Choice, Convenience and Efficiency

Soon after buying my first PC in Thailand, I bought a laser printer and jumped straight into the desktop publishing revolution - an early example of how personal computers could empower individuals and small companies.

Not long after, I bought a 2400-baud modem from a fellow member of the Bangkok Users Group computer club and joined the BBS scene. Apart from the enjoyment of this new virtual social life, the contacts I made while using electronic bulletin boards led directly to my working for Nectec and Internet Thailand.

It is a great irony that having had free and unlimited access to the Internet for six years, I spend 8-10 hours a day online but rarely have time to do anything other than email and research. And "research" brings me to the first killer app that has changed my life in recent years - the search engine.

Web-based search engines on the Internet can roughly be divided into two types, Internet-wide searches and site-specific searches. I've always used web searches for just about any kind of information, but I certainly don't believe everything I read on the Net.

Health is a good example. The Internet has a huge amount of information about health, fitness and medicine but you have to be very critical of what others write in newsgroups or web pages. People who are healthy and happy don't go around shouting about it on the Internet, it's the ones who have a gripe or an axe to grind that do. So there tend to be a lot of negative opinions on health-related subjects.

Another problem is that a lot of health-related online information is provided by vendors or clinics selling the products and services described. Try doing a search on "ginseng" and see how many truly objective web pages it comes up with. For this reason, it's a good idea to compare information with well-known and established web sites such as the Mayo Clinic (www.mayohealth.org/home).

The Toys

First computer: 1986. PC compatible, one floppy drive. Computer now used: PC compatible, Pentium 166 MHz, 32MB RAM, one 2GB HD and one 512K HD, USRobotics Courier V.Everything modem. On-line experience: Bangkok BBSes since 1986; and was operator of Rosebud BBS (which existed to feed Usenet newsgroups to Bangkok BBSes) in 1994. First Internet account with Nectec in 1994 and subsequently with Internet Thailand.

Working for an ISP is enough to send even the fittest of us to an early grave, so I try to slow down by doing a lot of reading, watching videos and listening to music.

And this is where e-commerce has been such a boon to me. The titles I'm interested in just aren't available here. You don't see 11th Century Japanese literature, Italian movies or 60s reggae hits on shelves at the local mall, but it's all available at online stores such as Amazon (www.amazon.com) and Barnes & Noble (www.bn.com).

The beauty of e-commerce is not so much the convenience of payment and delivery, but the ease of finding what you want. Amazon, for instance, doesn't just provide multiple ways to search its inventory, it allows you to listen to samples of CDs, read chapters of books, check editorial or customer reviews, view lists of similar products and rate the goods on sale.

Based on what you buy or what you look at, Amazon will even make recommendations as to what other items might interest you.

Online stores have done very well in acting as a storefront for others and allowing others to act as advertisers or channels for e-commerce. Barnes & Noble has a very fine Out-of-Print and Rare Books section that acts as a front for a network of small, specialist book shops. Amazon has a Bibliofind service (www.bibliofind.com) that is particularly good for used paperback books.

But you don't really need to tie your search to one particular store. Visit the Internet Movie Database (www.imdb.com) and it will show you whether a video, DVD or CD is available at Amazon's US, UK or German stores. Point your browser at @BOOKu (www.booku.com) and you'll be able to search for books at six different stores. Yahoo has a similar service for music CDs.

What this all adds up to, of course, is choice, convenience and efficiency. And on the subject of convenience, it's hard to imagine how we all lived without instant messaging.

I liked ICQ the first time I saw it - not for the neat interface or integration of applications, but simply for the messaging. For many purposes, it's so much easier to fire off a quick message than to pick up the phone and become involved in a conversation.

I was equally impressed with GSM cell phones' ability to do SMS messaging. And now ICQ has provided us with the means to send messages back and forth between PC and cell phone, providing us with a useful link between Internet and our personal gadgets.

And speaking of hardware again, I'm a recent convert to handheld devices - specifically the Palm Vx. After a lifetime of jotting down notes on scraps of paper, which are soon lost, it's very handy to have everything stored in one place and in my pocket, along with a to-do list, calendar and address book.

In the future, there will be virtually no limit to what can be done with handheld computers. They will increase in power, drop in price and continue to merge functionalities with wireless devices.

But it's unlikely we'll see G3 (high speed data transmission over cell phones) or the Japanese I-mode system here any time soon because the cost is prohibitive and the market far from ready.

Similarly, although broadband Internet is available in Bangkok, it hasn't really taken off yet because the cost is too high and the quality of ADSL too low. Cable modem access probably has the best chance of success in the long term, but up to now it seems to have been run as a monopoly. So while I'm sure the good things like broadband for home users and wireless handhelds will come eventually, it's likely that businesses and business people will be using them for a couple of years before the price is right for the average consumer.