Since I posted an article on HaiVL on Tuesday, it has raised eyebrows for two big reasons. First, the 9gag-like HaiVL community caught wind of the post, and then many people didn’t like my statement that “content in Vietnam is a wasteland”. So let’s take a closer look at the state of online content in Vietnam.

A key issue: generating content that lasts

First, let me get something out of the way. The content in Vietnam itself is not “bad” or “good”. The issue is organizing the content. Organizing it into a way that lasts and is easy to find and digest for new users on the web.

The forum model is as outdated as Geocities and Altavista. It was slowly driven out by blogs and then into even newer more sophisticated models. We’re way passed Web 2.0 by now. Certainly, in the US, forums are still used on company websites for questions and answers that are very specific, but the majority of internet users have flocked to new sharing and linking models. People have moved onto Wikipedia, Quora, Reddit, Digg, Stack Overflow, Pinterest, Facebook, Craiglist, Tumblr, 9gag, 4chan, and more. Each site has its own unique niche and user experience idiosyncrasies, but they all excel at one thing: user generated content.

How does this work in Vietnam?

A large amount of content in Vietnam is generated on news sites and forums. Forums like Tinhte and Webtretho publish news and allow users to start their own discussions. On Alexa’s web rankings, you can see that among the top 20 sites in Vietnam, at least 10 of the websites fall into this category.

These old models lack two things:

• The initial content is generated by publishers, not by users. It’s a news-based forum.
• It is not organized in a user-friendly way. Some of the best comments are embedded deep within the discussion.

If you look at these two things, in a way, it looks like Vietnam hasn’t even entered Web 2.0 yet. Has it missed the boat? I mean, Vietnam’s Pinterest clones all haven’t gained traction (including Rocket Internet’s attempt as well). But no, there are obviously enclaves of the twenty-first century web out there, like LinkHay, Zing Me, and obviously Facebook is growing in Vietnam like crazy. But Vietnamese users outside of these spaces are mostly sifting through Web 1.0. Why?

Is it because of Vietnamese users?

It’s always a senseless comparison, but startup scenes across the world are always comparing themselves to Silicon Valley. And one of the key things we envy in the Valley is the early adopter culture. Open up a new, random over-rated social media website like App.net and people flock to it. You may not be successful but at least you got a ton of user feedback in the interim. This doesn’t exist in Vietnam. Not only is the internet population (35 percent) relatively small but it’s so fragmented that most websites don’t get critical mass. For example, Linkhay, an awesome Digg lookalike, has been sitting under 200,000 users for years.

And it’s not an anomaly. Several of my sources working in search engines across Vietnam for the past few years have found that Vietnamese content is lacking (the 13th most populous country in the world and it’s not even on the map). This is why CocCoc and NHN Naver are looking to work with content industry professionals to get more Vietnamese content online. Only in the past year or so has this improved. It’s hard to find the best doctor online, or find out where the best place to buy a specific type of cloth is. Is it because Vietnamese users are unwilling to participate?

What did HaiVL, Foody.vn and others do right?

I think Vietnamese users are still getting accustomed to generating content on their own. This is why I really do think HaiVL is a pioneer. Because they’ve out-executed lots of other Vietnamese companies in the content space. The interesting thing is, as Dave McClure would say ”it turns out all you gotta do is copy great shit 99 percent then innovate one percent every month and you can beat the crap outta most people.” To win in Vietnam, it’s not just about cloning the right model, it’s about cloning very well. It’s about adapting a model we see somewhere else and executing it really well. And what HaiVL has done is get people to freely give content. So the problem isn’t with the users, it’s with what people are building.

One of the key things that HaiVL did was to perform really well on Facebook – not everybody can do that. And Facebook has only recently hit Vietnam, so upvoting and prioritizing best responses isn’t commonplace yet. What HaiVL is basically doing is educating the masses in a new way of interacting with content, in the same way that Nhom Mua and Rocket Internet are educating people on e-commerce.

To me, the country’s users are ready now, it just takes a few startups like HaiVL to take it to the next level. After all, HaiVL has great topics and fun material, and everybody needs comedy in their life. Next, who can take the success behind HaiVL and apply it to different niches of the content market?

Note: We’ve tried our best to cover a lot of the websites in this space and key aspects of the field, but we know we may have missed many, please let us know in the comments.

In the quest to take down Google in Vietnam, CocCoc is stepping up its game once more with the release of a new browser called Corom this week (a name, that pronounced in Vietnamese, sounds a bit like Chrome). I think this is a smart move. When I heard the news that CocCoc wanted to challenge Google in the country, I always thought that they would need to get into the browser battle. After all, most of my searching these days happens either in my Chrome default “omnibox” or search box, and in my default mobile browser. Thus, this move allows CocCoc to get onto Vietnamese users’ desktops.

Victor Lavrenko, CEO at CocCoc, says that the main purpose of building this browser is to “help Vietnamese users. That’s our strategy – do good for users.” and Corom helps to achieve that by providing some key things other more mainstream browsers like Chrome, Firefox, Safari, and – cough cough – Internet Explorer don’t have. He points out four main Corom benefits:

1. Typing in Vietnamese. Corom automatically add diacritics, so that when you type something you don’t have to use the Unikey/Vietkey
2. It gives access to Facebook, because it’s not very reliable due to being partially blocked.
3. In Vietnam, Victor says “the problem of speed is usually related to international channels etc. , so we download in several threads, and it’s much faster, up to eight times quicker”.
4. The new browser allows you to download videos from Youtube (you can do this in Firefox with an add-on, but not in Chrome).

Unfortunately for me, the browser is only for Windows. Windows is by far Vietnam’s most popular computer operating system, where Macs are only really seen sometimes used in the big cities. Victor says they do hope to come out with a Mac OS X version soon. When asked if they’d be releasing a mobile browser, an area I think has a lot of potential, Victor said:

Regarding a mobile browser, I think it’s not our target because mostly browsers are pre-installed and people rarely change them. However, probably we’ll integrate points-of-interest search into our browser and maybe this will be an advantage big enough for people to replace their mobile browser.

Content in Vietnam is a wasteland. Most of the nation’s users are flocking to forums where most of the content is being generated. For the past four years or so, much of the user-generated content has been on forums like Kenh14, a general board with topics spannng lifestyle to sports to fashion, and which is owned by internet juggernaut VC Corp. It has long been one of the hottest places to get on the Vietnamese internet. I’ve heard on the grapevine that it gets anywhere from 2.5 million to four million unique visits per day. On the other side, there’s the more niche forum Web Tre Tho which has over one million users who are mostly women.

(UPDATE: It has come to my attention from VC Corp, that it is not exactly a forum in the traditional sense. But it is still a central place in which people comment and talk about modern day issues according to topic, some consider this to be a “forum”, others not. Also, I want to clarify that “Content is a wasteland” does not mean Vietnam’s content is bad, but means that it is not organized very well, especially the user-generated type.)

To me, this forum-obsessed internet (common across most of developing Asia) is holding back richer content models like could be something more like Quora, Reddit, Digg, Wikipedia, and more. This is why HaiVL is one of my absolute favorite startups in Vietnam, because they’ve cracked a content problem. In just one year, with one developer, the site has achieved two million unique visits per day, which could mean anywhere from 30 to 60 million per month. That’s impressive for a team of just 5 people.

Hai, literally means “comical”, “funny” or “hilarious”. And that’s the prime focus of the website. It’s a platform for users to throw up funny images (or videos, which make up for 1/10 of posts) that they found or created and other users can like or comment on them. Users are uploading 3,000 to 4,000 photos per day. It’s a spitting image of 9gag (which currently gets 65 million uniques per month). And HaiVL’s got serious traction. I spoke to Vo Thanh Quang, co-founder and CEO of AppVL, the small company that is totally focused on HaiVL, their main product. He said:

We didn’t expect the kind of growth that we now have. At first, I just started out alone, and after not doing Place.vn which didn’t totally take off. Then suddenly, I started to see huge growth and had to hire a team to deal with our scaling. Now, today, we’re already running a profitable business with stable revenue.

The HaiVL team has also built apps for Android and iOS which respectively both got about 50,000 views per day, and 700,000 downloads in total. The majority of the users are within the 17 to 30 age range. And HaiVL’s revenue comes from ads. The key growth has been on Facebook, where they’e got over 1.5 million ‘likes’ on their fanpage. In fact, HaiVL is very closely tied to Facebook since users can only post if they have a Facebook account, and much of their early growth can be attributed to engaging Facebook heavily. But today, of their two million unique hits, 50 percent of them come directly. That means it’s seeping steadily into the consciousness of Vietnamese netizens. In the future:

We’re looking at just staying really focused and growing our userbase to 10 million unique visits per day. We also just added an editing function so that users can edit their photos online. That’s a long way off, and getting there will take time, especially since our growth up to now has been largely linear.

Another cool thing about HaiVL, is you start to see a new face of Vietnam. Although it’s about funny images, users often post very supportive images about poverty or the environment that also get lots of upvotes. The average popular image gets about 500 upvotes. As far as censorship goes, in case you were wondering, HaiVL does have a policy to take down any content that is politically sensitive or porn/nudity. Any user who violates these rules gets booted from the site within 30 minutes, their content gets taken down, and the user is not allowed to post ever again.

I think this is a really cool startup to look out for, mainly because it’s pushing Vietnam’s content space to the next level. We’ll keep you posted when they hit their next million.

I wrote about Vietnam’s food delivery landscape earlier this month, and already there are some new developments in the space. Today, Rocket Internet is finally bringing Vietnam into the branding fold by changing the name of its own food delivery service from Hungrypanda to Foodpanda.

The rebranding just means that the previous domain, Hungrypanda.vn that Vietnamese users have been going to for their deliveries will be shooting over to Foodpanda.vn. As Don Phan, the managing director at Foodpanda says:

We are excited to be now part of the global Foodpanda movement. The rebrand and our new, big partners take us further towards becoming Vietnam’s leading food delivery service. For our customers, we want to provide the best and most convenient way of ordering food.

The rebranding also comes along with the announcement that Foodpanda.vn has now integrated Gloria Jean’s Coffees, NYDC, BreadTalk, Tokyo Deli, and Subway onto their list of deliverables.

Despite the three big factors of uniting with the international brand, getting a huge infusion of cash, and getting some new restaurants on their online menu, Foodpanda is still going to have to work hard to deal with local incumbents, Eat.vn and Vietnammm, which have been in the market since 2011. So I wouldn’t say Foodpanda is on top of the Vietnamese market yet – it still got some way to go. That being said, Rocket’s two other big, Southeast Asia-oriented e-commerce properties, Lazada and Zalora, have been outspending local e-commerce sites in Vietnam and seeing huge growth spurts. The same is true for the chat apps like KakaoTalk, Zalo, and Line, who have seen huge user increases as they’ve upped their spending on television ads and visibility in the country. With a product as simple and consumer-scalable as food delivery, is it a matter of time before Foodpanda steamrolls the local incumbents? We’ll see.

Last week we reported that Foodpanda raised over $20 million to expand across Asia. It already operates in nine Asian countries.

After traveling up to Hanoi last weekend and hunting for cool startups, a lot of the people there kept recommending me to meet Ngo Xuan Huy. He’s got a 10-person team working on an app called Money Lover (the landing page isn’t online yet, so just go straight to the app links at the bottom of the page) on iOS, Android, and Windows Phone. And although it’s made in Vietnam, the app is going global. Worldwide, Money Lover’s has over 1.5 million downloads.

The app is basically a finances and expenses manager for individuals. It allows you to track your spending over time and manage your monthly or annual budget. So throughout the day, I could pull out Money Lover after I make a purchase and log it into the app. At the end of the month, I could look back at my spending and tweak according to my budget. The app Mint, from the Valley, also does a similar thing but it can be tied directly to your bank account.

Huy started out with the app by himself when he was in university and used it for his own personal needs. When Money Lover went live on the Google Play Store, he was shocked to find that a lot of people were downloading it. In the next two years, he assembled a team together to do it full time. Another cool thing about the Money Lover app is that it’s currently available in 28 languages, and Huy’s team didn’t translate any of those languages (except for English). Users created the translations themselves. The top two user bases are the US and Italy.

At first, the app started out as a freemium app, they tried out a paid version but now Huy is stick with the freemium model and that has secured the majority of downloads. Users can get a premium account, which opens up more expense management features. Huy says that:

In the latest version, we rebuilt it from the ground up to integrate cloud and web features. In the future, we’re hoping to get more into family accounting, where users can connect their accounts with their loved ones to share expenses. We’re also looking to work more with payment systems or banks just like Mint does.

I’m impressed with the simplicity and design of the app, Huy also says they’re going to continue innovating on the design and providing what users need. He’s also looking for new hires to expand the team on the mobile and web fronts, and also looking for investment for scaling, if anybody out there is interested.

We recently saw a Japanese startup do a similar thing in that nation, except that that app already connects to dozens of banks.

You can download it on iOS here and on Android here and on Windows phone here.

Check out more screenshots of the Money Lover app:

TMI, a Taiwan-based early stage investment firm founded in 2012 by US venture firm WI Harper Group, Kaifu Lee, and ITRI, has just invested in three different startups.

• CitieSocial: It’s a hip social discovery site in Taiwan that mostly features designer items and gourmet food.
• Driving Curve: An iOS app that basically collects data on a user’s speed and fuel efficiency when driving, thus presumably improving their driving skills. Also, this startup is from Taiwan.
• PeerIdea: It’s currently not clear yet what this startup does.

I took a look at CitieSocial, and it’s pretty cool. I already found a pencil sharpener I really want to buy. The idea is pretty niche in that it’s all luxury and novelty products so it’ll entice users to come through and check out products that they wouldn’t find elsewhere in more obvious e-commerce sites that feature normal branded products. It currently has over 100,000 members, and more than 100 brand partners. It’s a bit like Fab.com and other so-called designer-to-consumer sites.

So far, Driving Curve has had humble beginnings with only 20,000+ downloads and is gaining popularity on the other side of the world in France. According to Lucas Wang, CEO of TMI:

TMI has had a keen interest in apps related to the auto sector. Driving Curve has an exceptional product and stylish UI design. Most importantly, the team is top-notch: focused, passionate and ambitious. We believe our cooperation has unlimited potential.”

Lastly, PeerIdea hasn’t revealed much about what the company does. We just know that it’s started by Weiting Liu, who was also behind SocialPicks, a social finance startup founded in 2009, and he also designed an app on the Facebook platform that got more than 10 million downloads. TMI’s clearly investing in the potential of the founder in this case.

We reached out to TMI for details on the numbers, but with seed capital for these nascent startups, you can be sure it’s under a million dollars, just enough for the companies to scale.

For more info on TMI, which was founded last year, check out our recent feature.

In Vietnam, one of the most popular models for internet companies and startups to make money in the consumer space is online marketing. It’s only natural, after all, since Vietnamese consumers are still warming up to newer payment methods. That makes selling ads are an easy way to make money. Now, Google is opening up Google Adsense with Vietnamese language support.

Rumor has it that Google makes more money here in Vietnam, a country of about 90 million, than in Indonesia, a country of almost 250 million people. Vietnamese companies are obviously eager for business and growth, and Vietnamese consumers are eager to shop. So Google Adsense coming into the country makes sense, especially as smartphone usage booms in the country. In the announcement, Google also posted Vietnam’s hockey stick growth for internet penetration. Google can no longer ignore Vietnam:

And they especially cannot ignore Vietnam if new search players like Wada and CocCoc are getting really aggressive about attacking Google’s market share in the 13th biggest country in the world.

The announcement, which came on May 10th, has already got major sites like HaiVL signing up, and we’re sure to see bigger sites like Zing Me, and the major Vietnamese newspapers sporting Google Adsense. It’s simply much easier to go through Adsense than to go direct to companies for display banners. With this, we’re sure to see more money pouring into the online space as internet penetration grows and content (hopefully) gets better.

If you’re in Vietnam and you’ve got an iOS device, chances are you’re not using Apple’s Newsstand. Personally, I’m annoyed by it because I can never hide it in a folder. I also can’t get my hands on any Vietnamese-language magazines on it. Well, luckily Kpaper just released last week on iOS and Android.

I spoke with Nguyen Trung Nghia, the founder of KGP ID, which also runs projects including Sufi, Kcloud, Ktaxi, and Kprice. The really cool thing about the 17-person team is that some of there are actually in Da Nang, Vietnam’s fastest growing central city, with a nascent startup culture.

Basically, Kpaper is an app that allows you to read local magazines online. It’s the first of its kind in Vietnam and is another humble step in the direction of developing more online content in Vietnam. According to Nghia:

So far, we’re working with three main publishers, including Viettel and Soha, and we’re looking for more. We’ve already got 40 magazines online. The business model is to produce really good content and then get users onto our other platforms like Kprice, our payment system, and Ktaxi, a taxi booking system.

The interesting thing about paper is that it doesn’t actually download the magazines to your smartphone, but rather allows you to view them online with a cache. In a way, it’s like magazine streaming. So after you’re finished reading, the magazines automatically delete themselves but are always available to be “streamed” again. Currently, the magazines are all free and Nghia is working with more publishers to get distribution going. In the future, it’s possible that Kpaper will also charge for more pricey magazines, but this is just the first step right now.

You can check out the app on iOS and Android.

The team has been hard at work this week collecting all the top stories in China, so let’s take a look.

1. Report: More Layoffs at Renren, Signs of a Strategic Shift?

China’s Facebook, Renren, just might be looking at some serious changes to its internet strategy. Charlie speculates that this might be a shift into games and mobile apps.

2. China’s MadeiraCloud Gets $1.5 Million Funding, Opens US Office

Congrats to MadeiraCloud for another round of funding!

3. Alibaba Explores Online Mapping, Takes Stake in Autonavi For $294 Million

There’s rumors of Facebook acquiring Waze back in the Valley but Alibaba has already stepped up to the plate with the acquisition of Autonavi.

4. WeChat Now Has 190 Million Active Users, Close to Passing Whatsapp

Watch out WhatsApp, WeChat is after your spotlight. This chat app battle is happening on so many fronts it’s hard to keep up. There are so many battlefields here in Asia and across the world.

5. Umeng Dominates Chinese Mobile App Analytics, Plots Overseas Expansion

Thus continues the trend of Chinese internet companies increasingly looking global.

6. China’s Top 3 Most Profitable Web Companies

TL;DR: The top three are Baidu, Alibaba, and Tencent. They basically rule over the Chinese internet, but it’s telling to know what business models work in Vietnam.

7. After 1 Year in China, Evernote Reaches 4 Million Chinese Users

Evernote is getting more and more aggressive in Asia and 4 million in a year is quite a lot for the note taking service.

8. Tencent CEO Pony Ma Talks WeChat, Competition, Going Mobile and Global

Click here to get more notes on where Tencent is headed next. It’s fascinating to see the moves this innovative company makes.

9. Not Only on WeChat: Tencent Hints at Integrated Mobile Gaming Platform

And to follow up the last article, let’s look in more detail at where Tencent is really headed.

10. China’s Top 10 Smartphone Apps for Android and iOS

A really nice break down from Charlie on the top apps in China. Of course, QQ dominates both charts.

That’s all for this week, folks. For our full spread of China coverage, you can click here or subscribe to our China RSS.

I’m up visiting Hanoi, Vietnam this weekend to check out the startup scene, where there’s clearly a very strong community looking at mobile. But, without further ado, let’s get into the top news of the week.

Steven’s pick: Alibaba Explores Online Mapping, Takes Stake in Autonavi For $294 Million

Yesterday was the final day for Alibaba founder Jack Ma in his role as CEO. He want out with a bang with this major new stake in Autonavi, which comes just two weeks after taking a sizable interest in Sina Weibo.

