Thailand looks set to proceed with the widest educational tablet deployment to date, after the country’s government finally signed an initial $32.8 million (1.02 billion THB) contract for a project that aims to deploy close to a million devices across the nation’s schools.

The initiative, which was first announced as an election promise from the Pheu Thai party last summer, will see supplier Shenzhen Scope ship an initial 400,000 devices within the next 90 days, following first delivery of 2,000 test units, FutureGov reports.

An as-yet-unsigned contract is on the table for a further 530,000 devices — taking the rollout to 930,000 units and total spend to $75.7 million — as the government advances its objective of providing every first grade student at a public school with their own tablet.

The Scopad SP0712, which Thailand is buying, has some promising details on paper. It is powered by Google’s latest Android 4.0 (Ice Cream Sandwich) platform, and features a 7-inch touchscreen, 8GB of storage, 1GB Ram and GPS.

The eductional tablet market is growing and March saw the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) organisation announce plans to introduce a device, in partnership with Marvell. The organisations have begun distributing the $185 XO 3.0 — which is specifically designed for developing markets — in undisclosed numbers but Thailand’s deployment is the largest scale rollout thus far.

Thailand is paying $81 per unit from Shenzhen Scope, and the company says that the deal with Thai authorities could be followed by others worldwide.

“Thailand is the first country in which we have provided large numbers of tablets for students. Now we are talking with other governments to provide this kind of tablet device for [other] students, including Pakistan, Brazil and South Africa,” chairman Liu Jun said.

As a result of the deal, Scope is building ten new production lines that it says will double its output and see it produce 10 million units per year, in line with increased demand and interest.

For the Thai contract, the company will introduce 30 help centers across Thailand to provide support for users of the device, which Thailand’s ministry says was built specifically for the project.

As we recently wrote, Thailand’s project has had a number of issues and came under fire for pivoting its plans on a number of occasions.

Originally, as per the pre-election pledge, the initiative had been aimed at covering all secondary school students, but the scope was decreased significantly to cater to 6-7 year olds only.

Wranglings over reliability and warrants set the project back considerably. The new Thai school year begins this year but the devices are due to be delivered to schools by July, missing the original deadline by some time.

The deal to find a supplier was also somewhat protracted too. The Thai government signed a deal with the Chinese government, which then provided a list of four recommended suppliers for the project.

Those overlooked in the process reportedly included better known manufacturers like Lenovo and Huawei — which struggled to meet Thailand’s low price expectation — while a Thai-based, educational device specialist that lodged a lower bid than Scope was also rejected.

Given the background and development of the project, it remains to be seen if there will be further hitches. However, the scale of the initiative is likely to see it keenly watched by other governments and educational organisations.

Thailand has previously looked into similar strategies, most notably a proposed pilot initiative with the OLPC that had been planned by then prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra, the brother of current incumbent Yingluck. However, a 2006 coup brought a change of leadership and the plans were subsequently scrapped.

Aside from OLPC, Intel launched its Studybook educational tablet in April and, in India, the $140 Classpad has been made available to thousands of students in 25 schools in the country.

The largest iPad rollout from an educational organisation in the US saw San Diego Unified School District distribute 25,000 Apple’s tablets for students in the area.

Research In Motion (RIM) is adopting a ‘back to basics’ approach with its latest smartphone, the BlackBerry Curve 9220, which launched in India today ahead of a phased rollout across Asia.

The device itself is nothing spectacular. As BGR India details, it is based on BlackBerry OS 7.1, with a 2.44-inch QVGA display, Wi-Fi support, inbuilt radio, basic 2 megapixel camera and 2G suppport only. The real beauty is in the price, which is $215 (10,990 INR).

Despite the company’s much publicised issues in North America — it is no longer Canada’s top smartphone and losing ground in the US — the company’s phones continue to perform well in emerging markets, and Asia in particular.

The Curve 9220 is aimed at supporting this growth and, in addition to a tighter focus on sales in India, Southeast Asia and the Middle East, the device sees the company’s BlackBerry smartphones become more affordable, appealing to a new customer demographic.

