it was less in the line of reasoned argument and more in the line of an angsty rambling monologue which sought to sledgehammer the Government on a whole range of issues while avoiding any modicum of responsibility on the part of bricks and mortar retailers for the less than perfect “trading conditions” which they currently find themselves in. But that didn’t matter really. It wasn’t as if anybody else on the panel was qualified to speak on the issue anyway … Dick’s only real control factor was the host, Palmer, whose feeble protests about the strengths of Apple’s retail stores was brushed off by the entrepreneur within the space of about three seconds.

However, after I calmed down, finished my dinner and started thinking about Dick Smith’s history and the issue of retailing in the electronics industry in general, a wider point begun to surface in my mind. For that, Dick, and for almost making me choke on my brussel sprouts, I thank you.

As Australia’s technology sector has begun its annual two-week saturation experience with news emanating from the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, it is increasingly clear that globally, many technology manufacturers and retailers still largely see themselves as being caught in what I would describe as the paradigm of ‘marketplaces’ for their goods and services being sold.

Companies like Sony, LG, Samsung, Canon, Microsoft, Nokia, HTC and others are currently launching thousands of products at CES, and will launch hundreds more at the upcoming Mobile World Congress confab in Barcelona, with the view of attracting broad interest. The idea is that they will then work with retailers like Harvey Norman and distributors like Telstra, Optus and Vodafone to offer these products to customers.

The concept — call it historical — is that customers wanting a new gadget will walk into stores or browse their options online and make a choice between the various products. They will then buy the one which they want. It’s this sort of buying pattern which retailers like Dick Smith and Gerry Harvey have grown up with. It’s all they know. And it dates back millennia, to the days when community markets were the only place where regional goods were sold. From Rome, to Egypt, to China, every city, every civilisation has had its markets, and Dick Smith and Gerry Harvey are but the latest scions which this epic economic cycle has created.

The only problem is, in many cases, consumers are no longer making the traditional types of choices about what products they buy, because something like 95 percent of new products don’t matter.

Take the mobile phone market. Right now, if you talk to industry insiders, it is becoming appallingly clear that despite the fact that new phones are being launched all the time, in reality consumers are predominantly buying just a handful of devices. The huge number of Australians who bought a new smartphone in 2011 were far more likely to have bought an iPhone, a HTC Desire or Sensation, or a Samsung Galaxy S II, than any other handset.

They didn’t go to a “marketplace” and make a choice. They bought one of the top three or four options directly from a telco and ignored the bottom 50. And when the Samsung Galaxy S II, likely 2011′s best smartphone is available for peanuts — $39 per month (including plan) over two years on Vodafone — can you blame them?

It’s a similar situation in tablets, where something like 90 percent of Australians are buying iPads, which is virtually the only tablet brand with any market penetration right now. The only other tablet device Australians are really interested in is the Amazon Kindle. And often people will own both, because the Kindle is the best eReader. In laptops it’s a little more diverse, but again there are only a handful of models, led by Apple’s MacBooks and with the most popular models from HP, Dell and Acer hovering around as well. Lenovo in the business world. In television sets right now, according to my peer group, it’s Samsung. In furniture, Ikea.

The rapid integration of technology platforms with each other is only increasing this trend. Many people no longer use separate MP3 players, GPS navigation units, fixed or video cameras, audio recording devices, portable gaming consoles and so on. They just use their smartphone for all of these purposes. And I’m sure in a year or two laptops will start dying as keyboards are better integrated into tablets. TV brands will start dying when Apple eventually launches the iTV or whatever. We all know it’s coming.

Other areas are being touched by this trend as well. ISPs like iiNet do not want consumers to make choices about their ADSL routers. They want them to buy their standardised BoB device. Telstra does not want consumers to use their own digital video recorder. Telstra wants customers to use its T-Box. Video gaming options have increasingly become condensed to Microsoft’s Xbox and Sony’s PlayStation 3 consoles, and we’re not too far away from a future where all content to those platforms will be delivered digitally, doing away with yet another “marketplace” — the physical video game retailer.

Even within these digital marketplaces, choices are becoming less important. If you’re into role playing games, in late 2011 you were probably playing just the best one — the Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim. If you were into action adventures, there is no doubt you would have been playing Batman: Arkham City. For many people, there has been no need to make choices about which game to play, when it has become incredibly obvious which one is the best one to suit your needs. When you can get the best experience in a convenient format at a decent price, there is no need to settle for second-best.

The reason why this is occurring should be obvious by now: Globalisation.

When most of the top products are available globally (at least in first-world countries), there is no need any more for consumers to make choices — and hence, compromises — about the products they buy. They can simply read an authoritative review on the whole category of products on a global site like Engadget, and then follow that site’s recommendation for the best global product at any time. Then, you can often buy that product directly from the manufacturer — for example, Apple or Amazon — rather than dealing with a local distributor.

This process is inherently better than dealing with third-party distributors. You get the best stuff from the people with the best expertise about that stuff. You might pay more for it than those living in the manufacturer’s home country, but then you’d pay more at retail anyway, and this way you avoid the uncomfortable experience of dealing with retail staff who usually know less about the products you sell than you — or your cluster of Internet review sites — do. It’s this concept which is behind the success of Apple’s retail stores. If you buy stuff from Apple directly, you know they have the model in stock, you know precisely what the price is going to be, you get great service (albeit with a free dose of reality adjustment thrown in) and you’re getting one of the top products in whatever category you’re shopping in.

This concept — of the demolition of the idea of ‘choice’ and ‘marketplaces’ — is also evident in other areas of consumer electronics.

One of the central issues with Google’s Android platform is the difficulty consumers have with upgrading their handsets to the latest version. Honeycomb? Ice Cream Sandwich? Gingerbread? Froyo? We don’t care. We just want the latest version, whatever it is, and we don’t want that download to be controlled by our carriers, because they’re not the people who make our smartphones. Just get out of the way, the mantra goes, and provide one central, standard way through which Android can be updated, directly from the source to you.

