So Vietnamese

07/28/2016

Next time when you buy a smart watch, a wearable device, you think about Misfit you think about Vietnam. Vietnam is growing and growing fast. Expat returning to Vietnam for software talents. "It's not so much about the saving cost but it's about the pool of talent here" Sonny said. http://www.cnet.com/news/misfit-ceo-sonny-vu-on-vietnams-modern-day-success-story-q-a/

As part of Road Trip 2015, CNET sits down in Ho Chi Minh City with the CEO of Misfit Wearables to talk about the Vietnam tech scene and why the fitness tracker is making a big bet on the country.

03/13/2016

http://columbiaspectator.com/sports/2015/12/10/mens-tennis-success-runs-pham-ily

Senior Richard Pham and first-year Victor Pham were valuable assets to the Light Blue's fall campaign, as both brothers competed in final round matches at the USTA/ITA Northeast Regional Championship tournament.

08/28/2014

Quoc Le - Growing up in rural Vietnam, Quoc Le didn’t have electricity at home. But he lived near a library, where he read compulsively about great inventions and dreamed of adding to the list. He decided around age 14 that humanity would be helped most by a machine smart enough to be an inventor in its own right—an idea that remains only a dream. But it set Le on a path toward pioneering an approach to artificial intelligence that could let software understand the world more the way humans do
http://www.technologyreview.com/lists/innovators-under-35/2014/visionary/quoc-le/

Frustration with waiting for computers to learn things inspired a better approach.

08/07/2014

New one-star is U.S. military's first general born in Vietnam
Col. Viet Luong pinned on his first star during a ceremony Wednesday at Fort Hood, Texas, becoming the first Vietnamese-born general officer in the U.S. military.

Luong, the 1st Cavalry Division’s deputy commanding general for maneuver, and his family escaped Vietnam in 1975 as political refugees. The infantry officer and 1987 graduate of the University of Southern California has commanded a battalion of 82nd Airborne Division paratroopers in Iraq and led the 101st Airborne Division’s 3rd Brigade Combat Team, the storied Rakkasans, into combat in Afghanistan.

http://www.armytimes.com/article/20140806/CAREERS03/308060058/New-one-star-U-S-military-s-first-general-born-Vietnam

Col. Viet Luong pinned on his first star during a ceremony Wednesday at Fort Hood, Texas, becoming the first Vietnamese-born general officer in the U.S. military.

05/05/2014

Le herself has an extraordinary story

A refugee from Vietnam at age 4, she entered college at 16 and has since become a vital young leader in her home country of Australia. Today she is the founder & CEO of Emotiv Lifescience, a bioinformatics company that's working on identifying biomarkers for mental and other neurological conditions using electroencephalography (EEG).

https://www.ted.com/talks/tan_le_a_headset_that_reads_your_brainwaves

Tan Le's astonishing new computer interface reads its user's brainwaves, making it possible to control virtual objects, and even physical electronics, with mere thoughts (and a little concentration). She demos the headset, and talks about its far-reaching applications.

12/22/2013

Cool Ramen Restaurant in Vietnam Integrating a Mosaic
Source: Freshome

The Ramen Bar Suzuki, located in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam is a particularly interesting restaurant, with a mosaic wall and a cozy ambience. Its amazing interior, which is like nothing you’ve seen before, was specially design to make people feel comfortable. The team responsible with the project, 07BEACH, had to make Ramen glow. And that was not an easy job. Without to much guidance, the team started to seek for inspiration. The Tonkotsu Ramen (Pork soup noodle) was the restaurant’s specialty. So, this had to be the “clinch”. But Tonkotsu Ramen is far from being a cool item. So, the question was: how to make a common thing (like the pork soup noodle) cool? With ingenuousness, patience and an intricate pork soup noodle mosaic design to decorate one of the walls.

