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By TaiTran, February 11, 2012 7:07 pm

• Real identities is the next treasure
• Anything can plug in existing collection of real identities: advertising, market research, insurance, education, real estate, recruitment, pension, legal services, public services… ANYTHING!
• The current most relevant interface/facade for an identity is a profile on a social network
• Facebook owns probably the most powerful publicly-acknowledged identity database. Facebook’s real-time data mining has been scarily accurate.
• Google knows what we search. Facebook knows what we share & whom we connect to.

In Vietnam:

How to fully utilize the potential of identity? This is a decade-long strategy.

Comments (2)

By TaiTran, December 15, 2011 12:24 pm

Market size?

Fresh market.

Challenges

1. Piracy
2. User habit
3. Underdeveloped e-payment system. Currently, most e-payment is done through SMS. Content providers share 50-55% upfront revenue with telecommunication service providers

The Pioneers

1. Alezaa.com
2. VCCorp
3. VTC Online confirmed the intention
4. Publishers including FirstNews, Alpha Book, Youth Publisher
5. Lac Viet

A few players have expressed their intention to join the market. More update when their intentions have materialized and publicized.

Show me the money

I have just personally brainstormed a few ideas how players would workaround the challenges and elicit money from buyers

1. Target impulse buying demand
2. Provide convenience for mobile device holders
3. Provide a complete hi-end experience for smart phone holders – good content to go with good hardware
4. The long tail where pirates don’t bother pirating
5. Work with academic institutions to educate and/or coerce students into consuming the contents. Alezaa is deploying this

What categories?

1. Manga!
2. English textbooks
3. Chick lit

Show me MORE money

How to earn enough to be profitable?

I’m using Amazon for a case study

1. Selling Kindles at subsidy to create the platform for content consumption
2. Technology-powered automation to control scaling cost, and to serve the long tail
3. Large scale (one million titles as at December 2011) for network effect which leads to market domination which leads to revenue
4. Use bargain power to drive down costs from suppliers
5. Backward integration to cut the costs from suppliers

Image courtesy: Tiendq

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By TaiTran, December 14, 2011 4:34 am

GOOD is the enemy of GREAT.

Jim Collins

1. I hate COD (cash on delivery). My job requires me to travel frequently I’m not in my office for COD. Asking my colleague in the office to collect the items for me is very inconvenient because of the high frequency my purchases.

2. I’m flabbergasted and frustrated that when I expressed my personal desire that e-Commerce sites should support e-Payment to make my life easier, what I received was resistance from many e-Commerce service providers!

A common response was "you’re not in 90% of our customers".

I’m showing why this is a bad response.

3. BaoKim.vn is 100% free for merchants, and it shouldn’t be too difficult and time-consuming to integrate. I can use BaoKim. Instead of resisting (and showing the superiority of strategy to customers), why wouldn’t they just try integrating the service?

4. e-Payment is what (I believe) we aim to. However, since Vietnamese users have not developed the habit of online payment, e-Commerce service providers have learned to adapt with COD. COD, as we know it, is costly, inefficient, and risky (fraud orders) to merchants & service providers.

Do we want COD permanent here? I think no.

Have we learned to live (and suffer) with COD for so long that we take COD for granted, tend to guard COD as if it is the ultimate standard and resist e-Payment? Many e-Commerce practitioners give me the impression Yes.

We may agree that COD is good, at least for now. GOOD is the enemy of BETTER.

5. This is a minor point. Being an e-Commerce advocate, I understand how resistant Vietnamese buyers are, and I empathize with e-Commerce service providers. Please, my e-Commerce friends, don’t resist to even me.

6. Fortunately, I can prepay using e-Payment from my favorite e-Commerce service providers: eBay.vn / ChoDienTu.vn (NganLuong), tiki.vn (BaoKim / OnePay), WebSieuThi.vn (NganLuong), MuaChung.vn (Soha Pay aka MuaChungPay).

7. I am comfortable with OnePay, Soha Pay (running on top of OnePay), NganLuong, BaoKim. Sadly, Payoo, vnMart, vCash don’t directly support my bank.

8. I specifically wish the following merchants would support one of the 4 e-Payment services I’m comfortable with: NhomMua, Hotdeal, Vinabooks, CungMua. Disclosure: I’ve been buying over 3 million worth of vouchers from NhomMua in 2011.