A lot of what Dick Smith talked about last night, and what manufacturers will be talking about post-CES, is distribution. Jobs for people in stores. Deals being signed with carriers. Country-specific marketing campaigns. Economic protectionism for local manufacturing. But the reality is that increasingly, consumers don’t care about any of that. Many people would prefer the third-party retail ‘marketplaces’ which have existed for millennia to simply disappear as the ability to build relationships directly with the people who actually make the stuff we buy becomes possible, and in fact, completely normal. That middle men have a vastly reduced future in the global economy should, by now, be obvious to everyone. And this capitalist class — which has long made its margins on the top of the real innovators — deserves to die an ignominious death.

Dick Smith and Harvey Norman are fabulous examples of retail marketplaces where you can buy anything. But increasingly, people don’t want to buy anything. More often than not, they only want to buy the best thing. And that’s the one thing which mass market retailers never quite seem to want to sell you.

Image credit: Dick Smith on The Drum last night, believed to be covered under fair use

opinion Prediction: When Amazon’s Kindle Fire launches in Australia next year, it will very quickly become the second most popular tablet locally behind Apple’s dominant iPad, easily eclipsing rival offerings from the likes of Samsung, Motorola, Research in Motion and more.

What basis do I have for making this statement, which would appear to be controversial on a number of levels? Let me count the reasons.

Let’s start with the timing. Although Amazon has not yet confirmed when or if the Kindle Fire will go on sale in Australia, it’s likely that it will launch locally in about six months’ time. Why? Because the company has established a pattern of this kind of launch timing in the past.

The original Kindle was released in November 2007 in the US and never came to Australia. But the Kindle 2, which was released in the US in February 2009, was made available internationally in October that same year. The Kindle DX was released in May 2009, followed by an international launch in January the following year. And the third-generation Kindle was initially announced in August 2010, and shipped internationally at the same time as in America.

Now, normally you’d bet that it would take a while for the manufacturer, Quanta, to ramp up manufacture of this new type of device to scale internationally. The Kindle Fire is qualitatively a different device than the previous e-ink based Kindles, after all — Amazon hasn’t previously sold a touchscreen Kindle with a colour LCD screen.

But in this case, Quanta has already for some time been manufacturing a very similar device, Research in Motion’s BlackBerry PlayBook, for international sale for some time. So it shouldn’t be too much of an extension for the company to produce enough Kindle Fires in bulk to meet global demand. The Kindle Fire started shipping to US customers in November. We’d expect it to be available internationally by mid-2012 at the latest.

This brings us to the question of demand.

With companies like Toshiba, Motorola, Samsung and Acer already having launched Android-based tablets in Australia over the past year, and even RIM getting into the action with the PlayBook, what evidence is there that the Kindle Fire will be able to take the number two spot locally behind Apple, when every other company has had such a huge start?

Well, plenty.

For starters, a report from Taipei this week in influential industry journal DigiTimes suggested that Quanta had already shipped between three and four million Kindle Fires to Amazon, with shipments to reach five million units by the end of December or early January. This report dovetails with a report by analyst firm iSuppli that Amazon would ship 3.9 million Kindle Fires in this quarter this year.

Technology industry blog and analyst house GigaOM points out that these sales mean that Amazon will easily become the second-largest tablet supplier in the US — with iSuppli allocating it an estimated 13.8 percent of the market, compared with 4.8 percent from Samsung (whose Galaxy Tab 10.1 device is being blocked in Australia by Apple legal action) and 4.7 percent from Barnes and Noble with its Nook e-Reader — which also isn’t available in Australia.

It’s not quite clear where Motorola fits into the picture with its Xoom tablet, but given the price of the Xoom has been cut in half in Australia just a few months after the device went on sale, I can’t imagine its share of the market — in the US or in Australia — is going to be huge.

Now all of this is extrapolation, of course — none of these figures appear to be direct from Amazon, and perhaps the Australian market is different, after all. However, there is another direct piece of evidence pointing to the Kindle Fire’s imminent popularity in Australia — web traffic.

Several weeks ago Delimiter published the first Australian review of the Amazon Kindle Fire, after we imported one of the devices locally. And reader interest in this article has been huge — at least double that of any other review of a tablet device which we’ve published this year. And that’s only taking the first several weeks of traffic to the Kindle Fire review into account. I would expect our Kindle Fire review to eventually become one of our most popular articles of all time.

Bear in mind that the overwhelming majority of those viewing this review are Australians. They primarily arrive at the page through searching Google for the availability of the new Kindles in Australia. Those searching from other countries will generally pick up international reviews of the Kindle Fire through sites like Engadget or Gizmodo.

Personally, I believe all of this somewhat circumstantial evidence is enough to show that the Kindle Fire will be huge in Australia in 2012.

The only question which remains is why. Why will the Fire become a strong competitor to the iPad in Australia, when the Motorola Xoom, Samsung Galaxy Tab family, Toshiba Thrive, BlackBerry PlayBook and more have all failed to gain scale? It’s simple: Australians do not really see the Kindle Fire as a competitor to the iPad.

Over the past few months since the new Kindles were unveiled (including the Kindle Touch etc), the question I’ve been getting asked by my friends and family about them has not been: “Should I buy an iPad or a Kindle?” The questions have primarily come from people who want to buy a Kindle to jump onto the incredibly powerful eBook revolution which is sweeping Australia right now, but don’t quite know which device to buy. They know they want a Kindle, because that’s what everyone else uses to read eBooks — but they don’t quite know which one out of the new bunch they should buy.

In the mind of many Australians, iPads and Kindles are for two completely different purposes. The iPad basically replaces many of the functions which were previously carried out on a laptop or even a smartphone, while a Kindle (of any kind) is a replacement for physical paper books. Many people are not really that aware that the Kindle Fire can perform many of the same functions as the iPad, or that the iPad can access any Kindle library through the iOS Kindle App.

