30 posts from 2007

HCMC attracts huge capital for foreign investment projects

(Listed Dec 28, 2007)

Ho Chi Minh City has attracted a large sum of capital for foreign direct investments (FDI) in 2007 to become one of the country's premiere FDI destinations. A report from HCMC's Statistics Bureau said more than 460 foreign investment projects were licensed this year, an increase of 62.5 percent in terms of the number of projects and 40.1 percent in terms of their typical value. The city has seen an expansion of foreign investment projects in 2007 with addition capital of US$310.9 million being put into projects, increasing the total FDI capital in the region to about $2.6 billion, a rise of 16 percent compared with 2006. Foreign investors favored real estate and consultancy services which obtained 53.3 percent of their capital, the report said, adding that industrial parks attracted about 6.5 percent and hi-tech parks about 6.2 percent of their total investment. There are about 2,610 licensed FDI projects underway in the city worth a total of $16.55 billion. Industries account for 40 percent of these while 23.4 percent are involved in real estate and consultancy services. Reported by Vinh Son

News I have read recently reiterates past statements that foreigners will be allowed to purchase real estate in Vietnam.

Houses for foreigners could become reality

(Listed Dec 28, 2007)

Foreigners will soon be able to own houses if a proposal by the Construction Ministry is approved by the National Assembly's Standing Committee. To be implemented on a trial basis in Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City for a few years, the plan envisages allowing six categories of foreigners - including investors, non-property enterprises, and people married to Vietnamese citizens - to own housing for 70 years. Some of the other conditions are that they must have lived in Vietnam for at least one year, buy the house for themselves or their families and not for commercial purposes, and can only sell the house a year after receiving the ownership certificate. A foreigner who already owns a house can only receive the monetary value of other houses they inherit or receive as a gift. Foreign companies doing business here can buy one or more houses for their foreign employees. At the end of the 70-year period, if the title is not renewed, the owner has to sell or gift the house. The ministry hopes that besides easing the living and working conditions for foreigners in Vietnam, the plan will also help attract more foreign investment and develop the real estate market. Foreigners now rent over 1,300 houses and apartments in Hanoi and 4,000 in HCMC. If the pilot goes without a hitch, the government will expand this program to the rest of the country. FOREIGN BENEFICIARIES UNDER THE PLAN - People coming to Vietnam for direct investments. - People who have contributed to Vietnam and have been honored by ministries or higher-ranked agencies. - Cultural and scientific experts. - People married to Vietnamese citizens and living in Vietnam. - Honorary citizens. - Foreign-invested enterprises not operating in the property sector. Source: VNA

According to Google, more than 250 people showed up. People I have met liked it, and it certainly looked good in pictures.

I try to keep my Facebook Application Development Meetups happening on a regular basis, even when I am out of Silicon Valley.  About a week ago, I was discussing with some members about where we could hold a meeting this month. We had our last and largest one at AOL. Now that attendance was expected to be 80 or even more than a hundred, free venues were getting harder to find. Places like Spock, who had hosted past meetups were now too small.  We could ask AOL again. Microsoft was an option, but I was told one had to have a good reference from someone there, and even then it took several weeks to make things happen. With Google's announcement of a competing OpenSocial social network platform, one member pointed out that Google was one of the places we now could no longer consider for holding a Facebook meeting.

Or was it!? It struck me later that Google was the perfect place to hold a meeting about Facebook application development because OpenSocial was perceived as a competing platform.  Every Facebook developer was keenly interested in learning about the implications of OpenSocial, and how readily they could develop for this new platform.  Many wonder if they should adjust their social network application development strategy: perhaps they should switch platforms, or develop for both.  At the same time Google should see the audience of existing and prospective Facebook developers as an ideal target for educating about OpenSocial.

Put this way, Google seemed the best target location for our next meeting. And folks at Google agreed and were very helpful and enthusiastic.  They have provided us with space for 125 people, food, and an expert on OpenSocial to present on the subject.  Sudha Jamthe a member and blogger who MC'd the AOL meetup worked with Dave McClure, a particularly prominent social network blogger (500hats) who will be Master of Ceremonies at the Google meetup.

So there you have it: a very cool meetup at Google on Monday November 19th at 6:30pm. You should go if you are in town.  To learn more about the location, agenda, and members, see the meetup page or the Facebook event page or the parent Facebook Application Development group.

