Last September, the second Startup Weekend was held in Ho Chi Minh city here in Vietnam. Not to be outdone, here comes Hanoi’s first ever Startup Weekend. The event starts on June 14th (starting at 6:30pm) and spans until June 16th (to 10pm) and will be held at FPT University in Hanoi.

This year’s theme is “No Talk, All Action” and will focus on getting teams together to come up with ideas that have a strong business model, understanding of the market, product, and customer. So far, the event already has 250 sign-ups who want to participate, with 35 percent of them with more than two years of experience in engineering, design, and web development. They’re expecting 400 total sign-ups and have 14 mentors to guide the teams. So if you’re in Hanoi and you want to join, you better do it soon by signing up here.

Thus far, Ho Chi Minh city’s Startup Weekend events have been relatively successful in producing new startups like Keewi, so this will be an opportunity for Hanoi to get in on the wave. Although Hanoi has always had a smaller startup community with fewer events, I’ve noticed that startups coming out of the capital city to be quite robust. There are certainly more startups in Ho Chi Minh city, so perhaps the first ever Startup Weekend in the north of the country next month can help balance things out.

Last Saturday and the Saturday before, Vietnam held its third ever Mobile Day in the country to throngs of people. All told, over 2,500 people attended the events with 1,500 in Hanoi and 1,000 in Saigon. To say the least, there’s a big buzz for mobile in Vietnam and the industry is only going to get more crowded. Some of the presentations were pretty cool, so I’ll give you a quick taste of a few that caught my eye.

Presentations covered some very key concerns for mobile developers in Vietnam, like memory management for Android applications; four secrets to success for app monetization; building an online community and getting to the top of the App Store and Play Store; launching a mobile game in just three months; the issue of mobile payments. We’ll embed the slideshows of three of the many informative presentations here. You can click on the links below for more.

12 things you can learn from mobile products made in Vietnam

Zalo challenges foreign chat apps

Another interesting talk came from VNG’s Dao Ngoc Thanh who covered many of the technical aspects of Zalo and its growth over the past year from just a few users to over two million:

Going mobile and embracing mobile ads

Nguyen Minh Quy, from NovaAds, also gave some interesting insights about mobile ad networks. His presentation showed some really interesting numbers on the growth of mobile and what the opportunities are:

Next year, the event is sure to be even bigger with mobile growth growing even faster than last year and more companies jumping into the Vietnamese market before it’s too late.

There were plenty of other really awesome presentations at the event from across the board, but most of them were a bit more technical, so the slides in these will give you a quick good idea of the mobile landscape in Vietnam. You can find all the links to presentations from Hanoi and Saigon on the Mobile Day homepage.

Earlier this month I wrote about Tappxi, the Android app that makes taking a taxi in Vietnam safer and easier. This week, let’s look at Aloxeom. It’s a web-based service that connects passengers with motorbike taxi drivers for a ride in Hanoi, Vietnam. “Alo” means hello, and “xe om” are the Vietnamese words for motorbike taxi (literally meaning hugging vehicle).

So the service is like this, if I step out of my house and I need a ride to the supermarket, but I don’t want to take an expensive taxi, I can call the operator or via the website at Aloxeom and they’ll send the nearest motorbike taxi guy straight to me. Such motorbike taxis in Vietnam are everywhere, and they’re on most of the street corners of the main streets of Vietnam.

The problem with getting a moto-driver is that sometimes, when you’re off the main streets, it’s harder to find them and it’s always a hassle to haggle on the price. You never know how much it costs to get to the next district or five kilometers away. Thus Aloxeom solves this in two ways: the service has over 800 motorbike drivers in their database. All of the drivers are mapped out on their system along with their phone number, so if you tell the Aloxeom operator where you are, the Aloxeom database will send the closes moto-driver.

The cool thing about the service is that Aloxeom doesn’t actually employ the drivers, it’s an add-on service that allows drivers who already have their own personal business to tap into another network and avenue for revenue. But Aloxeom also guarantees quality and reliability. It’s sort of like the taxi-booking apps we’ve seen spring up around the world.

Aloxeom’s own people have interviewed every one of the 1,000 drivers that applied to the service and after a few months they had to remove a few from the system to keep the quality high. Aloxeom makes sure that every ride is VND 6,000 ($.30) per kilometer and sends an SMS to the driver and the passenger to confirm the right pay. Aloxeom takes 15 percent of the cut for every ride.

I talked to founder and CEO of Aloxeom, May Huy Mao, who told me that:

In the past, there have been companies that have tried to enter this space by putting GPS machines on the motorbikes or other extra services, but they didn’t gain much traction. We’re focused quite simply on making it easier to catch a motorbike taxi and calculating the cost without being taken advantage of.

The team of five has only been working on this project since early March and is looking to grow it into Ho Chi Minh city and Danang by the end of the year. I’m excited, and I’ll certainly use it the next time I’m up in the capital.

We’ve also written about a similar startup in Indonesia, called Go-Jek.

For those of you who are curious about the frontiers of Vietnam’s startup scene, an interesting place to start is the landscape of incubators, co-working spaces and communities. But as my buddy Chris Zobrist says, “I guess it depends on how you define ‘incubator’“. So I’ve got a relatively broad definition so that you can get a feel for what are the organizations, places, and people that are fostering the startup scene in Vietnam. Of course, there are a lot of projects I’m not aware of, and I’ve heard from some that there are more than that in Vietnam – some say that there are at least 20. I’ll just focus on ten here.

