At OneVietnam and VTP, we love social media, philanthropy, and having fun. When any two of the three interersect (as in our iStory initiative), we’re ecstatic. When all three combine, we’re over the moon. That’s why we’re so excited to see what Nick Kristof and Games for Change have in store with what’s being touted as the humanitarian Farmville.

In an interview with FastCompany, Kristof, a New York Times columnist who seems to have an infinite capacity for compassion, spoke of the need to adapt to changing media platforms for social good.

“I think gaming might be the next big platform for news organizations and causes. There’s some snobbery about games. Some people think games are just ‘what teenagers do’ or that they are too fun to be worthy of our attention. But there are a lot of people who spend a lot of time playing games online, so we in the news business would do well to think about how we can use games to attract eyeballs. My wife [Sheryl WuDunn] and I are doing a TV documentary of our book Half the Sky, but we’re also creating a Facebook game as part of it,” he said.

On the game itself, Kristof explained, “It will be vaguely analogous to FarmVille. You’ll have a village, and in order to nurture this village, you’ll have to look after the women and girls in the village. Actions in the game will also have real-world effects. In other words, there will be schools and refugee camps that will benefit if you do well in the game. It will go live when the documentary debuts at the end of this year.”

We love how Kristof is merging social media and humanitarian aid, but we’re also particularly invested in what Asi Burak, the co-president of Games for Change, had to say to Mashable:

“Nick and Sheryl’s ideas are perfectly aligned with what we want to see moving forward—breaking the perception that games are only entertainment… Most of the people who pick up his book or turn on PBS or even read The New York Times are already converted. What he’s hoping to do with social media and gaming is to go to the people who aren’t converted and engage them in a very sensible way.”

Preaching to the choir is an obstacle many nonprofits have to overcome when they try to garner new interest in their organization’s mission, so developing a product that can concurrently engage a disinterested audience and raise funds is quite a feat. It’s usually only after you’ve effectively engaged an audience that you can begin turning casual observers into changemakers.  We’re glad to see this happening.

And just think, if your boss catches you playing the game after it comes out, you can quietly point out that you weren’t wasting time, you were taking a moment of your day to do some good for the developing world.*

*Obviously we’re joking. We’re totally not liable if you get reprimanded for trying to pull a stunt like that.

We’ve confirmed with a first-hand source that Facebook will be unblocked in Vietnam, likely in early 2012.  The source reported that Facebook sent high level managers, including a Vietnamese American, to Vietnam last October to negotiate with Vietnamese internet service providers (ISP).  Since then, both sides have come to an agreement.

Last April, PC World Vietnam reported that FPT, Vietnam’s largest ISP, had signed a partnership agreement with Facebook and the site was to be unblocked.  We kept a close eye on the ground to gauge if this was actually true.  We received conflicting reports from readers living in Vietnam. Some reported unrestricted access while others claimed a DNS work around was still required.

We were not able to obtain the details of terms, nor the exact date of when Facebook will be widely accessible.  However, the source is highly reliable and has a first-hand knowledge of the deal.

As with last time, if you live in Vietnam, let us know if your Facebook access changed in the comments.

According to Macworld, iPhone 4S’s sold by Sprint will come GSM-unlocked.  Verizon’s version can be unlocked after 60 days. What that means is on your next trip to Vietnam, there will be no need to jailbreak and unlock your iPhone, a process that can be complicated and could void your warranty.  This feature is huge for the thousands of Vietnamese Americans making the pilgrimage home to Vietnam every year.  In fact, it’s huge for any of the 60 million Americans who are 1st and 2nd generation immigrants.

As for AT&T iPhone 4S owner, you’re out of luck. AT&T runs on a GSM network here in the US so they are well intent on locking the SIM to keep themselves the exclusive GSM carrier.

The iPhone 4S, though debuting as a disappointment to diehard fans due to lack of significant feature updates, is becoming the fastest selling iPhone to date. Apple has already reported 1 million units sold since the phone was announced last week.

Hey, psh! Stuck with the iPhone 3GS or 4 for another year? Don’t live in envy, follow our guide on how to unlock your iPhone/iPad for international travel here.

Update: Looks like Sprint is playing take backs, saying the phone will be locked after all.  However, Verizon phones can still be unlocked after 60 days.

In addition to meeting the featured guests, mingling, and enjoying the evening, there will also be an opportunity to get involved with a bone marrow drive.  Representatives from the Asian American Donor Program (AADP) will be present.  Of course, there will not be any donating at the event.  Attendees could volunteer to provide a cheek swab, which will be sent to a lab to determine if they are a match with anyone who needs a bone marrow transplant.  So, why not come out, have fun, and do something good?

