The UTCC campus is being equipped with Cisco Webex Boards (formerly called Cisco Spark Board). The boards will allow teachers and students to present wirelessly, whiteboard, and even annotate shared content, along with providing video and audio conference capabilities.This will empower students and educators to meet, create, communicate and share resources inside and outside classroom anytime and on any device, Cisco said in a press statement.

The UTCC campus caters to over 18,000 students and 1,000 faculties and staff. The technology deployment reinforces their commitment to the vision of becoming a leading digital university in Thailand. To provide a seamless and secure digital experience to users, UTCC is also adopting a secure wireless infrastructure with Cisco Connected Mobile Experience (CMX), which will have 800 access points to handle more than 15,000 devices and manage the internet traffic in the university.

The UTCC has also created a mobile app, USpark, for its students to leverage Cisco CMX technology. The app helps the university engage with students on a more personal level. UTCC can now send customized messages to students based on their interests and individual courses. The students can use the app to access a range of resources including curriculums, tutoring lessons, research and even take exams using their iPad devices. Cisco Webex also helps streamline administrative processes, simplifies lesson and schedule planning and manages students’ records with centralized coordination.

Porames Songsaengterm, Vice President for Information Technology at UTCC, said: “UTCC has transformed into a Digital University with the aim of providing an agile seamless experience to our students and staff across virtual and physical learning spaces. With Cisco’s robust core network, high performance of collaboration platform in a secure environment, educators, students and administrators can collaborate and share resources seamlessly, and have a closer relationship enabled by regular interactions that are not limited by physical proximity. Cisco technologies and solutions help us better utilize our resources and maximize teaching and learning outcomes. We’re excited to be working with Cisco as we aim to become a leading digital university in Asia-Pacific”.

In addition to CMX and Webex Boards, UTCC has also implemented Cisco Security solutions for email and intrusion prevention to safeguard the university from rapidly evolving cybersecurity threats. Cisco’s next-generation intrusion prevention system provides visibility and protection across the UTCC’s extended network.

Vatsun Thirapatarapong, Managing Director Thailand and Indochina at Cisco, said: “Educational institutions are realizing that technology can play a crucial role in making learning more accessible and flexible. Collaboration technology especially can help students and teachers connect, whether for group projects, online lectures and coursework, or spontaneous ad-hoc sessions at their own convenience, from anywhere and using any device.

Cisco has a long history in education and we have been working to make learning more intuitive. We continually design technology to boost students’ capacity in collaborative learning. We are excited by our partnership with UTCC to transform the way students learn and enhance the digital education experience in Thailand.”

“Blockchain could be used to promote transparency of information for anti-corruption and to increase the power of investigation,” said Torplus Yomnak, founder of Hands Social Enterprise.

He was speaking at a seminar last week organised by Thailand Institute of Justice on “Blockchain technology for transparency and accountability”.

Torplus, who is a researcher on corruption, suggested that modern technology could be applied in three areas. First, blockchain can be used for government procurement with strong investigation by citizens.

Torplus Yomnak, founder of Hands Social Enterprise

By doing this, Torplus said, blockchain could be used to manage related information such as procurement and auction-bidding in the server of Comptroller-General’s Department in order to allow associate networks to get access to the information.

Blockchain would help facilitate the investigation of concerned agencies and enhance transparency of the government’s procurement process, he pointed out.

Second, the use of blockchain to promote good governance in the private sector.

The technology will help the public check the history and the background of a company in order to know its relation with others as well as to consider if there were any risks or credibility issues with the company, he explained.

Lastly, it can be used for electronic assets declaration of civil servants and state officers to avoid conflict of interest and non-transparent investigation process.

Using blockchain would prevent any errors that could happen when filing papers as well as the erasing of information, he said.

Moreover, it would be easier to search for assets and have various ways to investigate the declared assets.

For example, it would be able to investigate the changes in the assets over a period of time, or it can analyse if there is any conflict of interest and can check if the assets are in accordance with or reasonable with the owner’s lifestyle.

“Technology can fight against corruption but to achieve this the public needs to be alerted in following the investigation and supporting scrutiny that is free from influence,” Torplus said.

Blockchain is also able to solve the human trafficking issue and the non-transparent processes in the fishing industry, the seminar was told.

Patipat Susumpao, co-founder of Open Dream, a digital-led social enterprise, said his organisation was trying to create a prototype applying blockchain for the fishery industry by tracking the origin of fishes – from where they were caught until they were served on the table.

He said Thailand is the world’s leading exporter of canned tuna products but environmental activists said the production process and supply chain in the fishing industry still has problems in terms of transparency.

