Some interesting figures:

1. By 2013, Australia’s online retail sector is expected to grow th $36.8 billion per annum ¹
2. 59% of Australian small businesses do not have a website ¹

It’s not rocket science – Australian consumers look for websites to help them make a decision. The website doesn’t need to have bells and whistles, it just needs to provide more info than a flyer or recommendation or advert can convey.

As Australians are catching up with other first world countries in terms of internet access speeds (thanks in large part to the coming NBN), the sky is limit in terms of the amount of efficiencies that can be had by embracing web based software and the growing array of devices that allow you to get online.

¹ PayPal’s research report ‘eCommerce: Secure Insight’ developed in conjunction with Forrester Research
and The Leading Edge.

In the past 12 months (Nov 2009 – Nov 2010), 53% of Australian adults have made a purchase online!

Of those online shoppers, virtually all had made purchases from Australian websites, while only a small percentage did not buy from Australian websites.

With strong growth across all sectors of online shopping, and the long path for most websites to make an impact online, now is the time to get your business online, or to get your existing website up to date with fast paced online technologies.

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Following the recent feature to specify a due date for a to-do item, A new filter has been added to the Studiotime to-do manager page, allowing you to filter based on items due today, tomorrow and overdue.

This is a great way to setup a quick one day list to progress through over the course of your work day.

Studiotime is an easy to use web application to manage your business time, tasks and invoices from your web browser.

Studiotime now supports due dates on tasks .

Due dates follow the same simple colour coding as task priorities:

- Red indicates the task has a due date within the next 3 days
- Orange indicates the task has a due date in the next 4-7 days

Due dates more than 7 days away do not have any highlighting.

This is a great way to further improve your workflow, prioritise and schedule ahead using Studiotime.

Get started with Studiotime to manage your business time – its free to signup and you can scale your account as you go.

Find out more about Studiotime

After several months in development, Thomas Multimedia is excited to announce the launch of Studiotime.

Studiotime is the culmination of several years of juggling projects at Thomas Multimedia.

We had problems:

• How do we keep on top of all the tasks (to-do items) that we had to do for each client?
• How do we track the amount of time we spend on each client in an integrated way?
• How do we cut down on needless back and forth communication and give a centralised interface to talk with our clients, staff and contractors?

You guessed it, Studiotime is the answer to all these problems! It is a place where any business can organise their time, tasks and invoices in a single secure, central place, accessible from any web-enabled device.

Perfect for web designers, web developers, programmers, recording studios, clinics, appointment-centric businesses – any business that needs to manage their time, allocate tasks to their staff and contractors, and at the end, send an invoice.

The entry level account is free, the premium top-of-the-line account is just $99 a month.

See for yourself – learn more about Studiotime.

A new product is brewing at Thomas Multimedia HQ… while we work feverishly on re-developing our booking software to accommodate lots of things learned in the past few years, here is a little teaser…

Thomas Multimedia is participating in the Mashup Australia competition which invites professionals from around Australia to create new and interesting web applications utilizing data made available by Federal and State Governments.

After only finding out about the competition a week before the deadline (3 weeks after the competition commenced) the pressure was on to create something unique and most importantly functional in a very short time frame on top of normal business.

Where to Live (www.WheretoLive.com.au) is a search engine that enables Australians to select the criteria that is most important to them in finding the perfect place to live.

The technology behind the site includes a typical LAMP (Linux-Apache-MySQL-PHP) backend and a javascript (mostly jQuery) driven frontend.

In keeping things interesting and challenging, I opted to experiment with a layout that has no submit buttons and no page refreshes. This layout is reminiscent of Mac OSX which typically does not require pressing any form of “save” button when changing system / application settings.

Overall I am very pleased with the result and the learning experience, it is definitely a formidable starting point for a wider ranging site.

Please direct any questions or comments to the comment form below or via our contact us page.

I came across an interesting read today about how traditional media companies (mostly newspapers) are adapting to capture and monotenize the web audience.

The concept of a newspaper subscription will change completely.

Instead of throwing a paper over your fence we will offer you:

- a much more sophisticated package of print and electronic content

- incentives for loyalty

- and tools that allow you to conduct transactions with our advertisers.

We will make our content suitable for the next generation of smart phones  devices that are still in their infancy with potential to deliver news, information, entertainment and shopping in HD with full interactivity.

The old parish pump reporting on local news will be reinvented as hyperlocal coverage of real time events such as

- Where to find the cheapest petrol

- How to avoid roadworks and traffic jams and

- The best retail offers available in your suburb that day
You will even be able to evaluate the performance of local schools

I can’t help but get the feeling they have been terribly slow to embrace the internet, and adapt their model to tap into the vast audience at hand. Internet audiences will pay (or learn to pay) for unique quality content that is of specific interest to them.

I myself would be happy to pay a subscription for a service whereby a team of IT journalists provided quality original content that far exceeds in terms of depth, the information freely available on blogs and via other sources. I don’t think online journalism is about giving away news for free – its about embracing the internet as a medium to target niche markets.

See the full article here.

Opera clearly has ambitious ideas on its mind with the release of Opera Unite.

It is essentially a way for you to share files on your PC, over the internet, and turn your home PC into a file server.

While the concept is not original by any stretch, what they are proposing has a certain freshness and simplicity about it that means it might just work.

Traditional servers are clearly still the solution to high volume file sharing and web hosting, and peer-to-peer networks certainly are not in any danger. But this really is about giving everyone, of varying technical abilities, a simple and easy to understand way to share files across different locations.

For someone like myself who already has access to several datacenter servers, and knowledge on how to use many of the web storage solutions already available, this is probably not something I will find a use for; but I would certainly still like to see it really take off and evolve.

At the end of the day for me I would like to host servers in my own home, and while I understand this means I miss out on datacenter features like fire safety, security, guaranteed power supply and connections, the biggest drawback is from home is the available bandwidth.

Lets hope the Fibre to the Home next gen broadband network in Australia truly liberates home and small business to operate at higher capacity.

About 11.3 million Australians use the internet. Ninety per cent of them are aged 18 to 44 – that is, consumers in their prime.

According to the Australian Communications and Media Authority, the internet is now the most trusted media source in the country. Ninety-five per cent of small-medium companies use the internet.
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Is your business maximizing its online presense through a website or web software that would allow you to work more efficiently?