With this in mind, many people will buy both; while many of those who didn’t want an iPad or an iPad alternative will buy a Kindle Fire to get access to eBooks. This is the genius of Amazon’s Kindle strategy: It’s not positioning itself as an iPad alternative. And this is why it will succeed in taking a huge slice of Australia’s tablet market next year — because many people won’t see it as one.

Image credit: Amazon.

review Would you still pirate content if it was easier just to buy it? That’s the question that Amazon’s posing with the new Kindle Fire tablet, the company’s first mobile device to offer integrated access to all of its digital content stores.

The affordable US$199 pricetag distinguishes it from the Apple iPad as a significantly cheaper alternative, and while it isn’t actually available in Australia, it’s not that hard to get your hands on one either through a friend or using a third party shipping company like ComGateway. We had the pleasure of putting one through its paces and came away mightily impressed.

Design
The first thing that struck us about the Kindle Fire was just how much it looked like the BlackBerry PlayBook. It’s a little shorter and a little narrower, but otherwise it’s a dead ringer, down to the 7” display, buttonless face, glossy black bezel, and soft touch rear. And it’s not poorly put together either – the Kindle Fire feels just as well-constructed as the PlayBook, which is an impressive feat considering how dodgy most of the other tablets in this price range are.

Its footprint is almost identical to that of the Kindle 3G, which in our opinion is the perfect size for reading eBooks and about the minimum size we’d be happy with for comfortable web browsing and watching movies. At 413g, it’s surprisingly heavy for a 7” tablet – 13g heavier than the PlayBook and only 180g short of the iPad 2’s weight – but it doesn’t feel too heavy. In fact, its density only adds to the perception of quality.

Amazon has gone for a completely minimal look, with an absence of buttons or branding on the face, and only a headphone jack and micro-USB port on the bottom next to a power/sleep button. Just as noteworthy is what isn’t included, namely physical volume buttons and front- and rear-facing cameras. Nor is there a memory card slot or a HDMI output.

Features
The Kindle Fire uses the Android 2.3 operating system, but you really wouldn’t know it by looking at it. The user interface has been completely skinned to remove any traces of Android, and none of the stock Google apps like Gmail, YouTube and Android Market are on board. Amazon has also removed many of the power user functions like multi-tasking and fast-app switching (although some apps, like the web browser, will preserve its state from when you last used it, and you can still play music in the background), multiple homescreens and widgets, Exchange support and many of the advanced settings like VPN functionality, account syncing and portable hotspot.

In other words, the Kindle Fire really doesn’t look or act like any other Android device we’ve used, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing if you aren’t a tech-savvy user. Amazon makes it extremely clear from the get-go what you’re meant to do with the Kindle Fire, which is a lot more than we can say about most other tablets. Clearly labelled at the top of the screen are links to newsstand, books, music, video, docs, apps and web, and there’s a bookshelf graphic taking up most of the homescreen that houses a slick 3D carousel of all the apps, webpages, music, books and movies you’ve recently opened (basically like iOS’ Cover Art feature, but extended to all forms of content), as well as any apps or content that you’ve marked as favourites.

Only the Kindle bookstore works in Australia – everything else is restricted to US users only, and since access is dependent on having a US credit card rather than geographic location, this rules out working around it with a US-based VPN. Still, we were able to browse through the content stores to get an idea of what’s on offer, and both the selection and layout of each store is impressive. Amazon has made it even easier to purchase content than Apple has by separating each type of content into separate stores rather than dumping everything into a single portal.

The good news for Aussie users that have imported the Kindle Fire is that you can sideload music and movies over USB. Amazon doesn’t exactly encourage this – there’s no USB cable included in the box, only a charger – but it’s easy to do as the Kindle Fire mounts as a USB mass storage device and it uses the common micro-USB connector. The trick with playing movies on the Kindle Fire is that you have to use the Gallery app rather than the Videos app, but other than that it works just like any other tablet, with native support for H.264 MPEG4 videos. There are workarounds for getting access to the geo-restricted content stores, and if you’re really keen, it’s possible to root the Kindle Fire, install the Android Market and missing Google apps and replace the custom interface with a standard Android launcher.

Unlike other Android tablets, the Kindle Fire isn’t driven by feeds and speeds, but the specs are better than you’d expect for a two-hundred-dollar tablet. It has a dual-core 1GHz TI Core A9 OMAP 4 processor, 512MB of RAM, 8GB of internal storage (around 6GB available for user storage), a 7” 1024 x 600 IPS display and 802.11n Wi-Fi. What it doesn’t have is built-in 3G (not that we were expecting it), Bluetooth or GPS.

As well as the aforementioned content stores, the Kindle Fire’s preloaded apps (which is what you’ll be limited to if you don’t employ one of the workarounds) include a web browser, email client, photo gallery, contacts, IMDB, Words with Friends, Pulse (a news aggregation app) and Quickoffice.

Performance
Since we couldn’t download any apps to the Kindle Fire, we weren’t able to run our usual Android benchmarks to test system and graphics performance. For day-to-day use, performance was good rather than great. Simple things like unlocking the device, flicking through the carousel of content on the homescreen and moving between the different content sections is reasonably quick, but we noticed quite a bit of lag when rendering complex web pages in the browser (although pinch to zoom works smoothly), and Flash videos in particular play poorly.

There were also lots of occasions where the touchscreen failed to respond to input for up to five seconds at a time. We also frequently had difficulty selecting particular items on the display, as the touchscreen would register input as slightly above or below what we were trying to tap on.

Speaking of web browsing, Amazon has tweaked the usual Gingerbread web browser to display all of the open tabs above the address bar – a much quicker way to navigate between pages than the usual thumbnail views in Gingerbread that are displayed in a separate screen. Thumbnails of all of the last pages you’ve opened in the browser are also displayed whenever you open a new tab, similar to what Safari and Chrome does on the desktop. But the piece de resistance is Amazon’s “Silk” technology, which takes advantage of the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) to accelerate page loads. But it’s a feature that needs time to develop – loading the SMH website, the Kindle Fire wasn’t exceptionally faster than other Android devices, rendering the page completely in 14 seconds (the Samsung Galaxy S II and Asus Eee Pad Transformer did the same in 10 seconds and 15 seconds respectively).

