One thing that upsets me when I get back is that in the last 3 years, e-commerce in Vietnam doesn’t seem to have made any progress. I mean, the infrastructure might be better now. You have more online payment service providers. Besides the old-school ones like Nganluong, Baokim, OnePay, we have SoHaPay recently launched by the Internet giant VC Corp with a bunch of narcissistic PR articles on their own popular news sites. They claim to partner with 18 banks which account for 90% of the card market in Vietnam. The funny thing about the card market in Vietnam is that it sounds huge but means little. There are 40 million cards in the market at the moment, but 10 of them can belong to one person, and 50% of them are currently inactive (if you question my numbers, comment here or ping me and I’ll send you the source). There are also more websites that have incorporated online payment. We also have Rocket Internet pouring money in through the Zappos clone Zalora. However, despite all these, around 90% of all transactions made on any popular e-commerce websites in Vietnam are still COD - Cash on Delivery.

There are many excuses for this, both conventional and innovative: people don’t trust online payment, people can’t be bothered to go through all those steps, people aren’t used to this method of payment. First, if they don’t trust you, make them trust you, service providers. To be human is to be brainwashed. Second, if it’s too complicated, simplify it. The third reason seemed to be the most legitimate 3 years ago, but now, really? After all these years? You have no one to blame other than yourself, service providers. Tai tran has an interesting theory to explain this situation: e-commerce practitioners are so used to COD that they are actually guarding it as the ultimate standard and resist online payment. We’ve all been taught to serve the majority, and the majority is now COD transactions.

Another thing that upsets me is that mobile money transfer service is nowhere to be found which makes Vietnam way lagging behind even Africa. Take Kenya. M-Pesa is like a one for all money transferring solution. You can go to a grocery store without any cash at all, buy all what you want, and then transfer money from your phone to the cashier’s phone. You can lend/borrow money from your friends without even meeting them or dealing with all the complicated account’s details. You can even withdraw money from any of those ubiquitous agents all over the country. What amazed me the most is not only the infrastructure available, but the fact that people there usually use it. Even a housewife who has only completed primary school and lives in a slum uses her phone to pay for her grocery once in a while. Why a country with the number of telephone subscribers almost doubling the population can’t do something like that? (Yes, we have 170M telephone subscribers while the population is around 90M). I have talked to some people are looking into doing something similar to M-Pesa in Vietnam, and the excuses they give me are: too many banks, too many Telcos, too many promotions which dramatically de-value phone credits (for example, you top up 100 000VND and you get 50% bonus). I’m no expert in this field, but I believe everything has a solution: partnerships, a separate account for bonus credit, etc. I have a feeling that mobile payment is inevitable. It’s just taking too long.

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It might sound simple, but an important factor to measure the maturity of social media in one country is the size of its largest Facebook fan pages. I was trying to find a list, but after almost an hour googling and scanning through all Facebook insight websites, the best I could find was the list from WATBlog more than 2 years back when MySpace was still the most popular social network site and Orkut still ruled in India. At that time, the largest fan page in India was for the game Scrabulous with roughly 32,000 fans.

In mid 2008, Facebook had only 77 millions users and now there are more than 500 millions people on Facebook. In India, the correspondent numbers are 646,000 and 13,000,000 (Of which, 11,300,000 are between 15 and 35 years old. Oops I feel like talking numbers and being pontifical now The number of Facebook users accounts for 16% total Internet users in India, which is 81,000,000 in number.)

Unable to find what I was looking for, I decided to do some researches myself. And I found out that…

the largest Facebook fan page in India has almost 1.5 million fan!! @_@

And if you are thinking what I’m thinking, you are right, the page must have something to do with Bollywood. But he’s not any of those strikingly hot actors nor actresses who are storming Bollywood gossips everyday. He’s rather a background figure, the one behind the masterpiece “Jai Ho” of Slumdog Millionaire, the first Indian who has ever won Globe Award and 2 Oscar awards. Yes, A. R. Rahman is the man! He triumphs both Aamir Khan and Shahrukh Khan to become the King of Indian Facebook community with 1,474,000 fans! He stands as a justification for the good taste of Indian millennium generation.

Following is another Bollywood product: “3 Idiots” with 1,193,000 fans. Even though I’m not really into the movie as I prefer comedies that use witty funny talks to those that rely on exaggerating actions, I have to say that the marketing team of this movie did an amazing job, both online and offline. I remembered laughing my ass off when I saw the super creative sticker on the back of most auto-rikshaws: “Capacity: 3 Idiots”. I really hope to have a chance to meet with the mastermind behind it all

The next 5 places are all taken by Bollywood stars Aamir Khan, Shahrukh Khan, Salman Khan, Rabir Kapoor and Priyanka Chopra with 949,800; 747,400; 667,200; 602,900; 596,900 fans respectively. Bollywood’s fanpage itself has 297,300 fans, staying at number 14.