I have to say it: the mosaic wall looks absolutely stunning. It makes the entire place (literally) shine. Ramen bowl shaped seats and undulating fences resembling to noodles complete the décor. The lack of seats’ flexibility determined the designers to add also another row of chairs, more flexible and comfortable, which can be combined in various ways

12/22/2013

PingTaxi adapts the Uber concept to Vietnam
From TechInAsia

Uber is one of the most promising companies coming out of Silicon Valley these days. As this Quora answer outlines, the potentials for a shared economy platform for logistics and transportation are exponential. Is it any wonder why Google Ventures and TPG invested $258 million into Uber? Uber solves infrastructural problems while unleashing a massive untapped shared economy. Thus, of course there are Vietnamese entrepreneurs rushing to replicate the model. Vietnamese entrepreneurs, after all, love to copy Valley models and adapt them to Vietnam. Ping Taxi is one of them.

PingTaxi and Tappxi square off in separate cities
Ping Taxi, which first came out in May, is a taxi-hailing app targeted at the local Vietnamese market. Ping Taxi is an Android app only, and it’s based in Hanoi. It resembles Uber in that it requires drivers to have an Android device so that customers can find out where the nearest drivers are. By looking at the map on your Android phone, you can see where the nearest taxi drivers on the system are. It’s therefore more advanced than Tappxi, but more problematic.

Ping Taxi competes with Tappxi, which came out in May. Tappxi, which TiA covered earlier this year, is aimed more at the foreigner market. More importantly, it only lets users call taxi companies, rather than specific cab drivers. Its greater goal is to help people make sure that taxi drivers don’t scam passengers by running up the tab while going for a spin. It calculates the cost of a trip and lets users know how much they should be paying. Tappxi works on both iOS and Android and is based in Ho Chi Minh city.
PingTaxi’s chicken and egg problem
PingTaxi has a chicken and egg problem. Currently, there are only 110 drivers on the platform and 3,000 users on the app. The problem is there are thousands of drivers in Hanoi, and a large majority of them are not on this system. They’re also largely accessible – you can easily step out the door and catch a cab, which almost defeats the purpose of the app. The main benefit is that you can rate drivers, identify the location of your favorite drivers, and hail them directly in the app.

Hoang Van Hau, CEO of PingTaxi, says that he has been running advertisements on the radio and offering a small bonus to incentivize drivers who sign on with the platform. That is, taxi drivers who have Android apps and know to download them. This is difficult because most taxi drivers do not own Android phones and make anywhere from $500 to $1,000 a month. But Hau is confident that this will shift as Android devices become cheaper.

Unlike Ho Chi Minh city, which is dominated by two leading taxi companies, Hanoi is full of many different taxi companies. This puts PingTaxi in a good market position, because it can sign many contracts with different companies which are hoping to grow their customer base.

12/04/2013

Eating dog became big business in Vietnam

Every year, hundreds of thousands of pets are snatched in Thailand, then smuggled into Vietnam, destined for Hanoi's top restaurants and street stalls. Demand for dogmeat is so high that supply has become a highly lucrative – and brutal – black market

No one knows exactly when the Vietnamese started eating dog, but its consumption – primarily in the north – underlines a long tradition. And it is increasingly popular: activists claim up to 5 million of the animals are now eaten every year. Dog is the go-to dish for drinking parties, family reunions and special occasions. It is said to increase a man's virility, warm the blood on cold winter nights and help provide medicinal cures, and is considered a widely available, protein-rich, healthy alternative to the pork, chicken and beef that the Vietnamese consume every day.

The government estimates that there are 10 million dogs in Vietnam, where dogmeat is more expensive than pork and can be sold for up to £30 a dish in high-end restaurants. Ever-increasing demand has forced suppliers to look beyond the villages where dogs have traditionally been farmed and out to towns and cities all over Vietnam. Dog-snatching – of strays and pets – is so common now that thieves are increasingly beaten, sometimes to death, by enraged citizens. Demand has also spread beyond the country, sparking a multimillion-pound trade that sees 300,000 dogs packed every year into tight metal cages in Thailand, floated across the Mekong to Laos, then shuttled for hundreds of miles through porous jungle borders, without food or water, before being killed in Vietnamese slaughterhouses.

