Date: Tuesday, February 23, 2010
Time: 6:00pm – 9:00pm
Location: Kem Bud’s NTMK
Street: 183 Nguyễn Thị Minh Khai, Q1

You probably know LinkHay, a Digg-like service built and maintained by VCCorp, a leading digital content provider of Vietnam. This evening we – users (”LinkHayers”) – will put together a small but cosy meet-up for those who love the Internet.

No special requirement, as long as you’re interested in Technology, you’re more than welcome. For me, it’s been quite sometime since I participated in a tech gathering after Barcamp Saigon 2009. And I think “tonight is gonna be a good night“. See ya!

The on-the-street survey that we did during the last Barcamp event revealed that Viettel had been doing a great job in the capital, luring a great number of new subscribers into their Internet, mobile, and data (GPRS) services, mostly thanks to price attractiveness. Friends that we talked to all thought the price was the competitive edge that Viettel had, considering the unbelievable high price that local players had to offer (due to lack of investment in infrastructure and other reasons).

Cambodia is a country a population of 14mil people and an average annual growth rate of around 8.5% in the last 5 years, boasting a lot more opportunities for future developments judging by our observation of the tourism sector (we love Siem Reap btw!), which makes a lot of sense for Vietnamese telcoms to consider participating in.

Out of the 3 players, I would say Viettel stands a lot more chance than FPT. Let me be realistic: FPT internet service sucks even in Vietnam, while Viettel is moving further and further in Cambodia. We’ve seen lots of banners everywhere we went to during our last week’s trip to Cambodia.

VTC may need a lot more time to materialize their investment, as obviously their service relies heavily on the establishment of broadband infrastructure, which takes time. Probably Cambodia has around 10000 people with broadband access today. My guess is FPT & VTC would ponder on providing online games to the local.

Anyhow, this is all great moves. I’m really excited to see many more Vietnamese companies going Cambodia as it would make our life much easier as frequent tourists to this wonderful neighboring country!

What were we told when we were at school?

1. Vietnamese are smart, creative, and hard-working (thanks god they also told us this!)
2. Vietnam is rich. We have gold forests, silver seas, and all that wonderful stuff that we would never use up.

I think Japanese kids were told something like this:

1. Our natural resources are scarce, if any.
2. We need to work as hard as possible to enlarge our wealth.

There’s a lot in common between the above-mentioned study and how we’re doing as a country. When we have a lot, we waste. No hard-work. No sweats!

The recent National Assembly meeting has alarmed that we are wasting an awful lot of money with ICOR being > 8. That basically means if we invest 8 dollars, we get back 1 dollar of growth. This is a ridiculously high ICOR compared to many other countries’.

For years we’ve been known to be a fast-growing, but little is known that we’re burning up our resources for that 8.x% growth rate.

More sadly, most of this ’s been fueled by government spending. In other words, we’re buying growth at the expense of tax payers and natural resources, leaving nothing for our children in future.

It’s high time we should tell our children that we’re POOR and they need to work HARD to earn whatever they want. Would you tell them otherwise?

The contest will run for two weeks, the end-product of which will probably be the Logo for Barcamp Saigon for a few years to come, until future organizers decide they need a newer one. Friday November 13th is the last day to submit your logo!

This contest is open to everyone, not just Logo designers. Candidate logos will be displayed on our website so that others can vote for their favorite Logo.

If you wonder why you should enter into this contest, we have the answer for you: it’s the privilege to serve a vibrant community of IT enthusiasts, the opportunity to get your name widely recognized, and to see how “the other dudes” in the industry are doing.

We ask only one thing from you: give it your best shot!

Alright, below are the details (copied mostly from the Barcamp Hanoi guys ^ ^).

Submission Deadline

Friday, November 13th, 11:59 PM (GMT+7)

Design Guidelines

The logo should:

* Convey the concept of Barcamp. What is a Barcamp?