Coming close to Indians’ love for their homegrown Bollywood stars is their love for the country. There are a lot of fanpages created testify their patriotism and they have attracted hundreds of thousands of fans. India – Jai Ho, a fanpage created by a social media agency called SocialKonnekt, has comes 8th with 571,900 fans. Proud to be Indian, Growing INDIA, Growing Ourselves & making INDIA a better place to live in also have 327,200 and 267,200 fans. A good sign is that Indians are well aware of their accent. Every accent I try to do turns Indian has been liked by 206,500 self-conscious Facebook users.

No matter how secular the government wants India to be, India is a religious country. They love their Gods! They find everyway possible to pay their worship, either at home, in a temple or on Facebook! Lord Ganesha – the God of knowledge and the remover of obstacles – seems to be the favorite God with 453,800 fans (or should I call devotees?), occupying number 10. He is right below Akshay Kumar and above IPL – Indian Premier League, cricket league of course!

Talking about cricket, surprisingly, cricket is not a big shot here. At 11th place is the best IPL – Indian Premier League can do with  fans. Indian Cricket Team can’t even make it to Top 50 as it has only 39,000 fans. Can it be explained that Indian sport lovers are not really tech-savvy?

The thing that excites me the most is the presence of big brands on Facebook. Those giants, from international companies like Nike Football India, Blackberry India, MTV India, Samsung Mobile India, etc. to local conglomerates like Tata Docomo, Pantaloons, Kingfisher, etc. all have Facebook pages that have more than 100,000 fans each. Online stores also prove to be very good at selling online with flipkart.com and Indian Gifts Portal at number 19 and 35 with 273,000 & 190,200 fans respectively. Of course, there are always some agencies behind them. The deep pocket of big names, the eagerness of users together with the talents of young social media agencies have made Indian social media scene one of the most exciting in Asia.

Another thing worth-noticing is the existence of a company that has the name probably coined by a toddler “Socialkonnekt”, the website poorly designed, yet has created at least 7 fan pages with more than 100,000 fans. They also claimed to have increased the number of fans of a page 100,000 mores in just 8 days. I’m really curious to know how they did that. Are all those fans real? Do those fans really care about the page they become fans of? Anyone has ever heard of them? If so, please let me know. Thank you very much!

Here is the complete list of 50+ largest Indian fanpages on Facebook for your reference.

**Disclaimer:

1. This list was complied based on my own research; it’s not official and not associated with Facebook in any way. I’m sure I’ve missed out some pages which I sincerely hope that you can point out, thus we can make the list more accurate. It took me a whole day to make it, hopefully it can entertain you for few seconds.

