Nowadays TrueHits.net is recognised as a solid, trustworthy and acceptable Internet rating provider and is heading towards becoming a commercial service run by a private company that was a spin-off from a government organisation.

How many people know that the well-known and popular service originated from the work of Piya Tanthawichian, a researcher at the National Electronics and Computer Technology Centre (Nectec)?

It appears that the success of TrueHits, represented by its pathway from research to a commercial service, was largely because of the efforts of Piya.

Piya graduated in information science from Tohoku University in Japan in 1999 and then joined Nectec as a researcher at Government Information Technology Services (GITS).

TrueHits was his research topic at that time as part of an attempt to develop the country's expertise and knowledge in the Internet arena. While widely available in many countries where the Internet was flourishing, Web-rating was a new thing in Thailand.

Piya says TrueHits was a dream he shared with Thaweesak Koanatakool, the director of Nectec at that time. They wished to develop Thai expertise in order to monitor and catch up with the breadth and development of the Internet, which was still a new thing to many Thais.

He wanted to develop applied research that could be turned out commercially instead of being left on a shelf or kept in a research database without benefits to local businesses.

"The idea was that we wanted to have a system to analyse the Internet usage of Thai people in order to foresee the trend of Internet technology in terms of infrastructure and application," says Piya.

"Then the research information would be turned out as reports used for governments and authorities in order to make decisions and lay out the direction of the country's Internet development."

At the outset, he started TrueHits with a statistics service provided for only 10 websites. Statistics included the number of visitors, page views, login times and average amount of time per visit. Records would be kept in the form of hours, each part of the day, month and year.

As a research project, TrueHits ran and operated without income. A group of researchers devoted their time and energy to developing its engine software.

After a couple of years, the number of websites serviced by TrueHits rapidly increased from 10 to 100 and then 1,000.

Then Piya realised that humans involved in the process were difficult to handle. So he developed agent software to automatically monitor and collect statistics of Internet use instead of using people.

Eight years after starting his research, Piya has climbed from a researcher to become a manager at GITS as director of its research and development division. This organisation has been upgraded to report directly to the National Science and Technology Development Agency (NSTDA).

Last year, TrueHits generated revenue for GITS of around Bt4 million, increased from Bt2 million in 2005, Bt1 million in 2004, and only Bt100,000 in 2003.

Piya says there is a lot of potential in the area of Web statistics. Currently, only around 10,000 websites of the total of 700,000 to 800,000 registered in Thailand are using the TrueHits service.

"Personally, I love Web monitoring that we provide 24 hours a day with a system involving no humans. We use an agent to monitor Web servers, mail servers, DNS and databases," he says.

Each day in Thailand, around 70 million transactions occur over the Internet. Imagine how valuable it would be if people acknowledge this huge traffic and can apply it. This is the duty of TrueHits - to let people know the scale of online transactions, what they are about, what their details are, and how to convert these transactions into knowledge and valued information.

This year, TrueHits has spun off from GITS to become a private company, Internet Information Research Centre, to run and operate web statistics services commercially with registered capital of Bt1 million. It is 49-per-cent owned by NTSDA while 51 per cent is held by researchers.

"TrueHits has spun off to be a private company and to be a profit centre. The aim is to make it have its own revenue and to run and operate the same as any private company," says Piya.

Under its business plan, the company's revenue is divided into three parts: Web statistics service, advertising and web monitoring.

Revenue this year is expected to reach Bt6 million and to climb to Bt10 million within two years.

The company is maintaining its core services as well as developing new services around the Internet to serve market requirements in the future such as a content rating service, which is at the development stage.

However, TrueHits is following the success of the largest local Internet service provider Internet Thailand, which became a public company several years ago.

Asina Pornwasin

The Nation