* Be distinct, unique and easily identifiable (It’s the logo of Barcamp Saigon, not a general Barcamp)

* Aesthetically fit in with a broad range of site/application designs

References:

* Starting files barcamp.org/SpreadBarCamp

* Sample logos barcamp.org/LogoGallery

* Barcamp Saigon 2008 Logo

* Barcamp Hanoi 2009 Logo

How it works

• First, create your Logo design. View the Design Guidelines for more details.
• Upload your design to the contest-specific Flickr group Barcamp Saigon 2009 Logo Design Contest for review.
• These designs will be posted online at the homepage of Barcamp Saigon for public voting. You determine the winner!
• The winning Logo will be used on blog, websites, banners, documents and T-shirt to help promote Barcamp Saigon 2009.
• If you have any additional questions, comment right below this post.

• You can submit more than one design.
• Submissions can be made via JPG/GIF/PNG however please be prepared to provide high resolution/vector graphic versions of your work.
• As part of the submission, participants must be willing to give up all their rights to the copyright and donate it to the community.
• Tag your photo with the phrase “barcampsaigon“. This will allow us to search for and pull your photo into a public image gallery.
• Make sure your Flickr account is linked to an active email address; this is the only means of contacting the winner!
• Don’t forget, the submission deadline is Friday, November 13th, 11:59 PM (GMT+7). Start right now!

Jiang Ziya

Stephen R. Covey, in his “The 7 habits of highly effective people”, talks about maps. No, life orientation. With the right map, even if you’re slower than others, or your techniques are not as good as them, you’ll “get there” one day. On the other hand, no matter how superb one person is, using the Hanoi map to find a club in Saigon takes him nowhere regardless of how skillful he is. Character vs Personality.

What the hell do fishing and maps have to do with social media anyway?

Well for one thing, social media is so different from traditional marketing in that it takes a lot of time, it’s incremental. It’s neither about blockbusters nor serial killing ads on da TV. It’s about building up the conversation and “keep posting”. Or fishing. With or without a hook. When you have an interesting story to tell, they will come to you. You probably won’t have to wait until you’re 80 like our man. But don’t expect success to come early.

It may never come, if you’re fishing in the wrong lake. What if the lake has no fish and you’re happily waiting? Bingo! We need a map! Why didn’t anyone say this early?

To make life easier for fishermen, Forrester Research has proposed a methodology called POST (People – Objective – Strategy – Technology), whose use is to help our men catch fish more easily. The People in this methodology means looking at the lakes we currently have and identifying ones that have the most fish. Simple as that.

POST Method by Forrester Research

So after two weeks of running the Social Technologies Survey, we’ve been able to release the initial maps to the highly-participated-by-the-fish lakes, which can be found here.

Don’t worry if you don’t understand Vietnamese, we’ll present it at Barcamp Saigon, in more details. But here are a couple of highlights:

• 26% are still blogging. This could be way higher if it were 2008. The closure of Y!360 has significantly increased the rate of unemployment in the blogosphere.
• Blog readers and commentators account for 80% (!) of Web participants.
• Forums are stil popular among Internet users in Vietnam, with only 10% “don’t give it a damn” about this platform.
• As expected, Social Networks rule the gang. 50% update their profiles/avatars at least once a month while 41% post on their buddies’ wall.
• RSS is surprisingly used by 21% of the participants.

Of course, our fisherman can always use guesswork, it might work, but he may waste time fishing at too many lakes at the same time. Do you love fishing?

Social Technographics Profiles

Our idea is simple: we want to gain a better understanding of how Vietnamese Internet Users are using Social Technologies (Blogs, SNS, Forums, etc.) everyday so we can target at them more effectively. Or to put it another way, we strive to build a big picture for the Social Computing scene in Vietnam.

