Tag: China

Saigon Tech Talent

It could have been a waiting scene at Acoustics, Saigon Rock Alley. Except for the instruments and the bands.

They were CEO’, CTO and Venture Capitalist. Not Bar Camp, nor Web Wednesday. It’s Mobile Monday, held on Thursday night.

The cool, the calm and the co-ed. They were all there. Web to Mobile and back to Web (the mother of all).

Bruce Lee clip was shown: “to hell with obstacles, I create my own opportunities.”

So they created, collaborated and commented.

The eagerness and hunger was there, for the next big thing, even in BioTech.

When I was looking that good, I wasn’t into tech. Now another young guy, by the same first name, sat there and told us to “build an ecosystem” etc….

Back then, all I knew was sound system and we were all hair.

Features phones vs smart phones had not even been in the horizon.

Yes, Vietnam is facing an e-payment problem; its e-commerce is consequently slow to take off. But what about those who come to Vietnam from an ecosystem that doesn’t have that problem? Should we make them walk around, pay by cash? How about  Tech Support…..

So the arguments tail-spinned in a different direction.

But the thought flow and thought form were there, punctuated by occassional nods of agreement.

Tech talent got it.

They just need a jump-start, like the eagle that needs a push.

Jump, said Jesus, to the invalid who complained that every time he tried (to get himself healed) , someone else had already jumped into the pool first.

Instead of getting to the water, Bruce Lee’s advice for us  to become water.

“Water in a cup becomes the cup….”

Saigon Tech talent will need to morph and move through window in between mobility and mortality.

It was good to see 160 show up after only a few days of SMS and flash mop.  Unlike at Acoustics, I went home hungry, but not drunk.

I still remember some if not all the challenges, comments and consolation.

It’s good to have attended Mobile Monday, in T-shirt and jeans.

Celebrating Love in Saigon

Consumer confidence is up. Spending is up. Cards, chocolate and crocodile (over beer).

I thought it must be Christmas or Tet all over again.

Hunting down a ticket for A House in the Alley took me to two theaters, with the only available seats at 11:20PM.

Way pass my bedtime.

Oh well, I tried.

Supporting Vietnamese arts has its price.

From comments I overheard – on the elevator down- the audience covered their eyes, hence missing out on what they had originally come for.

Vietnamese cover their mouths when laughing, and their eyes when scared.

Live a little.

In English classes, I encouraged folks to over pronounce their consonants,  to compensate for cultural conformity and held-backs.

The Girl With The Dragon Tatoo won’t be shown here due to some skin scenes.

What is suppressed in one area will find release in another.

It’s stressful to live in a collective culture: “why don’t you find your other half?”….

Glad strangers care.

Just don’t walk by like they did in China when a kid got run over twice in public.

Back to love in the Alley.

From the look of it, Dan and his crew probably have scored.

What’s more important is they packaged horror genre with date nights.

Keep it coming.

I know tomorrow night, the theater will be back to its norm: full of empty seats.

But love goes on, and finds its outlet in sidewalk cafes, river-front beer stalls and karaoke halls.

In restless dream I walk alone…

But the idea of love will forever endure.

Or else, 80% of music and movies will go to waste. And humanity will see its sorriest day.

I will celebrate, with one more hour left of my Valentine in Vietnam.

Slippery Saigon

Someone told me that the rainy season here would end soon.

Yet it is raining still. Outdoor activities like kung-fu class, xe-om, beer stalls all ceased.

I seeked shelters .

The trick to walk safely here is to step firmly with one foot into the sidewalk, not at its edge (which slopes down to facilitate water draining).

Yet the middle of the sidewalk  was often “occupied” by street vendors most evenings.

The last choice is to walk in the street where scooters in all directions fighting for right of way.

Rain or shine, the internet cafe are full: kids playing Chinese chess , soccer and Thumbelina online.

I found a restaurant that caters to Northern taste: boiled pork, shrimp sauce and stuffed tofu.

I miss mom’s cooking.

The owner paced back and forth trying to put his grandson to sleep (on his shoulder).

I remember my old baby sitter, who let me piggyback to and from kindergarten.

I wonder how many favors one accumulated in a lifetime.

And how many favors one gives back ( Karma currency imbalance).