As we speculated earlier this year, the growth in Android shipments (and demand) in Asia is putting RIM under more pressure than ever before. Though it doesn’t provide statistics for market share, the company has prioritized Indonesia, and to a lesser extent Thailand, Malaysia and India, and these markets are considered its strongest globally.

While the wide range of Android device is providing an app-centric smartphone experience at the fraction of the cost of an iPhone, the Curve 9220 sees RIM aim at a cheaper market segment, where its BBM (BlackBerry Messenger) service,  email and other basic apps are likely to appeal.

RIM calls the development of budget devices a “parallel approach.” The firm’s upcoming BB10 range will still focus on higher end users, but the low-end focus on affordability is aimed at the feature phone users, who account for 81 percent of device owners in Asia.

“We’re really trying to build on and help those people who are moving from feature phone to smartphone. We believe we can be successful in that,” Patrick Spence, RIM’s global sales chief, told Reuters.

The approach is a logical one, and the device will come to Indonesia and other markets “in the coming weeks” as BlackBerry moves to develop its position in Asia, and other emerging regions.

While it’s top-end devices are battling with Apple, Android and others, to varying degrees of success depending on your opinion, the move to reach first time smartphone owners is a logical one that can significantly boost its market share and develop a new army of BlackBerry fans.

However, with Nokia targeting ‘the next billion’, Microsoft bringing Windows Phone 7 to Asia and a range of local Android-based phone cropping up across the region, RIM’s smart play will still see it come up against strong opposition once again.

RIM is looking to build on its popularity in key markets in Southeast Asia by massively increasing its sales presence in Indonesia, Malaysia and Thailand, according to a Bloomberg report.

Speaking at the Mobile World Congress event in Barcelona, RIM’s head in Southeast Asia — Gregory Wade — revealed it will increase the number of BlackBerry sales points in Indonesia to 4,000; that includes flagship stores, store-in-stores and kiosks in the country.

Wade says the Canadian firm, which appointed Thorsten Heins as its new CEO in January, also has “aggressive” plans to grow the number of retail outlets selling BlackBerry phones in Thailand and Malaysia, where its smartphones are popular choices for consumers.

Already this year RIM has upped its push in India, where it is doubling the number of retail outlets selling BlackBerry smartphone, and it is now adopting a similar approach in other other parts of Asia.

Wade describes Indonesia as a “proving ground” for the region, and the country is a key part of the company’s strategy in Asia. Last year RIM held a global launch in capital city Jakarta, while it saw Apple-like crowds gather for the launch of a new handset there.

Southeast Asia is one of RIM’s strongest market worldwide and the region helped it post a 31 percent increase in sales outside of the UK, US and Canada during the last quarter. That’s in stark contract to the US, where sales dropped 45 percent, according to figures quoted by Bloomberg.

RIM has enjoyed a strong brand in Southeast Asia for some while, thanks to a number of reasons including competitive pricing, early mover advantage and the support of celebrities. However, this year its challenge is shaping up to be particularly fierce.

Android shipments continue to grow across Asia as does the popularity of Apple’s smartphones, which rivaling the firm’s BlackBerry devices more closely than ever. More than Apple, affordable Android-based devices are offering regular RIM customer an alternative option, with apps a notable strong point over the RIM devices.

Nokia is also on rise, with Windows Phone 7 based devices, and the Finnish firm still enjoys massive brand recognition and a strong reputation in Asia, which it will look to draw on with its Lumia range and affordable Asia-specific Asha devices.

Heins is determined to keep RIM among the top three mobile firms and there are new devices likely to be forthcoming this year. Part of the plan also appears to be a focus on the potential of Asia, and the company will look to, not only hold its position in the region, but grow further too.

After months of speculation and quiet hiring, Groupon has finally launched its business in Thailand today, making the country the 47th overseas market that the Chicago-headquartered company is active in.

Groupon Thailand rolled out an introductory website just two weeks ago and the service is now up and running in English or Thai at www.mygroupon.co.th. The business and its deals will initially cater for capital city Bangkok only, but the company reveals it will expand to other cities over time.