Charlie’s pick: Baidu Acquires PPS for $370 Million, Claims It’s Now China’s Biggest Video Platform

This one’s kind of a no-brainer. A new acquisition for Baidu that could reshape the streaming video market in China. They don’t get much bigger than this.

Youshen’s pick: How Alibaba Saved Weibo and Chinese Society (Maybe)

The man who stands for the Alibaba brand – Jack Ma – has earned my respect. With reference to Alibaba’s recent investment in Sina Weibo, Ma was able to acknowledge Weibo’s existing user community and had wanted to avoid being “condemned by its users and…history”. He clearly recognized the important balance between user appeal and commercial gains. My teammate C. Custer also highlighted Ma’s possible interest in maintaining Weibo’s transparency for Chinese society. If this is true, I take my hats off to the man himself.

Emily’s pick: Line’s Revenue for Q4 2012 Was $58 Million

It’s certainly some impressive revenue growth for LINE from last quarter of 2012 to the first quarter of 2013! And with the recent introduction of more services to the mobile messaging platform, such as the e-book service Line Manga, a Japanese animated series, and even a toy smartphone, we can probably see bigger growth later this year – especially in Japan!

Minghao’s pick: If More Than Half the Population of the World Lives in This Circle, Asia is the Future of Startups

There is certainly a rise in entrepreneurial activities in Asia. Therefore, in my opinion, many disruptive and highly profitable startups will come out of this region within the next decade. Why so? Besides Asia being most populated, the other factor is the many problems that clouds this region. Though Asia is one continent, the cultures and languages are so diverse; each country has its own language, and even within the same country there might be hundreds of different languages being used. The region also has other issues related to infrastructure, logistics, payment problems. With these many barriers, there are so many opportunities for entrepreneurs to work on.

Enricko’s and Minh’s pick: Two Serious Problems That Plague Tech Companies in Vietnam

Enricko: This is a thought-provoking article by Minh, and some might argue that the two problems he addressed also exist in other Asian countries as well. The other thing I loved from the article is about the level of discussion people dedicated inside the comments section. What I’m curious now after reading it is to see examples of good Vietnamese startups that entrepreneurs should look up to. Now we know the problems, who has managed to overcome them?

Minh: I never pick my own stuff, but I gotta say, the comments on my article are really thought-provoking and fun to go through. Props to the startup community in Vietnam for giving their own thoughts on two issues that clearly many Vietnamese entrepreneurs care about. I’m hoping to write more on this in the coming months, with more depth.

Vanessa’s pick: China’s MadeiraCloud Gets $1.5 Million Funding, Opens US Office

Aside from all the buzz happening in China such as this week’s Global Mobile Internet Conference, and Alibaba Group celebrating the 10-year anniversary of its Taobao marketplace yesterday, we’re really thrilled to know that our friends over at Beijing-based startup MadeiraCloud have successfully raised series A funding of $1.5 million.

I remember how CEO and co-founder Daniel O’Prey would tell me about the ups and downs of his startup journey, the effort put in to gather user feedback; and so we’re really ecstatic to learn that apart from successfully raising funds, it will also be opening a San Francisco office for its expansion efforts. Great job done for the folks over at MadeiraCloud! Looking forward to more updates from you guys!

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On the eve of Mobile Day in Hanoi tomorrow, I think it’s worth taking a closer look at mobile growth in Vietnam. It’s increasingly becoming a buzzword that I hear among tech circles that are looking at the consumer market. Especially with foreign companies like Hungrypanda entering the market with a mobile app and big internet companies like VNG going mobile first, and even e-commerce companies like Project Lana getting more serious about fostering communication over mobile, mobile is a clear and present future. The companies are all readying the battlefield for the mobile growth factor.

Mobile growth in Vietnam is bullish as hell

One of the key reasons we’re seeing such powerful growth in mobile in Vietnam is because of the monetization potentials. In Vietnam’s web space, monetization has mainly been lead by advertising and now e-commerce. But online marketing is sparse at best, only accounting for less than 5 percent of total marketing spending in the country.

Mobile, on the other hand, although not exactly an easy space to monetize, given that telecoms take more than 30 percent of the cut on purchases made via SMS, is still a significant space. It’s significant because the market is about to expand very fast. And that market comprises of users who may have never been online before. As of late 2012, according to my sources, Vietnam has over 27 million smartphones (much of that is not on iOS and Android). And as I reported before, 6 million new smartphones will be shipped into the hands of consumers by the end of this year. That’s a 150 percent growth over the year before. And this figure is just 1.5 million under the total amount of users currently reported on the leading chat apps in Vietnam. (1)

Okay, so there are macro-economic issues

Now, lately I’ve been seeing lots of sensationalist gripes from international economists about how Vietnam’s economy is in a crisis and that it’s Asia’s weakest link, and granted, these warning signs have been seen for a long time. There is no doubt that Vietnam is in a quagmire in dealing with banking systems, corruption issues, and infrastructural issues like education.

But these macro-economic sweeping statements miss some key things about Vietnam. One of them is, small and medium sized businesses in Vietnam, according to some of my sources, are still not impacted. They’re still growing. And they account for a lot of the new businesses and growth in the country. The technology industry is also robust as ever, especially being lead by the outsourcing juggernauts in the country.

And mobile growth underlines some very key factors

Where is this mobile growth occurring? Why are so many companies set on attacking the mobile space despite the macroeconomic factors? Well, over 70 percent of the Vietnamese population is under 35, and many of them are in or entering the employment market. What’s the average monthly salary of this group of people? VND 3.2 million ($150). That may seem small, but not so small when weighed against the buying power of families that pool their salaries together living in one household. And even more so when weighed up against the dropping prices of smartphones and the already severely low 3G rates. This population is going mobile very fast, and whoever comes to dominate is sure to make tons of money. So don’t be surprised when the mobile market is one of the support beams that lifts Vietnam out of its current economic woes.

Oh, and mobile designers in Vietnam, seem to be much better than web designers.

Disclosure: Now, granted, I’m no economy major. But the impact of mobile is still a huge factor worth looking at when assessing an anomaly of an economy like Vietnam, which has been repeatedly thought to be in a “crisis” but defied analysts again and again.

(1) The math goes like this: 3.5 million from Viber + 2 million from Zalo + 1 million from KakaoTalk + 1 million from Line = 7.5 million. This does not account for obvious overlaps. Suffice it to say, if 27 million (total from 2012) + 6 million (total shipped in 2013) = 33 million smartphones in Vietnam. Thus 7.5 million only accounts for 22 percent of the smartphone market. And that assumes there’s no overlap. If overlap is accounted for, that percentage would be much smaller. This also does not factor in WhatsApp’s unknown numbers.

In university, I majored in history of religion and visual culture, so how can I resist writing about a story where a meditating monk took pictures with a naked woman and now she’s asking Google to take her photos down? It’s just too juicy. It combines a host of controversial elements with a seasoning of technology on top.

NSFW Warning: all links have nude photos concerning this issue, so beware before clicking, especially if you are at work.

The photos are part of an exhibit that was released early last year along with a book titled Thoát, which can mean escape, liberate, or exit in Vietnamese. The exhibit, which was shown in the popular beach city of Vung Tau, was meant to be a commentary on feng shui and the relationship between image and story. In the 12 photos, Hue Phong, the feng shui expert and mastermind behind the project, dresses up in monk’s robes and Thai Nha Van, a model and actresses, poses nude behind him in various poses. The story starts out with Van walking up to a temple, meditating in the temple, and eventually learning from a monk there. But it all finishes with pictures of Thue Phong, dressed as a monk, meditating, with Van posing in the background nude.

Thue Phong’s whole idea was to shock the public and art industry to rethink lust, and oddly, to take a closer look at the teachings of Buddhism. Several Buddhist masters in the area have already denounced the exhibit as sacrilegious, and now Van is asking Google to help take down the photos off the internet. She’s also proposing to the photographer to give her licensing power over the photos, but I’d say it’s too late for that. They’re all across the Internet already.

If I know anything about the internet, Van’s attempt to take the photos down is just going to get her more attention, like this article. And the more attention she’s got, the more computers have got her photos. All in all, I think Hue Phong’s been successful in provoking the public into some kind of discourse, even if it wasn’t as he planned.

My favorite irony of this whole affair is that ancient Buddhist art always featured nudity, and no one protests that, it seems time has made Buddhist more conservative?

In Vietnam, ticketing is a relatively new place for startups. I’ve already covered Keewi, which mainly has done ticketing in workshops and community-oriented events, entertainment being a relatively new field for them. And that’s been the prime focus of VNTIC since June 2012. It’s an online platform for buying and selling tickets for entertainment events.

The eleven-person team is lead by Do Thuy, founder and CEO of VNTIC. Thuy says that his startup all started when:

I went to quite a few shows from foreign performers and saw a lot of problems, especially with Vietnamese audience members. Especially in the aspects of ease to buy tickets, payment, and language barriers. After looking around at the market, especially across Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, etc, we saw that we should work with Sistic.

Currently VNTIC is connected to the ticket networks of Sistic, Ticketcharge, and Kiostix, thus they are able to offer Vietnamese audiences access to events on these platforms. This is also VNTIC’s key competitive advantage, so if I want to go to The XX show in Singapore this August, I can grab it on VNTIC instead of having to go to the Singaporean distributor. This cuts down on the language barrier, delivery, and access for events for Vietnamese audiences. Currently, Vietnamese audiences can book shows in Singapore, Malaysia, and Indonesia from VNTIC.

But VNTIC also services events in Vietnam for Vietnamese audiences. Really popular stuff like tea shop music (a popular type of music show in Vietnam where musicians play music in coffee shops for small to medium sized audiences), theater, live shows, music shows, and more. Currently, VNTIC hosts over 100 shows of all types.

Since the start last year, VNTIC has had steady growth of events on the website and Thuy is looking towards the future:

We hope to have English on the site but we’re not focused on foreign audiences yet, we’re also expanding into Indonesia, which has a lot of potential for us.

For the first time since NHN debuted its popular chat app, Line is publicly announcing its quarterly earnings – and it’s a whopper.

Line’s earnings climbed 92 percent from the last quarter to hit JPY 5.82 billion (US$58 million). And a breakdown of where those revenues come from, you ask? Well, 50 percent is from in-app purchases across its 24 different social games, and 30 percent from the 191 stickers that are sold in the chat app. 80 percent of that $58 million came from Japan. That underlines Line’s strength in Japan – but also its reliance on the Japanese market.

Worldwide, Line has over 150 million registered users right now. Most of those users, despite the revenues, are not in Japan. Line has recently been making aggressive moves in Southeast Asia, South Korea, Taiwan, and even the US. But given the numbers, Line will need to work hard on monetizing outside of Japan.

Line’s financial numbers are interesting when compared to its key competitor up in South Korea, KakaoTalk, which reported $45 million in revenue and $7 million profit for 2012 at out Startup Asia event earlier this year. Although the startup KakaoTalk is still catching up to Line, those numbers are hard to ignore. WhatsApp, as tight-lipped as ever, has never revealed its revenue numbers but that hasn’t stopped users on Quora from speculating that its revenue figure must be around $45 million. Over in China, Tencent has been in no hurry to make money from WeChat, and will only start to monetize it later this year with a new social gaming platform.

There’s been some buzz on the Vietnamese internet lately concerning Nhac Cua Tui, one of Vietnam’s premier music listening services. Nhac Cua Tui has two main domains, the .com domain, and the NCT.vn one. Nhac Cua Tui, which means “my music” in Vietnamese, has become famous for its almost Last.fm-like recommendation engine and music distribution channel. The service has been promising enough to receive funding from CyberAgent Ventures early last year.

But the latest controversy concerns Nhac Cua Tui’s NCT.vn domain, which is a platform for game developers and gamers to post their games online to share. It turns out that quite a few of the games posted on the site are unlicensed – meaning they’re pirated. As reported by Ictnews, Nhac Cua Tui has taken the position that they are not a game distributor, but just a platform for sharing.

This has caused a bit of a stir. In fact, licensing and legal issues have been getting more and more serious in the online space here recently, with Coke pulling its ads out of VNG’s Zing, and Bao Moi under fire from local Vietnamese newspapers for stealing content. In my opinion, it’s great. It’s forcing online and offline companies to take patents and copyrights more seriously, and the end result would of course be more support and respect for truly innovative ideas.

In light of this, I called up Nhan The Luan, CEO of Nhac Cua Tui, for more details on Nhac Cua Tui’s position. He said:

The central issue, as mentioned before, is that NCT.vn is a platform not a distribution channel. We’re involved in curation, so it’s not a central issue for us. Of course, what we will do is become more rigorous about what content goes on the platform and what doesn’t.

Over the last six months, I’ve been talking to a lot of people across the tech and startup industries in Vietnam, and after a while, you start to hear the same things. You start to hear a signal in all the noise. And two resounding complaints I’ve heard in the last few months is that computer engineering is going down, and design sucks.

This all may come as a shock to many who view Vietnam as a rising engineering hub and an outsourcing leader, but what we see today are the seeds of a growing trend in Vietnam: bad design and lazy engineering.

Engineers in Vietnam are getting increasingly lazy

When some people compare computer engineering in Vietnam five to ten years ago to now, things have changed. And they’ve changed for the worse. But the biggest change people see is that younger engineers are lazier than the older generation. And the key problem has been that there are way more resources online than there were a decade ago. There are way more libraries, repositories of code from past engineers. This has created a generation of engineers who are more knowledgeable but are weaker coders.

In the past, engineers were forced to figure out the code themselves, and they would have to write it themselves too. This forced engineers to become better thinkers about how the code works and how the software fits together. Now, engineers can just cut and paste code whenever they need it.

This trend is even more so reflected in the products being produced by this generation. The products now aren’t as technically strong. I’ve talked to several leaders in the startup industry off the record, and they’ve said that when you look at websites these days – like e-commerce, online products, etc. – you can see that the products aren’t that deep. They’re easy to make.

All in all, this means innovation is impacted heavily. If engineers don’t know how to tinker, how can they innovate? Now, I’m not sure if this is just the usual older generation looking down on the green and fresh younger generation, but I’ve talked to a handful of companies, and this is a trend that CTOs have mentioned to me as well.

Vietnamese websites are fucking ugly

Another hurdle that faces Vietnamese online startups is design. And it’s a completely different beast from engineering because it has to do more with aesthetics and ethos than with the laziness of engineers. It’s also my personal opinion. But, I won’t point any fingers here, if you look at all of the startups that I’ve written about from Vietnam in the past six months, you’ll find that many of their sites are just plain ugly. And that doesn’t even include the big news sites that everyone frequents.

Take a quick click through Alexa’s top sites in Vietnam, and you’ll see a bunch of ugly sites. This is bad for two reasons: 1) without a strong design aesthetic it’s very difficult to compete globally where, in some cases, a beautiful design makes or breaks user acquisition, and 2) it means entrepreneurs and web developers are not thinking about user experience and user interface. It’s not good for Vietnam, and a design revolution is desperately needed.

Dealing with the two hurdles

So far, the only solution I’ve seen to this problem is education, something that Vietnam is struggling in, but something leaders in the community are working to address in workshops and events. In fact, those issues are two key reasons why people are getting so involved in doing events. But the wheels are in motion and it’s going to take a serious and widespread addressing of the problem – and that doesn’t look to be coming anytime soon. The issues are systemic.

On the other hand, this could signal a shift in focus. If libraries and code are easier to do, this means entrepreneurs can focus more on business and solving problems. The trouble with this argument is that engineering and design are inextricably connected to create an excellent product for the consumer market.

Is this happening across Asia? Or is this just specific to Vietnam? Let us know in the comments!

The observation was made by ‘valeriepieris’ on Reddit a few days ago and underlines Asia’s significance in the world, including in a much broader context:

Additional things I’ve realized: There are more Muslims in the circle than outside of it. There are more Hindus in the circle than outside of it. There are more Buddhists in the circle than outside of it… The circle pulls all of this off while being mostly water and including the most sparsely populated country on earth (Mongolia).

We could add a host more stats to this, in terms of types of governments, cultures, demographics, and so on.

But what are the implications of this for technology companies and startups? With its predominantly young population (with the exception of Japan), the region is ridiculously diverse in terms of different types of markets and consumer bases. That means very competitive. That means a company that is successful in this little circle is going to have to battle it out in various domains. Not unlike ancient tribes battling it out until one eventually dominates. The tribe that eventually dominates usually makes technological advances and has strong cultural values that make it happen. And that’s what we’re already seeing. Japanese companies are attacking Southeast Asia, Southeast Asian companies are attacking each other’s markets, Korean companies are jumping into Japan, and lots more competitive action.

Basically, cosmopolitan Asian has to be more than just ambidextrous. He/she has to be able to adapt to a host of small and large cultures and nations that very often barely resemble each other. He/she has to immediately think internationally.

Silicon Valley, although highly competitive and innovative with a long history of startups, does not face the challenges that Asia must face in order to grow and survive. And that’s the central thing. Silicon Valley is isolated. As diverse as the people in the Valley are, the environment promotes Valley thinking. And the Valley knows it, that’s why we’re starting to see Geeks On A Plane and Unreasonable At Sea, whereby Valley folks attempt to go global. But this is where Asia starts from, not what it’s looking for. And the circle proves it.

Here are a few stats for you to ponder: 24 percent of Vietnam’s search traffic happens on mobile and Vietnam has over 140 million mobile phones in operation (in a country of 90 million). The amount of smartphones shipped in 2012? Four million. And in 2013? An anticipated six million. The mobile market in Vietnam is nascent but growing fiendishly fast. So it’s no wonder that Mobile Day is one of the biggest technology events in the country.

The first Mobile Day was in 2011 and hosted 800 people. In 2012, Mobile Day had over 1,200. This year, Quang Anh, the main organizer who also sets up events like PHP Day and Mobile Monday, expects over 1,800 to 2,000 people in Hanoi and over 1,000 in Ho Chi Minh city. This will be the first year it has ever happened in Ho Chi Minh city. It will be huge, to say the least, with about 3,000 people in total.

The whole point of the event is for the growing mobile community to come together, share experiences and research over the year in the mobile field, and give workshops that push the community forward.

I asked Quang Anh why he thought Mobile Day was so popular, and he said:

One, I think it’s because mobile is a really hot space. Two, the community is very close. And three, in terms of organization, we focus on quality and bringing in content that the audience needs or appreciates. We’re not about promoting or marketing. We invite sponsors but the point is not to advertise their product. Every speech has to be about sharing experience and knowledge. Only about 10 to 15 percent of the talks will touch upon products.

So if you’ve got a free few days, come and check out Mobile Day in Hanoi or Ho Chi Minh city. In Hanoi, it’ll be on the 11th of May and in Ho Chi Minh city on 15th of May. If you can’t make it, please do check out the plethora of presentations that Quang Anh’s put up on slideshare.

I’ve been doing a lot of chat app news in Vietnam lately – the reason is mobile is in a very important growth stage and a lot of foreign and domestic companies want to get in. Just to refresh your memory, let’s go over the latest numbers that I’ve announced so far: KakaoTalk and Line both have one million users in Vietnam, first-mover Viber has 3.5 millions users, WeChat is functionally out of the game, and Whatsapp is unknown.

Now Zalo, the homegrown contender, has hit two million users. It’s a huge coup for VNG and one of the fastest growing periods for a domestic mobile app in Vietnam. According to Vuong Quang Khai, who manages web and mobile at VNG:

Two million users is an important milestone for Zalo. Of course, the mobile internet in Vietnam is just starting and the opportunities are still fresh for mobile services. Our next goal is five million users, which would account for 50 percent of the smartphone market.

Zalo’s breakneck pace can be strongly attributed local support and more significantly, advertising. This has allowed chat apps like Zalo to puncture the market and access smartphone users that may not even be accustomed to using apps on their phones. In many ways, VNG is doing the hard work of educating the smartphone market, a market where many smartphone owners buy smartphones for the novelty more than for the apps and services.