Patipat gave an example of British company Provenance’s pilot project in Indonesia. The British firm uses mobile, blockchain technology and smart tagging to track fish caught by fishermen with verified social sustainability claims. The goal is to stop many of the troubling practices within the illegal fishing industry, including slavery.

“Blockchain could help solve this issue as consumers can track where and what they are eating is coming from,” he added.

Moreover, the technology could also be used to identify the identity of labour in order to prevent human trafficking and child labour in the industry.

Varying advantages

The advantage of blockchain technology is how it stores the digital information by utilising computer networks that connect a huge number of computers to store and verify data.

The transactions recorded with blockchain will be safely stored with utmost transparency and will be difficult to duplicate or counterfeit.

Though they agreed in general that blockchain was not a universal remedy, participants said there were many benefits to establish the mechanics and a culture of transparency at both the individual and organisational level if it were used appropriately.

Because of its ability to act as a decentralised ledger, as a record of any type of transaction that needs a consensus or permission to enter and edit data on the blockchain database, industries from finance to healthcare are adopting it for varying uses.

The discussion raised several study cases from many countries and governments around the world which are going digital, embracing blockchain technology to improve their bureaucracies and resolve issues on civil rights and public interests.

Estonia uses blockchain to manage the information of identity card and the whole system of the civil rights.

South Korea has heavily invested in blockchain technology to promote investigation of their elections.

The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees uses blockchain to store information on immigrants and also the mechanics of the digital money so the immigrants can use money in everyday life and for food.

In the private sector, the diamond industry uses blockchain to record and verify the source of the diamonds at every single step to end the trade in “Blood Diamonds”.

In addition, the justice system has kickstarted the development of an application that utilises blockchain to store digitalised evidence in order to reduce exposure to counterfeits and enhance user-friendliness and further develop the use of artificial intelligence in the future.

As it seeks to achieve “unicorn” status, the three-year-old start-up QueQ is looking to transform itself from an app to a platform and to reach beyond being a queuing solution. This would see it ultimately shift its revenue model from that of monthly app payments to a transaction base.

In November, the company will have its first series-A fundraising, led by a Thai telecom player and following an injection of venture capital from South Korea.  The move is to drive QueQ to expand its business footprint to cover five countries in the Asia Pacific region, including current markets Thailand, Malaysia and Taiwan. The next two are likely to involve India, South Korea or Japan, said Rungsun Promprasith, founder of QueQ.

“This series-A funding will increase the company’s valuation by up to US$10 million (Bt330 million). Our goal is to become the unicorn start-up from Thailand,” said Rungsun. Though Thailand has a healthy start-up culture, none has yet broken through to unicorn status.

QueQ was initially developed and designed as a queuing solution to address the pain point of time spent standing in line for a restaurant seat. The ultimate iteration of QueQ is as a lifestyle app that appeals to people who want to address a pain point involving wasted time for daily activities.

“It is not only designed to solve a queuing problem, but to solve any kinds of time-wasting problems in people daily life. Once they have a problem like this, they will think of QueQ,” said Rungsun. “We want to be people’s every-day app, and a location-based app, that can create new businesses.”

Since its launch three years ago, QueQ has grown to more than 1 million users. He said the series-A funding would help QueQ speed its growth to above 5 million users in the next 12 months.  QueQ will also change from an app to an online-to-offline platform offering any kind of service, such as deliveries and cashless payments, which could help solve people’s problem of allocating time for their daily activities.

“Being a platform would help QueQ to create revenues from a massive number of users and to help pave the way to being a unicorn. For example, once QueQ platform can turn offline payment into cashless payment via QueQ, potentially huge revenues would come from transactions. To achieve this scenario, it would need to educate the market and change people’s behaviour, all things that are on the way,” said Rungsun.

Initially, QueQ’s business model is to gain revenue from corporates who pay for the queuing solution. But QueQ aims to turn its future massive users into direct revenue sources. Series-A is intended to open a new chapter for QueQ, to develop and provide new features and new services. To do that it would acquire a lot more users and businesses who need QueQ’s solutions. It would expand both the regional market and expand to additional vertical local market segments.

Take for example the new features: “pre-order” and “the next-door-delivery” service. It was developed in a collaboration between QueQ and Chulalongkorn University, and allows QueQ users to pre-order food from local restaurants in the Sam Yan area, and have them delivered by students. So far 30 restaurants have joined a one-month trail, and the service will officially launch in November.

