Stuart has been living here in Khrungthep for about five years and recently set up his company ITS4Knowledge. ITS4K’s first project is to create an e-learning platform to enable foreigners to easily and conveniently learn the Thai language. Appropriately enough, it is called ITS4Thai. Website here. You can sign up on the website for free updates in anticipation of the launch of their materials.
Thursday after lunch, Ken and I headed over to ITS4K’s corporate headquarters, a 30-square meter office on the second floor of a building near the Russian embassy and Wat Hua Lamphong, to assist with some alpha testing of their new product. We spent about ninety minutes reviewing the Level 1 materials including several games and testing functions. The interface is smooth and the convenience of learning online will be unbeatable.
In the next few weeks, Stuart expects to have a beta version ready. When that happens, I’ll let you know about it here. Stay tuned.
On the way back to the subway station, Ken and I walked past a food vendor who was pushing his cart to the Silom district to set up for the night. His fare: grilled chicken satay. As he was going down the road, he hit a bump and a tray of uncooked satay skewers fell onto the wet road (it had been raining all day). He stopped, scooped the skewers back into the tray, and continued down the road.
What do you want to bet that those skewers were grilled and served Thursday night?
christao408 
Hi Chris. Thanks again for stopping by our office to help test our language games. Your feedback will make a good website great. We should have something ready for the public by the end of this month. Hopefully our site will help a lot of people learn more about the tricky (but fascinating) Thai Language. At least I am looking forward to using it to help MYSELF learn more :)- Stuart
I find this article relevant.
Technology and education
Mandarin 2.0
Jun 7th 2007 | SAN FRANCISCOFrom The Economist print edition
How Skype, podcasts and broadband are transforming language teaching
IT IS early evening in Berkeley, California, and Chrissy Schwinn, a sinophile environmentalist, walks ten feet from her kitchen to her home office for her Chinese lesson. She has already listened to that day’s dialogue, which arrived as a free podcast, on her iPod. She has also printed out the day’s Chinese characters, which arrived along with the podcast. Now her computer’s Skype software—which makes possible free phone calls via the internet—rings and “Vera”, sitting in Shanghai where it is late morning, says Ni hao to begin the lesson.
One might call it “language-learning 2.0,” says Ken Carroll, an Irishman who in 2005 co-founded Praxis, the company that provides Ms Schwinn’s service, after hearing about these “Web 2.0” technologies from his slightly geekier co-founders, Hank Horkoff, a Canadian, and Steve Williams, a Briton. The penny dropped at once.
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“Tens of millions” of people in 110 countries now download the free ChinesePod podcasts, Praxis’s flagship service, says Mr Carroll. About 250,000 listen regularly and “several thousand” pay for the premium services, which include individual Skype chats with teachers. A second service, SpanishSense, is out, and more will follow.
As a businessman, Mr Carroll loves the economics behind this scheme. Having taught English in Shanghai for a decade, he always knew that the old technology of classrooms and books would never “scale” to cover the world. Now he has 35 employees, all in Shanghai, serving customers globally. He hires the city’s best language teachers and pays them about $500 a month, a good wage by local standards.
The customers are everywhere from Berkeley to Alaska and the Vatican. In the past, when language instruction—along with haircuts and massages—was a “non-tradable” sector of the economy, many people would not have found a native Mandarin speaker as a teacher in their town at all. Now they need only a broadband connection.