Of course, if you’re looking at Vietnam’s startup scene, you’ve got to separate it into two: Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh city. I’ve already written a bit about their different characters last week.

By the way, there are quite a few that are hush-hush and aren’t announcing their presence on the market yet, like Hub.IT, which will be opening around July. There are others I can’t announce at present, but I’ll keep you posted. Also, it’s worth noting that CyberAgent Ventures is incubating in both Hanoi and Saigon (along with coordination with Vat Gia, the major Vietnamese e-commerce company). They’ve got a real cool model with their hands-on approach to investment and incubation. We’ll be hearing more from them next week.

So let’s get down to it this list of ten split across two cities:

(Many thanks for Pham Minh Tuan from Topica for his data on incubators in Hanoi!)

Hanoi: Relationships, government, and carefully crafted startups

Topica Founder’s Institute: You can’t go to Hanoi’s startup scene without thinking of Topica’s Founder’s Institute. The training course has been around for a little over two years and gets new startups into a 15-week program, and invites leaders from successful startups in Vietnam to come and train the newbies. It just graduated 11 startups late last year.

5Desire: 5desire is an incubator and consulting firm that’s focused on accelerating startups in various sectors in terms of business and resources. They choose startups to participate in their program and they’re also running a co-working space.

Hatch.vn: A new player on the scene. The crew organizes monthly events, attempting to connect startups across various sectors and is building up to a big startup fair.

FPT: Vietnam’s biggest technology company is also in on the incubating fun with an incubator called FICO, which is actually more targeted at students.

Saigon / Ho Chi Minh city: Business mindset, international connections, and money

The Start Center and Saigon Hub: Originally, started out as just the ‘Start Center’, this co-working space has overflowed to necessitate opening up Saigon Hub, where workshops are given along with mLab and the vision is to get more events and support for startups that need space, acceleration, and possibly funding.

Egg Agency: This unique enclave, huddled up outside of Saigon’s city center, is equipped with a spa and gym. But the real value addition is that it’s a growth hacking incubator that brings in new entrepreneurs and runs them through laps of real business to build experience for their own projects. A pretty unique model.

mLab: The newly arrived mLab, with support from the World Bank, is attempting to unite the startup scene in Ho Chi Minh city with events connecting all the right people together. They’re also running hackathons and competitions to incubate in co-working spaces that they are coordinating with others in the sector.

Skynet: Skynet specializes in building a network of expertise and managers inside of their own company while incubating and accelerating companies that come to them. In a way, it’s like in-sourcing, instead of outsourcing.

Quang Trung Software City: This industrial park is dedicated solely to fostering the Vietnamese tech industry and hosts several technology universities as well as big outsourcing companies. They’ve also got an active incubator.

Conclusion

Outside of this quick list of incubators, there are also government programs that are staying more incognito at the moment. And there’s plrenty of private incubators that are flying below the radar. A new model that I’ve been seeing lately is an outsourcing company that also incubates and fosters new projects on the side. Although some have protested that outsourcing professionals have trouble thinking in terms of product, it’s still an interesting use of engineering experience.

Note: Please let us know if there are any incubators, growth hackers, and co-working spaces that we missed and we’ll add them to the list.

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:

The one millionth customer was Singaporean mum-to-be Kelly Nguyen, who was surprised by the Zalora team at her workplace, who handed over her order (a maternity dress) free of charge.

The Zalora crew also concocted a little infographic (below) to show some of its other stats. For example, the e-commerce service has shipped to 16,853 towns in the region so far, and over 23,000 new products are added to the site each week. To hold all that stock, the company has over 20,000 square meters of warehouse space, which is the equivalent of five football fields.

Zalora released its iPhone app last month, and attracted a further $26 million in funding back in March.

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.

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.

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!

Hey folks, Xin Chào Thành Phó Hồ Chí Minh! In case you’re wondering what that means, it’s actually “Hello Ho Chi Minh city!” And yes, Tech in Asia Meetup will be heading back to Ho Chi Minh, and once again we are all excited to meet and connect with the local startup community there.

This time around, we are excited to have Victor Lavrenko, CEO of Vietnam’s local search engine, Coc Coc, to share with us the challenges he faced in building a search engine up against tough competition from giants like Google. For those of you who have not heard of CocCoc, you can read more about them here.

Or… You are welcome to join us at this latest Tech in Asia Meetup to hear Victor speak on May 23, at 6:30 p.m. Once again, tickets are free but grab them fast while stocks last. See you there!

Agenda:

• Registration: 6.30 – 7.00pm
• [Interview] How CocCoc Plans To Take Down Google in Vietnam 7.00 – 7.40pm
• Q&A from floor: 7.40 – 8.00pm
• Networking & Dinner: 8.00 – 9.00pm

Venue:

Saigon Hub, 27B Nguyen Dinh Chieu Street, Da Kao Ward, District 1

View Larger Map

Speaker: Victor Lavrenko

Victor is a well-known Russian online entrepreneur with over 15 years experience in financial, strategic and technological fields. Graduated from Moscow state University, Faculty of Mathematics and Cybernetics holding MMath degree. Prior to commencing the Cốc Cốc project in 2010, Victor has held top positions from Technical Director to the Vice President of Strategy and Finance at Mail.ru (one of the biggest Internet companies in Russia).