The quality of the Kindle Fire’s screen was a lovely surprise. With most cheap tablets, the screen quality (or lack thereof) is one of the dead giveaways, with poor viewing angles, limited contrast and crappy black levels. But the Kindle Fire’s display is very similar in quality to the BlackBerry PlayBook’s. The colours are rich, you can make out lots of detail on the screen, and while the blacks don’t quite match the bezel around the screen, they’re only one or two shades off. The IPS display means viewing angles are good as well, although it’s a little more reflective than the PlayBook, resulting in more glare on the screen when you’re looking at it from different angles. As far as media playback goes, the stereo speakers are a little weak, but it’ll happily play movies up to 720p with no lag or stuttering.

We got another pleasant surprise with the Kindle Fire’s battery life. Amazon claims it’s good for up to 7.5 hours of video, but we were able to get an hour more than that with Wi-Fi off and screen brightness set to 50%. This is the sort of battery life we expect as standard on high-end tablets, but for a sub-$200 tablet to offer this as well is fantastic.

Conclusion
The fact that you need to hack the Kindle Fire to get the most out of it in Australia means this device doesn’t suit the same first-time tablet user demographic as it does in the United States. For Aussies, the Kindle Fire is best suited for users that are a little more tech-savvy and are comfortable with rooting and sourcing the requisite APK installers over the Internet.

If you are prepared to do a little hacking, then the Kindle Fire is the best-value tablet on the market even if you can’t buy or rent any of the Amazon content. It’s a compact, affordable and high-quality option for web browsing, email, multimedia playback, reading eBooks, and running any of the hundreds of thousands of Android apps. No, you can’t simply walk into your local JB Hi-Fi or Harvey Norman to buy one, but the fact that it isn’t officially available in Australia just adds to its geek cachet.

The Kindle Fire is available from Amazon.com to customers located in the US.

Jenneth Orantia turned her back on a lucrative career in law to pursue her unhealthy obsession with consumer technology. She’s known for having at least half a dozen of the latest gadgets on her person at a time, and once won a bottle of Dom Perignon for typing 78WPM on a Pocket PC with a stylus.

Image credit: Amazon. Disclosure: This article contains affiliate marketing links; if you click though to Amazon and buy a Kindle Fire or other products Delimiter will receive a small payment.

blog Industry newsletter Communications Day this morning revealed that Australia Post was planning a major push into telecommunications services, with Optus regulatory chief Maha Krishnapillai (who recently quit the company) joining to spearhead the effort.

Australia Posts’ efforts will reportedly come in three areas — tie-ins between delivery and e-commerce, financial services and banking (not sure I really understand that one) and lastly, the “obvious opportunity developing as the NBN continues to roll out”. The full article can be found online here.

CommsDay publisher Graham Lynch is pretty bullish on Australia Post’s (long-rumoured) push into telecommunications services. And he’s got a point. With retail outlets around Australia, obvious logistical capabilities and companies like Amazon demonstrating the value of integrating the virtual realm with physical delivery, many will be betting that Australia Post has the capacity to take a strong position in the new digital economy which Australia is now entering.

However, personally I think it’s a pile of crap. Is there a need to integrate package delivery with e-commerce, even to the extent which financial entrepreneur Mark Bouris is hyping in The AustralianIT today, with “electronic letterboxes”? Not really, or at least not right now.

Is there much of a link between financial services, identity verification and telecommunications? Not particularly, although they’re all obviously playing somewhere in the same ball park. People normally prefer these things to be provided by separate providers.

And lastly, can Australia Post become a significant reseller of services on the NBN, in competition with commercial telcos like Telstra, Optus, iiNet, TPG, Internode and so on? No. Not only is Australia Post way too bureaucratic and stultified an organisation to move down this path quickly, but surely a government-owned organisation should not be allowed to compete with commercial telcos in an NBN world. That would make a mockery of competition.

Australia Post’s telecommunications ambitions are not a threat, they are not a significant industry move — they are nothing but wishful thinking.

Maha Krishnapilla is joining Australia Post’s Retail Services team to grow our existing telecommunications business. The role will report to Executive General Manager Retail Services Christine Corbett.

Our objective of becoming a trusted services provider is centred on the areas of financial services, identity services and communications. These existing businesses leverage our investment in our retail infrastructure across more than 4,400 outlets and have been identified as areas of growth for Australia Post.

Image credit: Australia Post

news Cloud computing giant Amazon has advertised more than a half dozen new positions as it ramps up its operations in Australia, including a role for a Sydney-based datacentre operations manager, which will re-kindle speculation the company wants to roll out infrastructure locally.

The company revealed in July that it had opened an Australian office with dedicated local staff to service the cloud computing market through its Web Services division. At the time, The Australian newspaper reported that a local datacentre was slated to be unveiled by early 2012, with up to three sites in Sydney on the selection list.

Amazon has historically preferred to locate its cloud computing infrastructure internationally in locations such as the US, Ireland, Singapore and Tokyo. The move has spurred the creation of local players such as Macquarie Telecom-backed Ninefold and the rapid expansion of infrastructure owned by companies such as Telstra and Optus, due to the preference which many Australian companies have expressed for keeping their data onshore.

“We do not comment on rumours or speculations,” said Regina Tan, AWS’ public relations chief for its Asia Pacific and Japan region at the time. “Over time, we plan to have more datacentres in different countries and regions around the world.”

However, in the advertisement published last week and first reported by iTNews, Amazon noted that the successful candidate for its Sydney datacentre management position would be “operationally responsible for one or more of Amazon’s datacentres”. The successful candidate would also manage a team of datacentre technicians, “ensuring effective and efficient management of day to day datacentre operations.”