The interesting thing you’ll find in the infographic is Zalo is also getting users abroad, this in part can be attributed to the large population of overseas Vietnamese and, strangely enough, Vietnamese wives of Korean husbands. The app will come out with an English version in the next few months, which will position Zalo in a more global setting. The app is also now in a closed beta testing a calling function.

For more insights on Zalo’s growth, check out the infographic, which has some interesting insights into mobile growth in Vietnam.

Today, with e-commerce sites on the inevitable, aggressive rise in Vietnam, food delivery has been a bit forgotten, so let’s get a lens on the top four food delivery sites in Vietnam. Later, we’ll be interviewing every one of these sites and looking at their growth and models, but for today, let’s just take a close look at the stats. Of course, each competitor wasn’t willing to share all their numbers, but we could glean a few things.

1. Vietnammm

The first one to hit the market by just a few months in February 2011. The site has over 400 restaurants and counting, and processes over 20,000 orders per month. According to Jochem Lisser, CEO of Vietnammm, Iin the beginning, it was mostly foreigners, but now Vietnamese users are beginning to make a serious share of the orders.” Vietnammm started here in Ho Chi Minh city but also operates in Hanoi and Danang, Vietnam’s major northern and central cities. Vietnammm has a significant market lead in Ho Chi Minh city.

2. Eat.vn

Just months after Vietnammm was launched, Eat.vn also made it onto the scene. Eat.vn currently has 500 restaurant partners. The total sales across Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh city today are “a few billion VND (about US$100,000) every month” according to Anders Palm, the original founder of Eat.vn. Eat.vn was acquired by VC Corp last year. Eat.vn was also an early market leader in Hanoi, after seeing Vietnammm’s early rise in Ho Chi Minh city.

3. HungryPanda

A newcomer to the market, and backed by Rocket Internet, it has had a startlingly fast start in the country with 800 total restaurants and soon to be launching a mobile app. The site has only been in Vietnam for about a year and is pretty strongly focused on Vietnamese customers since 70 percent of its customers are locals. It’ll be interesting to watch HungryPanda compete with Eat.vn and Vietnammm.

4. Goimon.vn

The only non-foreign competitor in this list is Goimon.vn, which launched in November 2011. Currently Goimon.vn only has 150 restaurants as part of its coverage, but unlike the others it allows individuals like you or me to sell our favorite dishes via the platform. Currently, the site gets up to 1,000 to 5,000 unique visits per day and competes almost exclusively in the Vietnamese space.

Final Thoughts

So we can see that Eat.vn and Vietnammm, which were both started by expats living in Vietnam, first started with the overseas crowd, whereas HungryPanda, which is a foreign competitor with significant execution and financial backing and Goimon.vn, a Vietnamese competitor, are both going for the local Vietnamese market. But the key is, everybody is now looking more and more towards this country’s market, which has the ability to scale – whereas foreign consumers living in Vietnam are a relatively small market (liberally estimated to be under 200,000 nationwide).

The Vietnamese growth area makes sense to me, since Eat.vn and Vietnammm have a very secure market in the foreign market, it will be hard for HungryPanda to tackle their sector. The Vietnamese market is also huge.

I reached out to Hotmeal.vn, which is also founded by Vietnamese people, but the team did not respond. Its market share is also relatively small so it’s not clear if they will be able to compete with the big and incumbent players listed here.

In Vietnam, taxis are everywhere. Step off the airplane, and that’s one of the most accessible forms of transportation. But that doesn’t make it a comforting or a secure place. All the street smart Vietnamese folk know: only take Mai Linh and Vinasun. They’re the trustworthy taxis; everyone else will take you for a spin around the city, charge you the extra dollar, and send you on your way. It’s a common thing in Vietnam.

Of course, locals don’t get taken advantage of because they know the streets, but foreigners and expats are easy marks. This is exactly where Tappxi wants to help.

It’s an Android app that allows you to book taxis and also, according to Iris Ancares, one of the members of the seven person Spanish and Vietnamese team:

With the help of the application, foreigners can avoid common language misunderstandings with local taxi drivers when asking for the destination address. The application also calculates the most effective route and computes the average fare in order to detect rogue taxi drivers and scams in the route pricing, which is a big problem in Vietnam.

So, basically, if a taxi driver is taking me for a spin onto unknown streets, I can pull out Tappxi and say “Hey, this is the wrong way, don’t gyp me. I know the route and the real price.”

Currently, Tappxi doesn’t have any agreement with any taxi companies but features MaiLinh and Vinasun because they are currently the most trusted companies. The team also hopes to add more companies it deems to be trustworthy.

I played around with the app a bit and it’s really simple to use and useful, especially for estimating the real cost of a fare. It also had the text in Vietnamese for telling the taxi driver where to go. In other words, this is super useful for tourists and expats who aren’t good in Vietnamese and don’t want to get gypped by dishonest taxi drivers.

If you want to check out the Android app, you can check it out here. The iOS version is coming soon.

In Vietnam, COD is huge. What do you think of Vietnam’s cash economy, and where does online payment factor into that?

Binh: In my opinion, beating COD in the near future is not realistic as you cannot build Rome in one night – especially as it means educating mass habits. NganLuong however cooperates and hence co-exists with COD by a strategic partnership with ShipChung.vn, the first and only shipping gateway in Vietnam that connects to leading shipping companies and then – through an open API – lets every e-commerce website automate shipping fee calculation, shipping orders, and COD processes. In this partnership, NganLuong serves as an online bank that helps ShipChung in settlement of seller’s cash into their eWallet account, so the whole COD payment volume still goes through us. By this way we do not compete but utilize COD to grow e-commerce in a strong and united ecosystem, NganLuong has become the first and only online payment platform that supports cash.

In the future, where is online payment headed in Vietnam?

Binh: I believe online payment in Vietnam will stay at the intersection of the three strategic markets which are: e-commerce payment, which will be worth billions in the future, digital goods payment, which will be worth $1 billion in 2015 according to VINASA, and mobile payment, which is a growing trend.

In the beginning, how did you grow NganLuong, especially in 2008 when you started it up? It must have been difficult with such a nascent market, right?

Binh: As we needed payment/escrow function for our e-commerce sites and there were no one that could meet our requirements, so we became impatient and I decided to develop our own solution, both for ourselves and other e-commerce sites. It was important that we were the first to support offline payment channels like bank transfer, ATM, escrow that other players didn’t have. My tactic at that time was: we have very limited funding, we cannot compete by cash with other players, and also we need to take control of our own platform, so why don’t we develop a very simple version first. It was about lean startup – learn and change. And then we introduced better versions later, as timing is very important. From 2008 until now, there have been many models that have risen and fallen alongside NganLuong, many of them have spent millions of dollars on models that haven’t worked. So there’s something to Binh’s method.

What were the key factors that allowed you to be successful where others failed?

Binh: PeaceSoft group’s experience from many Internet-related portfolios (over 12 with an above 80 percent success rate) has so far has shown that money (aka: investment) is not necessary. The most important things are:

1. Understanding the market and nature behind every action that you take.
2. Having your own unique innovation to differentiate – not copycat blindly.
3. Bootstrapping your costs.
4. Executing in the most optimized way.

These points are absolutely crucial for surviving in the Vietnamese market.

There are some interesting lessons here for folks interested in getting involved with e-commerce and payment in Vietnam. Basically, instead of working to destroy COD, NganLuong incorporated it into a delivery system. This is probably one reason why GHN, which specializes in delivery and cash-on-demand payment, is one of the more promising startups in Vietnam. NganLuong’s current innovations won’t stop there. Binh says they will try to stay on top of this by introducing two new payment methods later this year. Binh also cites that NganLuong was able to leverage the power of the e-commerce ecosystem that was already available via Peacesoft, and this was key to the success of NganLuong. This is an important factor for doing business in Vietnam where much of a success is built on top of relationships and leveraging ecosystems. With access to customers via eBay.vn, ChoDienTu.vn and his other properties, he could push users onto the payment platform.

Lately, we’ve been focusing quite a bit on e-commerce and startups in Vietnam’s mobile market, especially smartphones, but we have yet to take a close look at the tablet market in Vietnam. And for good reason, the tablet market is nowhere near as aggressive as smartphones but some of the latest growth indicators reveal that it’s faster than you think. Research firm IDC revealed that last year, tablet growth hit 110 percent. This is in contrast to smartphone growth, which actually dropped four percent last year.

Currently, Apple still sits on top of the market. Research from the second quarter of last year revealed that the iPad still leads with sales rising 170 percent. At last count, Apple holds 78 percent of the tablet market.

There’s no surprise there, thus far, Android has yet to deliver a full size tablet that contests the iPad. Vietnam, which is hyper brand conscious, of course follows Apple. Android on one side, is seen as a hacker’s phone, but on the other side, is also seen as a poor man’s operating system. With Apple’s prices, it’s no wonder. But that hasn’t stopped a new market from appearing: low-end tablets.

Earlier this year, FPT, by Vietnam’s biggest tech giant, said that it plans to ship 600,000 own-branded Android phones, priced at around $200, this year and this is only the beginning. For those not in the know, FPT numbers over 10,000 engineers and has its hand in everything from telecom, outsourcing, software development, ICT education, and manufacturing. The BiPad produced by PI Vietnam, priced at around VND 2 million ($100) is one of the first of many steps in the direction of

But let’s all calm down, although some of these numbers do appear favorable, in 2011, only 120,000 tablets were thought to be sold in Vietnam. Thus, if the growth rates are correct, Vietnam has still not broken one million tablets sold per year. That’s in stark contrast to millions of smartphones sold every year. I think this is not an isolated example in Vietnam, across Southeast Asia, tablets are lagging, because consumers needs to catch up with smartphones first before they start considering tablets.

From a collection by artist Nhat Le on the differences between Hanoi and Saigon.

Vietnam, for the last century, has been a tale of two cities. Hanoi is the cultural capital, full of lakes, and with distinct cold and hot seasons. Ho Chi Minh city is the economic stronghold, with its access to the Mekong river delta and its two seasons: hot and hotter. In the north, the culture is characterized by some as being more stand-offish, traditional, and formal, whereas in the south, the culture is considered to be more open, money-hungry, and casual. Sometimes, when I go to Hanoi, I feel like I’m entering a completely different country.

It’s commonly known in Vietnam’s startup circles that Hanoi generally produces more engineers, and those engineers are generally more talented, whereas Ho Chi Minh city produces much better business-minded entrepreneurs. But how deep does this go? When you look at the prominent startups that are coming out of the two cities, you immediately see the difference.

Ho Chi Minh city: identifying markets and leveraging people

Southerners are generally business-minded, market-oriented, and relationship-building types. Technology is usually not the strong suit.

In Ho Chi Minh city, there are two big success stories we can look at that exemplify these southern traits: VNG, Vietnam’s premier tech company, and Nhom Mua, Vietnam’s runaway daily deals success.

VNG, with Le Hong Minh at the helm, went into gaming and made its money by selling vouchers in coffee shops. But it’s a classic example of what characterizes the thinking of southerners: identifying a market, building a team around solving the problem in that market, and building a company around that. Minh not only loved gaming, but he saw the opportunity there. What was key to VNG’s success was building relationships with a large assortment of coffee shops, arranging deals with games for licensing. VNG is the epitome of southern success.

Nhom Mua also follows suit. But it also reveals another side of Ho Chi Minh city – a culture influenced by Vietnamese overseas. Ho Chi Minh city continues to have strong ties with overseas Vietnamese (a handful of Vietnam’s outsourcing companies are managed or owned by overseas Vietnamese). Tom Tran, who started Nhom Mua is no exception. And like VNG, he identified an opportunity – a lack of a significant daily deals site in Vietnam – and hired a team to execute it.

Many of the bigger and smaller tech-related and tech companies in Ho Chi Minh city also follow this trend. What you’ll also see down in Ho Chi Minh city is a more entrepreneurial mindset, a more money mindset, which also translates to more hype and people starting startups because they can. But it also indicates an ability to identify and create markets.

Hanoi: the engineering minded forge into markets

Some have cited Hanoi’s software engineering prowess to its greater respect for education, and others because of a more careful culture. But whatever it may be, many of the top founders of northern companies have engineering backgrounds rather than business ones.

Ngan Luong, which MOL recently took a stake in, is an example of this engineer/founder story. Nguyen Hoa Binh is an engineer by trade and he also started Peacesoft, the main holding company for Ngan Luong, in university from the engineering side. Eventually it became a full-fledged company. It’s also an indication of one of Hanoi’s key traits, engineers stick around for a long time; Peacesoft has been in the startup game for 13 years now. Engineers in Hanoi in general, not just at Peacesoft, tend to continue to code for the companies they work for. Ho Chi Minh city, by contrast, looks like tadpoles and frogs jumping from one lily pad to the next.

Appota, one of Vietnam’s hottest mobile startups, is another poignant picture of engineering a solution to a problem which then turns into a company. Do Tuan Anh, who started out hacking away at iPhones ever since the first iPhone came out, slowly turned his hacking knowledge and experience into a mobile distribution company. Classic Hanoi: start solving a problem, and eventually turn it into a company.

Hanoi’s also got a reputation for being a harder and more difficult lifestyle, whereas Ho Chi Minh city’s lifestyle is more affluent. Some have cited the lushness of the Mekong delta rice fields down south and the barren toughness of northern weather for these key differences. Either way, it’s bred a mentality that is much more careful and hardy. Although Hanoians are less willing to go out for a coffee and bullshit about news and trends, they’re much more solid when they do decide to make a move.

A tale of two cities together

In addition to the above, there are a few comparisons worth mentioning. Some have noted that Ho Chi Minh city’s English level is above Hanoi’s level. A lack of bilingual events in Hanoi underlines this fact. In fact, in general, Hanoi lags behind on events compared to Ho Chi Minh city, which is arguably much more hungry for community. It’s also been noted that Hanoian tech consumers are just not as good as consumers in Ho Chi Minh city, they’re more fickle and not as interested in trying new things, whereas folks from down south are noted for trying out new apps and products, thus making it easier to test out new products.

Of course, these are generalizations and stereotypes, and there are exceptions to the rules, but these trends indicate the cultures that foster the types of startups that you will see coming out of the two cities. As Paul Graham says, “in a hundred subtle ways, the city sends you a message”. Or two cities, in this case. Hanoi sends a message of carefulness and solidity, Ho Chi Minh city sends a message of openness and money.

In a lot of ways, these two cities are really compatible with each other. They make up for each other’s shortcomings and they are what generally define Vietnam’s budding startup scene. How they compensate for each other and mature will be a key factor in deciding Vietnam’s startup future in the region. It’s also worth noting that Da Nang, Vietnam’s most aggressive central city, is quickly becoming a new hub, but it’s still got at least five years to go before it even come anywhere near what Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh city have.

Thanks to Ninh Nguyen at Pandora.vn, Andy Nguyen at CyberAgent Ventures, Hai Pham, Hoang Nam Hai at Mana.vn, Mike Tran at Keewi.me, and Trung Anh at IDG for their input to this article.

In Vietnam’s growing startup and outsourcing market, it’s been a tough task to get the best software engineering talent. On one side, outsourcing companies are basically brain-draining all the best talent, and on the other side companies pay cheap for engineers whose quality reflects their price.

In the online recruitment market, we’ve got big folks like Vietnamworks and Kiemviec, both recently acquired by foreign companies, and tiny interesting code competition projects like Geeky.vn. Plus, since late 2011, there’s been VietnamGeeks.

I talked with VietnamGeeks CEO John Vuu about his company, which helps IT companies recruit engineers, and asked him for some insights into the engineering culture in Vietnam. For John, who is from the US, this is not his first startup, having founded a dating website called PebbleClub in the States before coming to Vietnam. The dating site didn’t make it, but that’s par for the course. Failing is a rite of passage in entrepreneurship and John has since moved on to VietnamGeeks.

Today, VietnamGeeks lists anywhere from 350 to 400 new job posts per month from Vietnamese companies as well as foreign companies, a number that has doubled since last year, and has a catalog of over 6,000 resumés. The number of job listings has doubled since last year.

According to John, engineers really need to polish their CV skills:

In just a few years, the scene has grown a lot. Engineers’ resumes have improved and there’s more people in the scene.

Lots of engineers here assume that they should have a resume that is full of skills, but they don’t realize they need to get a really specific skill that they can build a career on top of. You can’t be good at everything.

Indeed, they’ve had to turn away many resumés because software developers generally don’t know how to write one.

Going forward, John is looking to pack in more community elements for the site like a forum and something similar to StackOverflow so that software developers can share knowledge and get to know each other. He wants VietnamGeeks to be the central place for people to go to for engineering jobs. This will be an interesting path as the company must compete directly with bigger sites like VietnamWorks and KiemViec who have larger portfolios of resumes but don’t have a focus on technology.

Vietnam’s engineering culture

Recently, I calculated with a few engineering buddies of mine that there are about 50,000 engineers in Ho Chi Minh city (just a guesstimate) and John confirmed for me that there are about 6,000 engineers graduating every year across Vietnam. In Hanoi, there might be about 60,000 engineers, since it has a reputation for producing good student in this field.

For this group, John sees a few key setbacks:

In Vietnam, there’s this thinking, possibly from family values, that if I’m an engineer in three years, I should be promoted to manager. They don’t want to focus and become good engineers. But they don’t realize that 10 years in Vietnam is probably equal to five years in the States of experience. Also, many engineers are in their 20s, that means people like system architects and product managers are harder to find. The really talented folks are often picked up very fast.

It’s clear that although becoming more aggressive and competitive, Vietnam’s engineering culture is still quite young, but that comes with the territory of being a developing nation. With over 100,000 engineers in the country, it’ll take some time to get really mature.

I’m a big fan of collaborative consumption startups like Airbnb, Zipcar, and Coursera because of their disruptive potential in incumbent markets – and especially the potential to open up new experiences for consumers. Triip is one such company in the tourism space, allowing anybody with a tour idea to create their own package and sell to interested tourists.

How Triip began

The idea actually started with Lam Ha, one of the Triip co-founders, back when she was in university and started a student group called Saigon Hotpot. The group of English-savvy students would take tourists around town and show them the significant sights around Ho Chi Minh city while also getting a chance to practice English with foreigners. The students did it pro-bono and within four years it shot up to the top spot of things to do on Tripadvisor. After university, slowly the idea of turning this into a viable business model made more sense.

With its team of nine – five of them being co-founders – they’ve slowly built up Triip into its current beta version. Today, Triip has approved 86 total tours. But being in beta and with no spending on marketing so far, only seven people have taken tours so far. This will certainly change when Triip goes out of beta in June as well as releases an iPhone app.

Elaborating more on the future strategy, Ha says:

We’re really focused on excellent customers service at this point, so we’re going to release Triipbook in the next few weeks, which teaches Triip creators how to create excellent tours. We’ve done workshops in Vietnam and Cambodia and saw that potential creators were really excited to create tours but had trouble coming up with them.

Already, Triip has a lot of very unique tours that you won’t find in traditional holiday packages. There are tours on Zen in Saigonnother on sand painting, and crowd-pleasers like a ride through the Sapa mountains with local Hmong children. Ha sees tours like these as central to Triip’s competitive advantages:

Although professional tour guides will offer very smooth and professional tours, it’s young people who have specific passions for their country or city that bring out really unique tours like our sand painting tour.

How it works

Generally, the way it works is someone like you or me submits a tour that we think is interesting to Triip. The Triip moderators will check if the tour violates any of their policies (Triip has rejected about 10 to 12 tours already due to such violations). Then the potential customers, aka tourists, will pay Triip for the tour. This money will be held by Triip until after the tour is finished and the customer is satisfied. After this, Triip distributes 90 percent of the earnings to the tour guide and keeps 10 percent.

