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Thailand: NSTDA Aims to Promote Technopreneurs |
| Source: |
nationmultimedia.com |
| Source Date: |
Thursday, March 08, 2012 |
| Focus: |
ICT for MDGs
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| Country: |
Thailand |
| Created: |
Mar 13, 2012 |
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Samart Innovation Awards seen as one step in that direction
To promote and provide opportunities for business and software developers to become technopreneurs, the National Science and Technology Development Agency (NSTDA) joined hands with Samart Corporation to launch the Samart Innovation Awards under the theme of tourism software development.
The aim is to leverage software developers to develop their software and solutions into commercial market.
Thaweesak Koanantakool, president of NSTDA, said that the awards will leverage the capability and efficiency of local software developers as well as help them to prepare before entering the business world so that they can be competitive in the software industry.
Samart Corporation executive chairman and CEO Charoenrath Vilailuok said that the Samart Innovation Awards is aimed at promoting and supporting local software developers provide their software and services in the market as technopreneurs.
The cooperation has divided the winner awards into two categories - mobile devices and business software. Each category has two gold awards to reach gold awards.
The two teams that won the gold in mobile devices were students from the Computer Engineering Department of King Mongkut's Institute of Technology Ladkrabang with the Hug Thailand project, and students from the Computer Science Department of Kasetsart University with the Virtual items collection game on Android for marketing and tourism support.
Natthawute Sae-Lim, a 21-year-old student who is the leader of the Hug Thailand project, said the aim is allow tourists to be able to explore their adventure destinations and share information with their friends via social media, websites and mobile phones. Meanwhile, businesses and shops are able to provide their information via social network and mobile application.
"The project aims to bring the geographical information system and mobile application together to create a social network that supports travelling. The system consists of trip planning, trip documenting and trip sharing. Users can make plans from previous trip information shared by other users. In the trip documenting part, users are able to make geo-tagged travelling diaries. Diary entries can be in the form of text, photos and videos," said Natthawute.
He added that travellers can share diary entries via online social networks like Facebook during the trip. They can also share all information obtained from their trips to the system such as information that will be used as guidelines when other travellers are planning their trip.
Meanwhile, Kitiphan Pikulvech, the leader of the virtual items collection game on Android for marketing and tourism support projects, said that the team spent a year in developing the project. It was developed to create a new kind of social network on smart phone or other portable Android devices by using virtual items exchange between users.
He said that users can search virtual items by shaking the device, collect virtual items for the user's avatar and exchange them for rewards, participate in sale promotions and collect points to buy accessories, there is an exchange function for sharing virtual items, a location recommended function and database management system to help administrators.
Two gold awards in the business software category were for the Newline project, developed by students from Chulalongkorn University, and Infradra, developed by a software company.
Marwin Chirapaisarnkul, a computer engineering student of Chulalongkorn University, said that Newline project utilises "Reverse Auction Technology" to solve the oversupply issue and the unsatisfactory booking system of hotels. Newline will be the most powerful channel for hotel booking. It is an excellent answer to all the needs of tourists and hotel businesses.
Newline is an innovative booking system that uses "reverse auction". This will motivate tourists (buyer) and hotel businesses (seller) and create a win-win situation for both sides. As for the "Newline business model", it has a specific definition of "vacant room". "Vacant Rooms" or "Over Supply Rooms" are rooms from which the hotel business (seller) would like to generate revenue with less profit (less income but fast sales). This is better than leaving it unoccupied.
"The Newline business model will use 'vacant rooms' from each hotel participating in the 'reverse auction' to create the perfect competition method. The results are tourists get the lowest price for these 'vacant rooms' while hotel businesses have an innovative channel to manage these rooms," said Marwin.
Nattida Kateratorn, assistant managing director of Ecartstudio, which developed the mobile application named Infradar, said that the project is a new application that integrates with Augmented Reality, Online Map, and User's Lifestyle data. As a result, end-users are able to search businesses, products, and promotions quickly and conveniently via smart phones. The application is supported by the iPhone, BlackBerry, Android and Windows Phone 7 environment.
The application has various features to help businesses promote themselves via smart phones. They can help users find a lot of attractive promotions in selected areas and business types through ShowPoint that helps users to search for nearby interesting locations that are being shared by others. Users can also share their own interesting spots with their friends and others as well as Events that helps users to find interesting spots within specific events. If you're not at an actual event, users can also choose to fly themselves to the middle of that particular event. Smart-phone users will be able to download the application free of charge while businesses who want to promote themselves via the Infradar application will pay a service fee, starting from Bt600 to Bt1,800 per year.
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Thailand: NSTDA Aims to Promote Technopreneurs To promote and provide opportunities for business and software developers to become technopreneurs the National Science and Technology Development Agency NSTDA joined hands with Samart Corporation to launch the Samart Innovation Awards under the theme of tourism software development
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