Amazon is also currently hiring for a number of other Sydney-based positions, in areas such as business development, account management, partner liaison and sales. One position will specifically focus on drumming up work within Australia’s public sector, which has especially indicated its preference for Australia-based hosting.

One of that staff member’s responsibilities will be to: “Work with marketing and PR to build a rich calendar and set of programs for business development, including content for activities such as educational events, tradeshows, media coverage, and presentations.” They will also “establish program win strategies”.

One possibility is that that Amazon will establish only a content distribution node in Australia — as it has in a wide variety of other Asian and European countries — rather than a full-fledged datacentre. Amazon’s edge network is focused on efficiently funnelling content from Amazon’s core out to other regions.

opinion/analysis
Get ready for the Amazon Web Services hype train to hit Australia. I expect to be smothered in expensive press lunches (which I will likely decline to attend), sent lavish gifts (which I will likely return) and invited to extensive press briefings (which I will probably attend, but only if there is the opportunity to engage in snarky question and answer sessions).

But seriously, is Amazon planning to roll out a full-fledged datacentre in Australia? The AustralianIT believes so. And now iTNews apparently does as well. But I do not. I encourage you to read my examination of Amazon’s datacentre network published in July. In it, I wrote:

“There’s simply no way that Australia will see an Amazon datacentre presence consisting of anything like the same scale that the company has deployed in the US, Europe, or even Japan. What we will see is likely something like Amazon Edge, plus a little bit on the side. Datacentre rollouts are more complex than headlines would make them out to be — and so are commercial decisions for a company as big as Amazon Web Services.”

There is simply no way that Amazon can deploy a large scale datacentre in Australia in the next few months to meet what has been publicly rumoured to be its launch date. Datacentres take time. Instead, I would expect that we might see a speedy rollout of a few shipping containers full of servers to meet local hosting requirements and give Amazon’s local staff something to try to sell to governments.

To achieve the cost levels and efficiency which Amazon is famous for, the company would have to do a lot more, but there is simply no evidence that that is occurring yet. And until it does, I would expect most Australian customer organisations to ignore Amazon’s efforts. Australia already has a bevy of local cloud computing players — Telstra, Optus, Fujitsu, CSC and HP at the top end, and companies like Ninefold at the lower end.

Amazon will have to get serious about Australia before its potential customers get serious about it. Am I wrong? Is Amazon building some massive datacentre in Australia? Prove it. Hit up Delimiter’s anonymous tips line. Otherwise I’ll continue to be a skeptic.

Image credit: Amazon

news Almost a year after it launched in the US, Google has brought its eBooks platform to Australia, announcing this morning that its catalogue included “hundreds of thousands” of commercial books available in Australia and “millions” of free eBooks on top.

The platform launched almost 12 months ago in the US. At the time, the search giant’s eBooks partnerships manager in Australia, Mark Tanner, made it clear it was planning to take the eBooks platform internationally as quickly as possible, and was working with local companies to do so.

Like Amazon’s Kindle bookstore and Apple’s iBooks, Google’s eBooks platform is hosted online, meaning you can read the same book on multiple devices — from your smartphone, to a tablet like the iPad or your PC or laptop. It also allows you to keep on reading from the same page if you change devices — as the other platforms also allow you to do.

Perhaps one of the key differences between the platforms is that unlike its competitors, Google is partnering with existing local book retailers to launch its eBooks offering in Australia. You can already buy Google eBooks through the Booktopia site, and the company has partnerships with Dymocks, the Co-op Bookshop and QBD on the way. It’s an approach that has gotten at least one other major eBook seller — Kobo — into a difficult situation in Australia previously. The company partnered strongly with Borders when it launched its eReader and online bookstore in Australia. However, when the retailer went south, Kobo lost a great deal of presence in the market.

In a blog post announcing the launch of the eBooks platform today, Tanner said it was now easy for Australians to find local authors such as Kate Grenville, Thomas Keneally, Geraldine Brooks and Christos Tsiolkas. The company has also opened up a local affiliate marketing program which allows Australian web site owners to earn commissions when they refer their users to Google eBooks — in a similar structure to Amazon’s popular affiliate marketing initiative.

opinion/analysis
To be honest, I was pretty interested in Google’s eBookstore 12 months ago when the company rolled it out in the US. In Australia, at the time, it appeared as though the nation was being left behind when it came to eBooks. Apple’s iBooks platform had yet to make a splash, Amazon’s Kindle store didn’t have the same extensive range it had in the US, and while the Borders and Kobo alliance promised strong title availability, it suffered from a number of technical glitches that made it difficult to use.

12 months down the track, however, things have changed pretty dramatically.

In that time an incredibly popular new eReading platform has exploded onto the market — Apple’s iPad. It’s a dead certainty that there are now hundreds of thousands of Australians reading eBooks on the iPad. Sure, the platform has nowhere — and we really do mean nowhere — near the title coverage Amazon offers — but most new popular books can be gotten through the iBookstore, and iPads (and iPhones) are everywhere. We see a lot of people using them to read … on buses, trains, on holidays on deck chairs, in cafes and more.

Beyond that, the popularity of Amazon’s Kindle platform has also increased exponentially. As Amazon has rapidly improved the range of titles on offer in Australia and decreased the price of its Kindle hardware (as well as making its Kindle app available on every platform known to man), the company’s offerings have proliferated throughout Australia as well.

Between Apple and Amazon, there really is no need or desire for a third eBooks platform in Australia. The demise of Borders and Kobo (although Kobo is still technically kicking around, I never see anyone using it) was barely missed, as most Australians just switched wholesale into the two major dominant platforms.

Google’s play with the book retailers is an interesting one. It allows Australian readers the best of both worlds — supporting their local book retailers while also maintaining their new eBook library in a global, and therefore permanent, cloud. And furthermore, like Apple, Google also has the potential to lock down a large mobile market — those using its incredibly popular Android platform on their smartphones — for eReading (although, of course, the Kindle app is also available on Android).

