Groupon has finally provided irrefutable evidence of its impending arrival in Thailand with the launch of a website for the service in the country.

Thai technology blog ThumbsUp spotted that the group buying giant’s website had gone live, though it is just an introduction to allow customers to register to receive confirmation when the service is launched.

We speculated that a launch would be forthcoming in the early part of this year, and that looks to be the case with the quiet introduction of the website. The company had issues grabbing the logical groupon.co.th domain, which fell victim to cybersquatters, and has instead launch using Groupon.biz.

The firm previously hired its executive team and pushed out ads for middle management, and its hiring efforts continue. An advertisement on the Thai Visa forum seeks a range of positions as the company “is looking to build our founding team and develop Groupon Thailand into a regional power”.

The Thailand branch of the company is being headed up by president and managing director Trip Wagoner, who formerly ran Groupon’s Crazyzeal operations in India, with former Detsche Telecom consultant Damian Kemner installed as managing director and CEO. Positions are also taken by founders Surawat Promyotin (sales director) and Bela Gupta (COO), while we discovered head of national sales and strategic partnerships Jay Neesanant in November.

What is unclear at this stage is whether Groupon is launching with a local partner, as is its common policy for moving into new markets. Thai Internet firm Sanook is the most logical partner given that it already runs a coupon service and has links with Tencent — Groupon’s partner in China — which owns 49 percent of the firm.

A Sanook spokesperson was “unable to provide a response” when asked if the company was partnering with Groupon on the initiative.

Groupon missed out on buying Thai market leader Ensogo, which was bought by LivingSocial. The company is keen on a move to Thailand as it has services in most of Southeast Asia’s other significant markets, including Malaysia, Singapore, Philippines (as Beeconomical) and Indonesia (under recently acquired Disdus).

Groupon’s corporate team and Thai representatives are yet to respond to our request for comment, however we will update this article with any statement that we receive.

For those curious of the headline image, it isn’t a Groupon-branded condom and in fact contains skittles.

The horrific Thailand floods started in July 2011 and along with many unfortunate deaths and destruction, they have also caused major disruption to many exports that the rest of the world relies on. One of those exports is storage devices like hard drives.

Many have blamed the floods and shipment delays of storage devices for the worst Q4 PC shipments have seen since 2008.

SCC, Europe’s largest independent technology solutions provider, released an update on the storage situation and it doesn’t look good for 2012. Andy Wright, SCC’s Director for Vendor Alliances had this to say:

The disruption to the supply chain has now started to really be felt, and we are seeing price increases and shipments being interrupted as the disk shortages begin to bite. Businesses need to secure their storage requirements before both demand begins to soar, avoiding significant cost increases, while also moving to further protect themselves by reconsidering both their use of current resources and the way they approach data storage as a whole.

As cloud computing and storage became more popular last year, it looks like many businesses will have to invest heavily into porting their data services to the cloud. With many disk manufacturers predicting shortages in the coming months, supply will drop and prices will increase.

Wright has seen interest in cloud computing increase since the floods, but companies seem to still want to rely on in-house disk storage and facilities:

In the age of cloud computing, many companies’ continued insistence on maintaining expensive in-house storage clusters makes less and less sense. At the very least, they need to be urgently considering their potential routes to reducing reliance on such facilities and pegging back spiralling demand for storage resources.

These shortages will also stall PC shipments in the next few quarters of 2012, which will cause PC manufacturers to take a hard look at the future of physical storage on home computers. It is most certainly a turning point in how we handle storage, however most consumers still don’t understand what the cloud is, or have concerns with storing their personal data somewhere other than their home.

According to a Bangkok Post article, Software Park director Thanachart Numnonda believes that BlackBerry users are likely to decline because of its focus on business, especially with the surge of more consumer-centric alternatives like the iPhone and Android. Even though he believes that the iPhone can still hold on to its market leader position, Google’s Android will undeniably witness a drastic surge because of the new handsets, including buget-priced handsets from China.

“Heavy competition will lower smartphone prices at least 20%,” predicted Opas Cherdpunt, the managing director of M Vision. Several manufacturers will introduce Android-based smartphones ranging from 6,000-12,000 baht (which is around $200-$400 price range). This includes the Thai local brand Spriiing Telecom, which has entered the smartphone market with their very own Android device.

