While many startups and young teams race for social networking services since it is trendy, sexy, other teams opt for less cool Web business. One year ago many people said if you had high traffic sites you could make good money (from advertising or from investors?). But when the financial storm came, ad spending falls can those SNS get a piece of still small online ad dollars. Instead of waiting advertisers, Teevn.com tried to sell on demand t-shirts to young people. Customers can access to the Teevn.com website to choose among thousands of designs for their t-shirts, and they can make their unique template through self designed or order exclusively to Teevn.On demand e-commerce is getting mainstream in many countries with successful models such as Cafepress, Zazzle. Designers can take part into the business as collaborators and make money from revenue share. The core competency of this model is not just the ICT technology (click) but production and logistic (brick and mortar). Young people (mainly students) love to buy their chosen t-shirts. Other product lines should be available soon. Think about your revenue model before starting up, especially in the current recession.

Disclosure: I help the Teevn team from the start and currently an advisor.

After the success of Google Devfest in HCMC on November 4, 2008 and many talent developers in Hanoi missed the Event, we plan to hold a mini Hackathon in Hanoi with focus on OpenSocial API. Software engineers from Exo Platform (going with Google Devfest team in Southeast Asia Tour) will interact with Hanoi based devs and geeks, some demos of OpenSocial API apps on Vietnamese social networking services should be showed. An engineer of Google Southeast Asia could join to assist the participants. The planned date is December 13, 2008. If you have any suggestion or need further information please drop me an email or leave comment.

A team of Google engineers will come to Ho Chi Minh City in the first Google Hackathon Tour in Southeast Asia to meet, talk, chat with local developers on increasing popular APIs: OpenSocial & App Engine to YouTube & the Google Maps API. Ho Chi Minh City University of Technology will host the Event on 4th November 2008. Google Team will try their best to answer all the questions from participating developers as well as learn from local talents. This is your chance to interact with Silicon Valley engineers and local programmers. Bring your laptop and energy to join the Festival for Developers. You will get free food and refreshments just like Googlers get free meal at Mountain View.                      

I just stumbled upon an article at PC World Vietnam online featuring a music website had launched a search service using Web 3.0 technology. In fact the search was powered by a local search engine called Socbay.com. The music site yeuamnhac.com also claimed its search using Sematic Web. I tested the service but could not find out what they called Web 3.0 or/and Sematic Web. Can someone show me their Web 3.0?

The largest IT company in Vietnam FPT just turned 20 years old last week with lot of anniversary and promotion actions. Local media and netizens strongly criticized the dancing performance of FPT Arena. To love or hate, FPT is definitely the most successful IT company in Vietnam and with its pool of talents it is the most admired company to some extent. After many successes FPTers are newly rich, turned old (and fat), lost energy. To inspire the new generation of FPTers, the CEO initiated the FPT 2.0 late last year. Nearly one year passed, FPT 2.0 is still something in the sky that FPTers did not want to capture. At 20 what is the road ahead for FPT? Keep expanding to other industries or set up a task force with some technology core competency to lead the new FPT (FPT2) into the new era?

Vietnamese web startups like to clone social networking services (SNS) like Facebook, Myspace. It seems to be easy, cool and trendy. One of the most successful Web 2.0 services winning hearts and minds of bloggers worldwide, Twitter is not popular in Vietnam. Joining social networks as anonymous user is still common in Vietnam. Showing to others what are you doing means you have to show some true identity. To my guestimate there are about 3k - 5k of Twitter users in Vietnam. More than one year ago, Japanese Ascent Network launched its Twitter clone Haru dubbed Tictac (meaning every second in Vietnamese, truly good brand name). A micro blogging service with no widget feature, Tictac is in the Deadpool now. Twitter clones are not in good position in China also. Chinese Internet users can use Tencent's QQ IM for their communication. To leverage its user base, Tencent launched a Twitter clone TaoTao, members can update from the Web and QQ only. Number of TaoTao users is far above other clones.

Can Yahoo leverage its user base of Yahoo IM and Yahoo 360 in Vietnam to launch a micro blogging service since Tumblr is getting adoption fast among bloggers in Vietnam?

LacViet Computing, a local software firm renowned for its dictionary applications using on PCs, has launched a portal with a hybrid name Vietgle (Vietnam and Google ?). Six main features available at the first stage:
1. Knowledge Vietnam: I thought it should be a Wiki style but it is only an online version of the old fashioned database that came out in CD-ROM longtime ago. Registered members can send in the comment, but I doubt who could do it since the content seems from the textbooks. Users could not find any picture associate with locations, no map link.
2. Online map: run of the mill mapping service, even worse than many other mapping apps available
3. Dictionaries: still the core competency of Lacviet online business
4. Automatic translation: based on its strength in dictionaries to expand into auto-translation, still in primitive stage, could be better through community contribution
5. E-book: it had bought the licenses of some books to upload to its online database, few titles
6. Forum: a feature just to add to have more utilities

My tips:
Why not change the name from Vietgle to VietKnol (Vietnam Knowledge), it is easier to understand and user friendly.
The services should be in alpha, private not beta for public usage and it was too early to run a PR campaign with the help of print media.

Local media is discussing which mobile operator would be Apple's partner to sell iPhone 3G in Vietnam. The two leading mobile operators Mobifone (a subsidiary of national telecom carrier) and Viettel (a powerful army unit) are racing for the exclusive rights of iPhone distribution. My estimate is about 50K of iPhone 2G in Vietnam and 2K of iPhone 3G used with SIM unlocked. Since iPhone 3G is still hardware unlock and the price is too high (around 1000 USD vs 700USD for 2G) so that many iPhone fans are waiting for full unlock solutions and reasonable prices. The leading mobile handset distributor, FPT's FDC is still silent about their plan for iPhone. In fact FDC is a leading distributor of Macbook and iPod in Vietnam. In the eyes of Jobs & Co, Vietnam is a third tier or fourth tier market. Apple's ranking of foreign markets is not based on volume of users but quality of subscribers where they can pay for the bundled services such as iTunes. Mobifone has more quality subs than others. How much the contract to subs is a difficult question since Vietnamese mobile users are not familiar with this kind of contract.

After Vinagame's Zing.vn climbed on top of other long established news portal such as Vnexpress, Vietnamnet based on Alexa ranking, VnExpress started the war against Zing. Across ICT related forums, members discussed how Zing could surpass Vnexpress on Alexa. Even a news release from Vinagame-Zing stated Zing.vn was the top traffic site in Vietnam. Some stand alone sites of Vnexpress like Ngoisao.net (celebrity news) had aggregated back into vnexpress.net to boost traffics and Alexa ranking. The hardwork made Vnexpress.net back on top of Zing. But why those publishers wasting resources just to get a not so creditable ranking. If they can engage more readers, build better community, sell more advertising dollars to partners they can rank better with any rating agency.
What do you think if Myspace produced a news release said it had climbed over Facebook on Alexa ranking?