Got a question about Australia or Australians? A new search engine developed by the National Library will have the answer.

Its called Trove. It searches across content from mostly Australian libraries and other institutions.

Just one of its many nice feature is that it includes archives of Australian newspapers from 1803 to 1954.

But you can also find things like books, diaries, journals, magazines, articles, pictures, maps. music, sound and video archives all sourced from Australian libraries and other institutions.

You can find it at this URL: trove.nla.gov.au.

And just in case you’re wondering … What is Australia? Try this search: http://trove.nla.gov.au/result?q=what+is+australia%3F

Does the galloping e-book industry mean the death of the publishing business as we know it?

It was widely reported that Apple’s iPad sold more than three hundred thousand on the first day.

It is predicted that five to seven million will be sold this year.

E-books are on the march and the ruckus between other major players in the e-book market like Amazon and Google is growing louder.

And what about writers? 

Will publishers and authors be adequately compensated in the new world of electronic book publishing?

The current pricing model adopted by Amazon is coming under increasing pressure for a change, especially by Apple.

Steve Jobs , the Apple’s phoenix-like CEO in turning the screws on Amazon’s pricing mechanism which was geared to gaining  a significant market share of the e-book audience by  selling them below cost.

Apple is undertaking to sell content at a price higher than Amazon.

If so, will they pay higher prices for content and will that trickle down to publishers and writers?

When asked why would Amazon increase prices, when consumers were already buying so many e-books from it, Jobs is reported to have cryptically remarked that publishers are unhappy and may ditch the Amazon pricing strategy.

The good news for publishers: according to statistics released by Amazon 40 percent of its customers order the electronic version of books that are available in both paper and paperless form.

This is across more than four hundred and fifty thousand e-books in the Amazon store.

There are an estimated three million users of Amazon’s Kindle.

Google’s online e-book store will be accessible on multiple devices.

Will the current e-book fever die down quickly as it began or will it become the dominant paradigm for the dissemination of information?

See more on iPad in the New Yorker.

CCH Australia’s new IntelliConnect platform has been a fantastic success and with its intuitive functionality, many of our customers have felt pretty confident about finding what they need from day one.

Such has been the interest, though, increasing numbers of users seem to want to drill deeper into all its great workflow tools and really understand the tremendous cost saving efficiencies it provides.

One of our key focuses in 2010, therefore, is to reinforce this at every available opportunity and make sure that all those who receive our training come away with a feeling that their investment in our products is “money well spent”

Whether at the ALLA conference or at any of the hundreds of IntelliConnect training presentations the team has delivered, our new platform has been enthusiastically received.

Almost all have immediately grasped its intuitive nature and leapt at the breakthroughs it represents for their research and workflow.

People are starting to use IntelliConnect in ways that we never imagined, and that surprised and delighted us.

Indeed end users have helped us re-define our training, and have contributed greatly to the ongoing development of both the platform and our help resources.

Over the last six months of 2009 the training team travelled all over Australia delivering more than 600 training sessions to more than 4000 individuals.

In fact, a total of 4304 people had been trained on IntelliConnect by the end of the year.

They travelled 65,000km delivering 326 onsite sessions and conducted over 250 online sessions and 34 public seminars.

As well as this all our major accounts received national roll out training.

The overwhelming feedback has been that of tremendous excitement at the possibilities IntelliConnect presents our users.

Here’s some feedback:

 “As Regional Tax Manager (Asia Pacific), it is of the utmost importance for me to have an up to date and reliable tax research tool. I have found the new CCH IntelliConnect platform to be most intuitive to use and the search results have been distinctly relevant, up to date and extremely well categorised. The convenience of being able to filter by jurisdiction and by document enables me to find what I need extremely fast.  I also find the research folder option with note taking function very useful.” — Zoran Havranek, Regional Tax Manager (Asia Pacific), Goodyear & Dunlop Tyres Australia Pty Ltd

“Impressive. Very detailed - seems to have thought of everything. Like the folder set up to filter lists.” — Linda Simonis - Downings Legal

“We have found CCH products to be second to none and easy to search through.” — M. Murphy OHS & QA Manager - Mutual Cleaning & Maintenance Pty Ltd

“IntelliConnect™ appears very well thought out and considers a lot of issues that researchers may have.” — Virginia Ung - RSM Bird Cameron

“Very user friendly and straight forward. Browser windows are comfortably familiar and alike to other commonly used interfaces.” — Caitlyn Good - Elphinstone Stevens

The CCH training survey made all the hard work worthwhile with great feedback from our customers: 

• 78.5% of respondents trained on IntelliConnect™ found that it provided them with everything required to effectively use the platform
• 66.2% of respondents agreed that the training provided assisted greatly with effectively using IntelliConnect ™

Of those who utilized training:

• 44.5% used face to face training
• 41.4% used Live Online training
• 22.5% used flash tutorials

The training team is pleased to release our first round of CCH National Customer Training seminars for 2010.