Here are some of the brightest engineers, ambitious entrepreneurs, leading innovators, and community leaders who will be in attendance.

Andy Do, founder of Embedded Works Corporation and co-founder of iAppThat, has been in the wireless and networking space for more than fifteen years.  He has held both engineering as well as management positions at Hewlett-Packard Co, Proxim Wireless Corp., and Avnet Inc.  As an electrical engineering and music graduate from Santa Clara University, Do also loves to sing and play piano.  He is currently building an ukulele from scratch.

Embedded Works Corporation is a distributor and integrator of electronic wireless components.  The company offers a full spectrum of RF technologies (Bluetooth, WiFi, Cellular, GPS, etc) to help clients integrate wireless solutions into most products and/or applications.

iAppThat is a mobile software start-up that offers the ability for anyone to make free mobile apps directly from its website without any programming experience.  The company was recently featured in the Silicon Valley Business Journal as a hot new start-up of 2011.

Guy Boyer, founder of Vynetics Inc, was born in Binh Duong, Vietnam.  He moved to France during his teenage years before moving yet again to the United States.  In 1990, he began his contracting business Vynetics Inc and since then has worked with numerous start-ups.  Boyer looks forward to returning to Vietnam more often and for longer durations within a few years.  He would like to contribute his skills to the tech community in Vietnam and perhaps engage in volunteer and charity work.

Hung Nguyen, vice president of AirKast Inc, has designed, implemented, and maintained networks of numerous small and global companies for nearly fifteen years.  As vice president of engineering platforms, Nguyen oversees all functions in the engineering and IT departments.  Prior to AirKast, Nguyen owned an independent, overseas consulting firm, was a senior network engineer for Visioneer, and founded NetFormations – an IT service company for small to medium businesses.  Nguyen has an MBA from San Jose State University and a BS in Computer Science from UC Santa Barbara.

Lam Tran, founder of My Web Media, is a native Washingtonian.  He moved to California in 2002 for college after which his interest in the web industry was piqued.  Tran then developed My Web Media with the goal of helping all business owners obtain internet exposure for their businesses at zero cost.  Moreover, My Web Media allows business owners to easily change the contents of their websites without any prior programming knowledge.

Paul Pham, product development director of OneVietnam Network (OVN) , was drawn to computers as a teenager because he found it easier to give instructions to machines than to communicate with people.  His fascination with technology grew as he immersed himself in the hacker community for its inherent anonymity.  When the web was still in its infancy, he staggered into the company that created the first web-based email – Hotmail.  Ironically, his job was to enable millions of users to communicate.

Taking a break from technology, he had traveled to Vietnam and discovered his love for the country of his youth.  For nearly two decades, he worked to bring aid and relief to Vietnamese both in the United States as well as in Vietnam.  When presented with the opportunity to build a virtual platform to bring expatriates globally together for the purpose of helping Vietnam, Pham signed up and thus OVN came into existence.

Aside from being the architect of OVN, Pham is also the co-founder of Aquaron Consulting, which specializes in infrastructure design and data automation.  He have founded a scholarship program that gives grants to college students finishing their last year of college and has worked with groups in Vietnam to help budding villages develop skills in building their local economies.  Pham is currently working on two start-ups and a stealth project.

Chinese and Vietnamese hackers have started a cyber war over the territorial dispute on the ownership of the Spratly Islands in the South China Sea [officially known as the East Sea in Vietnam]. According to Global Times, a website under the operation of the Vietnamese Foreign Ministry was hacked in June. The cyber attack has disabled all the links on that website and placed the China’s flag at the center of the page. The article said the hackers left their cyber names “3King” and “Xiao Lan” on the website and claimed to be from Yancheng (northeastern Jiangsu Province).

Apart from the flag, hackers also left Chinese phrases like “Spratly Islands Belong to China” on the website with China’s national anthem “March of the Volunteers” playing over and over again. The article noted that Chinese hackers invading into other countries’ government websites were not uncommon, especially if those countries were in some kind of dispute with China. For example, in 2010 August, the Chinese flag appeared on the Philippine’s government website asking for an apology after Chinese tourist hostages were killed in Manila. In October of the same year, the government website of Japan’s Shimane Prefecture was also hacked, with Chinese characters insulting Japan.

