Nearly 1,400 deals involving SEA’s Internet companies in 2016 and 2017 saw investments in series A and seed rounds. It shows that there are a lot of opportunities for Thai Internet companies, said Ben King, country director of Google Thailand.

The country’s Internet economy was valued at $10 billion in 2017, up from $5.8 billion in 2015, and it is projected to reach $37 billion by 2025.

E-commerce saw the highest growth at 43 per cent during 2015 to 2017. Meanwhile, online travel was the largest sector with $6.2 billion, followed by e-commerce with $1.8 billion. Thailand’s e-commerce market (in term of total gross merchandise value) is expected to reach $11.1 billion in 2025, with 12 times the growth rate in 10 years from 2015 (which was $0.9 billion).

“At Google, we’re committed to supporting Thailand to reach its enormous opportunity,” said King. “We will support Thailand in realising the opportunities and needs of its Internet economy by helping to train its people and businesses – from the largest e-commerce players to the smallest local stores – to reach new customers in Thailand and around the world.”

In 2017 alone, $7.7 billion was invested in SEA start-ups, almost doubling the $4.4 billion invested in 2016, according to the “e-Conomy Southeast Asia Spotlight 2017” report.

King noted the report’s forecast that the SEA Internet economy would reach $200 billion in 2025.

According to the report, there are $40 billion to $50 billion in funds required over the 10 years from 2015 to 2025, to build the whole forcasted $200 billion SEA Internet economy.

However, the report also unveiled a trend that seed global and regional investors concentrating their bets by putting their majority of funds into the unicorns – start-ups having more than $1 billion in valuation.

From 2016 to the third quarter of 2017, $9 billion in funding was injected into the unicorns, $1.4 billion invested in companies having value between $100 million to $1 billion, and $1.9 billion invested in companies having valuations below $100 millions.

SEA itself has spawned seven unicorns – Grab, Lazada, SEA (a Singapore-based Internet platform), Razer (a gaming hardware company), Go-Jek (an Indonesian hyperlocal transport, logistics and payments start-up), Tokopedia (one of Indonesia’s biggest online marketplaces), and Traveloka (an Indonesian online travel aggregator).

The report was co-developed by Google and Temasek and studied four key areas of the Internet economy, including e-commerce, online media, ride-hailing, and online travel. It did not include education, entertainment, financial services or healthcare.

Teerachart Kortrakul, CEO and co-founder of StockRadars, said the innovation aims to make investment easy and simple for everyone. The pre-sale of ICO will be on March 22. It will sell 120 million tokens, worth a total of $12 million, with the funds to be used to develop the social trading platform.

The concept behind the social trading platform is to enable those investors new to cryptocurrency trading to follow the leading cryptocurrency investors (the “leader”) in order to automatically invest in cryptocurrency in parallel with the leaders.

Followers will share with the leaders 10 per cent of their profit from every single cryptocurrency trade. The leaders, in turn, will share with the company 10 per cent of those rewards from followers. The company will receive 1 per cent from every single transaction that made a profit.

Meanwhile, the company will spend 20 per cent of its annual profit to buy back its tokens at the market price at the time.

“Targeted users for this service are not limited to Thais but anyone in the global market,” said Teerachart. “The beauty of the social trading platform is to leverage the playing field. It is to create new career opportunities for the new generations who are keen on cryptocurreny trading to be able to have income.”

He said the social trading platform could apply for stock trading once the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) allows it.

Currently, StockRadars has partnered with leading brokers in Thailand and overseas to provide real-time stock trading data, or StockRadars, via the mobile app. There have been about 680,000 downloads. StockRadars have also partnered with LINE Thailand to develop trading services with three brokers, including Krungsri Securities, Yuanta Securities, and Globlex Securities, via LINE Finance.

The trend bolsters trade transactions between suppliers and consumers, driving the growth of e-commerce. Online transactions are set to rise to 8.2 per cent from 4.8 per cent in 2017, thanks to the increased awareness of consumers. Purchasing goods via a smartphone has become an important trend.