Currently Victor is focused on the development of the Vietnamese Search Engine with the aim to win the local search market and to contribute to the development of the Internet industry in Vietnam.

Not forgetting, a huge thank you to our awesome Sponsors:

Corporate sponsors

VC sponsors

Startup sponsors

China’s UCWeb and its UC Browser app for mobiles have more than 400 million users worldwide with 100 million outside of China. Today at the Global Mobile Internet Conference (GMIC) in Beijing, UCWeb announced that it will invest RMB 3 billion (more than $480 million) over the next three years. The project is codenamed/abbreviated ‘GEEK’ and will focus on four things:

• Global expansion: Focusing on Brazil, Vietnam, Russia, and Indonesia. CEO and founder, Yu Yongfu also said that UCWeb will be opening up offices in these four countries very soon.
• Open Ecosystem: UCWeb will continue to strengthen its platform and replicate local success overseas. UCWeb says that its gaming platform has more than 20 games which are generating more than $150,000 each month right now. 200 million clicks are registered every day across all versions of UC Browser.
• Evolved monetization: Searching for new revenue streams while sustaining the growth for gaming content. In 2012, more than $15 million was generated from the games platform.
• Technology Know-how: Integrate with the cloud and scale to support new extensions and services in the future through technology advancement.

UCWeb CEO Yu Yongfu talking at GMIC2013 this afternoon.

To fuel UCWeb’s GEEK plan, CEO Yu said that the company has more than RMB 1 billion ($161 million) in cash and is already profitable. UCWeb’s revenue has doubled in the last three years and is generating revenue from ads (50 percent) and games (50 percent). The profit margin for ads could be as high as 85 percent, he added. If needed, CEO Yu claims that there are a lot of investors who are hungry to invest in UCWeb.

UCWeb, as we have written before, is poised for IPO in 2013. But in the interview with CEO Yu today, he said that he would rather delay going public to avoid unnecessary pressure from investors. Yu also said that UCWeb isn’t interested to get acquired and be part of a larger company. So while Baidu may be actually interested in UCWeb, it seems like Yu isn’t willing to let go.

UCWeb currently has more than 1,500 staff across the world and is looking to add another 1,000 more people in the coming three years.

(Photo of Yu from QQ Tech)

This is part of our coverage of GMIC 2013 in Beijing, running today and tomorrow (May 7 and 8). For other stories from this event, click here.

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.

After months of testing it out in South Korea and Japan, the messaging app KakaoTalk is today launching its social gaming platform for users in Indonesia and Vietnam. Along with this, a number of third-party game developers have created Indonesian and Vietnamese language versions of their social gaming titles that integrate with KakaoTalk.

Five games are ready today for the messaging app’s users in Indonesia and Vietnam: HotDogStudio’s Everyone’s Game for Kakao, Com2uS’s Tiny Pang for Kakao, LIVEZEN’s Astrowings for Kakao, GameZen’s BirdPang for Kakao, and CraveMob’s Hunter Cat for Kakao (pictured).

KakaoTalk has been pushing hard into both those Southeast Asian markets in the past few months, even spending on a big budget TV ad campaign for Indonesians that fused K-pop with one Indo pop star.

Korea-based KakaoTalk has just over 80 million users, and the startup made $7 million in profit last year, despite being up against web giant rivals like NHN (makers of Line), Tencent (WeChat), and Facebook Messenger.

The KakaoTalk Game Platform launched in its home market last August and soon showed its worth by propelling a number of its supported games to the top of Korea’s gaming charts. It then rolled out in February in Japan (Update: Also in the US since last November).

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 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.

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.

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.

The full Amazon Appstore new line-up in Asia-Pacific – it has launched already in Japan – is here, with larger nations highlighted in bold:

• American Samoa
• Australia
• Bhutan
• Cambodia
• Christmas Island
• Cocos (Keeling) Islands
• Cook Islands
• French Polynesia
• Hong Kong
• India
• Laos
• Macao
• Mariana Islands
• Marshall Islands
• Micronesia
• Mongolia
• Myanmar
• Nepal
• New Zealand
• Niue
• Norfolk Island
• Palau
• Papua New Guinea
• Philippines
• Samoa
• Solomon Islands
• South Korea
• Sri Lanka
• Taiwan
• Thailand
• Timor-Leste
• Tokelau
• Tuvalu
• Vanuatu
• Vietnam
• Wallis and Futuna

With developers and customers in those countries now having access to Amazon’s catalog of apps, it might soon lead to the company’s hardware, namely the Kindle Fire and Fire HD tablets – going on sale there at a later date. But the Amazon App Store can be used on any Android device.

By the way, there are some seriously odd places on the global list, such as Antarctica, and the Heard Island and McDonald Island (Wikipedia says: “Population: 0”).

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.

At the sidelines of the Startup Asia Singapore conference, I had the opportunity to meet Nobuaki Kitagawa (pictured above), CEO of CyberAgent Ventures China. He revealed that there are plans to increase the US$15 million fund targeted at the Southeast Asia (SEA) region to $20 million by the end of the year.