Triip creators can choose the days they are available to do a tour, how much time each tour is, and how much a tour costs. Triip is also developing a service where tourists can actually request a tour from tour guides. There was one special case where some tourists wanted to see inside schools, and surprisingly a tour guide popped up that took them around middle and high schools in Ho Chi Minh city.

Future plans

At the end of May, Triip’s founders plan to put Triip up on Indiegogo for crowdfunding and marketing, and in June they’ll be coming out of beta – plus there’s the upcoming iPhone app called WikiTriip. The app, which takes data from Wiki Vonyage, will allow users to search for information about places they are visiting and also will be data crawled by Triip to see what users are interested in visiting when traveling. This data will be used to suggest and design tours for travelers.

Currently, Triip operates in six countries including Vietnam, Myanmar, Laos, Cambodia, Thailand, and Indonesia.

Check out the video to see people’s experiences with Triip:

If there was any doubt that Japan is still a hot market for startups, this news should clear any doubts. Yahoo Japan and SoftBank Capital are joining forces to pump $20 million into helping early-stage mobile and social American companies expanding into Japan. This will certainly be good news for startups in the Valley who have been eyeing the Eight Islands.

Toshiaki Chiku, who is now heading the US operations via SoftBank’s office in New York, had this to say:

Yahoo Japan is making a big effort to expand our venture capital impact in the United States, and we are firmly committed to helping companies at all growth stages get into the Japanese market. Japan can be challenging for many U.S. companies, and given our scale and affiliation with SoftBank, we’re in a great position to help them grow and succeed.

SoftBank Capital is the venture branch of one of Japan’s largest telcos, SoftBank Corporation (TYO:9984), and thus has strong interests in promoting products and services that will be used on top of its wires. Yahoo Japan is set to report its Q4 earnings today and mobile advertising has long been its largest division, contributing to 20 percent of its earnings. Yahoo Japan is also Japan’s leading search engine and reaches over 80 percent of Japan’s Internet users through its many services. Yahoo Japan also went in with GREE Ventures to invest $2 million into social gaming just a few months ago.

SoftBank has been quite aggressive in expanding US startups in Japan. Not only did it invest early in Yahoo Japan in 1995 but also recently announced another $250 million to create the PrinceVille Fund aimed at getting US startups competing in Asia. SoftBank’s already got some considerable success with exiting companies. It sold Bluefin Labs to Twitter, BuddyMedia to Salesforce, HuffingtonPost to AOL, Hyperpublic to Groupon, and OMGPOP to Zynga. It’s looking to do the same in Japan.

Given the above interests, it makes sense for the two companies to double down on mobile and encourage innovation. Japan’s mobile consumers are also quite willing to pay for mobile services as evidenced by it being the top mobile ad market until late last year.

Full Press Release below:

SoftBank Capital and Yahoo! JAPAN Announce Partnership and $20M Fund Investment to Help Bring More U.S. Startups to the Japanese Market

Japan’s leading Internet company to fund early-stage companies via SoftBank Capital and help startups drive business in Japan

New York, NY & Tokyo, Japan – April 24, 2013 – Yahoo Japan Corp. (“Yahoo!JAPAN”), Japan’s largest web portal and one of the largest e-commerce platforms, and SoftBank Capital, a venture group affiliated with Japan’s SoftBank Corp. (“SoftBank”), today announced an investment and partnership designed to help U.S. startups of all sizes in everything from early-stage funding to later-stage expansion.

SoftBank Capital’s early-stage Technology Fund ’10 has been investing $100 million on behalf of SoftBank, which has anchored SoftBank Capital’s investing activities since 1995. Yahoo! JAPAN, a joint venture between U.S. Internet company Yahoo! Inc. and SoftBank, has invested $20 million into the early stage fund. This complements the $250 million PrinceVille Investments, L.P. fund (“PrinceVille Fund”) announced in February.

In addition to its investment, Yahoo! JAPAN is announcing Toshiaki Chiku as its head of U.S. operations, where he will oversee investments and partnerships while working out of Softbank Capital’s Manhattan office.

“Yahoo! JAPAN is making a big effort to expand our venture capital impact in the United States, and we are firmly committed to helping companies at all growth stages get into the Japanese market,” Chiku said. “Japan can be challenging for many U.S. companies, and given our scale and affiliation with SoftBank Corp., we’re in a great position to help them grow and succeed.”

Yahoo! JAPAN’s influence in the Japanese market allows its partners to fully harness the market’s opportunities. Every month, Yahoo! JAPAN reaches more than 80percent* of Japan’s Internet users through its services. Criteo, the global leader in performance display advertising, recently began an expansion into Asia after completing a Series D round with investors including SoftBank Capital and Yahoo! JAPAN.

“Our partnerships with SoftBank Capital and Yahoo! JAPAN have been crucial in helping us establish our presence in Asia, with Yahoo! JAPAN enabling us to rapidly scale our business by tapping into one of the largest sources of premium inventory on Japan’s leading Internet portal,” Criteo CEO JB Rudelle said.

Yahoo! JAPAN’s partnership with SoftBank Capital is one of many developments further cementing Softbank Capital’s reputation as the premier investment partner for U.S. companies looking to expand into Asia. The fund has been investing on behalf of SoftBank, which has brought many U.S. companies to the Japanese market starting with Yahoo! JAPAN in 1995. The investment firm recently announced its $250 million PrinceVille Fund designed to help growth-stage entrepreneurs and their businesses compete in and expand into Asia.

Yahoo! JAPAN and SoftBank Capital are looking to invest in companies in the mobile applications, social media, e-commerce, online advertising, gaming and cloud computing spaces. SoftBank Capital’s previous exits include Bluefin Labs acquired by Twitter, Buddy Media acquired by Salesforce.com, Huffington Post acquired by AOL, Hyperpublic acquired by Groupon and OMGPOP acquired by Zynga.

“We like to say that our expertise and partnerships give our portfolio companies an ‘unfair advantage’ when it comes to growth opportunities in Asian markets,” said Ron Fisher, Managing Partner of SoftBank Capital. “Partners like Yahoo! JAPAN allow us to deliver on that message and become a preferred partner that can help our portfolio companies forge the relationships necessary to further expand their international presence.”

Source: Nielsen (NetView JP), brand level data, access from home and office using PCs（excluding Internet application, February 2013

If you’re a Vietnamese mom and you need diapers, you need look no further than Taembe.vn. The new e-commerce site, quietly released two weeks ago, focuses very specifically on online sales of diapers.

The concept is so simple. But as we learned at Startup Asia earlier this month, sometimes the simplest ideas are the most successful. According to Tomo Huynh, Taembe.vn’s CTO:

You could say we focus on delivering diapers to doors, and if you’ve ever seen a woman carrying a pack of diapers on her bike, you’ll understand why.

Currently in this space there are two big competitors to Taembe.vn including Beyeu.com from IDG’s Project Lana, and Liulo – but both of these companies focus on general baby products whereas Taembe.vn focuses mainly on diapers (though it also sells other baby-related products).

The founding team’s made up of three main people including Tomo, who is also CTO at Alehap.vn, a local travel website; there’s Le Khac Ngan Ha, who previously worked at Vietnam Ventures Group and Brandsfavor.com, and Hien Doan, who used to work for Liulo. They all met at BarcampSaigon, one of the largest tech-related conferences in Ho Chi Minh city, and the three e-commerce aficionados saw an opportunity in this very specialist area. Ngan Ha is confident about the model:

Like Diapers.com, our focus will be on customer service. Customer service in Vietnam is still quite poor, so if we can provide superior customer service, we think we can become number 1 in a short amount of time.”

Taembe.vn already has sales. The company uses GHN for some deliveries but also has an in-house delivery team. Tomo says the startup is also “open to overseas investment from people who understand e-commerce in emerging markets.”

Disclosure: I am a friend of Tomo Huynh and also an organizer of BarcampSaigon. If you would like to read more on our code of ethics, you can find it here.

Remember the Vietnamese Dropbox that I wrote about in January? It just closed its first round of seed funding for an undisclosed amount with the goal of increasing brand awareness in Southeast Asia. Kleii’s also aiming to work more closely with service providers, release applications on all platforms, and then look at series A funding from Silicon Valley.

Today’s seed funders include Do Hoai Nam, CEO of Emotiv and an investor in local Vietnamese crowdfunding site IG9, and Nguyen Hong Hai, CEO of BTIC, plus some other angel investors. BTIC is a technology park located north of Ho Chi Minh city, heavily invested in by the Vietnamese government and aspiring to be Vietnam’s tech hub. It’s also where Kleii’s office is located.

I spoke with Nguyen Tuan Son, CEO of Kleii, for more details on each of the above points. But first, let’s cover some of the most significant stats.

• After 10 months, Kleii’s got 750,000 users. It’s set to get one million users by the end of this year. That’s explosive growth for a startup coming from Vietnam.
• Zero dollars on marketing.
• Kleii transfers five terabytes of data per day.
• Currently Kleii users use it mostly for photo syncing (41 percent), music streaming (27 percent), and video and documents storage (21 percent).
• Kleii’s top users, in descending order, are from: Vietnam, Indonesia, United States, Thailand, Brazil, South Korea, Malaysia, Germany, Australia, Singapore. Indeed, 60 percent of users are in Vietnam.

Son did not reveal current revenue nor the amount of the seed funding but we do know that the startup service has a freemium model like Dropbox where users who want to have more storage pay a fee. But, currently on the freemium model, users can get 50GB for free. That’s way over Dropbox’s initial 2GB.

For increasing brand awareness, Kleii is specifically focusing on Vietnam, Indonesia, Malaysia, and Singapore. In terms of working with service providers, Son would like to work with telecoms, ISPs, and TV providers. He didn’t clarify exact details on this but I speculate that, given Kleii’s strong interest in streaming media and aspirations of becoming the center of users’ entertainment systems, it will be in allowing users to stream more content on their devices.

For future platforms, Kleii is set to release Android and Windows phone apps in the next two to three weeks and an iOS app one month from now. We will keep you posted on those native apps. Up until now, Kleii’s streaming and cloud features have been built exclusively on HTML5.

Despite Facebook’s stringent photo policy, some things always just slip through the cracks. And this time, it’s prostitution.

The police authorities in Hanoi, Vietnam, just caught a prostitution ring leader named Do Thi Huyen (pictured right), who has been putting up her photos and photos of her “colleagues” on Facebook to get customers.

Huyen is 20 years old. After customers chose the girl they like, Huyen would let them know the price, and customers would be required to take the girls to a hotel of 3 stars or more. During the time that police were watching Huyen’s operation, they discovered that she was charging VND 4 million ($200) and pocketing VND 1 million ($50) for her advertising services.

The police had been watching her operation since early April and finally caught Huyen and one of her colleagues as they were taking two customers to a hotel. The site and Facebook profiles have since been taken down.

Currently, the fines for prostitution in this case are pretty low because the evidence on Facebook is not substantial enough for a full charge. They were charged anywhere from VND 100,000 ($5) to VND 300,000 ($15) so it’s not a heavy deterrent for social media prostitution. But this is one of the first cases for prostitution showing up on Facebook in Vietnam.

Pictures that Huyen posted onto Facebook of her “colleagues”.

One of my favorite local Vietnamese tech sites, Pandora.vn, just came out with an interesting report saying that in Vietnam e-books haven’t even hit one percent of the market.

Frankly, I’m not surprised. I had to go to Singapore to get my Kindle Paperwhite. Kindles in Vietnam are either sold out or nobody’s heard of them. For e-readers like Nook, they’re even harder to find. This is despite e-commerce companies like Tiki.vn promoting the sale of Kindles and companies like Alezaa promoting the use of e-books.

From 2010 to 2012, there have been some minor efforts from the Ministry of Education in digitizing textbooks and training materials. But companies like VTC and Go.vn, the government’s social network, have also created initiatives, but maintaining copyrights have been a big hurdle.

This is all in stark contrast to e-books in the US, where last year e-books took 22 percent of the total book spending. I think Vietnam specifically struggles with two things as far as e-books are concerned:

• There are just no e-readers around. In all the local electronics stores, they’re ridiculously hard to find. Merchants don’t think customers don’t want e-readers and customers aren’t buying them. Not to mention, tablets aren’t showing as much aggressive growth as smartphones are.
• Alezaa is one of the only platforms to distribute e-books – but it’s experiencing copyright issues, as are the other platforms. But the real issue is just like iTunes over Napster, this platform needs to be easier for people to buy, because some customers are always willing to pay.

Until these two things are solved, a kind of chicken and egg problem is occuring, e-books will continue to fail to gain traction. The Vietnamese e-book market needs to take a page out of the playbook of Ookbee, the startup e-bookstore from Thailand, and build a model that works for an increasingly mobile-oriented population.

MOL, one of the biggest payment companies in Southeast Asia, whose annual revenue is $300 million, is acquiring a 50 percent stake in NganLuong, one of Vietnam’s top online payments systems. Like Paypal, NganLuong works like a payment wallet solution which also includes other payment options like escrow, airtime, and credit card processing. But NganLuong does even more than that by allowing customers to deposit money into their NganLuong accounts via various sources including bank account, cash, post, ATM kiosk, and telco SMS before merchants withdraw the money.

NganLuong has been at the top of the online payment battle in Vietnam for a while now. It’s connected to over 10,000 merchants, three leading mobile operators, and 24 banks in Vietnam, meaning that it has one of the largest reach over the Vietnamese payment market.

Payment in Vietnam has been slow to take off mainly because cash-on-demand remains the most convenient and de facto payment method for merchants and consumers. Credit cards are nowhere. So it’s hard to tell when or how online payment will really take off in Vietnam. MOL investing in NganLuong could provide the necessary capital for the two companies to market and educate the market in online payments. MOL is also heavily interestedin gaming, and Vietnam is a huge gaming market. At this point, NganLuong is one Vietnam’s best bets (there’s also Payoo but it hasn’t gained much traction as yet and the website is ugly) at making online payment ubiquitous. If it’s successful, many markets would open up for Vietnamese startups in online education, e-commerce, content, and mobile apps.

That’s the third major acquisition of a well-known domestic startup in Vietnam this year. In February, CareerBuilder acquired VON, and earlier this month En-Japan acquired Vietnamworks. Suffice to say, Vietnam’s online space is hot. Companies want to get in early and secure market share before it explodes.

NganLuong is the online payments unit of Peacesoft, which has a variety of domains across the e-commerce space including:

• Chodientu.vn: the leading B2B2C domestic marketplace coordinated with eBay.
• Ebay.vn: a C2C and B2C platform.
• Prostore: an online retail solution for small to medium-sized enterprises.
• ShipChung.vn: a cash-on-delivery delivery website.
• NaiMa.vn: a luxury fashion e-store.
• AdNet.vn: an open affiliate advertising platform.
• SaoBang.vn: a classified-ads portal.

Thus, NganLuong has a particularly far reach across the online landscape of Vietnam and will allow MOL to spread its wings further in the huge yet difficult market of Vietnam’s over 30 million internet users.

We’ll be grabbing an interview with NganLuong’s founder and CEO, Nguyen Hoa Binh, later this week, so we’ll be sure to ask for details on MOL’s stake and plans.

In Vietnam, we’ve got lots of homegrown daily deals and e-commerce sites, as well as a few foreign companies like Rocket Internet and China’s Vancl entering the fray. So it’s pretty hard to find unique models like Shopby in the mix.

Shopby, which is basically a social commerce site directed at daily deals based in Hanoi, Vietnam, beta-launched in April 2012, and fully launched in December 2012. It’s a team of nine people. With currently over 11,000 users and approximately 500 to 5,000 visits per day, depending on deals and timing. It has 30 deals at a time and each lasts anywhere from one day to a month, mostly focused on fashion and food and beverage. The website is actually a pet project of SmartOSC, whose main business is building projects with Magento, an e-commerce platform. E-commerce is in their blood.

The idea of social commerce as used by Shopby, according to CEO Hieu Nguyen, is as he says:

A central place to bring people together who are buying the same things. People can make purchases based on interests of others on their social graph. Usually, customers make a decision to buy an item based on recommendations and interests from the people most relevant to them.

Outside of the social graph side of things, Shopby also allows users to follow shops they like and, of course, follow friends. Users can create their own new account, but mainly they use Facebook to login.

Shopby does have some competitors in the space, including Zaia.vn and Guu.vn but they don’t exactly approach it from the same social perspective. With Shopby, businesses and users can upload their own deals directly onto the site – these deals are only displayed if they are relevant to users in their social circle. Businesses can check statistics on user behavior and reaction to their deals. Looking to the future, Hieu says:

Currently, we’re in phase one where users can post deals they like. But in phase two, we’ll allow users to request deals. Thus requesting discounts on certain items in a shop. Phase two will come out in June.

At the moment, Shopby is in its growth phase so revenue is nil. In the future, Hieu is looking to grow it into a marketing platform, charging businesses for listings – and there’s a current stealth model for phase two of the company.

Last month, there was a considerable amount of online chatter about Vietnam’s prime minister planning to throw down $200 million to build a social network for the youth of Vietnam. Yeah, that’s more than the amount Coc Coc plans to pump into beating Google in Vietnam in the next decade.

It still remains unclear where the $200 million will come from and how the Vietnamese government plans to allocate that money to building such a huge and possibly bloated product. It’s also unsettled what the goal of such a project would be. Either way, we do know that it’s been allocated to the Ministry of Information and Communication.

In the midst of the rumors, some people have speculated that the as yet unlaunched Thanh Nien Vietnam, which literally means Vietnam’s Youth and appears to be a website for the government-sponsored national youth organization, was actually the $200 million project. But ICTnews.vn just debunked this. It’s not the $200 million project.

According to the Thanh Nien Vietnam website, the project won’t launch for another 253 days. Who knows what they’re doing for over a year when it took Zuckerberg one month to code the first version of Facebook. But I guess they want to be careful. It’s also not clear yet what the features for this website will be beyond what the CEO Le Quang Tu Do says is to bring the youth together in meaningful ways.

But there’s still no official word on the $200 million project and if it’s really starting up.

The Vietnamese government has made some significant steps in getting more involved in social media, like with Go.vn, which previously required Vietnamese citizens to enter their national identity numbers in order to get an account, but has since slowly spun off into a super platform that includes music, e-commerce, video, news, and education. Zing Me from VNG, on the other hand, still remains the biggest teen social network.

This week’s been pretty eventful for China, especially as far as money goes. It’s been lots of funding and lots of recorded revenue. That’s good news for the big market.

1. China’s LightInTheBox Files for $86 Million US IPO to Expand its E-Commerce Business

One of the many IPO’s that will come this year in China, LightInTheBox is a platform for Chinese manufacturers (of many kinds of items) to sell to overseas shoppers or small businesses.

2. Baidu Takes a Dig at Qihoo With Launch of Antivirus Apps in China

The war rages on as Baidu attacks Qihoo’s key market. Qihoo released a search engine late last year, so it’s getting heated between the two.

3. Yodo1 Gets $5 Million in Funding From Singtel Innov8, Helps Games Crack the China Market

The interesting Yodo1, which focuses on building games-as-a-service, just got a bunch of funding from Singtel Innov8. Games, of course, are a lucrative market across Asia, and China especially.

4. China Names Porn Offenders That Should be Shut Down, Apple’s App Store Included

This is a bit of odd news as Apple has had a long time reputation of banning porn from its platforms. This puts even more pressure on Apple in China, which is already facing a branding issue in China.

5. CNNIC: Chinese E-commerce Market Exceeded $190 Billion in 2012

Well, that’s just a big number, and within a few years, it will soon exceed the American market. I’m willing to bet that it’ll even beat the American market next year!

6. Kaifu Lee: Rumors of Weibo’s Death Are Exaggerated

This is good news for Weibo, which some thought would be taken down by WeChat and the chat app wave. As Charlie has remarked in the past, Weibo’s demise wouldn’t be a good thing for China.