E-commerce business has now evolved to fit the mobile phone platform. An expansion of digital technology toward mobile commerce has shattered physical boundaries and enabled everyone to post advertising on social media. The opportunity to sell goods via mobile phones is limitless and enjoying a bullish trend. Technologies for new mobile devices are constantly developed, and help make online transactions via mobile phones an exciting experience, along with providing and new business opportunities for both the buyers and sellers.

This trend is lately further propelled by the Bank of Thailand’s approval for commercial banks and their financial businesses to offer e-marketplace platform service as a channel for trading goods and services as well as making online payments. They are also allowed to use “big data” for product development and presentation and for their financial management.

Kasikorn Research Centre sees the online platform as gaining a more prominent role as both marketing and transaction channels, driven by the rise of a new generation of consumers familiar with new communications technology. Value chains that embrace all related businesses will offer a comprehensive system to better meet the needs of consumers.

Such a trend presents both opportunities and challenges that require business operators to make adjustments in their approach.

Business in this era should link physical stores with virtual transactions or online-to-offline (OSO) because sales opportunity can happen anywhere and anytime. Operators may mix various types of platforms by choosing the right ones for their businesses, or connecting each platform through a multi-online channel to match their business characteristics and their target groups.

The e-marketplace platform has drawn strong attention because it can identify the sources of products, enhancing its credibility for customers.

It can be verified by a simple management system with merchants categorised into groups, plus the customer-friendly purchasing and payment systems. This should enable entrepreneurs to add more value to their businesses.

Kasikornbank has recently announced its readiness to provide full-scale and comprehensive e-marketplace service to create new shopping experiences. The bank gears toward facilitating its base of 14 million customers, of which over 8 million of them are already using this e-marketplace. The bank’s customer base of 1.5 million small and medium-sized enterprises will bolster the online community because 200,000 of them are already online merchants, with a combined online transaction exceeding Bt100 billion monthly.

Kasikornbank will assist as a centrepoint for myriad products and services from small merchants – as well as companies from numerous business sectors – to make those transactions more convenient, faster and safer, and with no additional time constraints.

KBank is not only the first bank to announce its readiness to enter the market after the Bank of Thailand’s permission, but has also introduced “machine learning” technology to select goods to match the consumer’s demand. Th technology effectively creates a massive online flea-market network linking buyers and suppliers, most of whom are entrepreneurs wishing to expand their businesses online.

Data analytics and machine learning will make shopping an engaging experience. Small business owners or merchants will find a new world of markets and be able to offer goods and services that better match the needs of target groups, while also being able to better communicate with them.

At the same time, retail customers will be offered the best products to meet their preferences.

KBank is now testing e-marketplace services with a group of employees for the Valentine’s Day festival. They can order flowers from select shops at special prices and with free delivery service, with the flowers arriving at their loved one’s doorstep.

Kasikornbank will launch its e-marketplace service around mid-March to create an enjoyable shopping experience on smartphones. Customers will be able to select merchandise on the platform by checking the list of merchants matching their lifestyles such as agricultural produce from the “Pruanfun” project, as well as goods from retail entrepreneurs, small and medium-sized enterprises and other merchandise from the bank’s partners. This year, KBank plans to introduce over 30 million items to customers.

Patchara Samalapa is Kasikornbank’s senior executive vice president.

The San Francisco company claimed 500 million users in 180 countries and $1 billion in annual revenues in documents filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

The valuation based on recent private investment in the group stands at around $10 billion, making Dropbox one of the biggest Silicon Valley venture-backed startups.

Storing digital data from music and films to documents, presentations and images has become big business with the lifestyle shift to accessing content and services online from a cornucopia of internet-linked devices.

Dropbox woos users with a free version of its online file-storing service, then entices with premium features to upgrade to paid subscriptions.