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By TaiTran, December 7, 2011 3:31 pm

• With over 50% transaction value on MuaChung.vn going through e-payment, Soha Pay now ranks second in the market in transaction value.
• Soha Pay rebrands to MuaChungPay for, pragmatically, sales purpose.
• From the e-commerce websites I have visited, I see NganLuong has been more efficient in building its merchant network compared to BaoKim. This comes as a surprise since BaoKim insists on being free to merchant and charging customers for guaranteed payment instead.
• Payoo is expected to launch its cash-based offline payment solution with the technological and financial support from NTT Data

Also, one can use NganLuong & BaoKim to perform interbank transfer free of charge. This is how they are doing it

What are not "non-bank"?

The active solutions not included in this update include OnePay, Smartlink, VNBC and Banknetvn.

Being backed by banks is a tremendous advantage, putting these giants beside independent players would only dwarf the later so I am temporarily refrain from doing so.

Comments (1)

By TaiTran, December 3, 2011 6:41 am

Since 2008, the following

1. qblog.vn
2. hola.vn
3. tiutit.com
4. nhangui.com
5. lamgi.com
6. kucku.vn
7. tictac.vn

A veteran from the Twitter clone craze in 2008 is mimo.vn and they did implement the SMS mass messaging feature that I had hinted. Another one is also left is saigonica.com

In 2011, these new local micro-blogging products were launched:

1. ming.vn from VCCorp
2. live.zing.vn from VNG
3. pega.vn from VCCorp [slightly different in that it works on "add friend" mechanism instead of follow]
4. vsao.vn

The wave of Weibo cloning will be observable in 2012.

Meanwhile, Tumblr is growing rapidly. Vietnamese users like right-brain products.

Comments (1)

By TaiTran, October 30, 2011 3:23 pm

Disclaimer: all information are sourced from public information.

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By TaiTran, October 8, 2011 3:43 pm

• At its peak, Twitter had no more than 3000 users in Vietnam, the majority among whom are geeks. This is a rough estimation from many avid users. The number has dropped drastically since 2008.
• Most Twitter clones in Vietnam failed. This year, I only see mimo.vn left. It eventually implemented SMS updates that I had hinted back in 2009.
• 2 years after I deplurked, Plurk has been slowly gaining traction in Philippines and Taiwan. While information on the reasons Weibo dominates China is easy to find, analysis on Plurk is limited I still can’t answer why. A Taiwanese friend of mine, upon receiving my question, replied briefly “Personally I think the mechanism of Plurk is very close to Taiwanese ideology of mumbling”.
• When Twitter clones don’t work, a new wave of products were hatched: VNG launched Zing Live, a proclaimed Weibo clone by its CEO. VCCorp launched Ming.vn and Pega.vn. Pega, surprisingly, works on “add friend” rather than “follow” mechanism.
• I would expect more Weibo clones to come.
• Digg, reddit, Mixx, slashdot, furk are all dropping
• Meanwhile, StumbleUpon is having a spike in traffic. What has it done right?

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By TaiTran, September 10, 2011 12:41 am

MuaChung.vn, among top 3 Groupon clones in Vietnam, is being spun off from VCCopr and up for sale.

Potential price: up to $2m

Proceeds are most likely be used to fund solo.vn (a B2C service) and probably a few other projects.

Why: maybe management believes in other business models.

Speculation on who might be the buyer: more likely a financial investor than an industry buyer.

*

Update: TanNg commented that this was his joke.

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By TaiTran, April 20, 2009 10:33 am

Many discussions rose once again when Yahoo! 360 is confirmed to be closed in near future. The question most frequently asked is: who will be the winner? It’s apparent that some of us have been aggressive in finding nailing down the “winner” of the race after the fall of the regional giant.

Discussions are shot, entries are flared and debates are burst.

But can we take one step back and see if we are so scripted with scenarios for competitions in the market?

Have we asked the question how the market will grow and how we will grow with the market?

Product/Portfolio growth = Market share x Market growth

Where is the internet market in Vietnam? It is arguable that the industry is only in its first steps. There are great potentials in the form of markets that have not been reached and markets that have not been created.

It’s not only about gaining market share, it’s also about growing the market so you can grow along.

What will fuel market growth? The answer is efforts from every player in the industry. Your competitors also help the market grow.

@tanng and @duongminhviet have occasionally applaud FPT’s movements to enter deeper into the market. In my perspective, this is not only an act of diplomacy, but also out of their wisdom that competition shakes up and levels up the industry as a whole. As long as passion is there, opportunities are there.

Good luck

***

Appendix: market growth will be fueled by the following sources:

1. Urban adults who have not used internet services. They have income, are skeptical, and definitely not early adopters.
2. Users from provinces who have not used internet services. Their income varies, they range from major adopters to laggards.
3. Young people growing up. They have sponsorship, are curious, smart, and would make innovators and early adopters.