Nobuaki also said that CyberAgent Ventures has a keen eye on the Thailand market and started looking into it just three to four months ago. The current situation of the Thai market seemed favorable to them, and he is seeing more accelerators and seed investors popping up in the scene, in addition to the strong support that is provided by the ecosystem. He also noted that there are not many venture capital funds in Thailand. With CyberAgent Ventures focusing on series A and B funding, Nobuaki sees Thailand as a timely opportunity for them.

With presence already in countries such as Indonesia and Vietnam, Nobuaki is sure that they will be establishing an office in Thailand in order to be close to the market. Unfortunately there are no startups who have grabbed their attention yet, and they are still in the midst of meeting more in order to find the right fit. When asked about the kind of startups they are looking at, he tells us that they are looking at sectors involving B2C consumer internet and advertising, which pretty much follows the line of businesses that CyberAgent (TYO:4751) operates in Japan.

A new fund for South Korea this year?

Apart from Thailand, he also said that the CyberAgent company has entered South Korea, and has adopted a slightly different strategy as compared to China and SEA. The latter regions are developing markets and have much growth potential. Hence, most startups they look out for would be in consumer internet and online advertisement services.

On the other hand, as South Korea is a slightly more mature market, CyberAgent has a more specific approach, focusing on smartphone applications. With smartphone apps being a global platform, coupled with a large pool of talented Korean developers with a global vision, all factors seem favorable for them to establish a presence in the Asia Pacific region. In fact, CyberAgent Ventures made an investment in KakaoTalk back in 2011, and opened a Seoul office back in October 2012.

With this, they are very eager to set up an individual fund for the Korean market. Nobuaki explains that it is still in its preliminary stages, but could be established late this year.

He also added that the flow of money is currently all over the place, with both Chinese and South Korean startups looking to enter SEA and Japan, and Japan looking to China and SEA. In his opinion, the Southeast Asian internet community seems immature, but CyberAgent Ventures will be able to lead good exit plans if CyberAgent effectively expands into the region. It also hopes to help enhance the startup ecosystem with its networks.

When asked about its investments in Indonesia, Nobuaki also reveals that it will be soon making an investment in two startups within the gaming and e-commerce sectors pretty soon. Each investment will be under US$1 million. We’ll keep our eyes peeled for those.

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.

Sirgoo Lee (pictured right) is a very nice guy. He’s the co-CEO of Korea-based chat app KakaoTalk. When he went onstage at our Startup Asia Singapore event last week, he spontaneously said that he was really excited to be there, even before being introduced by interviewer Willis Wee. He went on to reveal important figures about the company’s yearly revenue and profit – something that few startups opt to divulge. So I was pleased I got the chance to meet Sirgoo in person after the conference to talk about the company’s expansion plans to Indonesia and Vietnam.

Sirgoo explains that KakaoTalk’s strategy is to let the general public know and at least try using the app. Whatever happens after that – either people will choose to use KakaoTalk more, or test rival apps – lies with the users themselves. He said that the biggest challenge so far is to convince people to take that first step to try KakaoTalk. Today, thanks to the high-profile, star-studded TV ad campaign the company is running in Indonesia, the app is now sitting at the top spot in the overall app category in the country’s iTunes and Google Play stores.

Sirgoo explained that since the TV ads aired in Indonesia on March 29th, KakaoTalk has received around 100,000 downloads every day. Which means that there are now at least one million Indonesians who have tried the app. The app’s progress in Vietnam is speeding up too, ranking fourth on iTunes and 13th on Google Play right now.

Searching for local partners

While the company is being very serious about expanding to Indonesia and Vietnam, there aren’t any KakaoTalk offices yet in either country. We understand that there are only two KakaoTalk representatives who have been sent to the latter country. Why? Sirgoo explained that those staffers will focus on initial marketing plans and will look for local partners.

Not only are they looking for local deals for KakaoTalk’s localized content, but the teams are looking for a big local partner to help them get going in each country. Sirgoo gives an example of how they signed a joint venture agreement with Yahoo Japan to help promote the app in the territory of homegrown rival Line.

Sirgoo says that they haven’t found this kind of partner yet in Indonesia and Vietnam. Such a partner, he explained, must have very good understanding of online services, and have strong influence in each local market. KakaoTalk’s rival WeChat has signed a partnership with Indonesian media giant MNC Media earlier this year, forming a joint-venture called MNC-Tencent.

Why BigBang?

I was curious why the startup company chose Korean boy band BigBang to be KakaoTalk’s TV ad stars. Sirgoo says that it’s not only the group’s youth appeal and influence that made the company chose them, but also BigBang’s depth of artistry and wider pop appeal. In this way, he sees the band as being like the Kakao app.

Another strength that KakaoTalk wants to keep up is the way it tailors its apps based on the audience. The company will not use the same strategy it uses in South Korea in other countries, and instead aims to attract a substantial user-base first while analyzing what users in new nations like or dislike. One of the reasons KakaoTalk isn’t pushing too many games to Indonesian users is because the company is unsure whether its new users like to play mobile social games or if they hate getting game requests from their chat buddies. A further localization effort is seen in how the company compresses its stickers and animations to cope with slower Internet speeds in Indonesia – this can also be implemented in Vietnam of course.

The future

Sirgoo believes that while the killer product on desktop internet is search engines, the killer product on mobile devices is messaging apps. And with more people using mobile devices, they will also demand that mobile devices can do everything that they can do on desktop machines. This includes games, shopping, and many other things.