7. China’s Ten Most Popular PC Games (March 2013)

Pretty straightforward, here’s a roundup of the top most popular PC games in China.

8. What Games Are Chinese Government Officials Playing at Work?

On another note, Chinese officials are also getting into gaming, it seems there’s no avoiding it. Games are hot in China.

9. Baidu-Backed Travel Site Qunar Reportedly Gets $57 Million Funding Round

Here’s another funding story, Qunar, which is a travel startup has just grabbed another huge round of funding. Looks like this market is about to blow up if it hasn’t already.

10. Amazon Rumored to be Starting Kindle Pre-Orders in China Tomorrow

As a big fan of Amazon (I recently bought a new Kindle Paperwhite), this is cool news and indicates that Amazon is looking more at Asia, if the rumors are true, of course.

That’s all for this week, folks. For our full spread of China coverage, you can click here or subscribe to our China RSS.

It’s currently the Hung King holidays here in Vietnam so people are taking a few days days off. But all around the rest of the region the news has been packed, so let’s take a look at what our bloggers selected as the top stories:

Steven’s pick: Chinese State Media: 60% of Consumers Are Starting To Think Apple Sucks

There’s a rather ugly element of Chinese state media patting themselves on the back for a smear campaign well implemented, and this is definitely not a fair piece of market research. But what it does show is that, regardless of the veracity of the numbers, Apple’s rough ride in China this year is far from over.

Charlie’s pick: China Names Porn Offenders tha Should Be Shut Down, Including Apple’s App Store

Chinese state media’s war on Apple continues, and as Steven’s pick above indicates, it seems to be working. But the charges seem to be getting increasingly odd. Porn? On the app store? Not the last time we checked.

Enricko’s pick: Studied Abroad and Returned to Vietnam: Startups That Defy the Brain Drain

Minh wrote a very interesting article about the people who came back to their motherland and seized opportunities there. These people have the advantage of understanding the local culture as well as having educational advantages from studying abroad. Developing countries, or Asia in general, need more of them to grow even faster. Come back and help develop your nation, folks!

Minh’s pick: CNNIC: Chinese E-commerce Market Exceeded $190 Billion in 2012

Almost hitting $200 billion is a huge number. Does that mean by 2015, the e-commerce market in China will be exceeding the USA and Europe? Last year, the US e-commerce market exceeded $200 billion, so China is catching up fast.

Willis’ pick: Tech Entrepreneurship is Brewing Up in Kathmandu, Nepal

We hear so much about tech and startups in Indonesia, Thailand, Singapore, Philippines, Vietnam, Japan, and China etc. This guest post on Nepal’s startup scene is refreshing and a good read. Although one of the Nepali companies I would recommend is Grespr, which seems missing in the article.

Minghao’s pick: Xiaomi Founder Lei Jun on the Pressures and Perils of Doing a Startup

I like Lei Jun’s sharing about his concerns when he started Xiaomi and how fear of failure propelled him towards success. For those who don’t know, Lei Jun is already a successful individual and investor prior to starting phone-maker Xiaomi. Xiaomi has since achieved more than one billion sales revenue in just the first half of 2012 and is recognized as one of the best startups in China.

Youshen and Emily’s pick: Beijing Startup Makes Invisible Masks To Protect You From Air Pollution

Youshen: I am a major fan of when business and technology aim to solve a problem. In this case, I am referring to the respiratory health risks of inhaling the PM2.5 pollution in the air in Beijing, China. With the toxic airborne particulate, Beijing residents are forced to don face masks to protect themselves against the risks of lung cancer, asthma and heart disease. Infipure had gone one step further by designing the mask for both functionality and the user. The “invisible” masks will help make users look good too. Given the documented effects of smog on babies, I am looking forward to Infipure’s upcoming sets for children.

Emily: I personally feel that it might be a revolutionary innovation that could change the way pollution masked are produced from now on. And as Youshen has mentioned, this startup has really made an effort to solve a problem, and in an aesthetically pleasing way.

Vanessa’s pick: It’s Official: Spotify Launches in Singapore, Malaysia, and Hong Kong

When I first received news and told my friends that Spotify was launching in Singapore – all of them rejoiced. It has been a much awaited move for many music fans here in Asia. And as I write this, I’m listening to my favorite Les Misérables soundtrack on Spotify too!

(UPDATED to fix a number of typos throughout the post. Sorry about those).

For other ways of reading us, perhaps try our tailored RSS feeds, or find us within Flipboard.

In Vietnam, the chat app battle is fearsome. Western competitors Whatsapp and Viber face serious opposition from Asian rivals like Line, KakaoTalk, WeChat, and domestic apps like Zalo and soon to be released Wala. Arguably, there’s no real leader right now.

Line, probably one of the sleekest apps in the space is headed and designed by NHN. I sat down with JB Park, the CEO of NHN Vietnam, to talk about where NHN is headed next in Vietnam and was surprised to learn some interesting moves for the coming year and facts about NHN in Vietnam.

Currently in Vietnam, NHN has 70 staff, mainly engineers, and over 250 servers in the country dedicated to Vietnam. The Line chat app has had over 1.5 million downloads so far, although Park did not reveal monthly active users. But what is really interesting is that the 70 staff that NHN has up in Hanoi, Vietnam’s capital, are not working on features for the chat app (that innovation happens back in Japan and Korea where Park says there are teams of Korean, Japanese, Russian, and American engineers working together), but they’re actually working on bringing a new search engine into the Vietnamese market, one of NHN’s other fortes.

That means in Vietnam, NHN is going to be competing in two very significant spaces: chat apps and search.

A quick look at the history of search in Vietnam

If you’ll remember, I recently reported that Coc Coc, a Russian-backed search engine, is looking to pump $100 million into defeating Google in Vietnam, and there’s also another Russian-backed search engine called Wada, who hasn’t gotten as much traction in the market yet. Historically, Vietnam has seen its fair share of search engines that want to be Google:

• In 2006, DFJ VinaCapital invested $2 million on timnhanh.com, which has now shifted into newspaper content crawling.
• In 2007, the Nguyen Hoang Group invested $500,000 in monava.vn, but has since closed down.
• In 2008, Tinh Van company invested $2 million into Xalo.vn, but hasn’t made much headway.
• In 2008, Socbay.com also debuted to great fanfare but also hasn’t gained much traction.

It’s been difficult. Since 2008, no significant players except perhaps Coc Coc have really stepped up to face Google, and Google remains the dominant search engine with over 80 to 90 percent of the search engine market share – and it’s by far the top website in Vietnam. So it’s interesting that NHN is jumping into the Vietnam search war as well. According to Park:

In South Korea, Naver has long been the king of search, soundly dominating Google, which has only had around five percent of market share. So in the next few months, we’ll be releasing our own search engine on the market.

In order for NHN to succeed on the search front, it will have to be proactive in building up its own content. That means coordinating with local companies and organizations that produce information.

The only way that we could be better than Google in South Korea was in working with content distributors and publishers locally, so that’s what we’ll be doing here. The problem in Vietnam is that content is very weak. So we have to look at helping to produce it and get it online.

It’s going to be an interesting journey for NHN’s search in Vietnam. Park didn’t say if the name of the engine would be Naver like in South Korea, but he did say they’re look at building a search app in addition to a website. The challenge moving forward will be if the team of Korean, Japanese and Vietnamese engineers can crack Vietnamese search better than the Russian-Vietnamese teams at Coc Coc.

For startups that are hoping to build products for everybody, here’s a case study that proves the power of focusing on niche, under-served markets.

In Ho Chi Minh city, there are only about 10,000 Japanese expats living here full-time. Across the country, there’s probably no more than 20,000. For the past two years, the Japanese population has seen a spike with Japanese offshoring companies, factories, and tourists taking a bigger interest in Vietnam. Out of this influx, has come PosteVn, a Craigslist-esque site for Japanese expats living and coming to Vietnam.

The site went online in Vietnam in February 2012, and was immediately profitable via its online ads. Taka, the founder and CEO of PosteVn, told me the story:

I used to work in the biggest Japanese magazine in Los Angeles, so when I moved to Vietnam, I knew that there was this real need for Japanese people living abroad. But the market here is saturated with paper magazines. That’s difficult for advertisers who want to do advertising and also paper is one-way interactions. For people living here, they want two-way, they want to communicate.

That’s exactly why PosteVN could experience immediate success in Vietnam. An under-served Japanese community needed to connect. For example, many Japanese businessmen only come to live in Vietnam for three years at a time and they have to get rid of their furniture and they don’t know who to sell or give it to, PosteVN addresses unique problems like these.

Before we even had a website, I just had a small PowerPoint and an idea in my head, and I came to the CEO of Japan Airlines in Vietnam, and I pitched PosteVN. He immediately understood and saw the potential, and gave me two tickets to fly to Japan for our raffle.

PosteVN is a lesson in identifying a problem and solving it. Today, PosteVN has 9,000 users and 50,000 pageviews per month. And it focuses on three main things for the Japanese community: a directory of stores and restaurants, original articles from the PosteVN team like interviews and Japanese recipes made with local ingredients, and a Craigslist clone whose most used features include, motorbikes, furniture, jobs, and community.

In July this year, PosteVN is expanding into Malaysia, and also opening up a new e-commerce website where Vietnamese and Japanese customers can buy exclusive luxury Japanese products. So we’re going to see yet another interesting e-commerce player here in Vietnam’s market from Japan.

Taka says that for Vietnam it’s just the right time:

Starting something like PosteVN in Japan is difficult because of cost, and starting it in countries like Thailand is difficult because of incumbent companies already in this space. Engineers are also cheap and good here. So Vietnam is really ripe.

With Taka’s recent success, he’s able to leverage his success and spin off into other tech prospects. The success of PosteVN is a lesson in identifying very specific problems and solving them. And consequently, making money.

If you’ve been following e-commerce and daily deals in Vietnam, you know that Nhom Mua fell hard late last year due to internal issues. And in the midst of that, Nhom Mua’s original founder, Tom Tran, got ousted. Well, Tom is back, with a new daily deals site to take on Nhom Mua, and it’s called Kay.

For an already bloated daily deals market, where at one point in time over 90 players were vying for the market, it’s an odd shot in the dark for Kay to step in, since it’s going to have to work hard to catch up. Today, there are about four dominant players in Vietnam’s daily deals market, namely Nhom Mua, Hotdeal, Mua Chung, and Cung Mua. What Kay does have going for it is a founder well-versed in how to make daily deals succeed.

When you take a look at the site, it’s very clear and not so overwhelmed with deals like the current leaders. This could be because they’re new, but it also makes for a nice interface. Kay features three services: services, tourism, and coupons, but the two former features have not been opened up on the site yet.

I’ve reached out to the Kay team, but according to Ngan from Action.vn, Tom usually hides from the media.

A model that I’m encountering more and more lately in Vietnam is an outsourcing-to-product business growth pattern. It’s where a company starts out doing outsourcing for clients, and then slowly transitions into producing domestic-oriented products created run by their own seasoned product managers. KMS has done it in a big way with QA Symphony and Terrabook also does it.

The team of five at Terrabook has been together for two years and Terrabook has been a side project that they’re hoping to grow into a fully-fledged studio making educational applications for children. So far, the team has released 20 interactive books and five games for Vietnamese children that range from teaching kids about numbers to vibrant images of nature.

I talked to Bui Trung Hieu, the co-founder and CEO to find out more about why a small outsourcing company like his got into online education:

Actually, all of our team members are sons and daughters of teachers so we feel very close to education. So our dream was to make products so education in Vietnam can improve. And from our experience in mobile and mobile marketing in outsourcing, it worked perfectly. We felt it was like karma.

Currently, the games and books are built on HTML5 so any mobile platform can access them. The team hopes to launch an educational social gaming platform later this year.

You can download their iPad app here to check it out.

via Tuan Anh, CEO at Geeky.vn

Yesterday I had the pleasure of interviewing Jeffrey Paine of Golden Gate Ventures in front of over 100 people at Keewi’s StartMeUp event. At first, I wasn’t going to write anything on it, but Jeffrey threw out so many nice pieces of wisdom that I had to jot them all down for you. Conveniently, there are only nine things you need to remember.

1. There are three types of bad founders

These are the red flags that Jeffrey says he watches out for when he looks at startups that are pitching to Golden Gate Ventures. Please forgive the coarse language, but it’s all quite clear and exact.

• Assholes: This one’s easy, just people who are just plain mean and insensitive to others to the point of being belligerent.
• Flakey and green: These are people that are inexperienced. It’s their first startup so they tend not to have the mettle or real world experience to make their idea succeed. In other words, they need to fail one or a few more times.
• Stupid but confident or stubborn and doesn’t listen: A very dangerous and common mix of traits.

(Bonus: Fucking nuts: A rarer breed. Jeffrey says he only sees one or two of these once a year, and it’s fun to watch.)

2. There are three types of good founders

So, of course, avoid the above, and focus on building with these:

• Steel balls: Founders need to be brave and continue keep being strong in the face of failure and negative feedback.
• Cockroaches: Good founders need to stay in the game for the long haul. They need to endure. Jeffrey says one of the faults of some founders is they drop out too early.
• The ability to talk to children and talk to the elderly (aka empathy): This is my favorite. There are some people that you know in your network of friends who can talk to a three-year-old naturally, and then turn around and talk to a 70-year-old. These people truly know how to empathize with their customers and adapt to people. This is a rare trait. It shows mental adaptability and insight.

3. There are three types of investors

These are the three investors you need to get to know:

• Family and friends (aka Angels)
• Seed funders
• Series A and above (aka the bigger money)

Jeffrey says you need to get to know them and pitch to all of them. Pick three investors that you don’t want to get money from and pitch to them first so that you have been practicing your pitches. And then, you can get enough feedback to go pitch to the investors you really want to pitch to. But before all of that, you should be pitching to your friends and family and get their feedback, of course.

Bonus: What is Golden Gate Ventures doing in Vietnam?

Vietnam is hot right now; in fact, we could say that Indonesia was hot last year, Thailand is slowly rising right now, but Vietnam is currently hot. We’re looking at 6 companies in Vietnam, but probably only two or three will work out, that’s just the statistics of investment.

Golden Gate Ventures currently has $10 million earmarked for Southeast Asia and Jeffrey says that 10 to 20 percent of that is for Vietnam.

Also, with Jeffrey’s latest traveling and seeing startups in Asia, he thinks that the latest trends are education, followed closely by consumer-oriented startups.

Nitrous.IO, Action.IO’s software development platform and key product, just got $1 million in seed funding from a handful of VC firms in Silicon Valley including Bessemer Venture Partners, Draper Associates, CrunchFund, 500 Startups, TIBCO Software, and individuals like Eduardo Saverin and Prosper Nwankpa.

The whole idea behind Nitrous.IO is to help “developers create a development environment in the cloud in a matter of seconds.” If I have a developer team and I want to build and implement a software product, it always takes a lot of time to find, download, set up, and install code on all my machines to create the product. It’s always a long, annoying and repetitive (and maybe even error-prone) process. This slows down software teams and costs money. And it costs even more money to do this for bigger software projects. Thus, what Nitrous.IO is building is potentially a huge, multi-million dollar market. And putting all this in the cloud is a huge leap forward.

In addition to the $1 million, Nitrous.IO is adding Tobias Lutke, founder of Shopify, and Joe Stump, founder of Sprint.ly and SimpleGeo, to their advisory board.

It seems Asian tech startups are getting closer and closer to Silicon Valley, with Greengar becoming the first Vietnamese company accepted into 500 Startups and of course Baidu opening up its Deep Learning Lab in California – and now all this attention for Singapore’s Action.IO. Are we witnessing a new trend of Asian startups in Silicon Valley?

You can check out the video for further reference on how the product works:

Hat tip to TechCrunch for spotting this.

In my opinion, most websites in Vietnam are crap. They’re ugly, poorly designed, horribly colored, and the font choice is atrocious. So I’m seriously thankful I ran into Sieu Web, which means Super Web, hence the logo. It’s a new website-building platform that’s designed to make website creation very easy, with responsive designs and an easy-to-use dashboard for the user backend.

To Truong Manh Quan, the CEO of Sieu Web, it’s a departure from services like WordPress and Tumblr, which are more geared towards blogging. Sieu Web is specifically designed for small businesses, e-commerce sites, and individuals – many of whom won’t be familiar with HTML or CSS. The cool thing is, the website themes are all responsive.

If you’ve been following Tech In Asia closely, you’ll remember that Enricko wrote about a similar website in Indonesia called Pixtem, which also aims at getting lower tech users online.

According to Quan:

Our strength is creating a website that is to create the most easy way to make a website for folks who don’t know IT, like an individual who wants to start a company or website for their company but doesn’t know any coding. We want it to be free and high quality. After two weeks in operation, we’ve already got 1,500 users on board.

These are the choices that Sieu Web offers so far, including: small business, e-commerce, musical artist, individual, and other.

At first, Sieu Web will go with the freemium model to get users, and after that it will open up two more packages with more features including more user support and plugins. In the future, Quan says:

First, we’ll be working on iPad and Android tablet apps so that users can manage, keep up with stats, and create their websites via iPad. Second, we’ll be opening up a platform for designers to be able to design their own themes and upload them to the site. After this, we’ll be looking at the global market.

All in all, I’m hoping Sieu Web and other websites in this vein become successful so that we can see an end to the crappy websites users have been subjected to for the past decade.

Image Source: dtinews.vn

Two factors draw in great talent into countries: really great projects that react to specific problems, and an environment that can allow smart individuals to tackle those problems. With 90 million people and still developing, Vietnam’s got the first factor in the bag, but unfortunately, the environment has been lacking. Many overseas Vietnamese and educated Vietnamese nationals continue to flee the nation.

But from the late 2000s to now, a new trend has been rising: startup founders and CEOs who studied abroad are returning home to Vietnam to run startups. I call them the “returners”. It’s a new movement that lies in hopeful contrast to the brain drain that Vietnam continues to face. These guys can just plow through the difficult Vietnamese environment.

It all started in 2004, when Le Hong Minh, who was educated in Australia, founded VNG and built it to become the biggest domestic software and web company in the country. And since then, companies like KMS, Greengar, Keewi, Not A Basement Studio, Tiki, Bo Cong Anh, Istart, LuvPrint, Geeky, and more are all founded and CEO’ed by Vietnamese nationals who studied abroad. It’s a new generation of leaders. But what is it that brought these folks back? What did they see that the brain drainers didn’t?

The right mind-set

Vietnamese nationals who study abroad have a significant advantage over overseas Vietnamese in Vietnam because of their understanding of the culture and the way of life. Generally, overseas Vietnamese have a Western mentality attempting to understand an Eastern mentality, but this process is too difficult for building a Vietnamese team or attacking the Vietnamese market. Going east to west and back to east is way easier.

This advantage also extends over Vietnamese nationals who didn’t study abroad, as Truong Thuy, CEO of Greengar elaborates:

I’m not sure if Vietnam’s education system has been well-developed enough so that the young local generation could be able to distinguish between what they should learn and what not. In the US, we are considered adults the day we turned 18, which means we need to live fully responsible for our lives and decisions.

It’s this sense of maturity and educational advantage that allows the “returners” to do well. Thus, according to Hai Nguyen of http://www.istart.vn, a new education startup, “Being educated abroad helps me to learn many interesting aspects to prepare for my entrepreneurial pursuits.”

The opportunities for the returner generation

And it’s these advantages that are put to the test in a market as innocent as Vietnam. Hieu Tran from Not A Basement Studio told me why he has come back:

I believe that Vietnamese people are very passionate. And hungry. Hungry to learn, hungry to prove themselves. And we’ve also got the skills. My co-founders and I want to be a part of this, to be working with these young individuals, to build product “made in Vietnam” for the world to use.

