On 29 May 2013 the Minister for Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy, the Hon. Stephen Conroy released the National Cloud Computing Strategy (‘the Strategy’) at the Cloud @ CeBIT Conference in Sydney.

The Strategy outlines the Australian Government’s vision for Australians to create and use world class cloud services to boost innovation and productivity, and recognises the need for government to provide tools to help small businesses make the most of the opportunities available through adoption of cloud computing.

Cloud computing could be very important stuff for small-to-medium enterprises (SMEs).

Research from around the globe is linking the adoption of cloud computing with improved business growth.  At the individual firm level, a Microsoft survey of 3000 SMEs found that the SMEs which had embraced cloud services had 40 per cent more revenue growth than those surveyed SMEs that were not using cloud services[i]. In addition, a study by the European Union found that the large majority of businesses using cloud services reduce ICT costs by between 10-20 per cent[ii].

Cloud computing enables ICT services to be delivered over the internet and consumed as a service, on demand, across a range of devices. In terms of pricing you can now pay only for what you use – a bit like renting instead of buying. This may reduce the need to purchase expensive hardware or software that could need to be replaced as technology changes.

The combination of high speed broadband, such as the high speed broadband available through the National Broadband Network (NBN), and the ever increasing range of cloud services may provide opportunities for many small businesses that don’t have access to huge ICT budgets.

The Strategy charts a path for government to help businesses capitalise on the benefits available through cloud computing services. This will involve:

• promoting the benefits of cloud services to small businesses, not-for-profits and consumers
• the development of a Cloud Consumer Protocol to promote information disclosure about products and services by cloud providers to help ensure consumers are well informed.

Keep an eye out for the industry specific Digital Business Kits. Up to ten industry peak bodies will be developing tailored ‘how-to’ guides to assist SMEs and not for profit organisations (NFPs) to engage in the digital economy, including cloud computing.

The National Cloud Computing Strategy is available at: www.dbcde.gov.au/cloud

LegalVision

Note: The following is not intended to be and should not be interpreted as constituting legal advice.

A website’s terms and conditions govern your relationship with visitors to your website. Even if your website doesn’t sell anything, it’s a good idea to set out what your organisation considers to be the acceptable rules of how users can access and use it.

Website terms and conditions can help ensure that your website (i) has a clear agreement in place for visitors to the website, (ii) limits what visitors to the website are able to do with the information and intellectual property on the website and (iii) minimises the risk of visitors taking legal action against you or your business as a result of their use of your website.

Here are nine of the key terms you should consider including in your website terms and conditions.

1. Ownership details

It is a good idea for your website terms and conditions to specify the URL address of the website and full details of who owns and operates it.

2. Agreement

If a visitor to your website does not agree to your rules then they should not use your website. Your website terms and conditions should state this and explain that if someone does not agree to your terms they should not continue to use your website.

3. Reference to other policies

Your relationship with visitors to your website is governed not only by your website terms and conditions, but also by any other policies of your business that are accessible on your website and which may apply when people use your website.  For many businesses this includes a Privacy Policy, as websites often collect personal information about visitors to the website (for example by using cookies).

4. Cookies

Your website may be using cookies to monitor visitors’ browsing preferences, which may allow your business to store their personal information for use by third parties. If this is the case, then visitors to your website should be made aware of this in your website terms and conditions.

5. Limitation of liability

You are not likely to have information about the personal circumstances of visitors to your website or to have control over how they use the information they view on your website.  As such, you probably don’t want to be held responsible if they suffer loss as a result of using or relying on any information on your website.  From a website owner’s perspective it may be a good idea to consider stating in your terms and conditions that visitors use the website at their own risk.  So far as is possible, you should consider expressly excluding liability and requiring website visitors to indemnify you against liability arising out of their use of your website.

6. Third party material

If your website contains third party material that is not owned by the owner/operator of your website then such material should be appropriately acknowledged on your website. Specify in your website terms and conditions that visitors to your website are not permitted to reproduce any such material without the consent of the owner of that material.

If your website contains links to other websites which are not controlled by you then it is a good idea for your website terms and conditions to state that those links are provided for convenience only, and do not constitute a recommendation or endorsement and that visitors to your website acknowledge that they use them at their own risk.

7. Consequences of use

Your website terms and conditions should require visitors to your website to only use your website for lawful purposes and remind visitors to your website that unlawful use of your website could give rise to an offence or claim being made against them.

8. Amendment

Most websites are constantly being updated and the material on them changed.  Your website terms and conditions should highlight this and explain to visitors that the content of your website, including the terms and conditions, may change without notice and that their continued use of your website will be deemed acceptance of those changes.

9. Refund Policy

If you sell goods or services through your website, you will need to ensure that you provide a refund policy to your customers. This could be included in the website terms and conditions.