The co-CEO believes that gaming and shopping success stories – two avenues that KakaoTalk has ventured into, he said – is just the beginning. Though Sirgoo declined to reveal what the team has in store next.

He believes that KakaoTalk is a platform for people from various industries and many countries to collaborate. This extends to not only games and stickers, but also to other bigger possibilities in the future. But his first priority is definitely to build up a big enough user-base in new nations first.

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:

#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:

This evening, we are pleased to have a panel of distinguished guests from Indonesia, Thailand and Vietnam to give us an insight on Singapore’s neighbouring markets. Held at Biopolis, tonight’s sharing and networking session is a prelude to tomorrow’s Startup Asia Singapore conference involving speakers:

• Reza, FOWAB in Bandung, representing Indonesia startup scene

• Mimee, Thumbsup, representing Thailand startup scene

• Mike Tran, Keewi, representing Vietnam startup scene

(The liveblog will auto-update below)

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 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.

Samsung (005930:KS) built its first manufacturing plant in Vietnam in 2009, pumping in US$700 million to build it. In 2012, the value of the exports from this plant exceeded $12 billion, that’s up from $7 billion the year before. That’s a return of $17 for every dollar invested. It represents a whopping ten percent of the value ($114.6 billion) of all exports out of Vietnam. To say the least, electronics manufacturing is becoming the new backbone of the Vietnamese export economy.

Following this quickly growing trend, and significant government-level support, Samsung is pumping another $3.2 billion into building another factory in Vietnam’s northern province of Thai Nguyen. Construction started yesterday. The huge project will see the building of a major handset and hi-tech electronics plant and a microchip manufacturing plant.

If this new plant performs as well as the first, it may end up producing well over $40 billion in Samsung exports per year. Samsung expects the first plant to produce $16.5 billion worth of exports by year’s end.

Although there have been rumblings of Samsung opening up plants in Nigeria and neighboring Indonesia – and many existing plants in China – it’s possible that the Samsung in your hand was made in Vietnam.

At Startup Asia, Mike Tran will swing by to give us all an introduction to the Vietnamese startup and technology scene. So I thought I’d take a chance to sit down with him so you can find out who he is before he grabs the mic.

Today, he’s the founder and CEO of Keewi, a company which, according to Mike, “wants to make it as easy as possible for anybody to create an event in Saigon”. Currently, the startup is evolving into an Eventbrite-like service for the Vietnamese market and two weeks ago launched its new ticketing service to help event organizers sell, promote, and manage their events online.

Keewi’s genesis

Mike is among a new generation of entrepreneurs in Vietnam who were educated abroad, like with the founders of Greengar, Not A Basement Studio, and even VNG. Mike studied civil planning and project management in Canada for seven years before coming back to Vietnam to work in one of Ho Chi Minh city’s largest corporations, Saigon Trading Group. In his own words:

In 2009, I helped set up a supermarket chain, and then moved onto a real estate project. In 2011, this project slowed to a crawl, which allowed me time to work on some ideas I had of my own: a website that helped curate online coupons. It was a time when Groupon clones were rising in Vietnam. But that idea died. I invited all my friends, and they would go to the site, but they found no reason to use the service.

So Mike closed that site down. It was when he went to a friend’s wedding that the first inklings of Keewi began. He went not knowing anybody and realized that there was no service to let him know if any other friends were at the wedding. That was the first version of Keewi, finding out if your friends were attending the same event. Mike adds:

Our small team of five took this idea and pitched it at Startup Weekend in 2011. We got to meet successful entrepreneurs and venture capitalists and really got into the idea of a startup.

After Startup Weekend, only two guys were still interested. – Mike and the developer. The first prototype was showcased at Demo Asia, which gave them another chance to examine user behavior. They learned that users wanted to use the mobile HTML5 site for networking. By April 2012, the second prototype was out, emphasizing networking.

Everytime Keewi shifted, it was always in response to user behavior. That’s part of their adherence to ‘lean startup’ and developing market-fit. This eventually lead them into the ticketing service it is today:

We realized that event organizers actually don’t really care so much that people can network. The biggest problem for event organizers is about getting people to attend events. We haven’t given up on networking, but ticketing is the more powerful need. So in a way, you could look at us as an Eventbrite. But our competitive advantage is payment, logistics, and building direct relationships with event organizers.

The startup scene In Vietnam

This last point about relationships is a particularly strong concern for B2B startups working in Vietnam. Mike elaborates:

Trust is a big issue in Vietnam. Vietnamese technology companies have a history of selling client data, so bigger companies would rather trust a foreign business.

So what’s the trick for Keewi? Mike explains:

There a few particular cultural loopholes. You have to appear big to your customers. Big companies won’t trust the small guys. You have to build a client list and testimonials. And even better if you get a testimonial from a company. You have to figure out what the foreign companies cannot do, and do that. And even get a foreigner in your team. It’s a key way to get around the trust problem.

Elaborating on that, Mike identifies the big obstacles that most Vietnamese startups face:

There’s a lot of startups here and it can be very competitive. This make it very hard to find good talent. Not only that, engineers just don’t believe in equity. In the Valley, engineers are willing to work and take equity because they believe in building something. But this is a very status-driven society. A startup needs to have cashflow right out the door or people won’t join. An engineering student right out of university believes that in two years he/she will be making 10 million VND (US$500) a month and in four to five years will be a manager. That’s a completely different skillset. So ultimately, it comes down to mindset.

