Australian Technology News

LATE Nirvana singer Kurt Cobain the secret weapon in the biggest video game battle of the year.

Freshtel has obtained a slim new look in its cost-cutting restructure, slashing its staff numbers by half.

The number of employees on the telco's books has reduced to 30 from 62 last year, according to the company's annual results to 30 June. The company had undertaken a strategic review to underline where costs could be cut. In April it said it had decided to maintain technical staff and those working on critical R&D, while cutting all non-core contractors or reducing hours.

The company's cost cutting fervour has seen it lose a raft of its executives. In June, the company announced the departure of Rhonda O'Donnell, stating cost as the reason. O'Donnell earned $414,347 in the last financial year.

The chief financial officer John Coates also left the company for another role and wasn't replaced, while the chief operations officer Ian Jackson's role was made redundant. In 2008, Coates earned $296,000 for the 2008 financial year. Jackson earned $298,876 this year for his work until 2 March 2009.

O'Donnell's role will be carried out by chairman Dr Allan Sullivan, appointed 22 May 2009. Sullivan was previously the CEO and director of ERG group. He has a close association with the company's major shareholder Custodial Capital Management which holds 23.6 per cent of the company's shares.

Delisting was another option the board was looking at to reduce costs.

"This will not only save hundreds of thousands of dollars in listing fees, audit and support infrastructure and staff costs, but will give the company a profile more in accordance with its current financial performance, ie, revenues of 4-5MA$ [million dollars per annum]; EBIT result of (2)MA$," the company's chairman Sullivan wrote in the annual results.

The board will work through the benefits and consequences of delisting prior to the Annual General Meeting, where the idea would be aired before shareholders.

In addition to its cost saving efforts, Sullivan said the company was also looking at merger possibilities to broaden its portfolio in the small- to medium-sized business market.

This financial year's results to 30 June saw the company's revenues plunge 34 per cent to $3.2 million, leading to a net loss of $10.2 million.

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New Zealand's Commerce Commission has decided to launch an investigation into an alleged breach of Telecom New Zealand's separation undertakings by its Wholesale business unit.

The investigation followed a decision last week by the independent oversight group in charge of keeping an eye on the telco's separation undertakings. The group upheld complaints by Vodafone and Kordia that Telecom Wholesale was breaching clauses of its parent's separation agreement.

Vodafone and Kordia believed that loyalty offers which rewarded customers whose entire customer base were serviced through Telecom Wholesale, and would be for the next two years, were breaching the agreement. The Commerce Commission said it had also received complaints on the same matter.

Telecom NZ's separation came into force on 31 March last year, following government led reforms which prompted separation of the company into network, wholesale and retail parts to improve market conditions by avoiding discrimination and improving transparency.

The first breach of the company's separation undertakings occurred in July last year. The unintentional "technical breach" was remedied in September.

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Vodafone has gone live today with its expanded 3G coverage to rural areas, now reaching 94 per cent of the population.

Coverage has been extended out to Kununurra in Western Australia, Port Douglas in Queensland and Devonport in Tasmania, according to the company. Vodafone's 3G coverage previously reached 80 per cent of the Australian population. The upgrade has also included adapting the 2G network to support EDGE technology.

The completion of the upgrade has met the company's deadline, set earlier this year after the company failed to meet its former deadline of last Christmas.

Vodafone has marked the milestone with free access to Facebook for new and existing customers until 31 October 2009.

"Vodafone's great value 3G services are now available to Australians living and working in regional cities and towns, as well as business travellers and holiday-makers who need to stay connected," CEO of VHA Nigel Dews said in a statement.

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SCIENTISTS in Israel have devised a portable breath tester that detects lung cancer with 86 per cent accuracy, according to a new study.

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Correction: the original article claimed that a 32-bit EFI chip would not allow a mid-2007 MacBook to make use of 4GB RAM if installed. This is incorrect: this limitation is due to Intel's 945 chipset.

Apple's OS X 10.6 operating system Snow Leopard, released today, by default loads with a 32-bit kernel, despite running 64-bit applications.

While it ships with a number of 64-bit native applications, Apple's kernel itself defaults to 32-bit, unless the user holds down the "6" and "4" keys during boot time, at which point the 64-bit kernel is loaded. Only Apple's X-Serve products, using Snow Leopard Server, boot into a 64-bit kernel by default.

"For the most part, everything that they experience on the Mac, from the 64-bit point of view, the applications, the operating system, is all going to be 64-bit," Stuart Harris, software product marketing manager at Apple Australia said.

Harris said that at this stage there were very few things, such as device drivers, that required 64-bit mode at the kernel level but the option was available. The decision to boot in 32-bit was to ease the transition to 64-bit, mainly for third party drivers that may currently be 32-bit only, such as those for printers and scanners.

"But we're trying to make it as smooth as possible, so people don't end up finding that 'oh, that doesn't work' because it's not available yet," he said.

There appears to be no way within the GUI to permanently boot the 64-bit kernel, requiring the editing of the com.apple.Boot.plist file to make the change — a text-based configuration file. Users have already released applications to address this issue.

Older Macs with a 32-bit EFI chipset are prevented from loading the 64-bit kernel, although there are claims that this is an arbitrary decision by Apple rather than a technical concern, with a hack using the Chameleon boot loader devised to get around the lock out.

It is unknown at this stage what sort of performance implications running 64-bit applications on a 32-bit kernel will have compared to a 64-bit kernel.

While a large portion of the OS has been optimised and updated, some applications, such as DVD player, Front Row, Grapher and iTunes are still 32-bit only, and some extensions are still run as a Universal Binary, despite the PPC architecture no longer being supported.

Apple also released Snow Leopard Server today, but were unable to detail the reasoning behind dropping ZFS support for the operating system, a much touted feature during the development stage.

Our full review of Snow Leopard can be found here.

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Vaughan Bowen, chief of acquisition hungry telecommunications company M2, is eyeing a major billing and customer relationship management systems overhaul expected to be kicked off next year.

Off the back of its recent acquisitions of Unitel, Commander's SMB arm and People Telecom, Bowen said M2 now operated four distinct retail customer and billing systems that a team within the company was now scoping out for consolidation.

"Commander, People Telecom, M2 and Southern Cross operate under different platforms in the retail area," said Bowen.

"A big focus in this financial calendar we have just entered, as a result of having acquired a number of businesses, we have acquired a number of operating systems. We bought them as going concerns with their operating system, but there is definitely a good case to be made for consolidation," he said.

The project team was currently assessing M2's options in terms of consolidating its systems, but whether M2 would opt for a new system for the whole business or simply use one of its existing systems was not yet known.

Billing system overhauls, at least for larger telecommunications companies such as AAPT and Telstra have proven risky and costly projects, particularly at the stage of migrating customers away from the legacy systems.

Vaughan declined to disclose the names of the systems currently in use, but said M2 owned three of its operating systems, while one was under licence from a vendor.

Possible vendors are yet to be canvassed but this was expected to be done in the latter part of the year, which would likely be from a specialist in utility billing systems vendor.

"Not so much SAP, but specialist utility billing systems," said Bowen. "We're calling it a business support system project which includes CRM, customer provisioning on the network, and management reporting for customer churn rates."

M2 yesterday reported an 86 per cent ($93 million) increase in revenues for the year to 30 June 2009 of $202 million. Earnings before interest, income tax, depreciation and amortisation was up 45 per cent to $13.33 million, while net profit after tax was up 45 per cent to $7.48 million. Bowen said the company now had 400 staff and said he was expecting to double its earnings next year.

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