We all need bail-outs at times and we all “occupy” at some point.

Meanwhile, I  read about the Obama’s latest injunction to use foreign aid resources to further human rights’ causes e.g. gay rights around the world.

It’s one thing to finally “don’t ask don’t tell” in the US.

It’s quite another to open US embassies and USAID facilities to be “gay sanctuaries” around the world.

Tall order indeed!

Has anyone briefed him about cross-cultural differences? about Cultural Relativity and Taboos around the world?

People barely got used to using “OK” (condoms) here, much less advancing “don’t ask don’t tell”.

For more than three weeks now, I have been out of one bubble just to enter another.

Here, in Vietnam, people are in constant motion; multi-taskers in the US would feel right at home (people riding scooters in busy traffic with one hand while talking on the phone and smoking).

On my first few trips here, I saw accidents that claimed lives. Lately, it has been less frequent.

Infact, phones are no longer the most sought after, nor are English classes (which are increasingly commoditized ).

Home Karaoke systems perhaps reach saturation point, just like chat room at internet cafes.

Indeed my IT guy and I couldn’t find phone cables (for fax and wireline phones).

Apparently telecom VN has gone completely mobile.

The working class meanwhile are trying to stretch their hard-earned money

(get paid, get a few dresses).

With holidays fast approaching, workers in China and Vietnam are scrambling for the last train home.

Saigon, though still slippery, will then be emptied of migrant workers.

“The Sad Hymn” (Bai Thanh Ca Buon) will be played way past Christmas.

Booze and beer will be consumed till the last drop. Caution: slippery when wet.

Nobody discussed “Occupy” here. We are 100 percenters, sharing the burden and hopefully the beer.

Why not while it lasts! Its famous movie star has just died of a stroke at age 54. His declared wish: someday to return to Vietnam,

and find acting gig among his peers. He has just felt short of that last wish. One of his screen appearances was in “We were soldiers“.

It’s slippery still in Saigon. I will sign off now before treading carefully home, or else, I end up in “We were alive”.

Crossed markets

Forbes kept praising the success of luxury brands in China while web sites in Vietnam and China mentioned “Pepper Spray on Black Friday”. Chinese-made goods, sold as lost leaders, to the first 100-early-bird shoppers.

Planned scarcity.

Hype-creation.

Sensational, sizzling headline-grabbing video op for YouTube.

We need attention. The media need it even more. (For some counter-intuitive reasons, Warren Buffet just spent a chunk of change buying his hometown newspaper, which was bleeding financially).

Maybe he knew something we didn’t.

Here in Vietnam, I found shopkeepers, “loss prevention” guards, and people at the coffee shops all trying to read something.

Literacy rates are high (low 90’s),  perhaps higher than a lot of their counterparts in Asia.

People in motion here at night market in Hanh Thong Tay (budget shoppers for style).

The demographic (mostly young) definitely is an advantage (they won’t die half way through your projects).

Young people here are very assertive in expressing their ideas and opinions.

If you can ride the scooters to and from work, you can definitely work.

And if you can ride to work, on an empty stomach, you definitely need to work hard.

And if you can ride to work on an empty stomach, while at home, there are more empty stomachs, you have no choice but to work and study hard.

What do young people do with their leisure time? That’s right, computer gaming.

Next thing you know, they upgrade to mobile gaming, the same way they have grown up wanting  to get behind the scooters.

Nation in motion.

Back to China with luxury goods and 200 million people moved out of poverty to the middle class.

In those same thirty years, we saw the decline of the West.

Next thirty years, the rise of the Rest.

Stock up on your pepper spray. Stock up on Christmas decoration.

Stockpiling your weapons of mass consumption.

Shopping has always been a patriotic act in the US.

Shop to save: what a contradiction in terms.

Meanwhile, people in China are putting away money for their “only child’s” wedding.

There will be a lot of empty-nesters in China.

There will then be a lot of old tourists from China.

They got tired of their own Great Wall (of China).

They want to take photo standing in front of the Eiffel Tower, built for the first World’s Fair.

They want to experience Paris of the 50-60’s, where “tous leas garcons et les filles de mon age se promaine, dans la rue…”

Everyone is entitled to their 15-min of fame.