And many people share this view, Roy Nguyen, who is also on the board of directors at the US Alumni Network in Vietnam, says:

I am so excited about this new generation of “returners”. I can’t count the numerous number of tech startups here coming from prestigious universities around the world like Harvard, Stanford, UC Berkeley, Cambridge, all gather back to our homeland and make it become more prosperous.

It’s a brave new world for people educated abroad to come back. If folks educated abroad stay abroad then they face the competition of a developed nation with its higher costs of living, a more competitive job market, and a very difficult place to do startup. Vietnam is considerably more open because there’s so many problem to solve in the market and the resources are much cheaper so an abroad education goes a long way.

Big impact

Of course, we’re already seeing the impact of VNG on the market, with its revenue of $90 million for 2012, and the new young returners are also building businesses that may one day scale to that level and beyond. In 2011 alone, more than 100,000 students studied abroad across 49 different countries. This impact will continue to be felt. The returners are making Vietnam more accessible and more international. I think Son Tran from Tiki.vn sums it up best:

I think it’s almost always better for any country to have people with diversified background, education, and experience to contribute to the economy (think US, Singapore). So we should encourage not just for native people to return, but foreigners to stay, work, and start new businesses.

There aren’t too many startups in Vietnam that are making a foray into medicine. In fact, I only know two: Wish.vn and Yton.vn. Let’s focus on Wish.vn, which is an attempt at creating a healthcare social network.

I spoke with Nguyen Quoc Tuan, CEO at Wish.vn, for the lowdown on the fledgling startup. He is also business development director for HiPT. HiPT has been around for 18 years doing software development in the domestic market and only in the last 10 months did it start incubating startups like Wish.vn. It’s got two more startups in the pipeline, but Tuan declined to say what they are. But he was happy to introduce Wish.vn:

It’s basically a social network for healthcare. In the beginning, we wanted to build a system where people could save their examination results online. But then we realized that we needed to build a social aspect to help the health of the community.

Tuan explains that simply, you could look at it as a combination of electronic health records, a social network to allow patients to rate health care, healthcare information, promotions connecting with partners, and tools to help you keep up your health. Yeah, it’s a lot.

Basically, users can log into the site via Facebook, they can post their personal health records, ask questions about their health and doctors will respond, and talk to other people interested in health issues.

Tuan hopes to make money in three ways: advertising, bringing partners like hardware providers in touch with hospitals, and annual fees from users for extra services like consultations, emergency medical services, and healthcare data. Users will be able to post what sickness they have and Wish.vn will recommend which hospital to go to, and what kind of medicine to check out. It’s a pretty ambitious project that seems to be going all over the place at the moment. But currently users are most attracted to the social network aspect (sharing their health problems) and pregnancy advice section.

To date, Wish.vn with its team of 15, has 20,000 users with 3,000 unique visits per month. That’s since they came out of beta in December 2012. Wish.vn is also working on building a healthcare app store that allows users to download apps that can help with their health, like for monitoring heartrate. The startup already has its own iPhone app that you can check out here.

But the truth is, it seems users don’t even care about filters, more than half of Instagram users don’t even use filters. I think most of the draw of Instagram has been the social network that’s built and ease of use. Some of the apps below do a good job of that, others not.

The nice thing about these photo apps, is it gives you a good idea of how each of these countries is innovating.

China

Most of these Chinese apps are feature-packed filter machines. I think the only one that currently interests me is Photo Wonder since it’s so thorough. Some have social networks attached, while some are standalone funky filter apps.

Camera360 (iOS, Android) – One of the most popular apps with over 80 million users. It’s chalk full of features on top of the obvious Instagram-like features (it’s got way more than Instagram). Users can decorate photos with stickers, edit photos, upload photos into the cloud and even create puzzle patterns with the photos.

Lemeleme (iOS) – A super simple app that doesn’t innovate much on what Instagram already does. It basically allows users to take pictures and post them to emails or social networks. It doesn’t have its own social network so I’m not sure how it’ll fair in the near future.

PaPa (iOS, Android) – An interesting concept that we’ve written about before, basically users can add sound to their photos. Japan’s Voicepic also does the same thing. It’s a cool concept but it might get steamrolled by the new wave of video apps coming to the fore.

Photo Wonder (iOS, Android) – Acquired by China’s mega search giant, Baidu, it actually allows users to see the filter before taking the picture, which is lightyears ahead of Instagram’s post-filter feature. But that’s not all, Photo Wonder also has an edit, collage, and allows users to download extra features like stickers and frames.

PIP Camera (iOS, Android) – This photo app departs from the traditional filter-oriented apps and has none of the usual filters you’d see in apps. PIP Camera focuses on framing your photos in different things like glasses, umbrellas, and computer screens. Fun, but a bit overwhelming.

Vida (iOS, Android) – In addition to adding pollution data to images, Vida is a fully packed app that allows filters, and sound. It’s even got its own social network. Unfortunately, you have to have an account with a Chinese social network to use it.

Japan

Japan’s been pretty innovative with photo apps, especially with apps that mangafy pictures. Fun for friends hanging out.

Camely (Android) – A cutesy app that, according to Rick, is “almost like Instagram if it were force-fed estrogen supplements”. Most of the filters are pretty female-oriented and pink, which makes for a particularly cutesy set of pictures. Download it for your girlfriend.

Cameran (iOS) – Cameran’s got an interesting take on decorations. It’s all about allowing users to randomize their decorations. Click on a flower decoration filter multiple times and you get to see different flower arrangements. It also comes from a rather famous Japanese photographer.

DecoAlbum (iOS, Android) – Another photo app centered on females, DecoAlbum allows users to create photos with text, backgrounds, glittery virtual stickers, and more and even allows you to assemble your photo collections into albums. It’s one of the few apps that actually prioritizes making albums.

Decopic (iOS, Android) – This app takes decorations to a whole new level. From adding customizable resizable decorations to hearts and stars painted across the pictures to artsy frames around your picture, Decopic a nice app, if you’ve got time on your hands.

Line Camera (iOS, Android) – Since it’s released by NHN, you just know this camera app is going to be feature packed. It’s 600 stamps, over 100 frames, 14 different filters, 156 brushes, and more. It’s Line’s flagship photo app, and nicely integrated into the chat app. Since it piggybacks on the Line platform, there’s lots of users.

Manga Camera (iOS) – With One Piece and Naruto being the world’s most widely read comic series’, of course Japan would come up with Manga Camera, an app that would literally turn you into a cartoon. You can even add in decorations like Japanese “wow” text.

Million Moments (iOS, Android) – Produced by Sony and primarily focused on photo viewing, Million Moments is a nice though possibly useless departure from the other apps in this list. It allows you to assemble small slideshows so that you can view with your friends. I’d rather view photos on my computer or TV though.

Snapdish (iOS, Android) – Another interesting niche take on photos is Snapdish. It’s all about photos and food, the ideal app for food-lovers, and they’re big population, half of my friends take photos before they eat. Snapdish puts this all in one place and connects food-lovers with each other, thus socializing food.

Voicepic (iOS) – Possibly the progenitor of PaPa from China, this app also allows you to add sound to a picture. It also allows you to add various filters on top of your sound-enabled pictures. I’m not sure how this is catching on though, especially with services like Vine gaining popularity.

South Korea

Pudding Camera (iOS, Android) – Despite the odd chocolate-like name, don’t be deceived, this app’s got the usual Instagram-like features plus a cool panorama feature. A panorama feature is not something most apps in this list have.The app annoyingly posts to Twitter, but can be circumvented.

Cymera (iOS, Android) – This photo editor app is a bit complicated and not so much fun, but it’s got lots of options for editing your photos. It takes quite a few clicks and touches to get to what you want to edit, but the result it really nice since you can do so much.

Southeast Asia

Since Southeast Asia is particularly fresh to the game, there’s not too many apps from each country, but certainly some worth noting, strong unique contenders to their East Asian counterparts.

Singapore

Babygram (iOS) – Have you ever been sick of all the baby photos you get barraged with on Facebook from your friends? Well, never fear, Babygram is here. The app is very specifically about sending baby photos into a timeline for yourself and your close family. Very cute and cuddly.

Fotobook (iOS) – Forget taking photos and posting them to a separate social network, this entire app is dedicated to browsing Facebook photos from your friends. It makes it really easy to look through all your friends’ photos. Other than that, not much to it.

PixaRoll (iOS, Android) – A concept rather similar to KeepShot from Vietnam, you take pictures and you can have them sent to people in other countries. Great for travelers who are on the go and don’t want to have to carry an extra pen and camera. Why buy a postcard when you can just get your photos sent straight to people?

Malaysia

Nostalgio (iOS) – One of the simplest framing collage apps out there, which basically has a set of 20 basic collage frames and 6 borders to choose from. Nostalgio also has filters to give your collages a little more effect. It costs $0.99, though.

Vietnam

Fuzel (iOS) – An Apple Editor’s Choice photo app for 2012’s best photos apps, this swanky app from Not A Basement Studio makes stitching photo collages together really fancy. You can select from a host of readymade collage patterns as well as customize your own, and then directly post to your social networks.

KeepShot (iPad only) – Not A Basement Studio newest iPad app allows users to create, edit, and assemble photo albums together. Then it lets users print the beautiful physical photo albums and delivers them straight to users’ doorsteps. It’s like Pixa Roll for albums, unfortunately, currently the service only ships in the USA.

Indonesia

PicMix (Android, Blackberry) - Indonesia’s feature-packed PicMix is awesome. You can edit photos with captions, filters, frames, and text, and following Instagram it’s also got a nice snazzy social network to post to. In February this year, PicMix has hit the eight million milestone with more than 108 million photos posted so far.

If we missed any apps, please let us know in the comments, and we will add them to this list.

We’re inundated with social media these days. I consider my friends who aren’t on Facebook lucky, they don’t have to deal with the onslaught of senseless status updates and the latent narcissism that it entails. Facebook has slowly but surely blurred the lines between friends and acquaintances and strangers, but hasn’t put much emphasis on close friends and family. This is where PassedOn comes in.

The startup, based here in Ho Chi Minh city, Vietnam, focuses on creating an online diary of experiences with your loved ones for the English-speaking global market. And as the name implies, creating an album of videos, photos, soundbytes, and thoughts with them before you or they pass on.

The project has been online since November 2012 and already has over 100,000 users with “some more active than others”. Marco Oparq, CEO of PassedOn, has his sights set on working with companies like Dropbox to add value by personalizing their services instead of working with big companies like Facebook and Google. All of the data on PassedOn is encrypted so not even Marco knows how users are using the service.

I chatted with Marco for some insight into what he terms intimedia and the story behing PassedOn:

Intimedia is a new generation of websites that are more private and intimate than the jungle of social media that is currently offered. The WWW has an overload of information sharing and too few places that you can consider for yourself and your direct loved ones.

Marco goes on to say that Facebook is for friends, Twitter for business and friends, LinkedIn for business, dating sites for new lovers, but for your mother, daughter, and best friend, there isn’t a website that takes care of people you currently care about.

How did you come up with the idea?

Marco: I was on a holiday to Cuba with my wife, and the airplane had turbulence. At that moment, I realized that if the airplane would have crashed, basically we had nothing arranged. My kids were with my parents in law in Colombia, and they don’t know my parents, they don’t even have the contact number. Nobody in Vietnam knew where I was, and actually my parents in Holland, didn’t even know I was on a holiday.

Then I thought, I’m surely not the only one who hasn’t taken care of the basics (bank details, crucial information, etc.). Then a couple of months, I started to talk with people and see if it would be a nice idea to have an online portal to arrange these necessities in case something unexpected happens. Throughout these months, I realized that in fact it is more important to leave behind your thoughts and emotions than the actual administrative parts.

What happens when a user dies?

Marco: When a user dies, the “eWills” will be released to their loved ones and added to their profile. Later, we will add functions like being able to receive a printed version of the eWill in a nice book and allowing the people to “Leave a message to the World”.

But Marco emphasizes that PassedOn is not about death:

Marco: In general, I think it is good to mention that PassedOn is not about Death it is about realizing who and what is important for you and get a certain peace of mind that you have collected these thoughts and moments in a special place so you can share it with those you care most about.

What about older generations who are not accustomed to services like this?

Marco: First: the UI will be more visual. Second: we use the first wave of members (young mothers) to teach them. They are surely a target group.

I asked what Marco thinks of other competitors in this space like Deadsocial, LivesOn and Legacy Locker, but he says that these services don’t focus on the emotional ties between loved ones. PassedOn is decidedly about preparing “for only the few people before you are not here anymore, and only they can see it at that time.” Google has also entered this space with its Death Manager today.

The project plans to do a UI refresh this month, release a new app in the beginning of May, and start a new service that allows people to email their pictures and data directly into the service.

Check out the video for more on the service:

In Vietnam, VietnamWorks is generally synonymous with finding a job. It’s far and away the top site and lists thousands of job listings, and gets an average of 200 new job listings per day. En-Japan, one of Japan’s top online recruitment firms, has also expanded across Asia outside of Japan including South Korea, Singapore, Hong Kong, China, and Australia. This latest acquisition will be its first foray into mainland Southeast Asia. The specifics of the deal have not yet been confirmed and I doubt they will be, but it will send shockwaves through the startup community for sure. Local Vietnamese news site Cafebiz.vn has speculated earlier this year that the deal would be around $22 million.

In February, CareerBuilder from the United States acquired VON (Vietnam Online Network), which manages KiemViec.com, the second biggest recruitment site in Vietnam. This left people wondering, why did CareerBuilder pass up VietnamWorks? Well, it looks like VietnamWorks had its sights elsewhere.

For the Vietnamese startup scene, this will be huge news, as VietnamWorks has been such a big and successful player in the online space. I’ve reached out to the CEO of VietnamWorks for comment and will keep you updated.

Hat tip to Chris Harvey for the catch.

(Source: En-Japan)

Google is a beast in Vietnam. Not only is it the top search engine, but it’s also the number one website in the country according to Alexa. Well, now the Silicon Valley giant is about to face stiff competition from CocCoc.

I already wrote about CocCoc in February. To refresh your memory, it has already got 400 staff and has spent $15 million since to develop its Vietnamese-language search engine. Victor Lavrenko, CEO at CocCoc, has informed me that the company plans on pumping another $100 million in the next decade to battle it out with Google. The company is based in Hanoi and it also plans to open up an office in Ho Chi Minh city by this summer.

The community in Vietnam here has been in awe of CocCoc’s search results. Google’s queries just cannot handle basic Vietnamese text input compared to CocCoc, so they’ve got a significant advantage on Google whose map results are still very weak, and whose understanding of Vietnamese language is close to nil. But don’t take my word for it, Victor says you should try it yourself:

Currently, we think we have much better points of interest-related searches. You can try some queries like “bia hoi lang ha” (if you’re in Hanoi) on our search engine and Google and compare them.

With CocCoc planning to pump more money into its product, it’s foreseeable that the service could overtake Google in the country in the next few years. But it’s too soon to tell, and they’ve only just hit the market with advertising.

There’s one other homegrown search engine for CocCoc to overcome too. And Wada is also funded by Russians. It’s an interesting search market unfolding.

The real estate market in Vietnam is a bubble. It’s long been known to be among the top 20 most expensive real estate markets in the world despite still being a developing nation. But that also means there are lots of opportunities.

Currently, the number one real estate listings site in Vietnam is Batdongsan. It’s getting anywhere from 4,000 to 5,000 new listings per day, which is a huge step over rival site Muabannhadat, which gets 1,000 new additions per day, and Dicoconline, which has about 500 to 600 per day. As of 2011, Batdongsan has listed over 650,000 properties, and by 2012, was well over 870,000.

Batdongsan is also the only one of the three that is self-financed. It started in 2008 in Hanoi, Vietnam.

The business is simple. Users create accounts, post their listings and manage them. Batdongsan checks the info. Batdongsan charges a fee for listing depending on the time period it’s online and where it’s displayed on the site. There are different service offerings from normal to VIP. The value the company adds for users is giving them data and analysis on the market and giving them a dashboard where they can manage all their data from views to effectiveness.

In the beginning, according to Dung Nguyen, in charge of business development and strategic projects, “The company started out as a property company, but upon realizing that there was a wide open space in online real estate, we pivoted into online listings.” The market size is palpable, Dung goes on:

Annually, the demand for listings in real estate is upwards of 2.5 million. That’s the number of listings users want to see. And all over Vietnam, there are about 50,000 real estate intermediaries including both individuals and organizations.

Batdongsan basically makes it easier for these intermediaries to reach out to customers and the transactions all happen offline without Batdongsan’s involvement.

Dung says the secret to their success has simply been good SEO so as to be discovered by potential users. Despite other companies like Muabannhadat getting funding from the likes of IDG, the startup’s success has come down to great SEO.

As the real estate and macro-economy slowly recovers, Batdongsan’s CEO Le Xuan Truong told me that he’s looking forward to the future:

At present, Batdongsan is among top 100 websites of Vietnam and regarded as the most effective real estate portal in the market. We aim at being in the top 20 and accounting for more than 80 percent of total market share in field of property classifieds. Currently, Vietnamese realtors have a habit of posting listings on a variety of property portals. However, in the near future, we are headed to be the first and the only website that users think of whenever they have a demand to list their properties online.

Just last week, two Chinese nationals were arrested in Vietnam. They were found with a total of 7,200 SIM cards that they were using to scam people via an elaborate telephone fraud. At first, I didn’t think this was interesting news, until I did a little hunting and found out that there’s an entire international ring of these guys operating across Asia. And they’re constantly getting arrested.

In the past few months, hundreds of these scammers have been arrested who are mainly Chinese or Taiwanese. In January, 80 were arrested in Cambodia. Last August, 350 were arrested in the Philippines, and in December, 100 were arrested in Sri Lanka. 19 were also apprehended in Thailand and Myanmar and ZDNet estimates that a total of 482 people have been arrested as of last month. That doesn’t include the suspects that were just captured in Vietnam.

To say the least, it’s either a huge network of scammers or a relatively easy scam that can be replicated across nations.

So basically, the scam is this: the scammer calls someone responsible for a company’s finances claiming to be the police and asks them to transfer money into a “safe” account for holding and/or inspection. New SIMs are used each time so that they can’t be tracked and the scammers also seem to use a two-step process in which they use SIMs to make a VOIP call over the internet, thus making it even less trackable. After the money is transferred, it disappears, and the scammer is never heard from again.

It’s interesting that all of this has gone down in just the last few months, I wonder if we’ll start to see more of these arrests in the coming months as the network gets broken down.

(Source: ICT News)

Finding good and great engineers for your company is a tedious and unsure process. Google and Microsoft are both well known for asking questions like: “How many golf balls can fit in a school bus?” or “How much should you charge to wash all the windows in Seattle?” Questions like these stump would-be geniuses and allow Google recruiters to see how applicants think. This rigorous process has clearly given Google some great results as they remain one of the most dominant technology companies of the decade. But there’s still space to innovate on engineering recruitment and that’s what Nguyen Tuan Anh is set on doing with his new site, Geeky.vn, which launched just this week.

When you go to the website, you’ll see the usual website introductions, but at the bottom of the screen, you’ll see what appears to be a command line function. For those of you non-engineers, think MS-DOS back before the days when the graphical user interface was introduced to the masses. Any user can type “help” and access the entire command line interface.

The concept is simple: engineers have to code their way through the website by passing levels. The website is organized into seven levels. After three months, the engineer that can pass all the levels will receive a total of VND 50 million ($2,400) in cash. You can only pass on to the next level by writing code that solves a particular set of problems which tests the engineers’ true coding ability. All of the code is logged into the Geeky.vn logs and recruiters and the Geeky.vn team can see every line of code and when they coded it.

