The story of a Vietnamese young IT talent
At the invitation of the Asian
Institute of Technology (AIT), on
November 14 Nguyen Hoa Binh,
a fourth-year student of
technology of Hanoi National
University, left for Thailand to
attend the Open GIS conference
on reducing the digital gap of the
Mekong Sub-region at the end of
February 2003. Binh was
requested to deliver four scientific
reports on information technology
(IT).
His reports introduce the possibilities of applying IT to prevent disasters and the
reality of applications in Vietnam, using the mobile webform technology
to build applications for e-commerce, the e-government demo system
with the use of Microsoft's .Net technology, and the Internet videophone
system to serve the teletraining. At the conference, Binh presented his
report "Applying the GIS Mapserver technology to forecast disastrous
situations of the Vietnamese health care sector."
Highly applicable topics
Binh was born in 1981. He had peaceful
childhood in Dong Ha Town, near Hanoi. When he attended a
maths-oriented class of the Nguyen Hue High School in Ha Tay
Province, his passion for informatics began to arise.
Binh won the third prize in the national maths exam of 1998-1999 for
high-school students, so he gained the admission into the Technology
Department of Hanoi National University without undergoing an entrance
exam. Later, he was admitted into the Young Talent Club of FPT
Corporation.
With the knowledge gained from books during the previous three years,
the freshman soon won the third prize of the Vietnam Intellect contest with
the topic "Building an on-line entertainment services complex combined
with e-commerce and the user community on the Internet," which was
organized in 2000 by Lao Dong (Labor) newspaper, VTV3 of Vietnam
Television and FPT Corp. He continued to win prizes for a series of
highly applicable research topics in large-scale national and
international contests. From studies on applying the GIS technology in
forecasting disastrous situations, the Vietnam Japan Geo-informatics
Society requested Binh and his associates to develop an "Email robot"
software system which automatically updates information on the GIS map
via email. The team also cooperated with Microsoft Vietnam to study and
test the e-government demo system using the .Net technology of
Microsoft. Most recently, Binh and his associates cooperated with the
Ministry of Health to set up Flood Map, an information system to
computerize the process of controlling and fighting natural calamities and
disasters from central to communal levels in the form of maps. This
system has been tested in four provinces and has great social meaning.
Good reputation spreads. The Service of Health and the Military
Headquarters of Hanoi asked Binh and his associates to make a new
Flood Map for Hanoi because the city has proper characteristics of a
cultural, political, economic center with many high-rise buildings, where
disasters are mostly caused by fires and explosions, even terrorism.
A "multinational software company"
With some achievements,
Nguyen Hoa Binh gained fame and had an ambition to test his ability in a
new field: business. In April 2001, Binh and his six friends established
PeaceSoft.Corp, a limited liability to provide software solutions. The firm
is located at 18 Le Van Linh St., Hoan Kiem District, Hanoi, and has a
website at www.peacesoft.net. This is an extremely young business, as
Binh calls it, because both the director and his staff spend half a day at
the office and the other half at the university. The company's director is
Binh and its motto is "Everything is Everywhere for Everybody on
Everytime" which the staff calls the "4E strategy."
After eight months in operation, PeaceSoft.Corp earned an encouraging
income of VND200 million. The figure for 2002 is expected to double.
PeaceSoft has 11 members, most of whom are IT students of specialized
universities in Vietnam. Two of them, Nguyen Ngoc Huy (two gold
medals from the Olympic International Informatics, 1999-2000) and Tran
Thanh Hoai (one silver medal, one bronze medal for Olympic
International Informatics, 2000-2001), are studying in Britain. Some others
are students of big universities in Japan, the United States, and so on.
"PeaceSoft.Corp is a 'multinational group'," Binh said humorously. "It will
be present in most developed countries in the world." That's a serious
idea. Binh's bookshelf has at least three books and pictures of Bill Gates,
the owner of the world-famous Microsoft.
PeaceSoft.Corp is still a very small company but is highly evaluated by
leading IT experts of Vietnam, Japan, AIT, and Microsoft. Prof. and Dr. Le
The Trung, chairman of National Disaster and Burn Advisory Council,
and chairman of National Kidney Transplant Society, has entrusted the
firm with studying and applying the Flood Map.
Voice chat: another success of Binh
Binh happened to hear of a
new technology which can reduce human voice data from 9kbps or 1-4%
of the original data. With the cooperation of Bach Hung Nguyen, one of
his friends at the FPT Corporation's Young Talent Club, Binh was eager
for the research. Finally, the two young men turned out the Voice
Everywhere Network program, first version, in late September 2000. They
introduced it temporarily at www.venet.peacesoft.net. In over one month,
4,500 people studied it and 250 others registered for a free account to
use this service. In early August 2001, PeaceSoft.Corp launched the 3.5
version after the successful test of the international Voice Chat between
Hanoi and Gainesville, Florida, USA, with the same quality as sounds for
ordinary telephones. Users of this software pay a surprisingly cheap fee
for long-distance phone calls. For example, a phone call from Vietnam to
the United States costs US$2.51 for the first minute and US$2.2 from the
second minute while a similar call with the use of Binh's on-line telephone
software costs only VND220 per minute, less than 0.6% of the fee for
ordinary phones and 1.1% for the VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol).
Self-confident, dynamic, creative and practical, Binh is probably the idol
of today's young people. He regarded the trip to Thailand as a chance to
seek more clients and expand his market.
"I make practical calculations, " Binh explained. "That's very necessary
in the market mechanism. You work for yourself and for other people as
well." Perhaps, with this point of view, Binh and his staff charged only
VND10 million for the Flood Map, a meaningful project to prevent natural
calamities for the community.
By Phuong Anh - The Saigon Times Weekly - November 23, 2002.
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