2. By the time I finished this list, a lot of things have changed and the numbers of fans have increased.

No.	Page Name	Fans (000)	Category
1	A. R. Rahman	1,474.0	Musician/Film Producer
2	3 Idiots	1,195.1	Movie
3	Aamir Khan	949.8	Actor
4	Shahrukh Khan	747.7	Actor
5	Salman Khan	667.2	Actor
6	Rabir Kapoor	602.9	Actor
7	Priyanka Chopra	596.9	Actress
8	India – Jai Ho	572.4	Patriotism
9	Akshay Kumar	560.9	Actor
10	Lord Ganesha	453.8	Religion
11	IPL – Indian Premier League	397.0	Cricket
12	Proud to be Indian	327.2	Patriotism
13	Bollywood	297.3	Movie
14	Facebook India	297.2	International Brand
15	Nike Football India	293.2	International Brand
16	Gandhi	286.8	Politician
17	Sarabhai vs Sarabhai	274.2	TV Show
18	flipkart.com	273.0	Local Brand
19	Growing INDIA, Growing Ourselves & making INDIA a better place to live in	267.2	Patriotism
20	India	266.0	Patriotism
21	Mumbai Indians	257.9	Cricket Team
22	Tata Docomo	257.7	Local Brand
23	Aamir Khan the Pucca Idiot	254.9	Actor
24	Pantaloons	246.5	Local Brand
25	The Taj Mahal	238.0	Landscape
26	Buzzintown	214.3	Local Brand
27	I Am Proud To Be An Indian	214.2	Patriotism
28	Kingfisher	207.2	Local Brand
29	Every accent I try to do turns Indian	206.5	Patriotism
30	BlackBerry® India	205.7	International Brand
31	Salman Khan Foundation -Being Human	192.8	Actor/NGO
32	Thank you Pakistan for taking Sania Mirza, Now Please take Rakhi Sawant also	192.5	lol
33	Indian Gifts Portal	190.2	Local Brand
34	Sony Erricssion India	185.5	International Brand
35	Jana Gana Mana (Indian National Anthem)	183.0	Patriotism
36	Indian Flag	178.8	Patriotism
37	Yash Raj Films	175.5	Movie/Local Brand
38	Diwali - The Festival of Lights	173.7	Festival
39	When you try doing different accents, but they all come out Indian.	163.2	Patriotism
40	Indian Army Fans	160.7	Patriotism
41	I am Hindu and i am proud to be one!	146.1	Religion
42	Sanjeev Kapoor	145.3	Chef
43	I Love Cars n Bikes	143.0	Hobby
44	You Know You Grew Up in India in the 90s When…	128.8	Patriotism
45	Jokes & Funny Pictures	128.2	Hobby
46	My name is Khan	126.8	Movie
47	Avatar India	124.8	Movie
48	Durga- The Holy Deity	123.8	Religion
49	Lord Shiva	121.0	Religion
50	Reebok India	116.1	International Brand
51	Shahid Kapoor	113.5	Actor
52	Royal Challengers Bangalore	110.1	Cricket Team
53	Ranvijay Singh	109.6	Singer
54	The Times of India	102.6	Newspaper/Local brand
55	Preity Zinta	101.1	Actress

Tags: A.R. Rahman, Aamir Khan, Cricket, facebook, Fanpages, India, Largest, Religion, Shahrukh Khan, social media, Top 50

It seems like things have slowed down for tech start-ups in Vietnam. There is no regular gathering, few jaw-dropping projects. Tech bloggers are retired and almost all big headlines are considered braggy. Some entrepreneurial gurus have made a point that Vietnam, start-ups wise, won’t speed up again for 2 years. There are many reasons for them to be cautious: the serial failures of social networks, micro-blogging projects, the recent economic meltdown, a new dot com bubble expected to burst any time.

But I don’t think so. I believe that tech start-ups in Vietnam are undergoing tacit development, and that there are hundreds of innovative ideas out there waiting to make a boom. The question is when.

After my last blog post about some interesting ideas spotted in tech start-up scene in Vietnam, someone from Red Herring has contacted me about Red Herring 100 Asia Award 2010 that “will highlight the exciting startups from Asia. The finalists for the award will be announced in July 2010. The 100 Winners will be unveiled at Red Herring Asia 2010 in Hong Kong.” They asked if I could give them, cited from the email, “insiders view about startups you find relevant in Asia (Vietnam, Malaysia, etc.) so we could offer them the opportunity to compete for the Top 100 Asia award.”

I’ve heard of Red Herring for quite a while, both good and bad things. Though I wouldn’t say that it’s the most prestigious award in the field, nor try to compare it with Tech Crunch Award, I think it’s a great exposure for local start-ups to be in the list. The award event is also a precious opportunity for ambitious young entrepreneurs to meet, exchange ideas and find partnership opportunities with other entrepreneurs, venture capitalists as well as other big names in the region. As stated on their website, “Red Herring 100 Asia will bring together 300 C-level technology entrepreneurs, corporate strategists, and venture financiers from across the continent.”

So, if you are working on a start-up anywhere in Asia, and you think that your start-up is innovative enough (which you certainly do, else why waste time working on it?), what are you waiting for? Submit your start-up profile before Jun 30, 2010 and stand a chance to be on the list of Top 100 most innovative start-ups in Asia!

The award ceremony will be held in Hong Kong, China, August 10-12, 2010.

Applicants must be:

* A technology company

* Headquartered in the specific geographical region of the corresponding Red Herring 100 award program

* Privately held and not listed on any exchanges anywhere in the world

* Not a previous winner of a Red Herring 100 regional award

For more information, please visit Red Herring website.

P/S

If you are chosen, don’t forget me lah

Tags: Asia, Award, Innovation, Red Herring, Start-ups, Top 100 Asia, Vietnam

This is my guest post for Vietnam Talking Point (VTP) – a news and editorial journal designed to shed a fresh perspective on Vietnam and Vietnamese issues. It is part of a larger effort called OneVietnam Network. OneVietnam Network is building the first online network for the Vietnamese community and it will be launched in summer 2010. For now, it needs 10000 fans on Facebook to be able to look for sponsorship. Support One Vietnam Network on Facebook here.