Given all these troubles, we asked Mike why he stuck with startup life, and we got a familiar response among entrepreneurs:

If I had to choose between a big corporation with lots of money or a startup. I would choose startup. Corporations think about squeezing every penny they can out of their marketing, sales, product, and even their customers. But startups, they have to think about their customers. They have to create new value in order to survive. They have to think long-term.

‘Start Me Up’

For the future at Keewi, Mike is looking to grow his ticketing service and building relationships with more event organizers. Today, the team is eight people and they’ve got six clients, and are still expanding.

He also organizes an event called Start Me Up that invites Vietnamese and foreign speakers to come and talk to fellow young entrepreneurs about the secrets to building successful startup. They also show movies and documentaries like The Startup Kids, which had never been aired in Asia before. The whole point is to get Vietnam on the startup map.

If you’re coming to StartupAsia you can look forward to seeing Mike talk on these points and more at 3pm on day 1 of the event, April 4th.

The FPT IV smartphone running Android 4.1.2
Image: tinhte.vn

There are 1.4 mobiles for every person in Vietnam, so there’s obviously a thirst for mobile. And in the status-hungry country, the smartphone market is growing strongly. So it makes sense that one of the country’s biggest technology companies, FPT, has set the goal of manufacturing and selling 600,000 smartphones in Vietnam in 2013.

This will be a shift from what FPT was shipping last year, which was centered on feature phones. It will mean that smartphones make up 70 percent of its mobile output.

The newest phone in FPT’s own-brand lineup is the FPT IV, a smartphone that costs 4.45 million VND (US$212), ships with Android 4.1, and is directed at the lower end of the price spectrum, targeting customers that can’t afford iPhones and big-screen Samsungs. Interestingly, it’s Vietnam’s first-ever homegrown quad-core phone.

FPT is also a telco, and does software outsourcing, education, hardware manufacturing, and more. It’s also closely affiliated with the government. It’s a clear indication that the government views the growth of smartphones as essential to Vietnamese economic growth. Also, given the aggressive nature of Vietnamese telecoms into global markets, it’s foreseeable that this could transition into smartphones built for the global market in 2014.

In other news, in addition to the FPT IV and its homegrown Android smartphones, the company is also planning to sell the premium Vertu TI smartphone, which runs Android 4.0. The phone costs 200 million VND – that’s over $9,500. Why anyone would pay that much for a phone with an outdated mobile operating system beats me. Oh wait, it’s Vietnam, where people buy $1.4 million cars just because they can.

(Sources: Vietnam Investment Review and Tinh Te)

As Facebook has increased its reach in Vietnam, the types of uses for the social network has diversified – and, sadly, sometimes it’s tragic.

On Wednesday, Vietnamese citizens spotted a pair of sandals and a cellphone beside a lake in Dong Ha city, Quang Tri province, out in the countryside. From the cellphone, Vietnamese police identified Vo Dinh Toan, a student at a local community college. This morning the police found his body at the bottom of the lake. Before jumping in, his friends reported that Toan had posted on Facebook, “There are many things I could not achieve.”

Earlier this month, a middle school girl from Ha Tinh province also posted to Facebook before she took her own life. She posted her update just before jumping from a bridge, telling her friends that “if death can solve all problems and lighten the burden on my mother then that is what I will choose.”

Worldwide, this is not new. There have been cases of people posting suicide notes on Facebook in the past. As Facebook has grown in Vietnam, it has become the main way for people to publicly update their friends and family en masse. Unfortunately, this also extends to tragic cases as these.

There is not much information on suicide rates in Vietnam, as doing sociological research in the country is difficult, but some academics have estimated that about 48.7 percent of suicides are among people aged 15 to 24 – which is also a prime demographic for online social media.

These heartbreaking incidents are a reminder to us to get closer to our loved ones, treasure the time we have with them, and maybe take our interactions on Facebook a little more seriously.

In October 2012, WeAreSocial calculated that Facebook had hit 8.5 million users in Vietnam to overtake local rival Zing as the top social network. Today Facebook is at 12 million. That’s one million new users per month added in Vietnam alone. One of my sources who works closely with Facebook in Vietnam says that these numbers are actually modest, and 15 to 20 million is closer to the correct count.

If this rate of growth maintains, we’ll see over 24 million users on Facebook by the end of the year. Currently, over 30 million people are online in Vietnam, this will most likely hit 40 million by year’s end.

Currently, for social media users in Vietnam, Facebook is the de facto social network. That’s good for marketing and traction across groups. For example, if I’m an events promoter, Facebook is by far the easiest way to access people en masse. But that’s also a huge barrier to entry for different types of social media sites as they try to gain traction.

Outside of Facebook, most Vietnamese users are on forums. There’s very weak Twitter penetration. Mimo, Vietnam’s Twitter, hasn’t hit critical mass yet. Linkhay, Vietnam’s Digg, sits far below one million users. VNG, whose social media site Zing was on top until late last year, moved most of its efforts into mobile – with Zalo – and out of traditional social media. Although rumor has it, VNG will be releasing Zini.vn, a microblogging platform, by the end of this month.

