What’s Vietnam’s next tipping point?
Lately, when thinking about the Vietnam startup scene, I’ve been wondering about tipping points. The online landscape in Vietnam has experienced a few big changes in the last few years. This is an interesting development for a country whose culture is built on conformity. In just a few years, Vietnam has already experienced several major tipping points online.
Social media bubbling up to an explosion
Just over a year ago, Facebook was just sitting at four million Vietnamese users, and today that count has doubled. It has finally hit its tipping point. ZingMe, the leading Vietnamese social network produced by VNG, is perceived by most people as being for teenagers. Yahoo360, Vietnam’s once dominant blogging platform, closed down under the mismanagement of Yahoo, but was mostly seen as a personal diary for teenagers. Facebook experienced a different entrance. Facebook, at first, was seen by users as a platform for games. This gave users an opportunity to get acquainted with the interface and start using Facebook for groups, pages, and advertisements. The periodic DNS blocks motivated by Vietnam’s political climate drove some users away from the site, but eventually it became the go-to social hub. And if your data is all in one place, you come back to your data. Now users are flocking to Facebook. Where games and adolescent social networks started, Facebook has exploded and looks set to be dominant for some time.
Making the web useful, real
Group buying took the online community by storm over the last two years with dozens of clones and the rise of key market leaders. People finally had a useful destination on the internet that had practical applications offline. Despite potentially flawed business models, what they did in the country was introduce an even larger population to a real-world application of the internet, namely e-commerce, which hasn’t been really prominent in the country thus far.
Another trend I see coming this year is mobile chat applications. I’ve got friends on Line, WeChat, Whatsapp, Viber, iMessage, and KakaoTalk. And now, even Vietnamese startups are jumping onto this trend, as seen with Wala. What we saw with group buying is it created e-commerce’s tipping point just like games created social networking momentum. Is there a critical mass happening in chat that will change form and produce something new? Is the current wave of e-commerce sites actually foreshadowing something else?
Tipping points are shaping the landscape
Vietnam’s copy-paste culture when it comes to intellectual property have created the environment for this snowballing to happen. In Silicon Valley (with its years of experience), skilled people, ideas, and resources exist on a much larger scale. This creates space for companies to focus on very separate parts of the online market. Vietnam doesn’t have this luxury. Instead, the landscape is shaped by overarching trends that dominate the priorities of startups.
Although Vietnam’s online landscape might be a bit two-dimensional, it might allow us to predict future trends more easily. Each major shift and trend builds towards the next and the last few trends give us an idea of where it’s heading. From blogging to games to social media to group buying to e-commerce and mobile chatting. Thinking of these major trends as a platform gives us a clue as to the next tipping point. In my mind, this platform is going to lead to a content war.
The post In Vietnam, One Tipping Point Leads to the Next appeared first on Tech in Asia.