Ariya Banomyong, Google's First Country Manager For Thailand

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WEEKENDBRUNCH

Seek and you shall find

By Nophakhun Limsamarnphun

Ariya Banomyong, Google's first country manager for Thailand, sees the search engine greatly expanding its services to meet customer requirements

Ariya Banomyong, a former executive of TrueMove, has taken up a new challenge as Google's first country manager for Thailand.

With 14 years of telecom and IT experience, Ariya also speaks four languages and holds two master's degrees in mathematics and & IT from the University of Marne-La-Valle, France, and in management from the London School of Economics.

As the head of Google's operations in the Thai market, he has four top priroties.

"First, we want to provide useful and relevant information to Thai consumers via our search engine."

Google is currently the world's biggest search engine on the Internet, while Thailand is the biggest user of its search engine in Southeast Asia.

On an average day, he says there are about 55 million search queries via Google in Thailand.

"Our second priority is about innovation. Whenever we launch new services, we make sure that they are available in 40 languages, including the Thai language."

"The 40 languages cover most of the world's population, as we make sure our services are accessible whichever language you use.

"Another example is Google's transit and Google Map. Thais are the No 1 user of this service, largely because when we go outside there is often traffic congestion.

"Our next priority is to promote Thai-language content, which is still vastly under-represented on the Internet, as it accounts for just 1 per cent of the total worldwide, even though the Thai population is the world's 20th largest.

"Fourthly, we want to encourage Thai businesses to go online. About two months ago, we launched a big event to attract small and medium-sized businesses to come to us if they do not know how to get online.

"For example, if you don't have e-mail addresses or websites, we'll provide them for you free of charge. If you have products that you want to promote on the Internet, we will help you do that. We will take pictures for you, put them on websites.

"Our primary mission is to get you online, and when more and more businesses are online, they will begin to grow and grow in the system by themselves.

"So far, we've had 25,000 small businesses joining this programme in just two months. We are also moving to provide this service in other Asean countries," he says.

Google is also going more social. Ariya says the search engine's technology allows Google to learn users' behaviour, preferences, and the words they use in each of the search queries around the world.

"For example, you can search for nearby restaurants on your mobile devices that suit your preferences. On Google-plus, you can also share the information with your friends.

"When you find something good, such as a nice restaurant or a nice camera, you want to tell your friends and share with the community and learn about their opinion.

"In fact, restaurant searches are the most popular in Thailand, followed by search queries on travel, shopping and hotels," he says.

According to Ariya, small hotel operators such as those in Thai resorts, will be able to reach potential customers overseas with greater ease and at a low cost via online marketing and related activites.

-- The Nation 2011-08-27

[TallGuyJohninBKK]

Seems Ariya was formerly True's Chief Commercial Officer, whatever that means....

https://plus.google.com/107011771701173116217/about

[virtualtraveller]

For starters, he can tell his bosses that I don't use Chrome because it insists on displaying results etc in Thai even though every single setting on my Mac is for English language.

B: the whole google account, viz using Docs etc has become an absolute shambles, it's thinks I'm using two accounts and has now shut me out until I integrate them but the process to do so sends me around in circles.

I really wish Google would perfect walking before it learns to run, rushing out all this new stuff, updated quicker than you can get used to the old one, and invariably it's full of bugs!

[muratremix]

He should put AIS network in exchange with Google pop ASAP.

TOT has Gbit exchange with google, which makes google services real fast (including google maps), but AIS is just too slow...

[Member]

Not hard to imagine that someone educated at University of Marne-La-Valle, and London School of Economics don't want to spoil his time with a total crap company like TrueMove

[Member]

nm

Edited August 28, 2011 by Member

[plumeria]

The tip of the iceberg: "the search engine's technology allows Google to learn users' behaviour, preferences, and the words they use in each of the search queries around the world."

Google is way too big. Way too powerful. Way too invasive.

There are no free lunches.

Only way for most of the hundreds of millions of online businesses to appear prominently in search results is pay, pay, pay, pay in monthly Google AdWords pay-per-click.

And it goes up to more than US$50 PER CLICK for some things.

And the Internet doesn't need more Thai language as much as more Thais need to have better language skills like Google's new country manager.

The privileged Thai who speaks many languages and studied extensively abroad tells the average Thai that all they need is more Thai content. What wrong with this picture?

[plumeria]

For starters, he can tell his bosses that I don't use Chrome because it insists on displaying results etc in Thai even though every single setting on my Mac is for English language.

B: the whole google account, viz using Docs etc has become an absolute shambles, it's thinks I'm using two accounts and has now shut me out until I integrate them but the process to do so sends me around in circles.

I really wish Google would perfect walking before it learns to run, rushing out all this new stuff, updated quicker than you can get used to the old one, and invariably it's full of bugs!

Apple has spoiled you by making it a policy to get all the bugs out FIRST BEFORE releasing something to the public.

If I had to choose between Apple taking over the world or Google, I wouldn't choose Google.