To the childhood’s dream.

Of  strange shores and leaving the familiar behind.

Materialism trumps sentimentalism any day, any time.

That’s how the world is flat: consumers are kings and queens, on Black Friday and any Friday.

ICT talent in a flat world –

re-post from 2011. This past year, things are getting heated up with “friend-shoring” chip manufacturing with Biden’s visit.

________________________________________________________________________________

If it hadn’t been for the slightly warm temperature, the water bottle that bore “QTSP” (Quang Trung Software Park) and the simulcast headsets, I would have thought I was back in 2005 at  a similar conference in Palo Alto. But this was Vietnam.  With speakers and delegates from Malaysia, Thailand, India trying to organize into a ICT block. “We competed with one another too much, selling to each other too much”, said a Thai delegate.

Instead, SEA ICT parks were urged to organize and synergize.

A message well worth noting and worthy of praise.

Except, Thailand just went through a century flood (at the tune of 46 Billion)

and Vietnam ICT college enrolment grew at meager pace of 2% (demands are calling for 12 times that).

I kept hearing the word “disconnect”.

Schools weren’t up to task for mobile, gaming and cloud computing.

Consumers just wanted to “use” technology, no matter where it’s from (mostly likely the West, but outsourced to the East and then repackaged and rebranded).

I worked the crowd, and walked the hallway.

I shook hands and met people at the booths.

I was behind those booths many times while at MCI and Teleglobe.

Now, it’s their turns.

Eye contacts, business cards in hand, and promise to keep in touch.

Right!

I said I was into softskills, not softwares.

They understood immediately.

Quid pro quo.

You teach me some, I teach you some.

We can send foreign teachers of every shade of accent for you to be exposed to.

Of course, at a very low price.

Accents are cheap.

Words are cheap.

Human connection: invaluable.

I lifted one guy’s spirit when I mentioned that companies like RightNow could still command a very high price, having been bought by cash-rich Oracle.

So the young and the younger got along, hand shakes without high fives.

Welcome to Vietnam, Welcome to the flat world.

Let the game begin. Somehow I know those guys behind the booths will turn out very OK, more than they now realize.

I have been there and I know.

They will hit singles and one of them will hit a ball way out of the park.

Just a numbers game.

Just a right mix of pressures, opportunities, collaboration and market demand.

Keep pitching

Keep selling.

Keep inventing.

They’ll come, even if it takes a huge flood to “flush” them out.

Currently wages pressure has turned to demonstration in China.

What are we waiting for? Someone else’s crisis, our opportunity.

Ironically, that double-meaning character was originally Chinese, now came in full circle there.

ICT talent in the flat world. ICT talent in Vietnam. I like it.

Vietnam, next Hong Kong?

On my first trip to Hong Kong summer 1981, I was taken in by the energy and entrepreneurial spirit there.

A camera shop (pre-Iphone era) next to a watch shop (again, pre-Ipad era) next to an electronics store.  Shoppers from India, Europe, Australia were all there, bustling about. Double-deck buses (still under British colonial rule) moved to and fro from Kowloon to Sham Shui Po.

China‘s Champs ELysees.

And that’s 30 years ago.

Now, boarding a bus in Saigon, full of college students from the University of Industry, I saw Vietnam‘s future 30 years from now.

Every kids on that bus ( with Samsung phones) will start a business or work for MNC companies, which will surely be coming (when wage pressures increase in China and water level rises again in Thailand).

In fact, Quang Trung Software Park is holding a conference on that very same topic (Human resources, mostly ICT, in a flat world).

Thailand wants to play a lead role in connecting and collaborating at this gathering.

Alliances for a planned and collaborative future (who is going to be the next Hong Kong or Singapore?)  Indeed, Manpower and other HR agencies have sprung up all over town. With hard and soft skills, one can command a decent wage here.

The living condition leaves much to be desired however : supermarket is located next to a dry dirty river, for instance. But all that can and will be fixed in time. Right now, younger learners are enrolled in foreign-own classes, picking up an expression here and a tune there.

My relative sent his daughter to the US to complete high school, Singapore to finish college and now to Australia for graduate school.

