TPL is proud to announce the second event we’ve organized in Vietnam around mobile development: VN Mobile DevCamp 2010.  As we did last year, we’re co-organizing the event with faberNovel, and have also brought MDC 2009 sponsor Orange France Telecom along as an organizer this year. From the website:

“The Saigon Mobile Dev Camp is an event focusing on mobile application development with professionals and young software developers.

Over the weekend, participants will share, learn and innovate thanks to: Workshops animated by Vietnamese and foreign experts.

A 24-hour coding contest on mobile applications development.

Attendance is free of charge. The event will be bilingual, in both Vietnamese and English.”

Last year’s MDC was a great success. It was the first event of its kind in Vietnam, combining training in different mobile platforms with a coding competition that lets developers put their new knowledge into practice. Plus, its free and open to anyone with a passion for mobile apps and some coding skills. We had over 75 attendees, and 8 teams stayed overnight to build apps for the coding competition.

TPL organizes this event every year as part of our overall mission to bring the state of the art in Internet technology innovation to Vietnam, and fast track the development of Vietnam’s top local talent. We’re looking forward to this year’s event, and are excited to see the apps developed by this year’s participants!

Paul Graham can be hit or miss depending on your perspective, but his recent article on being Ramen Profitable is a big hit. What is being Ramen Profitable? “Ramen profitable means a startup makes just enough to pay the founders’ living expenses.”

Paul, as usual, is discussing the rarefied world of founder/coders; while I love these guys, it’s not actually that great a description of the customers we work with, who tend to be exceptionally savvy in areas that aren’t software. Still, the idea is the same: spend the absolute minimum to build a real, working product and get as quickly as possible to ’sustainable’.

Of course, the whole article (including recipes) is worth reading but here’s the section that resonated the most with me:

A startup that reaches ramen profitability may now be more likely to succeed than not. Which is pretty exciting, considering the bimodal distribution of outcomes in startups: you either fail or make a lot of money.

While I would love it to be true that 50% of ramen profitable companies will “succeed,” I do agree that if your company can achieve any kind of real cashflow profitability, you’ve passed a huge hurdle and your chances of success are hugely better than average…not only because the business is proven to be working, but because you’re now giving yourself several different types of success to choose from.

And isn’t freedom to choose one of the real reasons we’re in this entrepreneurial game, to begin with?

Tech Propulsion Labs is happy to announce the first Webcamp Saigon on this Saturday, May 23rd 2009! This first Webcamp event will be a workshop focusing on web standards. Attendance is limited to the first 30 designers who want to join.

Update: Attendance is now closed for the first Webcamp workshop. Organizers are working on some creative ideas to get more people involved through slideshare and twitter, we’ll see what we can do to involve the many people who wanted to come but couldn’t.

What: Webcamp Saigon is a series of events specifically organized for Web Designers & Front-end Developers in the southern part of Vietnam. It is part workshop, part networking, and part geeking out about design. Current plans are to have quarterly events, sponsor design competitions, and anything else we can do to build communities of sharing, thinking designers in Vietnam

Who: The first event is a workshop by and for Web Designers, though we try to make room for fans of Web technologies, too :)

Why: The webcamp series aims to facilitate discussions and knowledge sharing among those who work on Web design and development, with a focus on Web Standards, Quality, and making the Vietnamese web beautiful and functional.

Where: Tech Propulsion Labs will provide a venue for the event, as well as take care of all the logistics involved. The address is at H17 (No. 64) A4 Street, Ward 12, Tân Bình District, HCMC. map to the Tech Propulsion Labs offices.

Sponsors: Together with Tech Propulsion Labs, ASALEO JSC and Frexy are sponsoring Webcamp Saigon.

Media, sponsorship or attendance inquiries related to Webcamp Saigon, should go to contact TPL. If you want to keep updated on the Webcamp series, join our Facebook Group: Webcamp Saigon

Tech Propulsion Labs CTO Dan Shupp is attending Singapore Unconference 2009, an event styled after DEMO and Techcrunch50 to showcase Asia-based Web Start-ups.

For more info, one of Tech Propulsion Labs’s Project Managers, Nguyen Anh Hung, blogged about the unconference at Fresco 2.0, or you can check the unconference’s site.

(from VietnamNet)

Viet Nam has officially become a member of Asianux, an organisation dedicated to the development of free software, Deputy Minister of Science and Technology Tran Quoc Thang has announced.

He was speaking at a recent symposium on open source software (OSS) in Ha Noi, organised by the Ministry of Science and Technology, the Ministry of Education and Training, the Viet Nam Chamber of Commerce and Industry and other agencies related to the IT sector.

“Viet Nam’s entry marks a new step in the country’s advancement in the IT sector in general and the availability of the OSS in particular,” Thang said.

Over the past four years, Viet Nam has adopted policies designed to encourage the development and application of the OSS, resulting in a total of between 14,000 and 20,000 personal computers using OpenOffice, Firefox, Unikey and other free software.

Experts say the development of the OSS enables developing countries to gain wider access to a range of software solutions, helping them increase their investment efficiency, better meet the demands of the poor and assist them in adapting to different indigenous languages and cultures.

Prior to Viet Nam joining Asianux, its membership consisted of Japan, China and South Korea.

Over the past few weeks a few of Saigon’s local tech luminaries have been getting together to organize Vietnam’s first BarCamp.

TPL is helping out in an organizational capacity, and we’ll see what we can do about running a session or two, as well :).

BarCamps are community organized “unconferences” 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 attendees. Anyone with something to contribute or with the desire to learn is welcome and invited to join.

Hello world!