While there were more than 500 million registered Dropbox users at the end of last year, only 11 million of them were paying subscribers, the firm said in the regulatory filing.

“A majority of our registered users may never convert to a paid subscription at our platform,” the startup warned.

Dropbox noted that the actual number of people using its service might be lower because some register more than one account.

While Dropbox has seen significant revenue growth since it was founded in 2007, the rate has started to slow.

Dropbox has incurred losses annually since it has been in business, logging net losses of $111.7 million and $210.2 million respectively last year and the year before.

The company had an accumulated deficit of $1.05 billion as of December 31, according to the filing.

“As we strive to grow our business, we expect expenses to increase in the near term,” Dropbox said.

Dropbox also warned potential investors that it faces threats from hackers out to plunder potentially valuable data from the cloud.

“We anticipate that these threats will continue to grow in scope and complexity over time,” Dropbox said.

Dropbox put out word in 2016 that encrypted user IDs and passwords of some 68 million clients stolen four years earlier were freshly leaked online.

“We have responded to this event by expanding our security team and data monitoring capabilities and continuing to work on features such as two-factor authentication to increase protection of user information,” Dropbox said in the filing.

“We removed the demo and regret failing to do so at the start,” Facebook virtual reality vice president Hugo Barra said in a tweet sent from his verified account.

“We got this wrong.”

Facebook-owned Oculus shows off virtual reality games routinely at conferences, and the shooting content was among standard offerings, including action games with violence, according to Barra.

“These shouldn’t have been present, especially in light of recent events and out of respect for the victims and their families,” Barra said in the tweet.

The Facebook booth at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) near Washington gave attendees opportunities to try Oculus experiences. A video snippet of virtual, first-person gun wielding was posted on Twitter.

Outrage erupted, with people questioning the California-based social network’s morals and whether money mattered more than morals to the platform.

Thousands of Republicans converged on CPAC, where they gather each year to celebrate their causes — and, in 2018, the populist movement that swept Trump into office one year ago.

But it was impossible to ignore the ever-present tragedy of rampaging gun violence, which has roiled American political discourse and put gun rights advocates and opponents under a hot spotlight.

Florida’s governor meanwhile announced that a police officer will be stationed at every public school in the state as part of a plan to improve security following last week’s deadly high school shooting.

And President Donald Trump repeated his call for arming some of America’s teachers and claimed the controversial proposal was increasingly drawing support.

Abdullah was wounded in a mine blast as Iraqi forces battled to oust the jihadists from Iraq’s second city Mosul last year. His right hand was also seriously wounded.

The 22-year-old is one of a group of Iraqi, Syrian and Yemeni amputees to benefit from a 3D-printing prosthetics clinic at a hospital run by the medical charity Doctors Without Borders (MSF).

“It’s not easy to replace a hand, but at least the new device gives me some autonomy and means I don’t rely too much on my brother to eat,” said Abdullah, who asked not to use his real name.

Wearing jeans and a dark green shirt, he said he had been transferred from Mosul to a hospital in the Iraqi Kurdish regional capital Arbil before heading to Jordan.

“Now I feel better,” he said, managing a small smile. “I hope I can heal my right hand too.”

The 3D printing technique allows the team to create simple upper limbs without moving parts, slashing the costs of manufacturing advanced, custom-made prosthetic limbs, according to MSF.

The MSF Foundation, a wing of the charity dedicated to research and development, set up a prosthetics production centre in Jordan’s Irbid last June.

A team of medics and technicians use the technique to help people born with genetic deformations as well as war wounded from across the region.

Doctors start by taking photos and measurements and sending them to the laboratory in Irbid, 100 kilometres (60 miles) north of Amman.

The data is entered into a system that designers use to create a virtual model of the limb, which is then printed and sent to MSF’s Al-Mowasah hospital in Amman for fitting.

Several organisations have developed 3D printing for amputees in recent years, but MSF says its project is a first in the Middle East.