Ensuring that you provide your customers and visitors with a complete and well thought out set of website terms and conditions is important. Perhaps it’s time to take a read of yours today!

About the Author:

Lachlan McKnight is the CEO of LegalVision. For more information visit www.legalvision.com.au .

One of the goals set out in the 2011 National Digital Economy Strategy was to significantly narrow the digital divide between households and businesses in regional areas and those in capital cities by 2020. In 2013, the Australian Government has already made significant progress in addressing this gap.

In case you are unaware, there are great benefits to be reaped from high-speed broadband for the agricultural sector. A recent IBISWorld report, commissioned by IBM, predicts that, as a utility, broadband will contribute to over a third (36 per cent) of the agricultural, forestry and fisheries sector’s revenue in the next 40 to 50 years.

Through a combination of next generation technology and high-speed broadband, farmers will be empowered by the ability to monitor, evaluate and manage a farm’s operations to make it more productive and sustainable.

Aquaculture, one of the thriving industries in the fisheries sector, is experiencing a renaissance thanks to a combination of sensor technology and the NBN. Sense-T enables aqua farmers to monitor water temperature, salinity and fish health through a large-scale integrated network of sensors which can be monitored by using an application on a smartphone. This technology assists aqua farmers to reduce business costs and improve both the health and quality of the seafood that is produced.

The SMART farm in Armidale demonstrates recent innovations in the agricultural sector which give farmers the opportunity to implement living soil moisture maps throughout their farms, tag livestock with wireless ear tags and GPS collars, while monitoring livestock through the use of 360 degree cameras. This information will help farmers to make better informed operational decisions leading to higher productivity and profitability.

There are many workshops, seminars and conferences that you can attend to find out more about the benefits of high-speed broadband to regional businesses. An upcoming event that you may be interested in attending is the Digital Rural Futures 2013 Conference that will showcase the many opportunities the NBN will offer to regional Australia. The conference will encourage discussion amongst the regional community on how to best integrate high-speed broadband into the ‘way of life’ in regional Australia.

The Digital Rural Futures 2013 conference will be held from 26 – 28 June 2013 at the University of New England, Armidale, New South Wales.

More information about the Digital Rural Futures conference is available on the University of New England’s website: http://www.une.edu.au/smart/ .

Sean@DBCDE

The Digital Productivity Conference (#digiconau) will showcase how broadband enabled technologies can increase innovation and productivity.

The conference will include sessions on education and training, e-government, regional Australia, health and ageing, telework, digital literacy, cloud computing, and online business. You can check out the full program if you would like to view details of the speakers and session times.

Keynote speakers include the Minister for Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy, Senator Stephen Conroy; co-founder of the Intelligent Community Forum Louis Zacharilla; and Dr Ric Simes of Deloitte Access Economics.

Following on from Senator Conroy’s recent launch of The National Cloud Computing Strategy , #digiconau will include an explanation of the benefits Australian businesses can derive from cloud services.

The Digital Productivity Conference will be held in Brisbane from 12-13 June. Although attendance in person is limited, you can register your interest to attend via email. There is no registration fee to attend #digiconau.

If you can’t attend the conference in person, you can participate via a live webcast and submit questions for the panel discussion via Twitter, using the #digiconau hashtag.

If you would like more information or to register for the conference webcast, please visit DBCDE’s Digital Productivity Conference webpage.

Connecting Up conference

This is one of a series of interviews we will be sharing with tips from people in the community sector about how not-for-profit organisations improve their impact online.

Digital Business: Thanks for making the time for this interview. To start off, can you please explain what you do?

Anne-Maree: My name is Anne-Maree Kerr, I work at TRI Community Exchange. We offer training, information and resources for the not-for-profit sector in New South Wales.

DB: What help do people ask you for most often?

AM: It’s actually the basics still. We are constantly getting questions about how to use Microsoft Excel, how to browse better, but people are starting to ask about the different technologies. So we’ve been asked “How do you use Facebook, how do you use Twitter effectively?”

Building websites is a really big one for a lot of organisations still. A lot of organisations don’t have websites at all, which still surprises me. And people are starting to get a bit clever about marketing, so I’m actually starting to get asked about how people can use photography and video to enhance their organisation’s image as well.

DB: What questions do you think that small not-for-profits should be asking themselves about how they’re engaging online?

AM: I think first of all they need to be asking themselves who their audience are, and where that audience is. So for a lot of aged care organisations who we work with, they have an older audience, and they’re making the assumption that their audience isn’t online. I think we need to start challenging those stereotypes; start looking at who is online, and how we can get some of those other people online as well.

Also, we shouldn’t necessarily focus on the clients. So with some disability services, it’s the carer we need to be getting information to, and we need to start engaging with those people.

