Ex-Bangkok Post journo resurfaced at Telecom Asia

The byline of Don Sambandaraksa, the popular IT journalist for Bangkok Post whom some PR loves to hate, appeared recently at Telecom Asia.

The last time the PR world saw Don’s byline was in the last issue of Bangkok Post’s Database on January 04, 2011.

Don is now a reporter at Telecom Asia and will focus more on the commentary section of the telecom publication.

In his latest commentary, he described Nokia Thailand giveaway of gold bars and motorcycles as lucky draw prizes as “Lush giveaway whiffs of desperation”.

Wrote Don,

What do you do when you are a former market leader in a country where goodwill still runs strong and your next generation of phones will not support the local language?

That is the situation facing Nokia Thailand right now given that Windows Phone Mango is reported that it will not support the Thai language out of the box. The answer that Nokia came up with was simple - turn on the marketing dollars.

In what some might feel an act of desperation, Nokia Thailand is giving away ten motorcycles and gold every week for the next ten weeks, with two cars in the final week for buyers of its dual-SIM phones - which are at the very low end, ranging from 1290 baht ($42) for the X1-01 to 2,990 baht for the C3-02.

Comments

Will mrbrown's post on Mr Tan Kin Lian's thermometer app "misadventure" promote technology ageism?

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