The clinic aims to give orthopaedic care to as many people as possible affected by the region’s conflicts.

Project coordinator Pierre Moreau said it had treated 15 Syrians, Iraqis, Yemenis, Palestinians and Jordanians since its launch.

“We chose Jordan because we have one of the biggest hospitals and most advanced, and it is a stable place in the middle of a war region so we have access to patients from Syria, Iraq and Yemen,” he said in English.

– Back to school, back to work –

It has also benefitted people born with deformities, such as seven-year-old Palestinian refugee Asil Abu Ayada from the Gaza camp northwest of Amman.

She lives with five brothers and her parents in a mud house, and was born without a right hand.

With her new prosthetic hand, she can now go to a normal school and even sketch drawings.

Too shy to speak to reporters, she sat manicuring her artificial fingers with the help of her sister Ines.

The 3D devices range in cost from $20 and $50 (euros) — a fraction of the cost of conventional prosthetic devices, which can cost thousands of dollars.

“You can design something that can suit this patient and is very specific to the activity of the patient,” Moreau said.

The new technique was developed by MSF in collaboration with “Fab Lab”, a digital manufacturing laboratory in Jordan.

Another beneficiary was Ibrahim al Mahamid, from Daraa in southern Syria, who suffered injuries to his left hand in a bombing raid in 2013.

A 33-year-old taxi driver, he had the hand amputated at a field hospital in Syria before moving to Jordan.

“The new prosthesis has given me hope to be able to go back to work and take care of family expenses,” he said.

The San Francisco messaging platform said the move was intended to rid the service of spam-spewing automated accounts, and not aimed at people using the service according to the rules.

“These changes are an important step in ensuring we stay ahead of malicious activity targeting the crucial conversations taking place on Twitter — including elections in the United States and around the world,” Twitter developer policy lead Yoel Roth said in a blog post.

The move was the latest by Twitter to enforce rules aimed at curbing disinformation, propaganda and provocation.

Since the 2016 election, Twitter and others discovered how “bots” had been used to sow political divisions and spread hoaxes.

“One of the most common spam violations we see is the use of multiple accounts and the Twitter developer platform to attempt to artificially amplify or inflate the prominence of certain tweets,” Roth wrote.

“To be clear: Twitter prohibits any attempt to use automation for the purposes of posting or disseminating spam, and such behavior may result in enforcement action.”

Posting duplicative content, replies, or mentions from an array of accounts one controls, by hand or by bot, is forbidden, according to Twitter.

“Bulk, aggressive, or very high-volume automated retweeting” is also banned, along with using multiple accounts to perform automated actions at the service such as following people, Roth said.

A sole exception to the rule was applications designed to broadcast weather, emergency or other public service type announcements, according to Twitter.

Developers were given until March 23 to bring applications into compliance with the tightened rules or risk suspension.

Keeping Twitter safe and free from spam is a top priority for us,” a Twitter spokesperson said.

“Today’s update to TweetDeck and our developer platform is an important change to ensure we stay ahead of malicious activity targeting conversations on Twitter.”

– Follower counts fall –

The crackdown is part of an effort to weed out automated and fake accounts, a move which rankled some conservative personalities.

Some users woke on Wednesday to find a sharp drop in followers, prompting a series of hashtags on the platform such as #TwitterLockOut and #TwitterPurge.

The cause was an ongoing effort to “identify suspicious account behaviors that indicate automated activity” or other policy violations, a Twitter spokesperson told AFP.

And, despite conspiracy theories that quickly gained traction at Twitter, the service denied any political bias.

“Twitter’s tools are apolitical,” the spokesperson said.

“This is part of our ongoing, comprehensive efforts to make Twitter safer and healthier for everyone.”

Twitter last month said the number of Russia-linked accounts firing off tweets evidently aimed at the US election in 2016 was more widespread than initially determined.

