Technology As Innovator

Recently Yahoo!’s strategy has been questioned when they declined to sell to Microsoft or offered their market-leading product Yahoo! Answers.

On product level, although Yahoo! lost 0-4 on social media, the company still has the advantage their teams can take advantage of: branding power and customer loyalty. And they can exploit the advantage to boost their product engagement simply by cloning other services.

For example, Tu has really sharp eyes when he noticed the hints of Yahoo!’s next products: they might try to clone Blogger or Facebook.

In fact, Yahoo!’s recent blogging platform for Hongkong and Vietnam imitated different features from Facebook (friend tagging), WordPress, Windows Live Spaces or Twitter (”Follow” concept under the old name “Add friend”).

With the new Facebook design disliked by somewhat millions users, Yahoo! can attempt to win back their user base by cloning only the simplest features (of course, less effective in data mining) of an advanced social network to target the non-tech-savvy users.

When innovation like Yahoo! Platform still has a long way to go, doing quick fixes on simple things might help Yahoo! in their identity crisis.

A. What happened, basically

Chip did a very nice coverage with her immediate post Twitter SaiGon 1st Gathering. Thanks a lot Chip, it wouldn’t never have been successful without you.

B. What happened in details

The detailed agenda included the normal information exchange and 3 main sections as listed below:

B. 1. E-Learner Platform 2.0

Two students, Mat and Hung, and starting to build their grand program on teaching children on an E-Learning environment which emphasizes Openness and Cost-saving and takes advantages of Web 2.0

Hung’s presentation immediately inspired many interesting debates. Apart from popular arguments on technology, costs and practicability of the tools, what impressed me most was that we brought the Willingness for Alternative Solutions on the table. We didn’t stop at the fad of new tools, we touched the heart of a Mindset issue.

For now, to avoid repeating Hung’s words duplicating Hung’s contents, I invite you to CLICK HERE to see their slide show for the program.

B. 2. BarCamp Saigon

“BarCamp is an ad-hoc gathering born from the desire for people to share and learn in an open environment. It is an intense event with discussions, demos and interaction from participants.”

So why would you want to join the BarCamp in Saigon:

1. If you’re a geek, you know what you do
2. If you’re in the technology field, this is a chance for you to meet with people with similar interests love
3. It’s a learning opportunity
4. It’s not only for networking. It’s open and honest
5. It’s a chance for you to see, hear, touch and talk about new things fresh right out of people’s head
6. If you’re an analyst, come over here to this information goldmine
7. Even if you’re not in technology, you might want to come here and share the problems you have in your jobs and maybe someone with a technical expertise can help with a solution you’ve never thought of
8. Start-ups, meet people here!
9. Venture capitalists, all geek faces around the region are here
10. Please feel free to add your point here or with a comment below

Please simply put the date in your calendar: 15/11/2008

B. 3. Mentioning some web services

Google, Navigos’ Caravat and Yahoo! Portal clone Timnhanh. Only quickly through though; we didn’t dig deep down on each.

B. 4. An investment opportunity

…on technology, blogging and media… something that’s never been done in Vietnam.

You don’t want to miss the next part. I know you don’t want to miss the next gathering. Please CLICK HERE to subscribe, you’ll never miss the next good things.

C. My Key Observations

Obviously, the topics don’t want to go away from my mind so easily. There are some few things I’ve observed from our gathering that I’d like to share:

C. 1. CommunicatioN first, then media

The gathering is an evidence of “CommunicatioN, not CommunicationS“. Technology (Twitter) serves as a platform to build and strengthen the human quality of communicatioN.

C. 2. Synergistic power

Unlike networking functions I had previously attended/organized, the gathering was full of positive, creative and synergistic energy, thanks to the burning passion and rich ideas from each attendant.

In other words, it was networking not for the sake of sheer networking. It happens when the good comes first, rather than the goods come first.

How do you agree with me?

C. 3. The internet is so full & rich has it fully reached the users?

This exclamation came from N., a non-tech-savvy professional: “The internet is so rich. I only have a Facebook and a LinkedIn”. This brought 2 thoughts up on me:

1. It reminds me of “Way of a Scientist” that I was thinking hard on one year ago.

We (solution providers) want to keep users from the complexity of technology.

2. It’s a good excuse for me to bring this statistics on the table: 58% of people don’t know what social networking is.

How about Vietnamese users? What is the percentage do you think? I believe that analyzing my following suggestions would be useful:

1. The opportunities of expressing via more traditional channels. This should help justifying the love for blogging in many Vietnamese users
2. The willingness to look for alternatives. This should help explaining Yahoo! 360’s huge success in Vietnam
3. The amount of time an average Vietnamese spend on online activities as compared to their peers in some other countries such as US or Japan. This should help reasoning the growth of social networks.
4. Physical distance between Vietnamese mutual connection. This might help with analyzing micro-blogging.

C. 4. Globalization

Kevin gave us a compliment “This is the first time we mid expats and Vietnamese that works!” Thanks Kevin, I don’t know about others, but if I am to name one thing that pushes me on, it would be my conviction in being a “Global Villager”.

Hold your breath…

…the next event is coming soon…

1. 360plus started off in April 26, 2008.
2. Reaction was very weak. None, yes, none, of my 360 friends moved to 360plus. Even the non-tech users lost their confidence in Yahoo! products. When they saw the buggy 360plus, they even backed off farther.
3. Later on we learned that 360plus Vietnam was the product for Vietnam. What was meant to replace 360 is Yahoo! Universal Profile.
4. With no old friend on 360plus, I made friends with some a few new people though. However, it was neither an information goldmine nor a communication platform I was looking for. The community there was filled with spams, unthoughtful and inconsiderate bloats from younger users, despite some very nice efforts to guide the new users. I lost my patience after around 500 entries.
5. I tried to come up with around 20 suggestions for features for the 360plus team before quitting nevertheless.
6. Not until early September did they introduce a data migration tool from 360 to 360plus. What flabbergasted me was that the tool looks like it bases on public RSS feed from 360 to import to 360plus, which means the 360plus team has limited access to the 360 global database. Where is inter-department collaboration inside Yahoo!?
7. But I’m sorry it was too late I was not even trying the tool out. I have backed up entries I want to keep to my Window Live Spaces blog, manually.
8. Many of my friends on 360 have moved to Facebook.
9. Will 360plus Vietnam hit the 2 million cap that 360 did in Vietnam?

Addendum

Yahoo! shut down their “social network experiment” Mash just a few days before. Generally people agreed with this decision, Mash was too weak even for a marginal project to last.