The number of mobile handset makers at CommunicAsia 2008 was down this year, with only two giant South Korean manufacturers, LG and Samsung, at the show, each occupying a huge area exhibiting their latest handsets and communications technologies.
LG Electronics officially launched the LG Secret, the third model in its Black Label Series of mobile phones, in the Asia Pacific market during CommunicAsia 2008 last week.
SOFTWARE
Adobe Systems has made significant enhancements to its Acrobat PDF family of products with the release of Adobe Acrobat 9 and enters the realm of cloud computing with the public beta launch of Acrobat.com - taking collaboration "one step further," according to Adobe's Southeast Asia managing director Ashley Wearne.
IT TRANSFORMATION
Three-and-a-half years ago, city and county officials in Honolulu, Hawaii were struggling to get by, supported by an antiquated IT system based on outdated mainframe computers and with 11 different telephone systems that were not interoperable: The police, fire department, ocean safety, ambulances, the military and the state government were unable to talk to each other in the event of an emergency.
Under the leadership of CEO, president and chairman Joe Tucci, EMC has grown dramatically through acquisitions that have provided the company with new technologies it has aggressively rolled into a rapidly-expanding product line.
BUSINESS SOFTWARE
Open source database MySQL is now formally in Thailand and is aiming its sights beyond the hobbyist and at the telecommunications and finance markets following its acquisition by Sun Microsystems. Announcing the push, Sun Thailand managing director Rampa Manoonsin spoke of how the market for databases meant a whole new untapped blue ocean for Sun in which there were many "redshift" business opportunities out there for the taking.
EXTENSIONS
The dust has settled a bit after the keynote presentations at the recent Apple WorldWide Developers Conference. With the extra information released in the following days, we now have a better idea of what Apple's announcements will mean for users. The outlook for Thai users, I'm afraid, is not that rosy.
OPEN THOUGHT
A nation divided. It only takes a simple ribbon with a political slogan in a posh up-market shopping centre to open up the wounds that divide communities, families, relationships and indeed the country, with the North and Northeast on the one hand and Central and Southern provinces on the other. Yes, the ugliness caused by Thaksin Shinawatra has spilled over even into a simple IT press conference.
SMARTPHONES
Asus has launched its P320 GPS PDA phone in the Thai market with a new emphasis on becoming less of a computer company and more consumer-oriented.
BUSINESS COMPUTING
SAP Thailand will focus on the CRM market this year with the launch of CRM 2007 in Thailand and is determined to grow its market for enterprise software faster than the 80 billion baht IT market as a whole.
NetApp is ramping up its presence in Thailand, having tripled its staff here from four to 12 over the past two months, as the company sees the Asean region as a major opportunity. The storage and data management company increased business here by 80 per cent last year, and Asean managing director Suresh Nair said that it was on target to double business in Thailand this year.
NetApp last week announced a FAS3100 and V3100 storage system series that provides improved performance and scalability as well as the SA200, SA300 and SA600 storage acceleration appliances and a performance acceleration module.
COMPUTING ON THE GO
Late last year, Asus launched the Eee PC, a small notebook that penetrated the large (and untapped) low-cost, ultra-portable notebook market so overwhelmingly other players are trying to imitate its success.
COMPUTER CURRENTS
'Free Download" are probably the most misused words you will find on web sites these days. When you think about it, any download you can do is a "free" one. It is what happens when you get the file onto your computer that matters.
EVENTS : ITU Telecom Asia 2008 September 2 to 5, at Impact Arena, Muang Thong Thani.
DIGITIZING MANAGEMENT
I just got back from attending a class on international air law in Singapore and found new appreciation of how international laws shape commerce and politics. It also demonstrated the huge hurdles that many countries have yet to overcome before international air travel can enjoy identical safety standards everywhere.
HOME BUILDER
As a long time Delphi and Borland product lover I spotted something I had not seen before, Delphi for PHP. We have covered PHP in the past and some time back, Delphi, so the combination of terms intrigued me.
COMPUTING OUT OF THE BOX
Today, almost all phones have an integrated camera. I often see tourists taking pictures using their camera phones and cringe. I imagine that these tourists have spent a fortune to get to Bangkok and are now recording their memories at VGA or XGA resolution. Just because a phone's camera isn't up to the task of archiving those "Kodak moments", doesn't mean that camera phones are not completely useless.
SLOAN RANGER
It seems ludicrous now, but the big sales push for Microsoft Windows when it began to edge into the PC market was that it would make computers easy to operate - as easy as a toaster, say? How could you go wrong if all you had to do was click on a cute little cartoon every time you wanted to do something?
HELP DESK
I hope you will permit me to address you as Wanda, since I have benefited greatly from your columns since the days of DOS and Windows 3.1.
APP SHOT
Everyone who has photos to share and a web page should put her photos online. There are a number of easy programs that help you do this, but none easier, I think, than Online Gallery.
WORLD REVIEW
Steve "President for Life" Jobs of Apple Inc rubbed the new, consumer-friendly, anti-snob iPhone in the faces of last year's loyal buyers; His Steveness dropped the price from $700 to $200, made the thing work with 3G, included the GPS he left off last year, and upgraded the Internet connection to "near-broadband" speed; true Appoholics will love being humiliated again, and the mass-market phone gives Apple a small chance of actually selling 10 million of the phones in their first 18 months, something that the snob appeal of a 22,000 baht phone was never going to achieve - but it still has fewer sales worldwide than Nokia's Thailand market.
HOME REVIEW
Prawit Leesatapornwongsa, head of the consumer protection section at the National Economic and Social Advisory Council, explained that the purpose of the government's new broadcasting and telecommunication commission is simple - censorship; the proposed law totally upends the aim of the constitution for a body to put media power in people's hands, and places it squarely in the hands of Cabinet members, who would get sole responsibility for picking the 10 commissioners from among their most toadying friends and dependent officials.
Cloud computing is coming - indeed, you may already be aboard the next wave of computing if you use web-based email, such as Yahoo!, Hotmail or Gmail.