However, I will go so far as to say the search giant’s eBooks won’t succeed in any major way. There was a time when the Australian eReading zeitgeist was up for grabs. The whole pie was on the table ready for the eating. And Amazon and Apple came along and grabbed it up with both hands. Once again, as it has been in many other fields (music, movies, group buying and social networking are some that come to mind), Google is late to the party. And this time, it may be too late.

The party is already in full swing without it, and its offering is basically a clone of those already in existence.

news One of Australia’s leading privacy advocates has raised concerns about the Commonwealth Bank’s new mobile, social and near field communications payments application, highlighting the fact that it has the potential to eliminate much of the anonymity offered by paying for goods and services through cash.

The app, unveiled yesterday for Apple iPhones and coming soon to the Android platform, allows customers to make payments from their mobile phone to anyone with an email address, phone number or Facebook friendship, as well as to merchants via the near field communications standard. It represents the latest in a wave of such apps, with similar platforms including ANZ Bank’s goMoney system and the Pollenizer-backed Pygg, which focuses on Twitter payments.

However, speaking via email yesterday, Australian Privacy Foundation chair Roger Clarke pointed out that many people didn’t necessarily want a complete payments trail collected by their financial institutions. “Examples of such people,” Clarke said, referring to a paper he wrote as early as 1999 on the issue, “include VIPs, celebrities, notorieties, different-thinkers, victims of domestic violence, people in sensitive occupations such as prison management and psychiatric health care, protected witnesses, and undercover law enforcement and security operatives”.

It is believed that financial institutions can be forced to divulge aspects of their customers’ financial records through certain legal processes. The ISP industry is already facing a similar issue, with organisations such as Movie Rights Group using the courts to seek customer information relating to Australians who have allegedly illegally downloaded copyrighted films online.

Clarke said a topical example of someone who might not want all of their financial data tracked might be a protestor at a political gathering such as the current Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting in Perth, “who is very well-advised not to generate high-intensity trails of location data”.

Location data in general, Clarke wrote in his 1999 paper, could be used by governments and the private sector in order to generate behavioural patterns against individuals, allowing the public sector to generate “suspicion” against individuals matching certain patterns, and the private sector to “classify the individual into micro-markets and thereby to manipulate consumer behaviour”. In addition, Clarke warned at the time that such data could lead to a substantially enhanced scope for politically damaging and personally embarrassing diclosures, blackmail and extortion, as well as “a vast increase” in so-called circumstantial evidence in criminal cases.

“The focus of public concerns is usually exercise of power by the State, but these technologies also greatly empower corporations,” the privacy advocate wrote. “The capability will be useful in dealing with troublesome opponents, such as competitors, regulators and lobbyists, but also employees, whistleblowers, consumer activists, customers and suppliers.”

As an alternative to transactions linked to individuals’ bank accounts, some cards are available in countries like France (the Mon€o card), which allow users to make anonymous transactions for small amounts, as an alternative to using cash.

Clarke said anyone would need some form of anonymous payments system who didn’t want to gift location and tracking information to their financial institutions, as well as a whole host of organisations associated with them — such as their financial institutions’ non-banking divisions, strategic partners, law enforcement and security organisations and so on. “In an era of ‘strategic partnerships’, customer confidentiality is increasingly under threat, as data exchange with other corporations offers the prospect of enhanced revenue and customer leverage, i.e. power,” he wrote in his 1999 paper.

The key issue, he said, was the need for payment systems which were designed without intermediaries such as banks — so that only the payer and payees were in position to keep records of transactions.

“If each transaction involves an intermediary, then that other organisation is in a position to record it, and may collude with other such intermediaries to consolidate a substantial trail,” he noted. If Kaching did in fact represent such as intermediary system, then Clarke recommended not using the platform.

In his paper, Clarke also pointed out that since the end of the 1970′s, when ATM machines became popular for cash withdrawals and credit cards popular for payments (as well as debit cards from the 1990′s), “an increasingly intensive trail of transactions has become available to financial services organisations”. In these cases, he wrote, “a degree of substitution has occurred, whereby hitherto unrecorded and/or anonymous transactions have been converted into recorded, identified transactions” — and organisations such as banks had increasingly sought to leverage the collected data.

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All this sounds a bit sinister, but Clarke has a point. The Commonwealth Bank is trying to make consumers’ lives easier, it’s true, but it’s also attempting to bring a vast swathe of new data into its systems which will give it a huge amount of extra insight into what Australians buy, where and when they buy it, and from who.

Tracking transactions to social network connections such as Facebook friends will allow the bank to map our real-life social networks without getting the keys to our online accounts, and replacing that $3.50 coffee cash buy (or $4.50 if you’re in the Sydney CBD) with a NFC swipe will give the bank a complete map of where you go for your caffeine hit — and when.

To say that information would be useful in consumer behaviour projections, or to law enforcement, or even to the Australian Taxation Office (for example, when conducting audits), is an understatement. Do you really want to hand over all of that data to your bank? I’m not sure just yet … the cash system we currently have is useful for a reason, and I’d like to see some anonymised, non-record-keeping alternatives to Kaching before I simply sign my transactional life away.

On the other side of the coin … we already give so much of this information away anyway. I tend to pay for every cost for my own small business through my credit card or bank account, to make it easier for my accountant to track expenses at the end of every quarter. On a personal front, I make dozens of micro-transactions each month through platforms such as Amazon, Steam and iTunes as well, buying books, movies, apps, games and so on, and the rate at which that data is being centralised is only increasing. I even buy groceries online through Woolworths.

If you had access to my bank accounts, you would already know many, many things about me. And I’m not personally sure how much more invasive adding low-end cash transactions to that list will be. Does the convenience of modern transaction systems such as Kaching trump security and privacy? Only time will tell.