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Some people might say that if 2007 and 2008 are the years of Facebook clones, 2009 is the year of Twitter clones and 2010 is going to be the fail of both in Vietnam. However, the doom of Facebook and Twitter clones does not necessarily mean something bad. In fact, it has helped our Internet startups get real and forced them to work on practical ideas instead of chasing after some Facebook or Google miracles that happen on the other side of the planet. Let’s check out some of the most exciting ideas that tackle real problems in our country. If you know any that is not on the list, please do not hesitate to comment below!

Catch a bus online – http://www.donxebuyt.com/

As you might already know or might not want to accept it (in case you are the one who is responsible for it), the bus system in Vietnam is a mystery with random schedules and routes. There are often cases when commuters just hop on whatever bus passing by to ask if this bus goes to a location and then hop off if it doesn’t. Realizing this problem, Nguyen Van Thanh – a 29-year-old programmer – has built a website where users can look up for bus direction from a place to another. Users can also look up for direction for cars, motorbikes and walking. When asked about revenue model, Thanh honestly answered: “This service targets mostly students and workers with low income, I haven’t thought of any way to make money yet. However, a young businessman who wants to contribute to community has invested in the project without asking for profit.” Thanh hopes that when the website is more popular, it can save time of hundreds of thousands of daily bus commuters in Ho Chi Minh City. However, how to promote this website to the worker class who is assumed to be not very geeky is a challenge.

*My 2 cents: Somehow the website reminds me of Singapore’s www.gothere.sg – my life saver service when I was in Singapore. I wonder if Thanh has ever thought of bringing this service to mobile phone, either as an application or an SMS-based service.

Delta Viet – Make your Make dreams come true http://deltaviet.com

A project by students and for students, Delta Viet was created by 2 university students named Le Viet Hong and Nguyen Thanh Minh. It might sound ironic that I categorize the project as practical while it taps into the most unrealistic thing ever: Dreams. The main philosophy behind Delta Viet is: “Life is nothing if you don’t have a dream” and “Dream is only dream until you work on it”. Delta Viet provides a platform where users can write down and manage their life goals and creates a community where people can support each other’s dream as well as find those with the same dreams. The website also publishes touching and motivative true stories written by its users. The system works! Born exactly one year ago, the website has already got some recognization like the first prize at “Starting a technology business with 300,000,000VND” (Khởi sự doanh nghiệp công nghệ với 300 triệu) competition.

Comments from a founder of Delta Viet Le Viet Hong:

“The idea behind Delta Viet is similar to that of www.43things.com, however, Delta Viet is focusing more on social activities because writing goal down is not a common thing in Vietnam. The revenue will come from advertising, training and premium memberships. Generally, there is no competition because student segment is not that potential.”

Digital “So lien lac” - www.liva.com.vn

In Vietnam, there is something called “So liên lac” – the little book invented to facilitate communication between teachers and parents and to betray all mischievous activities created by students. It was no doubt my enemy during secondary school; and it’s such a relief to know that its digital version wasn’t thought of until 2006 [when I already finished secondary school] by Viettel – a giant telco in Vietnam. The idea was soon copied by few other mobile value added service providers. Parents can send an SMS and receive their kids’ school results by SMS everyday. To make it worse, in 2009, Liva introduced Internet-based “so liên lac” where parents can log in and see their kids’ results, class’ schedule & extra curriculum, teachers’ comments, etc. and contact school immediately. This service is still under testing beta.

“Xe om” Online – http://xeom.com.vn

This is the concept that made me laugh so hard that I almost fell of the chair. Xeom, literally translated as “Hugging motorbike” and academically translated as “Taxi motorbike”, is the most popular means of travel for those who don’t own a transportation in Vietnam because it’s much more convenient than bus and much cheaper than “Taxi car”. Xeom business is very random: normally you just need a motorbike and 2 helmets to become a Xeom driver. However, a group of foreigners and locals has decided to systemize it. They created a website at http://xeom.com.vn. The project aims at building the largest network of professional Xeom in Vietnam. Clients can choose their Xeom based on age, profile, language skills, city knowledge, etc. According to the website, the project has a lot of meaningful social goals like: “Elevating the pride of Xeom’s”, “Reducing pollution – Xeom’s consume lesser fuels than taxis”, “Reducing traffic congestions”, etc. I have no idea if it should be called a web service or how the execution of the project is going on, but A+ for the idea.