My article in LiveMint.com, online newspaper in India. First published 17 Dec 2017.

The year 2017 has been a crucial one for Thailand. The funeral of King Bhumibol Adulyadej in October was the symbolic beginning of a new era in every aspect: political, economic and social. King Bhumibol was the world’s longest-reigning monarch in modern history. His rule lasted more than 70 years (1946–2016). In fact, all the modernization periods of Thailand after World War II were under his reign.

In those 70 years, Thailand transitioned from a pre-industrial economy to an Asian economic miracle. …

Hello Medium, long time no see. I just realized I haven’t written any post in 2015. Let’s stop this trend.

I found I wrote How Can Microsoft Fix Surface Pro 3 Sales in August 2014. Almost two years have gone and many things happened. Now I own a Surface 3 since the beginning of May 2016 and it has become my main driver since then.

Checklist Revisited

Now it’s time to get back to my old post and see how Microsoft fix the problems:

Make Windows 9 (Threshold) can run existing Windows Phone apps as ‘emulated’ mode (as same as running iPhone…

This post is a non-comprehensive list of important events in Thailand’s 2014 tech industry. Suggestions on additional events are welcome. Please contact me at @markpeak.

Note: Most of source links are in Thai and are from my website: Blognone.

Telecoms

This is a big year for three major Thai telcos:

• AIS changed its CEO from veteran Wichian Mektrakarn to marketing chief Somchai Loetsuthiwong. This is a planned succession so no surprise here. It’s still interesting to see how Somchai can lead #1 carrier of Thailand in the next few years. source
• dtac has the biggest surprise as John Eddy Abdullah resigned…

I was a paid user for Crashplan backup service. When my subscription expired this year, I decided to remove my 300GB backup completely off Crashplan and move to other solutions.

Here are my reasons:

Bad Things About Crashplan

I understand the importance of backing up all your data. I always backup my own data to other local machines, external hard drive and DVDs. However, my tiny office was broken in once and I lost office desktops & backup drives so I realized the need of off-site backup.

In 2011, I chose Crashplan because of its unlimited cloud backup and paid $59 a year for…

One of biggest trends in Thailand’s 2014 ICT landscape is the battle for cheap smartphones by all three major carriers. Here are the current options:

AIS

In 2013, AIS partnered with Acer for cheap Acer Liquid Z3 at 2,590 Baht. The device was a smash hit with more than 500,000 units sold.

Here comes 2014, AIS goes further by partnering with India’s Lava for cheaper devices. This time AIS uses co-branding strategy by stating them as “AIS LAVA” phones.

There are several Asian tech companies entering Thailand in these recent years. It’s obvious that once they were success in their home countries, it’s natural move to expand into Asian neighbors. South East Asia is a very good promising region and Thailand (along with Indonesia) seem to be top two contenders in SEA region by market size and infrastructure.

According to my knowledge, here are some Asian tech companies (excluding enterprise and gaming companies) in Thailand.

Japan

This article is the follow up of my previous Can Sigve Fix DTAC? After that, I had a chance to talk with Mr. Sigve Brekke, interim CEO of DTAC and ask him directly about almost everything.

The full interview is posted on Blognone (all in Thai). Here are some main points in English.

My first question was “What went wrong at DTAC?” and Sigve answered me with a very concrete answer: “DTAC can’t adapt itself into data-driven world.”

DTAC mainly missed three things:

1. Underestimate the future demand of mobile data in Thailand. …

There are very few interesting Thai tech hardware companies out there. According to my knowledge, the top one is the book scanner company Atiz. This team also expanded into wearable device called Wellograph. (See the interview here, in Thai language)

The other up and coming hardware company is Drivebot. The idea is simple but quite powerful: every modern cars have ODB-II port for diagnosis, let create one device connecting ODB-II and summarize all data to your phone via Bluetooth.