On Tuesday October 13th we started the survey, which essentially asked people which technologies they are using. After receiving some very constructive feedbacks from @nhnguyen and @chipro, we decided to restart the survey, sacrificing the first 300 samples. However, since we mostly used social media to push the survey to people, it’s worth it, especially when the data were very skewed (asking Facebookers if they use Facebook, for example.)

It didn’t take long for us to achieve the same number on the next day, and with Raovat123’s support, our samples have grown substantially since then. What’s more, samples from this Classified ads site are very neutral to our survey and the random people who come from search engines through this site have been a great comfort to us. Thanks @ncchinh a bunch!

Raovat123's Frontpage with our Survey Banner

After talking to many people we understand that this is not a really perfect survey in terms of methodology and the questions that we asked. However, we’re pleased with the progress and pretty confident that this is a very good start in our venture into the real world of social media in Vietnam.

The survey will be closed by the end of Monday, whose initial data will be available to the public before long. A more detailed discussion will be presented at Barcamp Saigon. In the meantime, stay tuned by taking a look at our daily updates (in Vietnamese) here.

It wasn’t a very pleasant moment at first, and I was not alone. Let’s take a look at the new design when it’s still fresh:

• The highlight is gone. For the past month we’ve experimented with different kinds of media on the highlight as a marketing tool for our Fan page and all of a sudden it disappeared. Without this, advertisers’ve lost a valuable estate, but thanks god the suggestion box is still there. I will take another couple of weeks to see how this hurts our work ( or how other changes may compensate for it.)
• Live Feeds are back. Oh dear, I almost fell in love with these feeds a while ago when Facebook decided to pull the plug. Now it’s back! It’s not the same as before though. Things can go viral more easily but I’ve heard the neighbors saying it’s too noisy and irrelevant. “Why do I need to know someone becoming friends of all of these strangers?” or “why they don’t they group those tagged in the same post together?”. Hopefully it will be better with time.
• News Feeds are the new Friendfeed. I haven’t used Friendfeed a lot but I can tell that this new option looks a lot like FF. Basically content that gets the most reactions stay on top. It makes life a lot easier for those whose motto is “content is king” but this is probably not a good thing. It’s going against the long tail, and fat cats just get fatter. Now we can start seeing the fruit from Facebook’s acquisition of FriendFeed.
• Friend suggestions are confusing to me. Seeing “Reconnect with him/her” makes me wonder when I removed that person when in fact we’re still good friends.

The old design of Facebook has come back with more bells and whistles. But I’m trying to refrain myself from giving any opinion of these changes now but will come back in a few weeks when data are available for analysis. For the time being, I’ve switched to the Live feed option.

For those who like the new design, here’s your friend. How about you? Do you “like” or “dislike” the new design?

Please take part in our poll to vote for your preferred date HERE

• If I navigate to “Tin mới” [New News], and choose Technology, I get newly submitted Tech news.
• If I navigate to Technology, and choose “Tin mới”, I get general submitted links instead of Tech ones.

It’s weird. Can you guys fix it?

It has been a long while since we have heard something from the only Venture Capital firm in Vietnam, and it looks like some good news. Are our men back to business? (wink)

Looking back, I used to be one of the Twitter “evangelists” who would excitedlt pitch this shiny social technology to anyone in contact. But that’s changed now. Not that I don’t believe Twitter will be something in Vietnam in a foreseeable future, but it’s practically not practicable for brands to take advantage of this as a communication/ PR platform. If I were to advise a client on which social technologies to use for the next social media marketing campaign, Twitter would be at the end of the list. Sorry, my blue bird.

Haven’t we had enough local microblogging services? And what sort of difference does Mino bring if cheap SMS message is the only difference from the others? Maybe, just maybe, this can help them push more users to the platform, but it might take them at least two years to grow like Twitter used to. Because it looks exactly like Twitter on first look. How much percentage do 5mil users account for out of the total Internet population? And how much would that be for the Vietnamese market? Plus, what’s the point for the English interface anyway? Did someone just mention Facebook? Tee…hee…

I’m a little clueless.