Tuan Anh, Geeky.vn’s founder shared with me more:

The thing about engineers is, a resume, degree, and interview is never a good indication of how good an engineer is. You have to see it in how they code, how they deal with problems, and their willingness to outsmart and solve problems. For example, with one of our Geeky prototypes, one engineer solved a coding puzzle over the course of four hours from late 1am until 5am in the morning. And I could see how many times he had attempted to solve the puzzle. It shows that he tried really hard and he’s a good engineer. This guy actually went on to be a CTO.

So far, after a week, the site has 150 users and no one has passed level one yet. Next week, the team will be rolling out level two. In June, Geeky.vn will hold its final offline event where the team will roll out its final seventh and hardest level where only the top engineers will be invited to solve the hardest puzzles.

The idea came to Tuan Anh when he was working on HR solutions for companies who need good developers. He said, “it was really hard to look for good engineers without wasting time and money, so I tried this method and it worked really well, so I thought others may benefit from that.”

The cool thing about the project is that it’s getting local support from big companies like VNG, 2359 Media, TGM Tech, Siri Nova, and Misfit Wearables. The project is built by a team of engineers, so they understand what it takes to suss out what all the good engineers. In the future, Tuan Anh is looking to grow this into a viable recruitment business.

In 2011, we covered a similar site from India called Interviewstreet.

We will keep you posted on Geeky.vn. Stay tuned.

On the Alexa traffic rank, Zing Video is the fifth highest ranked site in Vietnam. But that number piggybacks on the strength of Zing Me, VNG’s flagship Facebook-like site. They’ll be allowing users to download individual videos they want to keep starting on April 9th; and from April 19th to June 1st, users can download their own videos en masse. It’ll all be over officially on the June 2nd when the service goes completely offline.

Taking down the service falls in line with two main factors for VNG, a general shift in strategy and a disinclination to compete head on with Youtube. In terms of strategy, VNG has been going heavy into mobile with new products like mobile chat app Zalo and mobile social games like Giai Dieu Vui while maintaining its strong strategic advantage with web real estate like Zing MP3, Zing News, Laban (a web and mobile browser), Zing TV (which allows users to broadcast Vietnamese television onto their web browser or mobile), Zini (a new Weibo or Twitter-like service released earlier this month), and Baomoi (the leading news portal that VNG acquired). In terms of foreign competition, Youtube currently holds the number four Alexa traffic ranking in Vietnam just behind Google and Facebook.

On one side, VNG is obviously shifting its resources into new projects like Zalo and Zini, but it also brings up a scary thought: can Vietnamese companies handle competition from mega companies like Google and Facebook? Certainly, VNG’s Zing Me has maintained a strong domestic growth rate of 12 million users compared to Facebook’s 12 million – though Facebook’s aggressive one million new users per month growth rate in Vietnam makes it look like it’ll win in the end. But can this growth be maintained for long as Facebook gets more aggressive about how users can access its platform with apps like Facebook Home?

In China, Youtube has been blocked since 2007 effectively allowing local competitors to dominate the space without resistance. In Japan, Youtube has faced an innovative competitor in Niconico-douga which in addition to streaming videos, allows users to comment on top of the video. Up until now, VNG’s Zing Video was the only one that could take on Youtube in Vietnam.

This underlines a current of unease in the Vietnamese consumer domestic market. Effectively, VNG is competing with Google and Facebook on multiple fronts, and it’s having to pick its battles more wisely in order to stake out a secure market advantage. Zalo makes a lot of sense because both Google and Facebook are weak in chat apps. But with Google rumored to acquire Whatsapp soon (and Google Talk rebranding as Google Babel to be more like a new-style group messaging app), how will Vietnam’s Zalo fare if Google puts all of its engineering weight behind one chat app competitor that is already incumbent in the space? And how will Zing Me do up against a Facebook that is even more aggressive about innovating its interface. On the other hand, Zing MP3 is bound to remain untouchable with the American music industry holding back services like Spotify and Pandora from going global.

All of this, although fascinating and telling of VNG’s prowess in the consumer space, does not bear much weight on VNG’s central business: gaming.

(Source: Zing’s Blog)

Vietnam just might be the first Asian nation to legalize gay marriage later this year. The upper echelons have been discussing legalizing since mid-2012 and the gay community has been waiting with bated breath with gay pride demonstrations and literature.

And the internet has been heating up with support for the LGBT movement in Vietnam too. My Best Gay Friends, a series of nine Youtube videos made in Ho Chi Minh city, has gone viral in Vietnam – the eighth episode garnering over 1.4 million views so far. The number may seem small in contrast to PSY’s Gangnam Style, but to put it in context, Vietnam’s top music videos rarely break three million views. So, it’s a huge step in the direction of getting the mainstream Vietnamese population on board with gay rights.

My Best Gay Friends – a hit-tip to the Bangkok Post for spotting this – humorously follows the lives of various people in the LGBT community as they celebrate birthdays, hanging out with each other in the city, and go through the trials of life in Ho Chi Minh city. The issues range from mundane topics to serious things like marriage and perception in modern society. Bonus, it’s absolutely hilarious. The channel that’s been posting the series has been doing videos in support of gay pride since 2007. My Best Gay Friends started last year and the most recent episode came out three weeks ago, and the popularity hasn’t abated. Each episode has broken a million views.

Last year, Vietnam had its first ever Gay Pride parade in Hanoi, the country’s capital, where parents came out in support of their children who had come out of the closet. This is particularly inspiring in a country where being gay is generally laughed at and scorned. Families have been known to disown their children upon discovering their sexuality, and the words “bị bi đê”, from the French, literally implies that being LGBT is a disease. So the video going viral underlines growing support for the Vietnamese LGBT community and a possible counter to common misconceptions.

You can check out the first episode here and then you might get into the whole series as well:

* Thomas Clayton, CEO and President at Bubble Motion (Moderator)

* Jamie Lin, Founding partner at appWorks Ventures

* Nobuaki Kitagawa, CEO at CyberAgent Ventures (Beijing) Co., Ltd

* Chris Evdemon, Partner, Innovation Works (IW)

* Casey Lau, Co-founder at StartupsHK, Community Developer for SoftLayer

* Sangeet Paul Choudary, Venture Advisor, former incubator

#11:28: All the guys are introducing their various markets. In India, the feeling is start in Asia and then go global, Sangeet cites the success of Inmobi and Slideshare for examples of this new trend. Jamie says you can hire Taiwanese developers very reasonably priced, $16,000 per year for a fresh graduate. Every year there’s at least 25 countries getting listed in Taiwan. In China we see a lot of companies not going public but in Taiwan it’s a more stable capital market.

#11:31: Casey Lau introduces the startup scene in Hong Kong, which he believes is very ambitious and strong in innovative solution that are not “check-in” related. He says Hong Kong startups are a bit arrogant in that they don’t want to enter China and they don’t want to enter Southeast Asia.

#11:32: Chris Evdemon says he’ll be covering China: “it’s the most exclusive rapidly growing and innovative region in the world at the moment”. Nowhere near at the Silicon Valley maturity but they’re catching up. Everything is going towards the mobile space, especially with the absence of Google. China went from 0 to 150 million Android users in 2.5 years. It’s super fast growth. Many of these startups are growing like we’ve never seen before. Baidu, Alibaba, Tencent, etc. are formerly startups are now acting more corporate. They’re starting to do acquisitions. That’s huge. These large companies are competing with each other in every space in mobile and web. Baidu used to be just search, etc. but now they’re all competing in each other’s space. The question is now, where do I squeeze in between all these big giants? Now we finally start to see super angels, which is good for starting, and big guys are also going to acquire. That also leaves it hard for negotiation. But now, China is also becoming an increasingly localized, which makes it hard to start for foreigners.

#11:38: Thomas Clayton asks what’s the environment like for VC’s across the Asian region.

#11:40: The pool of venture capital in China is closer around $8 billion in contrast to the $1 billion in Japan. Japan and China have arguably the same GDP, but there’s more early stage capital in China.

#11:46: On the Indian VC side, there’s angel investing, but there’s a Series A crunch in India. Inter-funding has been happening where funds put money into two companies. If one company fails, they transfer it over to the other company.

#11:50: Funding in Taiwan. High-tech manufacturing has been getting a lot of the funding. But there’s been a lot of success in the allocation of money.

#11:52: Where are the IT clusters in Asia? In India: Bangalore is a hot IT center for India. Delhi and Mumbai are also newer clusters. A lot of companies from India are coming to Singapore because of tax. The trend is companies are bringing the management to Singapore and the technical teams stay in India.

#11:54: Are there a lot of Gaijin entrepreneurs in Japan? There are but very few.

#11:55: A lot of Japanese companies like GREE and DeNA coming into Southeast Asia. In Southeast Asia it’s a big of a land grab. The Chinese are a little bit more patient or wary about how to internationalize. Tencent is making big international moves. Chris thinks the Chinese will get more involved in SEA for three reasons: 1) they’re closer culturally. 2) they understand how to make products that are free. They build products are more entertaining and social very well. Thus, he thinks China is going to be more successful than Japanese products. They’re also very ruthless because they’ve been brought up in an extremely competitive market. 3) They also have a ton of cash. Tecent has earmarked $1 billion for acquisitions. But we need to see more local competitors and investors.

#12:00: Perception of Singapore and Southeast Asia as a whole. Chris says Singapore has a place in the Southeast Asian ecosystem. Many come here for lifestyle. He’s a fan of the government involvement. Not a fan of the government funding schemes though. Would like to see more market-driven funding. Casey says it ups the game from Hong Kong, the HK government thus thinks “how can we help our startups too?”. The same goes for Taiwan, according to Jamie. For Taiwanese companies, Southeast Asia is increasingly looking like a reasonable place to expand. From Sangeet, good mentorship, good funding and good technical base to support and mentor the next group, that’s happening in China and India and is missing in Singapore at the moment. From Nobuaki, for Japanese companies they always look at China and Southeast Asia. For China, it always looks too late, and Southeast Asia should be the opportunity.

UPDATED: Made a few changes on Sangeet’s quotes that he clarified on companies he mentioned and investment opportunities.

I just came back from Japan with my family, and I’ve got a bunch of pictures on my iPhone that I wanted to share with my mom and dad. How did I do it? I sent them an email with an attachment of photos. If my parents were hip, I’d probably make an album on Facebook. And if I had extra time, I’d probably make a website. All of this is tedious as hell. Luckily Cinnamon.is, a startup that just pitched onstage at Startup Arena, is actively working on this very real first-world problem. They just pitched their Android app called Seconds, which is not yet on Android. The demo showed a really fast uploading speed.

Cinnamon basically allows friends and family to share photos in their own private albums through their smartphones. It gives people the chance to comment on photos privately and curate albums together. The team is also about to release an app called Seconds, which automatically uploads photos to private albums.

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve had complete strangers commenting on photos I thought were private on Facebook. For users tired of this invasive Zuckerberg nonsense, services like Cinnamon will be particularly welcome. Especially if it can be adapted smoothly across generations (my parents don’t use Facebook, and my grandparents still type with two fingers on the computer).

They did a really cool demo where she took pictures and it immediately went online to the other device.

According to Pham Van Anh, the marketing manager:

Many times earlier when CEO and co-founder Miku Hirano went to an event, she and her friends took a lot of photos and she brought her laptop all the time. At the end of the event, she collected SD cards from her friends, put them all together, and distributed all the photos to them. It was so bothersome, but still she wanted to get all the photos so at that time it was the best option.

It also looks like the humble team of three out of Japan is also looking for new hires to expand the development side of the business. So if you want to be a part of the new wave of private social media, give them a ring. And of course, if you’re looking to share photos with your loved ones, give them a try.

UPDATE: You can now download the app from their page here.

Warat Wongmaneekit just pitched his new Zocial here at our Startup Arena contest. It’s an advanced social media tracking and analyzing tool, which allows marketers and companies to track the hottest trends and and see what’s being said about their own brands. It currently collects data in Southeast Asian countries only.

So far, ZocialInc has already shipped two major products. Zocial Rank, which basically lists the top social media rankings across five different platforms including Facebook, Twitter Foursquare, Youtube, and Instagram. So if I want to know what are the top Facebook pages in Vietnam, I would just go here and immediately see who’s hot. Then there’s ZocialEye, which allows real time social media monitoring, which is currently being used to monitor Bangkok governor elections. If I’m a candidate, I can see who likes me, who doesn’t, and see immediately how the social media public is responding to my public persona.

ZocialInc comes out of Thailand under the guidance of Pawoot (Pom) Pongvitayapanu with his 10-person team, who built up Tarad.com, Thailand’s biggest e-commerce site, to its eventual acquisition by Rakuten. According to Warat Wongmaneekit, product development manager and co-founder:

We started to rank brands on social networks first and our clients needed to deeply understand the voice and behavior of people in social networks. After that we created a platform and research solution to client and almost client like it so much.

Last week, I spent a good few hours getting lost in all the social media rankings. A really cool peek into Southeast Asia’s social media frontiers.

This is a part of our coverage of Startup Asia Singapore 2013, our event running on April 4 and 5. For the rest of our Startup Arena pitches, see here. You can follow along on Twitter at @techinasia, and on our Facebook page.

Most folks these days making banners find them to be either very expensive or tedious. Only big digital creative agencies can afford to make nice banners that build traction with consumers. That leaves smaller companies who don’t have an easy avenue to create banners that can attract customers. That’s why RichMediaAds is targeting this under-served group.

According to Alvin Koay, the CEO and founder:

Flash/image banners have only one point of interaction, which is click-through (CTR). The correlation between CTR and a conversion (sale, signup, download, etc) is almost negligible (0.01 percent). On the other hand, the correlation for engagement is 0.49 percent. This means advertisers need to create engaging ads that users can interact with. This can increase conversions drastically.

The whole concept is to turn the ad space into “mini websites within websites”, so that visitors don’t have to click their way out of their current websites to access the content. And the perk is that it’s for entry-level advertisers, publishers, or bloggers who can’t hire expensive agencies but still want to offer nice banners for their clients.

RichMediaAds’ revenue model will grab a small percentage of the ad impressions per impression. The new startup hopes to open up a whole new advertising landscape for the little guys.

If you’re a business that’s looking to break into online advertising, RichMediaAds makes that really easy for you. Alvin Koay just presented his new startup onstage at our Startup Arena event in Singapore. The company, founded in Malaysia, allows users to design their own hip interactive banners to be posted across the web.

The project is already underway with business partners in Latin America, Europe, Japan, the US, and Southeast Asia.

This is a part of our coverage of Startup Asia Singapore 2013, our event running on April 4 and 5. For the rest of our Startup Arena pitches, see here. You can follow along on Twitter at @techinasia, and on our Facebook page.

Rohit Agarwal just presented here at Startup Arena on his project, Framebench. It’s a pretty cool concept.

As a person who works closely with product designers and engineers, I’m digging Framebench, which just pitched at Startup Arena. It’s a web app that allows designers and their clients to collaborate on designs in real-time and in the cloud. Thus making it really easy for designers to get feedback on their work, and adapt accordingly to suit the needs of their clients.

Rohit goes on:

While working on a computer graphics project in college, we realized that we couldn’t use Google docs to collaborate on images and that’s when the idea struck and we built the first prototype. We later got incubated at IIM-Ahmedabad’s iAccelerator program. We are at a phase where early customers have started pouring in. We expect the next 3 months to be crucial in terms of the hockey stick growth.

If you’re not getting it yet, think of a Google Docs for creative designers. In the creative design industry today, it’s common practice for clients to send product or design requests and designers will submit the projects asynchronously, sometimes giving feedback over e-mail or even a phone call – or if they’re ambitious, using Skype’s screenshare feature. Framebench comes in and streamlines all these needs into one platform.

Designers and clients can chat together while looking at the same designs and even color or sketch on the same design at the same time. And since Framebench is attempting to enter the creative industries, it’s nicely integrated with Dropbox and Basecamp.

The team of seven is from New Delhi, headed by two co-founders who worked together since college, India and is quickly growing its sales channels via its recent seed investment of $150,000 from Blume Ventures. It currently has 1,250 users. If I were Google, I’d be acquiring Framebench immediately and adding them to Google Drive’s enterprise offerings.

Check out their video for more details:

#15:23: Mike’s filling us in on his background studying in Canada and coming to Vietnam.

#15:25: Vietnam is potentially a gold mine, it’s very hard and tricky and hard to figure out. In 2007-2008, there was a wave of startups that came and died from hype. If you look at the numbers it’s a high population of over 90 million and over 35 percent internet penetration. It’s also a very young population.

#15:27: Going mobile is growing very fast with VNG’s Zalo being taken up really fast. But think carefully about going mobile first. Websites are still more common.

#15:28: Payment in Vietnam. Telcos take over 40 to 50 percent of every transaction.

#15:29: There’s a lot of local players in Vietnam. And it’s still very possible to make it big in Vietnam. But it’s hard to find quality people with the right mindset. Getting a high valuation is rare. And COD (Cash On Demand) is still very popular. That’s because of the Vietnamese culture wanting to see products before paying.

#15:30: Players that are currently doing it anyway, despite the hard path to being successful with Vietnam: Keewi.me (Mike’s company) in online ticketing, Giaohangnhanh.vn in delivery for e-commerce, Appstore.vn in App distribution, IG9 in crowdsourcing, and Tiki.vn in crowdsourcing. And also, he just introduced all the VC’s currently in Vietnam: CyberAgentVentures, IDGVentures, PVNI, DFJIVinaCapital, and KustoTigerIT Investment.

#15:33: And that’s that!

Here’s Mike’s slides just in case you’re wondering:

#12:15: And now James is stepping on stage. He says the South Korea is the 3rd ranked in the world in terms of economic dynamism.

#12:17: PSY (of Gangnam Style) has given us encouragement. Although he’s not very good looking, but he overcame adversity. So it washed away the fear of a language barrier to access the global market.

#12:20: Internet penetration in South Korea is very high and advanced (over 104 percent). And almost 70 percent of the population is using smartphones. That’s huge!

#12:21: South Korea is also almost 50 percent using 4G LTE, that’s the highest in the world.

#12:23: James advises that startups who are working in the mobile space, should focus on Android first, get user feedback on their apps, and then move forward into iPhone.

#12:25: In 2012, there was a renaissance of Korean angel investors and accelerators. And also, foreign investors like CyberAgent Ventures are getting really active in the space.

#12:26: The current e-commerce market is also huge. It’s more than KRW 30 billion. All in all, it’s a really powerful and compelling market and I wish you luck in getting into the market.

Here’s James’ presentation just in case you wanted to see it.

Daily deals have been one of the biggest trends to hit the internet since social media. Pioneered and popularized by Groupon, the deals model swept the world by storm and the Philippines is no exception. The pole star in the Philippines is Ralph Wunsch’s MetroDeal, which gets over two million unique visitors per month and is currently the Philippines’ number one e-commerce site.

Since I’ll be chatting with Ralph on April 5th at Startup Asia, I thought it’d be nice for you to have a quick preview of what MetroDeal is all about and what kinds of insights can be gleaned from his work.

Ralph’s actually half Austrian and half Filipino. Having worked successfully in a daily deals site in Austria, he went on to found MetroDeal in the Philippines.

Ralph started MetroDeal alone in late 2010 with one laptop and working out of his apartment. Within 15 minutes of launching the website, he sold his first deal. It went on to sell over one thousand times. In the first month, he made $50,000 of sales. By his fourth month, he had already hit $1 million. This was all in a period when he was hacking away solo with one person to do customer service. By the end of 2011, he had over 20 employees and by the end of 2012, he had over 50 people.

By 2012, MetroDeal achieved over $18 million in sales and is projected to hit $20 million by the end of 2013. It’s currently profitable.

Much of MetroDeal’s success can be attributed to a local market that was still weak in understanding the market for daily deals and the enticing offers his site pushed forward. One offer that Ralph noted to me was a buffet dinner cruise that was offered at 50 percent off. This deal sold over 40,000 times in two days alone. According to Ralph:

That’s a record in all of Southeast Asia, even. And that came out when we were barely six months old. It’s deals like these that really put us on the map.