The website is live now but there are no deals there yet. Groupon Thailand promises that “we’ll help you discover the best things to do, see, eat and buy” and, from the layout, it looks like the discounts will be up to 70 percent while deals will fall under ‘Bangkok’ or ‘travel’.

Commenting on the launch of the business, Damian Kemner, CEO of Groupon Thailand said:

We are very excited to expand the benefits of Groupon to customers and merchants in Thailand. Groupon allows Thai consumers to experience a wide range of amazing offers and experiences they won’t find anywhere else.

Groupon’s entry into Thailand won’t be straightforward and it will go head-to-head against its familiar rival LivingSocial, which owns Ensogo, the company that dominates the Thai group buying space. Groupon had actually tried to acquire Ensogo when it was bought last year, however LivingSocial closed the deal.

The additional of a business in Thailand means Groupon is now active in no fewer than five major markets in Southeast Asia; Malaysia, Singapore, Philippines (as Beeconomical) and Indonesia, under recently acquired Disdus.

The official announcement makes no mention of its management but, as we revealed earlier this month, the team will be a mix of overseas and Thai executives. Kemner will work with Groupon Thailand president Trip Wagoner, who formerly ran Groupon’s Crazyzeal operations in India, while high level positions are taken by founders Surawat Promyotin (sales director) and Bela Gupta (COO).

This mix of local and foreign executives is important to note as Groupon has been accused of lacking local awareness in other markets, particularly in China were its troubled joint venture was initially staffed by European managers.

Another detail missing from the official announcement is confirmation of a launch partner, which Groupon has commonly used when moving into new markets. We speculated that Thai Internet firm Sanook is the most logical choice, 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, but we’ll wait to hear more on this.

The news is positive for Thai consumers as the competition is likely to bring more competitive pricing and encourage more merchants to consider group buying. We can also expect that the industry’s exposure will increase among mainstream consumers and revenues will grow industry-wide.

We’ve contacted Groupon Thailand to ascertain more information now that the launch has been made public. We’ll keep you posted with any new information that we’re given.

Image: Shutterstock user Juan Camilo Bernal

The government of Thailand has agreed to a deal with China that will see it import 860,000 tablet computers for its one-tablet-per-child scheme, a project to provide a device to all first grade students in the country.

Although a government-to-government memorandum has been signed, Thai authorities are yet to conclude a price or purchasing agreement for the devices. A report from FutureGov claims that they are assessing three manufacturers — Huawei, ZTE and Lenovo — for the order, however Thailand’s ICT Minister Anudith Nakornthap says the supplier list is yet to be finalised.

Any deal on price will be coordinated by China’s government but that hasn’t stopped Huawei from publicly questioning the $60 per unit price that Thailand is offering, according to the Bangkok Post. That price is half of the retail cost of the company’s device and Michael MacDonald, CTO of the firm’s Thai operations, told media that it would need to be increased in order to strike a deal.

Despite driving a hard bargain, Minister Nakornthap foresees that an agreement will be reached by the end of the month, which falls in line with Prime Minister Yingluck Shinawatra wish to see the devices in schools by March.

While it has signed an agreement for an order already, the Thai government will need to raise additional funds as its $63.3 million (1.9 billion THB) budget will only cover 560,000 tablets, that’s more than 200,000 units short of the full order.

In conjunction with the initiative, Thai authorities are also planning to introduce WiFi connectivity at all schools across the country, while it may also extend the plans to provide tablet devices to other age groups in junior schools.

Last November we reported that the government had commenced a trial of the laptop scheme, which had been a key proposal from the successfully elected Pheu Thai party. The plan has faced criticism from some academics who believe that the money could be better invested in other areas.

The one-tablet-per-child policy could see governments in neighbouring countries adopt a similar approach and its supporters believe that it will help demonstrate the potential that technology has to assist learning.

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.

Update: A Groupon spokesperson has been in touch to confirm that the company is currently unable to talk about its service in Thailand. We suspect that a launch event will be coming soon.

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.