Stories like this put Vietnam on the path toward becoming another Hong Kong , while Hong Kong itself has moved up the value chain (per NYT Friedman) to full service economy, “off-shoring” its manufacturing further up North.

In other words, if those “Boat People” were to arrive today and be allowed to go off camp to work, they would be at a total loss, as opposed to work off-book in the garment industry as back then (“tailored in Hong Kong”).

Back to ICT as a way out

Young people naturally pick up new skills faster than older workers.

This is especially true for language-acquisition.

Once we can integrate the two camps (business savvy vs tech savvy) we are on our way to a promising future.

I notice primary schools and Universities here have started an all-English curriculum,  Vietnam’s latest attempt to copy the Asian Tiger miracle. Private universities are busy constructing “campuses” modeled after counterparts overseas (Hoa Sen, Tan Tao ), still have to shuttle students to and fro on chartered buses to city’s outskirts.

Countries like Taiwan, Singapore and S Korea have all traveled that road.

The raw materials are present, as evident from my bus ride which was all of a sudden empty after the drop off  at the main campus. Franchise concept has taken hold here: sticky rice chain, sugarcane juice chain, KFC chain, Lotteria chain and Tous Les Jours.

Being a “virgin” market has some pluses. Investors can’t wait to stake out location, location, location and brand positioning.

But the locals will learn the ins and outs of good and bad use of capitals.

(23 things they don’t tell you about capitalism by Chang).

The solution: go ahead with caution, but still move ahead speedily when  opportunity presents itself.

Just the way heavy traffic is here . Just the way people are moving about in Vietnam now. Just the way I saw in Hong Kong then.

Micro Trend, Macro World

Economy of scale, strength in numbers, linear growth.

Out of the 7 Billion of us, almost half live in the cities (hints: pollution, traffic congestion, high crime rate, time crunch, shrinking quality of life, more opportunities but unsustainable).

I read about China’s sewer cooking oil, crocodiles roaming the streets of Bangkok, and tent city on Wall Street.

In Micro Trends, the author mentions niche markets like knitting, which command 1 percent of the larger market.

Harley Davidson is now targeting women (empty nesters whose OK’s are critical before husbands can “buy to be wild”).

Near where I live, a new store has just opened. It is called “Halloween Express”.

They cherry-pick the 7 Billion-dollar seasonal costume and candy markets.

Or, take virtual Job Fair. More candidates can visit the “booths” while HR and recruiters can make the most of their day. Fewer people are working and those who do, handle more work. The net effect has been productivity increase.

99% of 6 Billion in 1999 is less than 99% of 8 Billion in 2025. Too many people living too long creates capacity crunch. To solve this, we have to move to virtual world  (social media and rural broadband are in).

Population grows linearly, while  tech has shot up in hockey stick curve, creating an ever widening “digital divide” (lady old lady, driving while texting???).

Enter the rising costs of health care. A nightmarish scenario.

I don’t believe  Social Security will pay out as planned.

They will move the lamp-post, in the hope that those of us who don’t go to the gym will die before the first checks are cut.  Even when they did arrive, the adjusted for inflation amount will barely be sufficient (I read about a retiree couple relocating to Nha Trang and getting by on their meager income).

To find the silver lightning, we must look at new comers to the party.

They are eager, enthusiastic and resourceful. Our next billion of knights will have arrived by 2025.

Not long ago, when Bill Gates made his visit to Vietnam where young students said they all aspired to be mini-Gates.

I hope the same can be said about Steve Jobs, whose penchant is in product design, where Art intersects Technology. Design something people and yourself would want to have. New thoughts for a new world. Micro trends for a macro world.

Let them visit

In “Imagined in America“, Friedman reminded us that 30 years ago, Hong Kong used to be a manufacturing colony. Today its economy consists of 97-percent service, with a booming tourism industry (mostly visited by Mainland Chinese).

The second point was, America too can become a tourist Mecca that lures 300 million cash-hording middle-class Chinese. Already we saw the influx of Chinese students at America’s top Universities, such as Cornell and Columbia.

Why not allowing their parents to visit Casinos after visiting the Campuses (instead of having Wynn  move his headquarter to Macau).

I can see an America in the year of 2020: Chinese tourists arriving ten times as many as their Japanese counterparts back in the 80’s, renting Winnebago by the thousands for their long treks across this land. America, their showroom.