An indictment issued this week by US special counsel Robert Mueller, investigating Russian interference in the 2016 election, named the Internet Research Agency, described as a bot and disinformation operation which sought to sow divisions in American society using social media.

 Currently, paper documents such as complaints and briefs for civil litigation should be submitted to courts and used in courts, in principle.

Under the plan, people who are going to begin civil trials will be able to submit complaints and briefs by accessing a dedicated website that will be newly created on the internet by the courts. It is expected that the new system will boost convenience and promote paperlessness.

The government mentioned greater use of information technology in court procedures in the “Future Investment Strategy” approved by the Cabinet in June last year. Since then, an expert council has continued consideration on the matter.

As the expert council will soon submit a proposal, the government will begin considering a revision of related laws and the establishment of a system. The government aims to introduce such a system as early as fiscal 2020.

Article 161 of the Code of Civil Procedure states, “Oral arguments shall be prepared in writing.” The law obliges people involved to provide complaints, briefs and documents related to evidence in the form of paper, in principle.

When submitting the documents to the courts, people involved are required to directly deliver them, send them by postal mail or fax them to the courts. Under this system, there have been complaints about problems such as the time and expense of printing, postage or delivery fees, and securing places to store such papers.

If submission of complaints and other documents via the internet is allowed, it can result in reducing burdens on plaintiffs, lawyers and other parties concerned, and can make court procedures speedier. The government will also consider building a system in which the courts manage trial records in an integrated manner.

The government is also considering a measure by which a teleconference system, which is now usable only among courts, will be connected to lawyers’ offices and other locations, aiming to reduce burdens on people who come to the courts from faraway places.

At the same time, the government will carefully consider assistance measures for elderly people and others who are not accustomed to using personal computers, so that such people will not suffer any inconvenience.

In the World Bank’s 2017 rankings on the ease of doing business, Japan ranked 23rd in the category of court procedures among 35 member countries of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.

The use of information technology in lawsuit procedures has been steadily increasing in the United States, Singapore, Germany, South Korea and other countries. Voices of concern have been raised in business circles in Japan that the nation will lag behind the rest of the world under the current style of court procedures, in which too much emphasis is placed on paper documents and face-to-face meetings.

In 2004, the government introduced a system in which some court procedures, such as requests for changing dates of court sessions, could be conducted on the internet. But there were only two cases in which the system was used. The government discontinued operation of the system in 2009.

Researchers at Cambridge University have teamed up with a Dutch media collective to develop an English version of the game aimed at inoculating people against the spread of so-called fake news.

The exercise encourages participants, who are tasked with building audiences for their imaginary fake news sites, to stoke fear, anger and mistrust by simulating the manipulation of online content.

In the game they choose polarising falsehoods to publish, cultivate an army of Twitter bots, fabricate evidence, and propagate dubious articles and conspiracy theories.

“If you know what it is like to walk in the shoes of someone who is actively trying to deceive you, it should increase your ability to spot and resist the techniques of deceit,” said Sander Van Der Linden, director of the university’s Social Decision-Making Lab.

“We want to help grow ‘mental antibodies’ that can provide some immunity against the rapid spread of misinformation,” she added.

The psychological theory behind the effort is called “inoculation”.

Researchers at Cambridge last year found that briefly exposing people to tactics used by fake news producers can act as a “psychological vaccine” against bogus anti-science campaigns.

A pilot study conducted with teenagers in a Dutch high school used an early paper-and-pen trial of the online game, and showed the perceived “reliability” of fake news to be diminished in teens that played compared to a control group.

“A biological vaccine administers a small dose of the disease to build immunity,” said Van Der Linden.

“Similarly, inoculation theory suggests that exposure to a weak or demystified version of an argument makes it easier to refute when confronted with more persuasive claims.”

The game, based in part on existing studies of online disinformation, takes its cues from actual conspiracy theories about organisations such as the United Nations, and about issues such as vaccines.

It is set to be translated for countries such as Ukraine, where disinformation campaigns are particularly rife.