VCs are seeking Vietnamese Web 2.0 Startups

Yahoo SEA just teamed up with the leading mobile operator in Vietnam Mobifone on mobile search services. Along with TVC campaigns young locals could see promotion couples riding old Vespa bikes carrying iPhone mockups. At first sight, it seems to be a cool move since the creative guys had associated the mobile search service with the hottest phone and trendy bike. But if you own an iPhone, want to surf web the first choice should be Wifi then GPRS/EDGE. Even with low speed GPRS iPhone owners can use Safari to search with Google. More than 50% of iPhone users are gadget savvy, the others just use iPhone for fashionable reasons so that using oneSearch with iPhone should not be their choice. In fact you can find Nokia N81 co-branding with Yahoo Mobile page, why not use it consistently. One good option is to explore the BlackBerry segment with increasing number of young users. BB owners are heavy GPRS users with many opt for flat packages.

• Vietnamese language uses Latin based characters, so it is not a big barrier to Google indexing, not the same pattern with Chinese, Japanese, Korean characters.
• Chinese Government had banned Google and other foreign search engines sometimes, made it easy for local Baidu to grow.
• Vietnamese web users in general are quite happy with Google search results.
• Firefox browser with Google toolbar is increasing popular in Vietnam.
• Vietnamese webmasters put Google SEO standards first.