Image credit: Mateusz Stachowski, royalty free

news Diversified online retailer and technology services group Amazon overnight announced a tranche of new e-reader and tablet products, including a flagship touchscreen tablet device based on Google’s Android platform. The bad news for Australians? So far most of the new products are available to US residents only.

In an extensive media briefing held in New York by the company’s chief executive Jeff Bezos, Amazon unveiled a clutch of new Kindle devices. The line-up represents the latest iteration of the world’s most popular e-reader.

The cheapest Kindle now starts at US$79, and it’s now 30 percent lighter than the previous model and turns pages 30 percent faster. It doesn’t feature a touchscreen, unlike the rest of the new Kindle line-up, and it’s probably the most comparable to Amazon’s existing Kindle offerings, but at a substantially reduced price.

However, the more revolutionary new Kindles are the US$99 Kindle Touch, which features a touchscreen and integration with reference platforms such as Wikipedia and Amazon’s own Shelfari. The US$99 model only comes with Wi-Fi access for syncing books, but there’s also a US$149 model which comes with 3G access. Amazon is billing the 3G connection as functioning in over 100 countries globally.

Then there’s the device which most avid Amazon followers have been waiting for — the company’s Kindle ‘Fire’, which is a 7″ tablet based on Google’s Android platform (although heavily modified) and looking quite a bit in form like Research in Motion’s PlayBook tablet.

The Fire introduces a number of new features not previously found in Amazon’s previous generations of much more static e-ink-based tablets. It has a vibrant touchscreen designed for multimedia access to the over 100,000 movies and TV shows, over 17 million MP3 songs, over 1 million books, hundreds of magazines and newspapers and some 100 exclusive graphic novels available through Amazon’s online catalogue.

The Fire’s operating system is radically different from most Android tablets available on the market today and features a number of additional features — such as the ability to sync where a user is up to in a movie being watched on the tablet and then automatically have their loungeroom media centre track to the same spot.

In addition, the Fire introduces a new web browser architecture dubbed ‘Silk’ which sees Amazon render HTML pages on its cloud computing platform for output to the Fire — speeding up the process of web browsing. However, the tablet is similar enough to existing Android tablet offerings that it can run existing Android applications — with Amazon listing Angry Birds, Plants versus Zombies and more as being compatible.

However, the caveat for Australians interested in Amazon’s products is a large one — as it is for every other interested customer outside the US.

Right now, although Amazon’s existing e-reader line-up has been available internationally for some time, the only product which Amazon announced today which is available outside the US is the entry-level Kindle — the Touch Kindles and the Fire have small “US-only” labels on their product pages on Amazon, and Amazon’s press release on the subject makes it clear they are not for purchase outside the US yet.

The higher-order Kindles will ship to customers who pre-order them in November — meaning customers outside the US will likely be forced to wait until the new year before stock is available. The entry-level US$79 Kindle is available today, however. For further reading on Amazon’s new products announced today, we recommend This is my next or Engadget, which both have substantially more information on the new Kindles and associated services — including video demos.

Some shots of the new Kindles:

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And so the wait begins. It will be some time before Australians have any idea when they can buy a Kindle Fire or a Kindle Touch from Amazon directly, although the devices will likely work fairly well in Australia if you can get a friend in the US to mail you one, or if you can order one through other third-party retail channels etc.

However, there is also a secondary wait: The wait to find out how much of Amazon’s multimedia content (music, movies, TV, newspapers and magazines) will be available in Australia. Previous investigations have shown up a significant difference between Amazon’s US catalogue and the company’s Australian catalogue, and we only expect that difference to exponentially increase with the availability of music, video and digital printed content in Australia.

There’s also the cost. Our UK cousins have already noted substantial price increases on Amazon’s new Kindle range in their fair land … I’m sure we can expect the same in Australia.

Are we being too tough on Amazon? Is it too much to expect for the company to launch its new products simultaneously worldwide? Many would say yes. However, there is a gold standard which Amazon has to live up to. If Apple can launch simultaneously worldwide with its iPad, iPhone and MacBooks … Amazon should be able to do the same, with its much more limited and less complex range.

Sometimes, that wonderful global marketplace just seems so … US-focused.

Disclosure: This article contains affiliate marketing links; if you click though and/or buy something Delimiter will receive a small payment from the supplier.

Image credits: Amazon

blog Fascinating comments about the state of Australia’s cloud computing landscape have just arrived from Department of Defence chief information officer Greg Farr (pictured), one of the most respected technology executives of any stripe in Australia.

In this feature article published in the Financial Review’s MIS Magazine (where your humble reporter spent some time a while back), Farr makes it clear he believes the Australian cloud is “a long way away” from looking anything like its US counterpart:

“[Providers] still see a commercial opportunity in value-added services, where a solution is designed around what the customer wants,” Farr says. “That’s a valid thing to do, but it’s different from the US model, which really is about buying [technology as] a commodity, the same as you buy electricity or water.”

With providers like CSC morphing the cloud model into unrecognisable shapes (sorry Bob!) and the cloud computing hype wave beginning to recede substantially in Australia, it’s hard to disagree with Farr’s comments. In my view, much of what is being labelled “cloud computing” in Australia should be more correctly labelled “managed services”, at least until we get more large-scale public cloud providers such as Amazon.com and Rackspace providing on-shore offerings. As always, Farr is one step ahead of the curve when it comes thinking about enterprise IT in Australia.

Image credit: Department of Defence

Jenneth Orantia turned her back on a lucrative career in law to pursue her unhealthy obsession with consumer technology. She’s known for having at least half a dozen of the latest gadgets on her person at a time, and once won a bottle of Dom Perignon for typing 78WPM on a Pocket PC with a stylus.

review What’s that, you’re still reading books on paper? How very old-fashioned of you, sir! Whether you like it or not, books are following the same digital trajectory as music and movies, and soon, it won’t be a question of whether you’re reading eBooks so much as what device you’re using to read them on.