They will look and try on garment that were made in their homeland, and nap in IKEA showrooms (rest areas will have lazy-susan tables and vending machines will serve tea).

They will gamble and eat Chinese Food on nation’s highways.

They will be interpreted by their Ivy-League graduated sons and daughters who can’t wait to inter-marry “white” folks.

The “spy next door”, who is now spokesperson for V-8 juice, will soon move in.

Atlantic City will see another revival as hasn’t seen in decades.

Florida will prosper, not because of its retirees base, but because of its casinos of the seas.

These tourists from China will visit the Oakland bridge, touting among themselves that it was one of the first US construction sites China has bid on and delivered (along with MLK memorial site) on time. Propaganda can then spin that the transcontinental railroad couldn’t have happened had it not for the ingenuity and involuntary contribution of their ancestors.

I wouldn’t be surprised that we find not one, but two national chains for Chinese food (Watch out Panda Express).

And by 2050, when I am long gone, America will have its first Chinese American presidential hopeful. If we can now have not one, but two Mormons on the same debate, both trying to take down the God Father’s Pizza CEO, my prediction should not be that far-fetched (999, is that the price of a pizza? uttered former US Ambassador to China).

Instead of following the money trail to the East, let them come West.

The grass is greener over here anyway (developers have imported New Port Beach homes in China).

However, the only disappointment will be their final stop in Hollywood, America’s dream factory. There, they will only find illegals selling maps to the Stars’ Homes, and the Hollywood Boulevard Sidewalk with Tom Cruise’s palm imprints in front of the Grauman’s Chinese Theatre.

One of the actor’s famous line was “show me the money”. After a stop in Vegas, and with Hollywood as their last stop before boarding the flight home, our tourists could only laugh at their American experience: homeless people, Made-in-China T-shirts and Taco Bell.

What used to be a dream, hardly turns out as thought. Welcome to California, now go home. Do not “occupy” more space. From the vantage point of those leaving on Pacific-bound flights, Lady Liberty seems to turn her back without saying “come and see us again”. I heard their fellow countrymen didn’t get better treatment in Cafe Paris anyway. Waiters Francais need some getting used to, as does the Japanese economy, world’s  number 2 for a while until now.

Inching back to life

When we face a critical juncture on the road, we need to be decisive.

A liberal arts training doesn’t hurt either. Even when two people arrived at the same conclusion, liberal art thinkers insist that between A and B, a straight line might not be the best alternative.

Just the shortest.

As nature would agree, it favors the fittest, not the fastest among us.

We are having a leadership crisis. Our Job Czar, himself the best job outsourcer, says on 60 Minutes “I work for the shareholders” when asked about CSR (Corporate social/civic responsibilities).  Those shareholders might be Saudi sovereign funds, or  Chinese who couldn’t wait to get their hands on the secret sauce of GE aircraft engines).

The seamstresses and the toy makers who saved, end up owning the aircraft makers who overspent.

Remember, the problem of a declining America doesn’t happen overnight.

It is a confluence of factors, none of which favors the American work force (the missing middle class).

It would be easy if it had been a series of  A/B forced choices. I look at Steve Jobs timeline, and notice a parallel between his life and America’s:

starting from 1976 when he built his personal computer in a garage to the latest I-phone roll out.

At roughly the same time, America hosted Deng’s visit to Texas  and ordered a bunch of toys (remember Mattel then, Foxconn).

The rest as they say, is history: restless children play at stationary desktops, while dumb adults tinker with smart phones.

Light-weight, high-yield processors have upended America’s growth trajectory which began with heavy industries ( 50’s American autos are still popular in Cuba).

This shift doesn’t just level the playing field. It erases the whole map (employees carrying personal smart phones to work, hence, increases both personal and corporate productivity).

Now we have to crawl back to life, like in the Wrestler: feeling the rope and relying on muscle memories.

We need to inch back to life with new digital instincts. We need to be the fittest again before resigning ourselves to fateful and final acceptance of defeat.

I never know an America that is fatalistic. In its short history of warfare, its people always take up arms when challenged. In that spirit, let’s reverse course, inch by inch, back to health. It might have been a step back, but who knows, this will end up with two steps forward.