09/17/2013

Hang động Sơn Đông ở Việt Nam là hang động lớn nhất trên thế giới.

Nó daì hơn 9 kilometre, có rừng và sông, và có thể chứa được một tòa nhà chọc trời 40 tầng trong đó.

Nhưng không ai biết bất kỳ điều này cho đến bốn năm trước đây.

Một người đàn ông địa phương đã phát hiện ra lối vào hang động vào năm 1991, nhưng người Anh là người đầu tiên khám phá nó trong năm 2009. Bây giờ, công ty du lịch Oxalis đang chạy thử nghiệm các tour du lịch của các hang động và đăng ký cho sáu ngày tour du lịch để có đặt năm tới.
Vào năm tới tour du lịch, du khách sẽ trèo 80 mét để vào hang.

Mái của hang động sụp đổ thế kỷ trước. Ngọc trai hình thành trên hàng trăm năm như nước chảy, khô và lá lớp tinh thể Canxit trên cát.

09/17/2013

09/11/2013

Chuyến tàu đi qua một con đường hẹp ở Việt Nam hàng ngày làm cư dân rút lui vào nhà của họ. Tàu đi hai lần một ngày.

http://youtu.be/OxOi_P1zdAo

A train travels through the middle of a narrow street in Vietnam everyday making residents retreat into their homes. The train passes twice a day and there h...

09/09/2013

From The Economist:

Electricity in Vietnam - A heavy load

In July an amendment to Vietnam’s 2004 electricity law reaffirmed a long-stated plan to create a competitive electricity market. But the government is scrambling to raise the roughly $5 billion in investment it needs each year to meet the soaring energy demands of Vietnam’s 90m people. The chief problem is the stranglehold that Electricity Vietnam (EVN) and other state-owned companies have over the power grid.

Vietnamese law requires EVN to sell much of its electricity at an unprofitable average of seven cents per kilowatt-hour. It means the company racks up debts with fellow state behemoths supplying coal and gas. A senior EVN executive recently told a state-run newspaper that losses between 2009 and 2011 exceeded $940m and that a 5% price rise in August will hardly improve things.

With energy demand growing by up to 14% a year, the situation cannot hold. The country is running down its easily exploitable reserves of coal and gas and by 2015 will become a net energy importer. Vietnamese investors do not have the money to bankroll the building of the sophisticated thermal plants needed to boost power output and replace Vietnam’s fleet of clunkers. (A plan to develop from scratch about 10,700 megawatts of nuclear capacity by 2030 is a pipe dream.) Yet given low electricity prices, few foreign investors see any profit in financing new plants.

Prices need to rise sharply, but cheap power is an essential component of the party’s social contract. Leaders worry that steep increases could spark unrest. The country’s poorest are increasingly sensitive to cost-of-living increases.

And so it remains unclear quite how far Vietnam will go with its plan to create a competitive and more transparent power market, one in which the state is supposed to play a less dominant role. Officials at EVN and other state-owned power producers benefit from state regulation, sometimes through corrupt practices, even as the companies they work for lose money. They have a vested interest in blocking structural reform. What is more, the government is wary of international financial exposure. It has not forgotten the fiasco at Vinashin, a huge state-owned shipbuilder. It ran up debt and in 2010 missed its repayment of a $600m loan arranged by Credit Suisse. The default forced a downgrade of the country’s sovereign debt.

Vietnam has so far been wary of giving generous incentives to foreign investors for power-grid development, says Oliver Massmann, a lawyer in Hanoi who specialises in energy. However, he warns, the lack of foreign investment in Vietnam’s energy future may mean that brownouts ultimately become rolling blackouts. That would compel international factory owners to consider migrating to Thailand, Indonesia and other countries in South-East Asia with more reliable supplies of power.

Meanwhile, an increasingly stressed electricity grid threatens to act as a brake on the economy at a time when many Vietnamese already blame the government for economic mismanagement. The last thing it wants is people taking to the streets in frustration over power cuts.