The third-generation Amazon Kindle first launched in July last year, but you could only buy them through Amazon.com directly. Now, as of a couple of weeks ago, they’re available locally, and you can walk into any Woolworths, Big W or Dick Smith and buy one off the shelf. We’re actually surprised at how close the local pricing is compared to buying it from Amazon; for the top-of-the-range 3G version we reviewed, which costs $210 locally, it’s only ten dollars cheaper once you factor in shipping.

Design
Stroll into any JB Hi-Fi or Harvey Norman and you’ll see up to a dozen different e-readers from brands you’ve probably never heard of. With a couple of exceptions, they’re all pretty nasty-looking, with ugly designs and questionable build quality. The Amazon Kindle is cut from a different cloth; the graphite grey casing, tapered edges, soft-touch rear and slim dimensions all add up to a classy-looking e-reader that’s light enough to hold with one hand.

Most of the design elements of the third-gen Kindle have been retained from the original Kindle that launched in 2007, just in a much slimmer and sexier package. A 6” e-ink display takes up most of the Kindle’s front, with a QWERTY keyboard and five-way navigational pad below it, page-turn buttons on either side of the screen, and the rest of the controls – volume, headphone jack, micro-USB port and power button – on the bottom.

Features
Like most e-readers, the Kindle’s 6” screen uses e-ink technology. This differs from traditional LCD and AMOLED displays in that it uses real ink to render elements on the screen. If you haven’t seen an e-ink display in action yet, you’ll probably be taken aback (as we were) by how closely it resembles a printed page.

This print-like display is a lot easier on the eyes for extended reading than an LCD or AMOLED display, and it leaves smartphones and tablets for dead when it comes to visibility in direct sunlight. The other advantage of e-ink is that it draws such a miniscule amount of power compared to traditional screen technologies. With wireless off, and assuming you read for one hour a day, the battery on the Kindle is good for an entire month.

Built-in 3G is one feature that you won’t find in any other e-reader available in Australia, making it easier to buy and download books from the Kindle Store without needing to hunt down a Wi-Fi network or, worse, transfer books from your computer. What’s different about this implementation is that you don’t have to pay any ongoing charges for 3G access like you would a tablet. Usage is free for the lifetime of the device, and even better, you can use it in 100 countries and territories around the world for free as well.

The Kindle can do a few other things besides displaying books, but they’re mostly proof-of-concept features and nothing you’d really want to use on a regular basis. There’s a WebKit-based browser that works for free Internet access overseas in a pinch, but it takes so long to render pages that you’re likely to give up in a hurry and retreat to the safety of your nearest Internet café. The text-to-speech feature will make even the most interesting book sound like a disjointed robotic monologue, and the MP3 playback doesn’t display the name of tracks or let you navigate through your music library.

Performance
For all the perks that the Kindle offers over a tablet for reading, the one drawback is that it’s a lot slower to use. The slower refresh rate of e-ink compared to LCD results in brief black flash every time the screen changes (like when you turn a page). The lack of touchscreen also means you have to resort to using the five-way control pad and side-mounted page-turn buttons to do anything – if you’ve gotten used to touchscreens on all your gadgets, the Kindle will feel awkward to use by comparison, and the somewhat clunky user interface doesn’t make it any easier.

Amazon claims that most books download in less than 60 seconds over 3G, although this depends on how thick the book is and whether you have good 3G reception. We bought George R R Martin’s latest 1,040-page novel, A Dance with Dragons, directly from the Kindle; over Wi-Fi, it downloaded in 58.5 seconds, and over 3G (with three out of five bars worth of signal) it downloaded in 1 minute and 39 seconds.

Australia’s Kindle Store is different to the one in the United States, and we were interested to see how the selection and pricing differed between the two. Based on Dymock’s current top 10 list of bestsellers, both stores had six out of the 10 books, and we were surprised to find that the Australian Kindle store was missing only one book that the US store had, and had one book that the US didn’t. Even more surprising was that the Australian Kindle books were cheaper, with the biggest difference being the Tiger’s Wife by Obreht Tea; this was selling in the US Kindle Store for $12.99 and the Australian Kindle Store for $8.66. But the AU store isn’t always cheaper; A Dance with Dragons cost US$14.99 in the US Kindle Store and $17.25 in the Australian store.

One thing’s for sure: buying eBooks is significantly cheaper than paper books. Buying the six books in Dymocks’ top 10 list from the Australian Kindle store cost $43.79, whereas buying the same books in paperback cost $115.87. Those savings can really add up if you’re a big reader, and the Kindle will pay for itself after you’ve purchased twenty or so books. If you’re a fan of the classics, you’ll break even much sooner, as the Kindle Store offers over 1.8 million classic books for free.

Conclusion
The Amazon Kindle 3G is over a year old now (click here to see its product page on Amazon), but it’s still holding its own remarkably well against newer e-readers. The lack of touchscreen is probably its weakest point, especially now that Kobo and Sony – its two main competitors – have released e-readers with both e-ink displays and touchscreens. Still, the Kindle’s built-in 3G and larger selection of books (which are generally cheaper than other platforms) continues to give it an edge over other e-readers.

But the Kindle isn’t just competing against other e-readers. Tablets are a much bigger threat: they’ve got larger screens, can run multiple eBook apps (so you can buy books from whichever service sells them cheaper), can be used for dozens of other things besides displaying books, and are cheaper than the Kindle if you go for an entry-level model.

E-readers definitely have their advantages over tablets, as we mentioned earlier in the review, but your mileage will vary as to whether those things outweigh the convenience of a more powerful multi-purpose tablet. From our own experience, the Kindle hasn’t been getting much love since we got an iPad, but it’s still invaluable during vacations – especially when there’s long hours on a plane and/or a beach involved.

Disclosure: This article contains affiliate marketing links; if you click though and buy something Delimiter will receive a small amount of recompense.

Image credit: Amazon