Audience is key, and finding out who they are. Once organisations know that, they can start to think about the different places their audience spends their time. And if that’s Facebook, or Twitter, or Pinterest, that suggests how the organisation can use that medium to get their message across.

DB: Speaking of a wide range of NFPs, what are the three tools that you’d suggest organisations try first?

AM: For social media, definitely Hootsuite . We find it’s a tool that allows us to manage our Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn presence online in a very timely manner. It also gives us really good statistics and it’s taken a lot of the time out of having to manage those streams. Because we’ve got everything in one place, it’s very clear. Hootsuite for us is definitely number one.

Pixlr is probably one of the greatest image editing tools that not-for-profits can use. It’s free, it allows you do everything from a really basic interface right up to an almost Photoshop-like workspace, and it allows you to load up images you’ve taken, get images off the web, and you can save them back for use in your promotions and online.

The other one, for planning, is Mind42 , which is a really great mind mapping tool that allows you to get your ideas down, reorganise them, share those ideas and ask for collaboration with other people. And again, that can be exported and taken into other products if you need to.

DB: Are those tools particularly expensive?

AM: No, they’re all free. Some of them do have paid options. With Hootsuite, for example, we pay $10 per month to allow us to get better analytics and manage more tools, but for a small to medium not-for-profit who’s just starting with social media, the free version would be fine.

DB: To wrap up, is there anything you’d tell small not-for-profits who are just trying to start out here?

AM: Invest time in training your staff and giving them time to learn. There are a lot of tools out there, and they’re not all going to work for all of your workers. It’s about giving them time to try things out.

We think it’s better to attend a day’s training than to waste weeks trying to work something out yourself. So we really encourage people to spend 70% of their budget for this on training and 30% on technology. It’s often completely skewed in the other direction, so that’s the main thing we’d encourage small organisations to do.

DB: Great, thank you for your time.

AM: That’s alright. Thank you.

Stay tuned for more interviews from the Connecting Up conference over the next few weeks.

By Hannah, DBCDE

The Ready for Business services come on the back of research Westpac conducted to assess how business and consumers are engaging online. The research found that while more than half (53%) of the surveyed Australian small to medium sized enterprises (SMEs) did not have a website, 53% of the consumers surveyed said they were spending more than one hour a week shopping online. This suggests that businesses may be missing out by not meeting customers where they want to shop.

Westpac’s General Manager Retail Banking Gai McGrath stated ‘the results demonstrate a divide between the “digital haves‟ and the “digital have-nots”. Many businesses without digital tools such as a website and online invoicing and payment capabilities are competitively disadvantaged’.

The SMEs who responded to the Westpac survey said that their biggest barriers to getting online were getting set up (28%) and knowing where to start (22%). In light of this, Westpac and MYOB say they have developed their Ready for Business services with the aim of providing SMEs with tools and information to help them get started online.

According to its website, Ready for Business offers services which aim to help SMEs:

• attract customers by building an easy to use website with MYOB Atlas;
• manage their earnings with a Westpac Business Account;
• get paid faster with the MYOB LiveAccounts online accounting tool; and
• plan ahead with online tutorials from Westpac’s Davidson Institute and complimentary sessions with MYOB consultants.

Of course, it is always a good idea to review the terms and conditions associated with services (including the applicable fees and charges) in light of your own particular circumstances, objectives and needs before contemplating signing up as a customer.

More information about Ready for Business services (including terms and conditions) is available at http://alliance.westpac.com.au/myob/ .

We also have information about other industry initiatives on the Digital Business website, including Getting Aussie Business Online and Driving Business Online.

By Natalie, DBCDE

*Disclaimer
This blog post should not be taken as an endorsement of any particular product or service.

BEC Australia’s

We have met some amazing home-based business owners over the past few months from a broad range of sectors. We talked to a personal trainer who wanted to know how she could use social media to attract more clients in her local area, and a book supplier wanting to know how to incorporate online transactions into their website.

We have not only met consumer based businesses – some service based businesses have also been asking us questions about how a digital strategy can assist their productivity, enquiring about video conferencing and online stock management systems. We shared our answers to some frequently asked questions in an earlier blog post.

If you are in the Darwin area, and run a micro business or are thinking about setting one up, you might like to consider keeping Thursday 30 May free so that you can attend the Darwin HomeBiz Connect Expo.

The Expo will bring together a range of Government agencies and private corporations, aiming to provide a ‘one-stop-shop’ where attendees can access a variety of information on a broad range of topics, including ‘how to develop a business plan’ and some of their obligations as employers.

The Digital Business team will be at the Darwin HomeBiz Connect Expo to answer your questions about the how the internet can improve your business, and how you may be able to sign up for the free training being offered by the Australian Government funded Digital Enterprise program.

