OneVietnam and South Bay First Thursday present Tech Edition

Tablets, social networking, clouds, SSDs, networking networks, USB 3.0, iPhones, Androids, and more – technology is ubiquitous in this day and age.  As such, OneVietnam Network and South Bay First Thursdays have teamed up to present Toast of the Town: Tech Edition on Thursday, August 4^th at Koji Sake Lounge in San Jose.  RSVP at http://tot-tech.eventbrite.com/

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.