The Vietnamese media has also been reporting on those cyber attacks. According to Thanh Nien News, 200 Vietnamese websites were attacked in June, and 10 percent of those websites were managed by government agencies. For example, 20 websites under the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development were hacked. A source from the ministry’s network security supporter said that they have identified that the Internet protocols (IP) of computers attacking the portal were from China. According to some Chinese bloggers, they believe the attacks started by Honker Union, a mysterious hacker organization in China formed by young people with sophisticated computer skills. However, the Vietnamese also began their retaliation. Several Chinese websites were also under attacks by Vietnamese hackers, one of them was posting an image with a Vietnamese sailor holding a machine gun with English and Vietnamese words saying “Paracel Islands  and Spratly Islands Belong to Vietnam” and Chinese characters saying that “Vietnam People are Willing to Protect the Sea, the Sky and the Country.”

Governments are scared, even in the US. They struggle to understand social media and the movement of technology, leading them to react by blocking sites like Facebook and Twitter. They should embrace technology rather than fear it. Attempts to control information will drive even more extreme activities and cause governments to miss out on valuable opportunities. Here are three reasons why.

1. Blocking access leads to more extreme networks

According to Dr. Jennifer Brinkerhoff of George Washington University, who has spoken at several security conferences regarding digital diaspora networks, extremist networks tend to become more liberal as their membership grows.  The idea is that a network might start with an extreme point of view, but as they grow, that point of view becomes more centric.  Extreme points of view are replaced with more centric, mainstream views.  It’s a regression towards the mean, a well understood concept in statistics, being applied to social networks.

The bottom line? Governments should allow networks to expand to dilute extremism.  It’s a no brainer: block a social network and what you have left is a groups of angry tech savvy young people that can circumvent the firewall anyways.  Now they are just especially angry and bent on revenge.

2. Social Media does not cause revolutions

Does "Liking" count as activism?

Prominent writer and New Yorker columnist Malcolm Gladwell wrote a piece about how social media can’t provide what social changed has required.  He recognized the revolutionary impact of social media on information sharing but argues that the key elements for change are groups on the ground that have already existed before, and despite, social media.  He cited several social revolutions that occurred long before social media, like the civil rights movement.

The bottom line? Though social media enhances the transfer of information and speeds up popular support, it is not the underlying cause of revolutions.  Governments should be less concerned about social media and more about resolving the reasons why its people are unsatisfied.

3. There’s a major opportunity cost for blocking out the world

The globe has gotten a lot smaller with the proliferation of the internet.  We can befriend and have conversation with people from across the world thanks to social networks (think pen pals on steroids).  With technology pushing globalization, countries need to be participative rather than reclusive.  China’s “Great Firewall” will ultimately prove to be a mistake as it blocks Chinese citizens from exposure to innovations and opportunities from around the world.

Vietnam has the opportunity to differentiate itself from China and communicate to the rest of the world it is willing to be a participative and open player.  Open access to social networks will also allow Vietnam to take advantage of an incredibly valuable expatriate network and reverse the “brain drain” from the country.  The 3 million Vietnamese living overseas generate around $80 billion in GDP, equivalent to the entire country of Vietnam.

The bottom line? In a globalized economy, it is foolish to shut your people from the rest of the world.  The overseas community is critical to the development of Vietnam.  It’s simply good for business.

FPT, Vietnam’s telecom giant, signed into partnership with Facebook last week.

Yes, this is the same FPT that many accused of shutting down Facebook.  With the new partnership, FPT will help promote and sell ads for Facebook.  FPT will also consult in developing the Facebook application especially for the Vietnam market.

This is a huge, and surprising step for Vietnam.  First, it further opens the channel for Vietnamese people to be part of the global network (Facebook is 500 million members strong).  Second, it is an indicator that Vietnam has a willingness to deviate from the policies of its neighbor to the north.  It is easy to be cynical and question the motives behind the partnership, but at the end of the day it is a move in the right direction that will ultimately benefit Vietnamese consumers.

We will keep a close eye to see if and when access to Facebook will be restored in Vietnam.  If you currently live in Vietnam, let us know.

Source: PC World Vietnam (In Vietnamese)

Addendum: Are our 2011 predictions slowly manifesting after all?  (Albeit different from how we imagined.)

image from vietnambusines.asia

Last August, the Vietnamese government began implementing an online gaming curfew in a purported effort to mitigate student distractions and discourage gaming addiction.  Now, it looks as if the government has taken their campaign against online gaming a step further.  As the Vietnam News Agency reports, the “Ministry of Information and Communications has asked internet service providers to block access to on-line games each day from 10 pm to 8 am by March 3.”