We built a small barrier against street flooding a few weeks ago. But as you can see from the photo to the left, it failed the second subsequent time the streets flooded. To be fair, our neighbours told us that the flooding we experienced was almost as bad as the worst that had happened in decades.

Given our experience, however, our next efforts were quite a bit more serious. Over the weekend we raised the entire floor level several inches, which should cover us against the worst floods in fifty years. We also corrected some problems with our drains. One neighbouring family had lived on our alley for a hundred years, so we did have some history to draw on in this regard.

I was amazed how fast work took place.  From Friday to Monday, we went from utter chaos to order again.

We started with the chaos to the left, and ended up with the order to the right.  While we were at it, I had a stone face put on one of the walls because our chairs were scuffing it. The whole wall construction, including materials cost about $125. It is amazing how quickly and inexpensively things can get done here when everything works as planned.

For our work on Friday and Monday and over the weekend, we just squeezed everyone onto the second floor, so we had no interruption in our software development work.

The dry season is supposed to start anytime now.  But at least now we do not have to rely on luck, and we are ready for next year.

All week I have been camped out in the lobby of the Elios Hotel interviewing potential Ruby-on-Rails Extreme Programming candidates in Saigon. I have had enormous help in this from a local business analyst.

I have met briefly with dozens and dozens of candidates to find a few who could be part of a new elite programming team here.  One good source of candidates has been the fallout from the recent sub-prime mortgage industry collapse. One US-based company, Portellus, unceremoniously shut down their entire offshore operation in Vietnam, opening up quite a few people with good experience (although most were not adequate for my needs).

After the normal grueling flight, I am back in my favourite hotel in Saigon, The Elios. The best room rates have gone up 50% since March 2007. But it is nice to be in this oasis of order in the sea of chaos that is Vietnam. Naturally, the first thing I did was check my Internet connection. The wifi in the room was a bit disappointing compared to my memories of it.  Typical of Vietnam, the asymetry is the wrong way around. Upload speed (279 kbps) is three times download speed (102 kbps). DSL is normally the other way around. What this tells me is that the hotel has a symetric leased line, but the Vietnamese government's firewall knocks the bandwidth down to a third of its potential, probably because they are parsing all of my communications.

O'Reilly has digitized their entire content and, along with some from a number of other publishers, has made it available online and rentable, with a monthly allocation of downloadable chapters in pdf format. As a recent addition, online video on technical subjects has also become available. The service is called Safari.  The really amazing thing is that O'Reilly has managed to get other publishers (such as SAS) to participate in a common Digital Rights Management (DRM) scheme.

The fee is about $34/month, with higher and lower price points around that. This sounds like a lot, but makes sense for people like me who spend hundreds of dollars a year on tech books, mostly because they want them available on short notice if they need them for work on a special project.

And of course, it is great if you want books available when you travel. You simply can not buy programming and other english language technical books like O'Reilly's in Vietnam and many other parts of Asia.

So, without this online service, I had to anticipate needs and bring a few select (light and important) books with me. I still ended up needing a few more. I spent hundreds of dollars this year alone shipping books to Vietnam, giving some away because of their weight, and carrying and paying excess baggage fees for those and others as I traveled. I expect O'Reilly to save me the need to buy and carry 90% of the books I might have otherwise.

The big downsides to using Safari are the slower I/O speeds of online information (a book still has far higher resolution and can be read far faster). And of course, I am all the more dependent on having a fast and reliable Internet connection. A fast Internet connection is not always easy to find when traveling, and always costs more. In my upcoming trip to Vietnam, I may end up paying $1000 a month more than I would otherwise for a hotel with a better Internet connection. But I need this for other reasons than just Safari; and Safari looks like it would work in a rather low bandwidth (Internet cafe type) environment.

Back in 1995, I threw together a quick extrapolation forecast of the number of users on the Internet. The numbers look ridiculously small today. At the time, I recall wondering if the forecasts might be a bit optimistic. Single social networking sites like mySpace and Facebook contain more users, and "home pages" today than we estimated for the entire World back then.

This chart was part of the business plan/feasibility study for an Internet appliance called the "Web Spyder". I developed this with C.J.MacDonald in 1995.

I'll be back in Saigon (Ho Chi Minh City) at the end of next week. The main purpose will be to see if I can find more programmers for ventures back here in Silicon Valley. I should be able to benefit from my extensive geocoding and tracking while I was last in Vietnam. I literally documented my every step using a GPS, and geocoded photographs and notes.