As more and more people from Thailand are getting hooked on the Internet and social networks, we can only expect the number of smartphone users to continually be on the rise. The decline in smartphone prices is definitely a good sign for budget-conscious Thais who wish to bridge the digital divide, an effort that will most likely be driven by Android this 2011.

Just to backtrack a little and give you a brief background, Thailand is one of the few remaining countries in South East Asia without 3G, lagging behind even Cambodia and Laos. They were supposed to hold an auction back in September last year, but due to politics, lack of transparency and other legal problems, it has been held off.

More recently, an auction of a 3G vendor is scheduled for Friday; however, after being dropped from the bidding, ZTE Corporation has petitioned to the Administrative Court for yet another temporary halt to TOT’s auction for a 20-billion-baht project (roughly $640m) that aims to expand Thailand’s 3G network nationwide, Bangkok Post reports.

Thailand’s state-owned telecom operator, TOT (previously known as the Telephone Organization of Thailand) has already formally announced the names of the two qualifying bidders – the SL consortium of Samart Corporation and Loxley Plc, and the AU consortium of Advanced Information Technology and United Communications.

Zhang Xiao-ke, managing director of ZTE Thailand, claims that its disqualification due to “unrealistic financial calculations” was completely unfair based on the fact that its submitted bid proposed a higher core network capacity than what the state telecom enterprise required in the TOR. He even guarantees that the company can further reduce five billion baht off the price of the 3G project if it wins the bidding.

The TOT board will let the management to decide if the 3G auction this Friday as scheduled. TOT’s plan is for an e-auction on Friday so that the winning bidder can sign the contract by mid-Feb. There are still no guarantees, however, that the auction will indeed push through on the scheduled date.

The companies intend to launch their online shopping mall in Indonesia 2011.  This first stage is just a preliminary website inviting merchants to contact Rakuten Belanja Online (literally, Rakuten Shopping Online) to learn about setting up a shop within the mall.

Indonesia boasts the fourth largest population (240 million) in the world and the region’s largest number of internet users (33 million) with tremendous growth potential in the e-commerce business. Rakuten and Global Mediacom aim to make Rakuten Belanja Online Indonesia’s largest internet shopping mall.

Rakuten Belanja Online will initially operate the internet shopping mall by offering domestically produced products to Indonesian consumers by local merchants.

In the mid-to-long term, Rakuten Belanja Online will build a global e-commerce transaction platform by working in close cooperation with “Rakuten Ichiba Japan”, “Rakuten Ichiba Taiwan”, and “TARAD.com” of Thailand.

The joint venture company will also be linked with, “Lekutian”, an Internet shopping mall in China, which Baidu, Inc. and Rakuten launched jointly, as well as with Buy.com, Inc. in the U.S. and PriceMinister S.A. in France, which were acquired by Rakuten in July.

“Rakuten Ichiba” is Japan’s largest Internet shopping mall and offers approximately 70 million products by about 35,000 merchants. Global Mediacom is the largest integrated media group in Indonesia with operations encompassing content and advertising based media, subscriber based media and media support and infrastructure.

A webcam chat-room in Thailand has been shut down after a 24 year old woman broadcast her suicide on the service.

The woman hanged herself in front of a webcam broadcasting on the Camfrog internet service.  Before doing so she is believed to have posted messages in the “ghost radio” chat-room to say that she was unhappy that her boyfriend had split up with her.  Thai police are treating the death as suicide based on this information.

The suicide has sparked an outcry in Thailand over the improper use of webcam based chat-rooms.  Authorities have been urged by mental health experts to stop any video copies of the suicide from being distributed over the internet to prevent copycat suicides.

This is not the first time webcam based chat-rooms have caused concerns in Thailand.   The same site, Camfrog, was in the news a few years ago when it was found that youngsters were stripping off for sex chats with strangers.  The are also reports that the site has been used by teens to sell drugs.

The “ghost radio” chat-room where the woman broadcast her suicide, has now shutdown.  It’s not known at this time if it will reopen.