While the Vietnamese government has been actively monitoring citizens’ internet usage for some time now, it’s interesting to note the timing of this second request.  The Middle East is currently in the midst of a revolution spurred on through the internet, and US Secretary of State Hilary Clinton just announced that the US would begin taking formal measures towards promoting greater internet freedom.  Of course, while there appears to be a timing correlation, we can’t assume causation.  It could all be a grand coincidence.

What are your views?  Does this internet limitation call for a re-evaluation of what online gaming constitutes?  Are the government’s concern founded in real issues?  Eastward, the South Korean government too once proposed limiting gonline gaming, and a South Korean man recently passed away following a 12-hour gaming session.  (Here also, though, we can’t assume causation.)

Can the Vietnamese government manage, as it claims, to meet the demand for information while reducing online addiction?  Will this ban be largely ignored like previous bans?

Everything is Fair Game in Vietnam

Vietnam needs more intelectual property lawyers and a strong enforcement system.  Sounds boring?  Perhaps so, but data from the World Bank 2011 report imply it may be the only way to rocket Vietnam from a third-world manufacturer to a global competitor like South Korea.  Yes, it’s even a higher priority than new schools.

Asian Tiger or Copy Cat

What’s the difference between the Asian Tigers (Hong Kong, Taiwan, Korea, and Singapore) and the rest of Asia? If you invent something in a Tiger Country, you have reasonable assurance that your invention won’t be stolen and copied thanks to an army of lawyers, strict and robust IP laws, and a cooperative enforcement agency (the government) that will fine or jail anyone stealing your trade secrets.  As a result, the Tigers enjoy the highest living standards in the world and is home to major brands like HTC, Samsung, HSBC, and LG.

In contrast, step into China or Vietnam (or most places in Asia, for that matter) and you’ll find that nothing is sacred.  A walk down to the Saigon Centre will reveal imitation Louis Vuitton purses, fake Northface backpacks, and yes, even Google branded toilet paper.  There is little concept of branding as anything can be copied.  Businesses compete by driving prices to rock bottom, cutting corners and quality along the way.  Who can blame them?  What’s the use of wasting time on building a quality brand or innovating when you can just wait and copy the guy next to you without repercussion?  As a result, Vietnamese consumers demand foreign products and domestic brands are relegated to compete at the bottom for razor thin margins.

It’s simple: protect people’s ideas and they’ll find it worthwhile to innovate.  Innovation means a stronger economy.  It is no surprise that the ten countries with the highest standard of living are also the ten countries with the toughest IP laws and enforcement agencies, according to the Taylor Wessing Global Intellectual Property Index and Doing Business 2011, World Bank.

IP Protection Ranking, Doing Business 2011, World Bank

IP Protection More Important Than Schools

We live in the Internet Generation.  With a population averaging 26 years old, Vietnam embodies this generation more than any country in the world.  Saigon is young, tech savvy, and hungry.  They can learn from anywhere.  Stanford, Harvard, and Berkeley have online video courses.  There are tutorials on just about subject on web.  There are countless stories of art majors who become star developers by learning to code online.

The Internet generation is not as reliant on traditional schools as the generations before them.   What the Internet Generation in Vietnam needs most is a system that will protect their ideas and innovations.  They need to be able to openly innovate and partner with each other without having to jealously guard every idea.

There are faint signs of a start-up community building in Vietnam, but I fear that it is in danger of collapse if the IP system is not fixed and enforced.  The next few years will determine if Vietnam will grow up to be an Asian Tiger, or just another Copy Cat.

It’s a momentous day for Vietnamese engineers.  Hoa Dinh Viet, a Vietnamese-French engineer, is sitting on top of the Mac App Store with his incredible Mac Email client, Sparrow App.  The email application is called the perfect desktop translation of Gmail: simple, powerful, and beautiful.

I’ve been a beta tester of Sparrow for a few months now and I’m blown away by the quality and attention to detail.  It is truly a world class application.  I’m not the only one that thinks so.  Sparrow is receiving accolade from the toughest critics, including Daring Fireball, John Gruber.  Gruber, a notoriously tough critic and semi-diety in the Mac world, calls Sparrow “the most interesting new Mac email client in at least a decade.”

Hoa is no stranger software; he is a former Apple and Amazon employee.  The man clearly has the talent and passion for his craft.  Thanks for showing the world Vietnamese people are capable of world-class innovation.

Hoa’s Twitter.

Link: Sparrow App