But with Facebook’s consistent rise in Asia – apart from Japan and Korea, where chat apps are now stronger – it’s sucking up all the users in the country. Even if newcomers arrive into the market, it will be hard to take them away from the reigning social king. To me, this is sad because there’s less and less space for niche social media sites to build communities.

Kleii, the Vietnamese Dropbox I wrote about in January just had one week of downtime where users were unable to access their files. It left some users scratching their heads and some pissed off. Well, it is still technically in beta.

Kleii is Vietnam’s only significant global competitor in consumer cloud services.

According to the company blog, the outage was initiated by Kleii to fix a potentially dangerous security breach in the software that the testing team found. According to Nguyen Tuan Son, CEO of Kleii, there was no hack attempt but he wanted to close up this hole before anything happened. With the product due out of beta in six months’ time, the team is clearly attempting to seal up any potential pitfalls before going fully live.

Today, the Kleii site and service is back online again and offering users who signed up before March 10th a whopping 100GB of free space for a year. Users already get 50GB space on a normal free account which is a big jump over Dropbox’s usual 2GB or potential 10GB of free stoage.

When I last checked in, Kleii had just over 300,000 users. Two months later, there are more than 700,000 users. At this growth rate, the user base is set to hit one million by the end of next month. For perspective, Dropbox, Kleii’s prime global competitor, is sitting at a cozy 100 million.

Today, Vietnam’s finally got a crowdfunding platform. The full-time team of seven come from a motley crew of startups based out of Hanoi including Dynabyte and The Missing Corner. The company is founded by Nam Do, the current CEO of Emotiv, a US company now based in the Silicon Valley, which produces a piece of headgear that allows users to control objects on a screen with their brains. IG9, a cheeky version of the english word “ignite”, will be the first crowdfunding platform of its type in Vietnam – operating in Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh city.

Crowdfunding is not a new concept to Asia, there’s at least nine across the region from Japan to Indonesia. The IG9 team hopes to be at the forefront of this in Vietnam, so I talked to Lew Yin How, CEO of the project, to get the lowdown.

In a largely cash economy like Vietnam, how are you actually going to get projects funded online?

Since this is the first type of project of its kind, we want to open up the payment options as much as possible, so that payment won’t be a limiting factor. This includes the usual online payment, bank transfers, and also COD. We also allow people to pay at our office and designated partner.

Of course, COD would most likely be the biggest payment method for IG9, as this is how many of Vietnam’s e-commerce giants get payment.

In a nascent market like Vietnam where crowdfunding is alien, how are you going to get your name out?

Our strategy is working with projects that already have a huge community. One of our first projects is a dance group called St. 319, who easily has hundreds of thousands of FB likes and a lot more views on Youtube. When these projects work with us, it’s our mutual agreement that both sides will leverage on their existing community to promote it.

At today’s launch, IG9 will already have four projects to go and twenty more projects in the project pipeline to be launched over the coming weeks. How well it fares with these known projects will be a real test for the model in Vietnam and a big teaching moment for the currently non-existent user base.

How are you different from Kickstarter?

Kickstarter’s focus is mainly on creative projects; but for us, we see this model as very versatile – it really depends on the market response. There are two ways this can turn out: the first is similar to Kickstarter, with the main focus on creative projects; the second is more towards crowdfunding for startups (which takes some time for the market to develop). So our initial focus would be on the creative projects.

Currently, IG9 accepts projects under 14 Categories: Art, Comics, Dance, Design, Fashion, Film & Video, Food, Games, Music, Photography, Publishing, Technology, Theatre, and Community.

Will you be managing projects just like Kickstarter?

There are 3 main phases: pre-campaign, during-campaign, post-campaign. Pre-campaign, our team will work closely with project creators to package a campaign that provides great value and of great interest to potential supporters. From our experience, most project creators have no experience with fundraising, so, we guide them more than Kickstarter does – Kickstarter’s attitude is pretty much just screening, and then hands off. During-campaign, we make it easy for you to communicate and update supporters, sharing them milestones, or if there’s new rewards. Post-campaign, we make it easy for creators to contact and communicate with supporters, giving them updates, following-up on fulfilling the rewards.

Of course, the cool thing about crowdfunding platforms is they disrupt top-down big investors and publishers who are the content deciders. It allows the people to decide what they want to see in the market. This is potentially very disruptive to a place like Vietnam where content is largely top-down and monitored. A place where creative and content projects are largely regulated by the Ministry of Culture, and often vetoed when even slightly controversial.

Our current approach is to just start more conservative first, running with projects that are more within the boundary of their regulation. We will solve that problem as we go along.

We’ll see if this dichotomy will actually play out on the platform or if project posters self-censor before their projects go up. It may be alright, because as Yin How says, “the projects we have are things that are gonna happen anyway.”

Either way, I welcome more consumer participation in product and service development. The good folks at SGE has a neat list of crowdsourcing sites in Asia here. And if you’re looking to crowdfund, make sure you’re armed with a kickass crowdfunding plan before kick starting your campaign.

Tapmee, a new Vietnam-made location-based social networking app just launched today on Android. The app, which has been in closed beta since 2011, is being developed by five people. It basically allows you to friend people nearby and chat with them on Facebook or on Tapmee’s native inbox. It’s a pretty new platform idea for Vietnam, so I grabbed an interview with the founder so you know exactly what it is. For early adopters, you may recognize similarities to Circles.