These dates are now on www.cch.com.au and all our clients are welcome to book in through the site.

Below is the direct link to the registration page. Remember all our clients are welcome to have as many users as they please and the seminars are complimentary: http://www.cch.com.au/au/Training/MinisitePages/Public-Seminars.aspx

Your training team

The training team welcomes a new team manager: Jonathan Taylor.

Jonathan has been with CCH for 23 years in June and started out as an Account Manager in the South Eastern suburbs of Melbourne in 1987. During his time at CCH he has had many roles within Sales at state regional and national levels.

In his new role as Sales Development Manager he will have much more of training and support focus and he is really looking forward to using some of his experience in the business to help the Customer Training department deliver even greater value to CCH customers.

Kylie Dugan oversees customer training for New South Wales, Queensland and the ACT. Having come into the role of CCH Trainer from a Major Account Manager in 2009, Kylie has been able to build on her existing relationships in this tier as well as develop many new ones.

James Eade coordinates customer training for Victoria, South Australia, Western Australia, Tasmania and the Northern Territory. James joined CCH as a trainer in 2007. He comes from a background In Major Accounts and Project Management in the financial, telecommunications, education and government sectors.

Contact us at - custtraining@cch.com.au

For Live Online training go to: http://www.cch.com.au/liveonlinetraining

It’s budget season again and time to talk tax.  ‘Deficit’, in any form of human endeavour, is creepy, crummy and outright unwelcome and budget deficits have an unmistakeable ability to put one’s dough in danger.

However, in recent times, deficits  have been relentlessly creeping up on governments, debt levels are not far behind. 

The chronic budget deficit that is currently plaguing the United States has invariably prompted wide spread  red hot discussion about the wisdom of increasing taxes to meet the challenge.

What then is the upshot of a tax hike? Unpleasantly surprising and frighteningly disturbing!

The Tax Foundation in its “Fiscal Fact” of 12 March 2010  (Can income tax hikes close the deficit?) has some very disturbing news for both, governments and taxpayers.

See http://www.taxfoundation.org/publications/show/25984

According to the Foundation, if the 2010 US budget deficit is to be closed the tax rates of couples will have go up from the range of 10 percent to 35 percent to a range of 24.3 percent to  84.9 percent.

The average tax payments in 2010 will have to rise to by almost $10,000 in 2010 and in subsequent years.

To what extent do tax increases alter taxpayer behaviour?

The report is scared stiff that tax increases may send most people off the boil:

“ With high income people paying a federal tax rate in the 65 to 85 percent range, and most states adding on about 8 percent , plus local income taxes and payroll taxes, tax rates would be close to 100 percent  for some households. In other words, beyond some point government would be taxing away all earnings and there would be no incentive to work.”

Will the breezy times in Australia keep rolling  or is  the Henry Report about to give us a nasty jolt?

George Soros is back in the news warning that the financial world is relentlessly hurtling headlong into a bigger boom and bust than the GFC.

The continuing lack of effective financial market regulation, the spiraling trade balance between countries, gloomy employment prospects in most countries and the looming Greek crisis are getting uncomfortably close.

Soros has been consistently questioning the reasoning in high circles of finance that the ‘magic of  markets’ has the wherewithal to correct itself and that the efficiency of the markets is a bastion of stability.

Well, nothing seems to have changed for the better with regard to the regulation of markets - we’ve only seen stimulus packages.

The regulators believed that the financial markets had the ability to reach equilibrium and that behavior in the market place was predictable just like under the laws of natural science.

In his famous book “ The crash of 2008 and what it means” Soros refers to his favorite ‘theory of reflexity’.

According to this theory, prices cannot only be determined by assuming that the markets are efficient (and that they will reach an equilibrium) but also by considerations such as bias and expectations of market participants.

He argues that bias of market participants has the potential to influence the course of events, which in turn can change the bias of other market participants.

The spiraling decline in the value of securities and derivatives (especially synthetics such as the CDS’s) is a good example of reflexity at work.

There are a few reported observations by Soros that may well be considered  here in Australia:

1. The package negotiated for the rescue of Greece should be levying only concessional rates of interest. Higher rates would invariably lead to greater problems in the future. Similarly if a business is in a cash flow difficulty lending should be at a reduced rate so that the threat of insolvency does not make a comeback;
2. The ‘oligopoly’ of the four largest banks in the United States should be broken up (the number of ‘oligarch’ banks in the US  sounds familiar); and
3. Implementation of the ‘Volcker rule’, according to which banks should not be allowed to take part in owning hedge funds and private equity operations.

Paul Volcker (“Slay the inflation dragon”) was succeeded by Alan Greenspan as Chairman of the Reserve in the Unites States.

Click here for SMH article “George Soros issues stark economic warning”, 15 April 2010.