The Darwin Home Biz Connect Expo will be on from 9am – 4pm on Thursday 30 May 2013 at Rydges Darwin. If you would like to attend, you can register for the event on the Home Biz Connect website .

You can also get the latest updates about HomeBiz Connect by following them on Twitter (@HomeBiz_Connect) .

Kaet, DBCDE

The Minister for Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy, the Hon. Stephen Conroy, has announced the Government will partner with 10 national industry peak bodies in 10 different sectors to develop Digital Business Kits to address industry-specific gaps to assist small-to-medium enterprises (SMEs) and not for profit (NFPs) organisations get online and take advantage of the National Broadband Network (NBN).

Australian SMEs are not making full use of online opportunities as extensively as those in leading digital economies. According to the ABS only 41 per cent of SMEs have a website, and only 27 per cent accept orders online. Small businesses account for around 96 per cent of all Australian businesses.

Five specific industry sectors will be targeted because of the number of SMEs in those sectors and the opportunities the NBN will provide to these SMEs. Applications will be sought from industry peak bodies in the building trades, farming, retail, manufacturing, and restaurants and cafes.

The other five industry peak bodies to be funded will be determined based on criteria including the quality of proposals and the number of SMEs and NFPs represented by the peak bodies that apply.

Grants of up to $500,000 per successful national industry peak body are available.

Update: Applications sought for the Digital Business Kits program

The consultation period for the Digital Business Kits program has now ended and we thank you for your comments and feedback on the Digital Business Kits Draft Guidelines for Consultation.

The application process for the Digital Business Kits program opened on 31 May 2013. Interested national peak bodies are invited to apply.

Applications must be lodged by 5pm AEST on 25 June 2013.

Further information, including the final Digital Business Kits Program Guidelines and the Digital Business Kits Program Application Form, is available at: http://www.dbcde.gov.au/digital_economy/programs_and_initiatives/digital_business_kits 

Any comments or questions regarding the application process should be directed to the Digital Business Kits program team by email at dbk@dbcde.gov.au or by phone on (02) 6271 1546.

Australian Communications and Media Authority’s (ACMA)

trends and perceptions of communications in Australia

Accompanying the ACMA’s main report were three smaller, more targeted reports. One focussed on the growth of online video content [pdf] (which we blogged about here), while another discussed Australia’s progress in the digital economy [pdf] .

This latter report is the focus of today’s blog post and reveals some statistics that may be of interest to small and medium enterprises (SMEs).

This report suggests that one of the most significant developments in the 12 months to June 2012 has been the increase in internet usage via mobile phones. A little under one third (32%) of Australia’s total population (over 14 years old) accessed the internet via mobile device in June 2012 compared with 21% in the previous year. This trend, as well as other research , appears to suggest that these figures are likely to keep growing.

Today many small businesses are aware of the necessity of having – at the very least – a basic website. However the increase in internet usage via mobile phones suggests that it is becoming increasingly important for SMEs to also optimise their website for mobile devices.  This website has some useful information about mobile optimisation and tips about mobile advertising.  Previously we discussed some of the trends in mobile usage and what it may mean for your small business, and also highlighted how mobile commerce may be important to business strategy.

Another interesting set of statistics from the ACMA’s report on Australia’s progress in the digital economy relates to the way businesses are using the internet and technology. Again, the most notable increase relates to the growing use of mobile internet connectivity, with 63% of SMEs using smartphones for business purposes (compared with 46% in the previous year). Tablet computer use also increased to 29%, while social networking pursuits for business purposes jumped to 27%.

The ACMA’s statistics point to a clear trend towards internet mobility, driven by both consumer and business activity. In the same way that businesses without a website could be left behind, the growing use of smartphones and tablets in the next decade suggests that websites without mobile optimisation may also be left behind.

It’s particularly important for SMEs to keep up with technological changes. Mobile optimisation may be one of those rifts that SMEs should consider closing.

By Daniel, DBCDE

PeSA Australia Internet Conference

This is the seventh year that the conference has run and like previous events the 2013 Internet Conference will feature some of the biggest names in online retailing. Organisations that will be speaking include ASOS , the Iconic , Kogan , CatchOfTheDay and Harvey Norman . With regulars such as eBay , Australia Post and PayPal also taking part, there are plenty of opportunities for you to learn from some experienced members of the industry.

In addition to the keynote speakers , there will be five concurrent streams of sessions covering topics such as online retailing tools, eBay & PayPal , online marketing and social media. One stream will be devoted solely to online retail case studies.

There will also be 40 exhibitors that you can ask any questions you may have about ecommerce.

More than 600 people are expected to attend this year’s PeSA Internet Conference on 29-31 May at the Gold Coast Convention Centre. If you would like to find out more or buy tickets for the event, check out their website .

By Natalie, DBCDE