According to founder Nguyen Ngoc Hung (nicknamed Hung Zino), he wanted to create a Foursquare for Vietnam, but it wasn’t the real problem.

Because according to my needs and the needs of Vietnamese users, people want to meet each other. I found, while traveling around, that when I would travel to a new town, it was hard to meet new people.

Hung traveled outside of Hanoi, the capital of Vietnam, by bike, looking to meet new people, but it was difficult. He always had to get on the laptop, open websites, etc. There are similar chat-and-flirt apps around the world, such as Skout or the China-made Momo, but they’re useless if nobody nearby is using them.

Facebook just resolves the issue of networking with friends that you already met or know. WeChat and Zalo are more focused on communication and keeping in touch with friends. So there’s still space for an app that is focused on finding new friends.

So how are you different from Foursquare?

Foursquare is focused on locations, like finding out which locations have the best food and coolest atmosphere, but Tapmee is focused on the people at those locations. So you’ll go to Tapmee to find out if there are people at this location or not, not whether or not the place is good.

In Tapmee, users will be able to chat with the people at the location through the Tapmee native inbox or on Facebook. In a way, if you don’t have the guts to go up to the cute girl in the restaurant, you can use Tapmee to meet her. That is, if she is also on Tapmee. The privacy issues are mitigated by allowing users to block people they don’t want to meet.

How will Tapmee make money?

Currently it has a virtual currency system. It’s used for various things within the app like giving other users gifts and this will evolve into a full voucher system where users can buy vouchers to redeem at locations and with merchants for products. And of course, we will also evolve the platform to accommodate marketing for brands.

For Tapmee, there might be too many barriers to entry. Users have to be on Facebook – perhaps not a big problem considering Vietnam is the fastest growing Facebook nation – and on Tapmee in order to use it. The draw will be if users are actually interested in meeting other people. With WeChat’s “Look Around” function and the large amount of dating apps, it might point to a significant need. I think Tapmee’s success will depend on how fun users will find it plus how well they manage privacy.

With Facebook already getting burdened with the onrush of new Vietnamese users, Tapmee could either be extra weight or it could serve to spice up people’s social lives. I think if they head in the direction of spontaneous dating, they might have something.

Currently, the app is only on Android and can be downloaded here. The iOS version will be out later this year.

If you know anything about the beginning of Silicon Valley, you know that it all started with a group of men called the Traitorous Eight, who worked in a company called Fairchild Semiconductor. They were pioneers in chip manufacturing and laid the foundation for the most productive tech valley in the world. Chips are still one of the most important areas in technology, they are in every computer device on the planet and it’s a highly competitive field with the likes of Intel, AMD, Texas Instruments, Toshiba, Samsung, Qualcomm, and lots more competing. Which chip is going into the latest iPhone, HTC, or Samsung phone is headline news.

Undaunted, Vietnam is entering the fray. Or at least, taking chip manufacturing into its own hands. Just last week saw the formation of the Ho Chi Minh Semiconductor Industry Association. It brings together industry leaders, universities, and companies to facilitate the learning, research, and production of semiconductors in Ho Chi Minh city. This means money is being funneled into connecting the dots, building more factories, and looking long-term at chip manufacturing in Vietnam. Although it’s an industry that takes a decade to build up, the money is already pouring in.

This is big. After all, in 2012 alone, Vietnam earned US$16 billion through exporting electronics. That’s a 91 percent jump from the year before. I wrote about this in January, highlighting how Vietnam’s electronics manufacturing is getting really serious.

So the electronics sector is already hugely profitable in Vietnam, but what does this association spell for the future? It means we’ve got cross-institutional involvement in microchip manufacturing. And when you’ve got the government on board, processes get streamlined, land is opened up, and bureaucracy is potentially reduced.

Now if this kind of support could also trickle down into domestic software startups that work in local and global markets, we’d be looking at a really different Vietnam. But I doubt that’s coming anytime soon.

(Source: Bao Bien Tu, article in Vietnamese)

More good news for VNG today – after announcing record sales revenues – as its Vietnam-oriented Zalo messaging app has reached one million users earlier this month.

That’s a particularly strong showing for an app that got out of beta just late last year to compete with serious foreign messaging app rivals who’ve been here for much longer. Line and KakaoTalk, which have both been marketing their apps strongly, including on TV, have hit one million users each. While Viber, a slightly different app that’s a bit more like Skype, has steadily grown beyond 3.5 million users.

The Zalo team has also hinted at a few cool features on the horizon – they tell us in less than a month – including making online calls, upgrading mobile chatrooms and giving Zalo’s microblogging and photo interface a redesign.

Of course, this market is still very nascent and much of the potential lies in smartphone users who have yet to make the transition over from SMS. With more than 20 million people using smartphones in Vietnam, this market is still largely untapped.

Two issues remain for all these competing social apps: who will win over the smartphones and minds of the Vietnamese consumer; and how will they partner up with local mobile telcos? That’s something Line is already working on. I certainly think Zalo – being a Vietnam-made product – is better equipped to understand consumer minds, and it’s possible that VNG will be able to make nice with Vietnamese telcos to offer BBM-like data packages for free messaging in the future.