Next up for MetroDeal is the launching of a new travel portal that will leverage their market penetration where sites like Agoda are still unknown.

Swing by in the afternoon at 3:30pm on April 5th (the second day of our event) where I’ll be interviewing Ralph to get more details on MetroDeal and the key elements to his success that we can glean for our own startups.

Across the region, telcos are in a quandary as to how to deal with chat apps like Line, Whatsapp, and KakaoTalk. These messaging apps offer a free and fast alternative to SMS and have the potential to obliterate SMS returns for telcos. Especially with smartphones on the rise, this trend is inevitable. And telcos are feeling the burn.

Effective on April 1st, Vietnamese telcos Mobifone and Vinafone hiked up the prices of mobile 3G internet for their customers. Data packages went from VND 10,000 ($0.50) per month to VND 40,000 ($1.90), and student packages went from VND 15,000 ($.72) per month to VND 35,000 ($1.67). They also cut their data plan speeds from 7.3 Mbps for users back to 256 Kbps after they’ve exceeded their data plan by 100MB.

Vietnam had one of the cheapest 3G rates in the world, but these new price hikes will be a blow to that record.

All of this makes a lot of sense from a business perspective as most Vietnamese telcos are either owned by the government or closely associated with it. So they have a strong agenda to get as many users on board as they can since that’s the government’s vision. But such low prices can’t be sustainable – telcos can’t offer such rates and still grow, and chat apps have especially underlined this.

With the number of smartphones in Vietnam set to go over 30 million by the end of this year, it’s a real concern. The more people buy smartphones, the more likely they’ll use messaging apps, and the more likely SMS profits will plummet. So of course, the telcos are panicking and hiking prices. On the other hand, I think this is a much better response than Indonesian or Chinese telcos, who decided to build their own chat app competitors.

(Source: VNExpress)

VNG just released Zini.vn at midnight March 30th. It’s a new project that has been in secret stealth mode up until very recently. The project resembles Twitter since it employs hashtags but unlike Twitter, Zini also emphasizes photos. Users, like Facebook, can see photos or photo albums posted in the main newsfeed. It basically features hashtags much more prominently as the center of the user experience and encourages users to add and follow hashtags.

Interestingly, the service requires authentication via Zing Me, VNG’s long-time social network, Facebook, Twitter, G+, or Yahoo. This is all part of VNG’s strategy to get any and all users on their platform without requiring them to create a totally new account. This has been especially the case with VNG’s latest products like Zalo and Giai Dieu Vui, which can authenticate via Facebook.

I played with it a bit and clearly VNG is trying to educate users on the idea of the hashtag. Not only is the hashtag prominently featured on the Zini logo, but it’s also emphasized in the right-hand column of the interface. This is an interesting approach compared to incumbent microblogging service Mimo.vn, which has been doing microblogging since 2009. The Mimo team decided to take away hashtags later in the development and focused on content building.

With VNG getting very serious about mobile via its chat app Zalo (with over a million users), already being a strong contender in social media with Zing Me (at last count they had over 12 million users across the country), and now getting into Zini.vn with hashtag-focused microblogging, I wonder how VNG plans to unite all these disparate or arguably competing services without cannabilizing itself. Or will the company slowly phase out one service in favor of another?

In no particular order, we’ve got some really cool China tech news this week, with tons of numbers and neat charts for you to get a glimpse of China’s latest trends.

1. Now China Seems to be Targeting Human Rights Activists with Android Spyware

Politically-motivated malware and spyware attacks have usually been focused on PC, Mac, or email accounts – but that’s changing.

2. Report: Jailbreaking Declining in China, Now Down to 32.3% of iOS Devices

Is it because Apple’s made it easier to pay for apps? Or because the Chinese economy has caught up to online payments? Or maybe users are hacking less because they’re satisfied with what Apple’s providing? Click through to find out.

3. China’s Teen Gamers Revealed, From In-Depth Demographics to Deepest Desires (Infographic)

This bizarrely huge sub-culture of China reveals some of the modern manifestations of the large beast that is China. I’m surprised that up to 20 percent of Chinese gamers are female. Nice!

4. China Will Have 300 Million Android Users by the End of 2013 (Infographic)

By the beginning of next year, 2014, China will have more Android users than there are citizens of the United States of America.

5. China Has 160 Million Active Android Users, 85 Million on iOS (Infographic)

And if you’re not convinced that China is going to hit 300 million by the end of the year, look at these growth rates and current numbers.

6. QQ, China’s Top IM, Launches As a Facebook App

QQ has been China’s instant messaging app of choice for years. But it has also been trying to open up to worldwide users, and this new Facebook-based app should help with that plan.

7. With Market Share Shrinking, Bing’s China Dream is in Serious Danger

Microsoft is really struggling, with its China VP saying this week: “If you can’t see users’ search questions and choices, if you don’t have enough data to work with, then there is no way to make improvements [to the search engine].” Oh dear.

That’s all for this week, folks. For our full spread of China coverage, you can click here or subscribe to our China RSS.

Just five days away from Startup Asia and the news is still hot this week! Besides the whole team preparing for our event, we caught up on some pretty interesting news. And since I’m out here in cool windy Nagoya practicing Zen before the conference, here’s this week’s hot serving of juicy news.

Willis’ pick: Smartisan OS, China’s War on Apple, and the Hype Train

Smartisan OS has had a lot of buzz this week for being the Chinese mobile OS and also an Apple iOS killer. Funny thing is, it’s based on Android. I think Charlie has quite smartly pointed out that all these are just buzz which was also employed by Xiaomi before it was launched. Well, at least Xiaomi has an awesome product (I own a Mi2) but I seriously doubt Smartisan OS and its hardware is going to be anywhere near Xiaomi’s standard.

Steven’s pick: New US Law Focuses on China Cyber-Espionage, Could Block Lenovo Sales to Government Departments

Former assistant secretary at the US Department of Homeland Security: “While the provision doesn’t prohibit purchases of Chinese-government-influenced systems, it makes such purchases politically difficult. How will China react? Not well. China has spent years trying to curtail its own purchases of IT from outside its borders, but that won’t stop it from calling the bill protectionist and claiming a violation of US World Trade Organization obligations.”

Minh’s pick: No More 3G in North Korea for Tourists

Well, I knew the honeymoon for North Korea was going to be over at some point and it’s happening sooner than I expected. In what would appear to be a parallel with Vietnamese and Chinese approaches to the internet, North Korea, I’m guessing, was testing the internet waters to see how it would impact the population. Maybe it’s because foreigners were showing their 3G-enabled phones to locals or there was just too much of a lens on North Korea than the authorities wanted, either way, here’s hoping it all opens up again so we can get more peeks again.

Charlie’s pick: Infographic on China’s Young Gamers

My news of the week is this massive infographic I spent a full day translating from the Chinese report by iResearch and QQ Games. If you’re interested in game development or game marketing in China, this is absolutely a must-read, and there are some very surprising results in there too.

Emily’s pick: Thailand’s Chang Allows Followers To Order Home Deliveries on WeChat

It’s really interesting to see chat apps services, in this case, Tencent’s WeChat, offering a different usage to users other than just being a pure conversation application. It’s definitely going to be great to see other companies jumping on the wagon, and introduce more convenient services to users!

Minghao’s pick: SoftBank to Take Majority Stake In ‘Puzzle and Dragons’ Maker GungHo

This is big. In my opinion, gaming is the only vertical that’s proven to make a lot of money in Asia. This news further confirm my perspective that it can make shipload of money. We see that in Vietnam’s VNG, China’s Tencent and Shanda, Japan’s GREE and DeNA. Now we have GungHo that has market capital of five billion.

Enricko’s pick: Samsung Pours Another $3.2 Billion Into Vietnam

Like Minh pointed out, electronics manufacturing is one of the biggest industries in Vietnam, and it’s about to get bigger with companies like Samsung trusting its investment on the country. And the size of the investment is four times bigger than the one Samsung did in 2009, and that alone can be a clear indication to how much jobs and revenue growth Vietnam can expect to see in the coming years.

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In Silicon Valley, techcooperation is everywhere. Hardware firms, software companies, and startups of all sizes work with each other to build products and services, APIs are shared and built on top of each other. Granted, there’s also conflict – like with Twitter locking Instagram out of embedded images – but the environment is still one that encourages collaborative innovation. Headquarter doors are arms length apart. Intel is just miles away from Apple, Google, and Facebook.

That’s not the case in Vietnam. The technology industry is split in three: electronics manufacturing, outsourcing, and the domestic startup market. Vastly different industries each deeply isolated.

But each industry is huge. Electronics exports in Vietnam are now worth over US$16 billion. The outsourcing industry in 2007, by some estimates, brought in well over $180 million in revenue and possibly reached $3 billion in 2012 (I’ll get deeper into outsourcing numbers below). And VNG, one of the anchors of the domestic tech and startup industry in Vietnam, pulled in $90 million in revenue last year alone. Trouble is, there’s no desire for the three entities to work together.

Quang Trung Software city, a software park sanctioned by the Vietnamese government.

The two biggest tech industries in Vietnam

Frankly, the electronics and software outsourcing industries are ones that exist because they can squeeze higher value out of lower margins. In electronics manufacturing, companies like Samsung and Intel pump in millions of dollars to build factories and train workers. The management is top-down and the revenues are high. Although it allows Vietnam to partake in high level electronics production, it will take at least another three to five years before a Vietnamese company can take on the level of scale of the foreign firms. Therefore, they may remain isolated for another decade here. They’re plants, not headquarters based in a campus.

With software outsourcing, it’s a fast growing industry. The software and IT service industry in Vietnam, in total, pulled in $2.3 billion in revenue in 2011. And if the 25 to 35 percent growth rate is solid, it may have pushed into $3 billion last year. By some estimates, the outsourcing share of this number could be at least a quarter or half of this revenue.

Software outsourcing is especially appealing to software engineers who are graduating from Vietnam’s engineering schools. It’s higher pay – excellent engineers sometimes expect up to $3,000 or more per month – and they get to work on deeper technical problems from companies hailing from places like the US and Japan. For a family-conscious engineer, this is the way to go: big problems, status and money.

Tech startups, a nascent frontier that outsourcing needs to mentor

Software startups, on the other hand, are small by comparison. Although VNG has posted $90 million in sales revenue last year, it’s one of the only big stars that is successfully competing in the domestic consumer space. The bulk of this revenue is likely still in gaming, an area that is still hot and VNG’s core competency. Gaming is an industry that new, smaller studios such as Like.vn and Colorbox have just started getting into. E-commerce is still young and largely unprofitable, with Rocket Internet’s Zalora and Lazada taking the majority of market share and still spending like crazy.

Startups in Vietnam are still a relatively new concept, and they’ve arguably only been around for the last five to seven years. In my personal database of startups I’ve recorded about 250 currently running startups in fields from education to mobile games to social media. Until now, the domestic market was so unprofitable that it made way more sense to go into outsourcing, where you can get more bang for your buck. But the shift is coming this year and next year, as the smartphone market awakens and the domestic market becomes more accustomed to spending on things like software games, products, and services. Things are heating up.

This is why I think it will be really important for outsourcing companies to start getting in bed with startups. Currently, the startup community lacks governmental support, money, technical skills, product management, and experience. Things the outsourcing industry has a lot of. As Vietnam’s domestic market accelerates, growth will be exponential, and it’s no wonder that foreign messaging apps and e-commerce startups are jumping into the market last year and this year. So if the outsourcing industries don’t start getting involved domestically, it will be a huge missed opportunity. I don’t know how this will manifest: in networks, in workshops, in government initiatives, or what; I just know it needs to happen. The teenage startups need their uncle outsourcers to lend them a hand.

In an e-commerce market as huge as Vietnam’s with over 30 big e-commerce players and hundreds of smaller players, logistics and collecting payments are big problems. That’s why Giao Hang Nhanh (GHN), which means “Fast Delivery”, an e-commerce delivery and logistics business, has risen out of this teeming gang of online shops. As far as e-commerce delivery goes, GHN is the first company that comes to mind for most Vietnamese e-merchants. GHN does two things really well: delivery and payment.

I interviewed GHN’s CEO Luong Duy Hoai, to get the scoop on how GHN is doing and what’s up next. The service they offer is quite complex but it solves so many problems at once that it’s worth looking really closely at the model. But first, some numbers.

GHN currently serves over 800 online merchants, over 20 of those merchants are larger scale B2C e-commerce sites like Tiki.vn, Project Lana, MuaFast, Nha Sach Phuong Nam, and Foci, to name a few. Most of GHN’s merchant base comes out of the group buying industry. So far, GHN has delivered over 60,000 orders since its founding early last year, and has 60 staff at last count. Currently, GHN handles over 1.5 billion VND (over $70,000) of transactions per week for its clients and has over 200 million VND ($9,500) of revenue per month.

For merchants, GHN offers three things:

1. 2 to 3 day delivery for 10,000 VND ($0.50)
2. Next-day delivery for 15,000 VND ($0.70)
3. Same-day delivery for 20,000 VND ($1.00)

All these delivery times can be requested from the merchant or customer side. GHN takes orders from multiple merchants, synthesizes them into manageable routes via an internal logistical system and gets them to the specified customers on time via its own fleet of delivery men.

How can a company that serves over 800 merchants, and delivers to 600 to 700 people daily, guarantee anything under 3 days delivery? It’s GHN’s sophisticated logistical system. Currently, e-commerce sites in Vietnam who are not using GHN generally deliver their coupons and goods four days to a week from the initial purchase online.

The logistical infrastructure at work

At first, GHN hired coordinators to develop routes for their trained motorbike delivery guys. These guys would look at routes and orders and plan out the delivery routes for delivery men. But, according to Hoai:

The goal was always to optimize process through technology. We now have coordinators, but our system, now automates 60 percent of all the decisions. Coordinators are freed up to work on other problems. The system plans the route, catalogs the transactions, and keeps track of all the deliveries. In the beginning, we had 10 or 20 deliveries per day, that was easy for one person to organize. Now we have over 500, it’s impossible for one person to organize all that. Our system handles it all.

GHN’s biggest competitive advantage is this system. And there are basically three key solutions that GHN brings to the market:

1. The automated decision and route planner as described above.
2. An API and dashboard that allows any customer to upload orders and track them. Orders can currently be uploaded to GHN’s server by calling directly to customer service (ideal for low-tech small businesses), accessed via the dashboard, and uploading an excel file into the system. Basically, they’ve made it really easy for merchants to submit orders and have them delivered automatically according to their time preference.
3. A payment collection system that prevents delivery men from bamboozling the system and running off with the money or products. Delivery men must travel back to GHN’s cashier hubs (there are four in the Ho Chi Minh city) three times a day to return money received and get new delivery orders from the system. If delivery men do not return, the system locks them out, and does not issue out further routes or delivery protocols. All money collected is returned to merchants Monday, Wednesday, and Friday of every week.

In the GHN dashboard all merchants have to do is submit their orders and GHN takes care of the rest. Merchants can even set delivery times to six months ahead and track exactly when customers received their orders. The system even sends SMS texts to customers when a delivery man has received a delivery, thus letting them know that an order is on its way within hours.

This is a map of the locations of all of GHN’s merchants across Ho Chi Minh city. The GHN system will arrange routes along these locations.

The problems GHN solves

GHN gives e-commerce sites that use its service an edge – they’ll get their coupons or products into customer hands much faster than anybody else – but it also hits at a key chord in Vietnamese e-commerce. As Hoai says:

E-commerce is in a very early stage in Vietnam. Buyers and sellers don’t trust each other yet. And warehouses, sales channels, infrastructures, and delivery systems are still underdeveloped. Our goal is to build a trust-building service for e-commerce that can scale very big and bring Vietnam into the next level of e-commerce within the next five years. We do this with our sophisticated tracking system and rigorously training our delivery men in customer service.

E-commerce is the new bastion of Vietnam’s young population. Many people who don’t have a job in the trying Vietnamese economy look to e-commerce as an easy solution where you don’t need to set up a physical shop, just a website. And now with GHN around, you don’t even need an in-house delivery guy/team.

Hoai is third from the right.

What’s next?

Currently, the company is expanding its merchant-base and Hoai expects to be handling over 1,500 deliveries per day by the end of this month. Many people in the startup community have speculated that GHN will get into the e-commerce business itself because of its infrastructure but Hoai is adamant not it’s sticking to its area:

Actually, we’ve gotten a few offers to be bought by several e-commerce players in Vietnam, but we refused them. We’re focused very specifically on delivery and don’t want to get acquired by any partners. If we did, we would alienate all of our other merchants. This wouldn’t make sense from a business perspective.

Currently, Giao Hang Nhanh is not profitable yet, but the more scale the company handles, the closer it approaches profitability. And with the strong value-adding system GHN has created, that’s likely to happen this year.

Vietnamese app developer team Not A Basement Studio, whom I interviewed earlier this month, has released a new iPad app on the US App Store called KeepShot.

The basic idea is you can take photos from your photo album, throw them together into KeepShot, curate and edit the photos, and then submit the album to the KeepShot server. Then the company will print a nicely designed photo album and deliver it to your door. The concept might remind some users of Postagram, which allows iPhone users to create a postcard from their own photos and send a physical version to family and friends by making an in-app purchase. KeepShot takes this idea to the next level by adding filters and creating full photo albums with fancy designs.

Not A Basement Studio worked closely with My Publisher, one of the biggest digital printers in the world, to provide the ideal photo albums. KeepShot is a free app, but of course to print the albums it charges money via in-app purchases. Although, if you grab the app now and make an album, you’ll get a free 20-page photo book that’s worth $36 as part of their launch promo.

According to Hieu Tran, the business guy:

There was just one goal we had in mind for KeepShot: make photo books fun. We think photo books are a really great way for loved ones to share memories with each other, and we want KeepShot to be the easiest and funnest way to make photo books.

The app is all in keeping with Not A Basement Studio’s focus on photos after their success with Fuzel, which garnered more than one million users since its launch in July last year and was even featured by Apple as a top app in the photo category.

If you’d like to try out the app, it’s on the App Store here. Of course, you’ll need an iPad to try it out.

Metaps, the Android monetization platform out of Japan that just secured $11 million in series B funding, is today teaming up with Vietnam’s Appota, an iOS and Android app monetization and distribution platform, to tackle the Vietnamese Android app market. The deal allows Appota to use Metaps’ SDK as its official monetization engine, which should make it easier for local developers to make money from their Android apps.

Metaps, which is now operating in Japan, Korea, the US, Singapore, and Hong Kong, has been aggressively expanding its reach. By bringing Vietnam into the fold, this signals Metaps has its eye on Southeast Asia where smartphones are still on the rise. In Vietnam, for example, smartphones barely make up 20 to 30 percent of the mobile market, compared to East Asia where smartphone acquisition is at 90 percent in South Korea. But with Vietnam’s rapid smartphone growth, it’s time to get in now before rivals ad platforms do so.

This is an interesting move for Vietnam’s Appota, which started in 2011 and has its own SDK that allows developers to monetize their apps. I spoke with the CEO Do Tuan Anh and he’s long had dreams to bring Appota out of Vietnam, so this deal may fall right in line with that. According to Tuan Anh:

We will have the main mobile business in advertisement, so cooperation with Metaps will be a good step for us to join in the advertisement industry.

Metaps, which garnered over 10 million downloads via its platform in 2012 will now be able to access Appota’s 7.6 million Vietnamese users.

This is all in keeping with Metaps’ goal of being the largest Android monetization platform in the world by 2013. But before it gets there, it’s probably going to have to start looking seriously at China (which is on Metaps’ to-do list) and Europe, where smartphone penetration is much higher than in Southeast Asia.

Update: Added quote from CEO.