Success always rewards itself with more. It just that we haven’t tasted it lately to remember how intoxicating it once was and can still be.

In the mirror

Among Dylan’s many memorable lines is “you don’t need the weatherman to tell you which way the wind is blow-in”.

Even without the weatherman, we can feel that things are at a boiling point.

Like in the movie “the Network”, people start to open their windows and bell out “I am mad like Hell, and I won’t take it anymore”.

Except this time, instead of opening their windows, they opened Windows and Adbuster, which called for Occupy Wall Street (and McToilet on Wall Street).

A leaderless protest against figure-less forces that have worked against them e.g. commoditization, globalization, or automation.

Their 60’s counterparts wanted to rage against the status quo.

Conversely, “occupiers of Wall Street” just want to have an occupation that pays a little more than “nickel-and-dime”.

The wind is blowin but not in their favor (Andy Rooney has just retired leaving one vacancy for roughly 2 Billion people who recently joined the rank of the Middle Class).

Instead of “Hell No, We won’t go”, they are now yelling “Hell No, PLace To Go”.

India? China? Brazil?

To land a job in  BRIC‘s countries, one needs a crash course in language and culture.

(I resent the author of a recent Economist’s article, ridiculing “poor English” in Vietnam. Cheap shot at best, and colonialistic at worst.

http://www.economist.com/blogs/johnson/2011/09/english-vietnam?fsrc=scn/tw/te/bl/iamenglishteach

Go ahead and try to learn Mandarin).

Employers look for those with soft-skills that couldn’t be outsourced such as critical thinking, communicative and collaborative skill set across the cultures, but also to pay them at blue collar wages (high skill/low cost) since employers themselves are caught in a competitive race to the bottom due to outsourcing, offshoring and now re-shoring. Damn if you do, damn if you don’t.

Currently a jobs bill which runs at $200,000 per job is on the table.

Foreign students said “No thanks” (even when their HB1 visas were extended) and went home after graduation (BlueSeed is trying to dock a ship out in Seattle Waters to go around this rule).

At first, I thought it was because of the wives (who couldn’t find spices in groceries stores) who pressured their expat husbands to return (let’s stay to India and Singapore) – Japanese executives wouldn’t choose to work here in the US for fear of derailing their career tracks – But, I found it’s more of a pull than push force that they chose not to stay around (follow the money i.e. emerging domestic markets).

In “It used to be us”, the author of “The World is Flat” himself is baffled by his own themes (globalization and IT revolution).

Now, even call centers got automated (outsourcing next level, to automation), so high-value representatives can proactively chat with callers.

We are all caught off- guard: a job loss here, a dead-end career there.

Before we know it, we blame it on Wall Street (partly true, but not the whole picture – the same way India’s service industries and China’s manufacturing industries got the blame for our Lost Decade, or the Japanese lean -semiconductor- manufacturing in the 80’s or the Vietnam War for taking the Johnson’s administration’s eyes of the-Great Society).

But the story is more complicated than that. The solution seems to be multi-pronged because the problem is multi-faced.

Jack Ellul already touched on the idolization of “technique” back in the 60’s. Now, techno-fundamentalism is pervasive in every faced of life (what could be digitized, must be digitized – Larry Page was quoted to say : “let’s have a million engineers” to outrank or outPagerank Microsoft’s 25,000 strong army), forcing “human” to reflect and re-think about what it is that makes them marketable (the human touch, emotional intelligence etc….) in the 21st century.

No wonder we feel short-changed (too many of us chasing too few opportunities at the bottom – even high-paying construction jobs are no longer there on this side of the housing bubble). At the top, one will take a CEO job, like at HP, but for only $1.00.

It reminds me of Newsweek which was acquired also for $1.00).

This Halloween we will be in default costumes, that of homeless men and jobless women (carrying huge luggage, or brief case).

It’s time to revisit Native Americans on the occasion of Columbus Day (to press restart).

It’s time to reinvent  the American Dream. We don’t have to look too far, since the cause and the cure for today’s malaise and misery are right there, in the mirror.

I hope they keep the mirror squeaky-clean there at the McDonald on Wall Street for our protestors’ comfort and convenience.