Chulalongkorn University students do the delivery, and some 20,000 students have joined the platform. “We call them ‘day-workers’ who would like to do a part-time job,” said Rungsun. The first new service is called DayWork, which grew out of the next-door-delivery service. DayWork is also a new start-up with a 30-per cent investment by QueQ, and 70-per cent from its founders. DayWork will soft launch along with the next-door-delivery service. It is designed as a part-time job platform that matches job to workers, mostly students.

“DayWork is to serve the huge massive part-time job market in Thailand,” said Rungsun. “It is to help students to do work in their free time. First, DayWork will start with food delivery next month. Then in early 2019, it will increase to more kinds of hiring (of part-time workers).”

QueQ evangelist Prairwa Kalayanamit, 17, said that most users are female and new features and services, especially DayWork, are designed to serve the new generation.

Later, with series-B fundraising, QueQ will aim to monetise its by-then massive number of users, at over 5 million, with a 30 per cent increase per month in active users.

Facebook Gaming is invested in the Thailand gaming industry, in order to help Thai gaming creators build meaningful and engaged communities around the games they love, says Stephen Chun, director of APAC Games Partnership at Facebook,

Facebook launched its partner Gaming Creator Programme in Thailand six months ago, and has since recorded progress and growth from the Thai creator community as well as from creators across Southeast Asia.

Several of the tech giant’s Thai creators are already seeing encouraging results from the first few months of streaming on Facebook. For example, PJY Gamer, one of the first creators to join the gaming creator programme in Thailand, has been entertaining fans in Thailand playing RoV. Since joining the programme, PJY Gamer has grown followers by tenfold to 473,000.

Other partners include Roger Films Studio and NooEve PUBG. Six months into the programme, Roger now has a community of 120,000 followers, and livestreams of “The Sims” have an average of 4,000 concurrent views.

NooEve has built a dedicated following streaming PUBG Mobile. She has increased her following by six times to 76,000 since she joined the programme just over a month ago.

Facebook is continuing to introduce new tools based on creators’ feedback by working with the creators to test and roll out new features.

This includes the Level Up Programme for aspiring gaming creators  to start growing their streaming communities on Facebook, as well as on Facebook Stars. The latter is a feature that allows viewers to support their favourite gaming creators by sending stars and a thoughtful message while watching live gaming streams.

The Gaming Creator Programme, and the Level Up Programme, will support creators in Thailand by helping shape the experience for streaming on Facebook.

From October 26-28, the Thailand Game Show will include the most talked-about titles across the gaming spectrum, plus e-sports tournaments, concerts, and other events.

Dubbed “Candy Tin”, the mini space station, which was launched on Thursday from Taiyuan, Shanxi province, has been positioned in orbit and is powered by Commsat Technology Development Co, a Beijing-based small satellite constellation operator. The Tmall Global communication satellite, meanwhile, is scheduled for launch just days ahead of the Nov 11 shopping extravaganza, known as Singles Day.

The launches commemorate the 10th such 24-hour e-commerce spending spree, which was first held by Alibaba in 2009, and also mark 10 years since the first Chinese astronaut walked in space, said Jing Jie, president of Alibaba’s Tmall shopping site.

According to the company, one major purpose of the plan is to enhance customers’ user experience during the gala, which clocked up 168.2 billion yuan ($24.2 billion) in sales last year. It said the space technology will better serve the integration of online and offline shopping interactions across the globe.

“The satellite collects the blessings of our consumers from different corners of the Earth and launches them together into outer space,” said Jing.

The satellite will orbit the Earth once every 90 minutes, broadcasting sentimental messages to consumers when the satellite passes over their location, the company said. Users will be able to access the feature via the Taobao app. The company did not disclose the function of the mini space station.

Liu Dingding, a veteran industry analyst in Beijing, sees no direct connection between the satellite launch and an immediate improvement in customer experience for the festival season, calling the launch “more of a publicity stunt”.

Cao Lei, director of the China E-Commerce Research Center, agreed, saying: “The satellite cannot yet exert a substantial influence on the current shopping procedure, from sourcing and purchasing to logistics.”

But he said the launches are likely to inject fresh vigor into the Singles Day promotion, which this year will prioritize globalization and the interaction of online and offline commerce.

Recruiting around 180,000 brands from home and abroad to offer discounts to buyers, Alibaba is using Tmall Global, the dedicated cross-border portal, to offer 3,700 categories of imported goods from 75 countries and regions on its platform.

Meanwhile, Alibaba’s subsidiary platforms, such as Tmall World, AliExpress and Lazada, will bring the event to hundreds of millions of overseas shoppers.

“Global tech powerhouses are elbowing their way into the likes of satellite and quantum computing, which are the launchpads for the next wave of commercial applications,” Cao said.