From HP's study - 2014

Finding your single market in Southeast Asia

According to Lim and Suang, one common mistake entrepreneurs in Southeast Asia will make is looking at the region as a single market. The second mistake is thinking that Vietnam’s population of 92 million or Indonesia’s population of 250 million people is one single market. The reality is that each population itself is stratified. Khor recommends slicing markets by spending power as the different groups of people with different spending power will behave differently. For example, the 50 million wealthiest people in Indonesia will probably have more in common and behave similarly to the wealthiest people in Ho Chi Minh city, or Manila, or Klang Valley, rather than 100 million almost-as-wealthy Indonesians.

Lim gave the example of Reebonz, a company which sells luxury bags to wealthy consumers. For Reebonz, their addressable market size is about 60 million people across Southeast Asia. These 60 million customers spend an average of US$3,000 a month on luxury bags, and reside in Singapore, Kuala Lumpur, Jakarta, Bangkok, Hong Kong, Manila, Australia. As of a year and half ago, the company was valued at US$250 million.

Full article: http://www.techinasia.com/find-big-single-market-southeast-asia/ 

“Nếu gió không thuận chiều, hãy dùng mái chèo.” - Ngạn ngữ Latin

“Bạn không thể ngã nếu bạn không leo lên cao. Nhưng sống cả đời dưới mặt đất chẳng có gì vui thú cả.” - Khuyết danh

10 Small Things You Can Do Every Day To Get Smarter

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Writing down what you learn every day boosts your brainpower.

You might be under the impression that intelligence is a fixed quantity that is set when you are young and unchanging thereafter. But research shows that, if so, you're wrong. How we approach situations and the things we do to feed our brains can significantly improve our mental horsepower.

That could mean going back to school or filling your bookshelves (or e-reader) with thick tomes on deep subjects, but getting smarter doesn't necessarily mean a huge commitment of time and energy, according to a recent thread on question-and-answer site Quora.

When a questioner keen on self-improvement asked the community, "What would you do to be a little smarter every single day?" everyone from dedicated meditators to techies and entrepreneurs weighed in with useful suggestions. Which of these 10 ideas could you fit into your daily routine?

1. Be smarter about your online time. 

Every online break doesn't have to be about checking social networks and fulfilling your daily ration of cute animal pics. The web is also full of great learning resources, such as online courses, intriguing TED talks, and vocabulary-building tools. Replace a few minutes of skateboarding dogs with something more mentally nourishing, suggest several responders.

2. Write down what you learn.

It doesn't have to be pretty or long, but building a few minutes to reflect in writing about what you learned into each day is sure to boost your brainpower. "Write 400 words a day on things that you learned," suggests yoga teacher Claudia Azula Altucher. Mike Xie, a research associate at Bayside Biosciences, agrees. "Write about what you've learned," he advises.

3. Make a 'did' list.

A big part of intelligence is confidence and happiness, so boost both by pausing to list not the things you have yet to do, but all the things you've already accomplished. The idea of a "done list" is recommended by famed VC Marc Andreessen as well as Azula Altucher. "Make an I DID list to show all the things you, in fact, accomplished," she suggests.

4. Get out the Scrabble board.

Board games and puzzles aren't just fun; they can also be a great way to work out your brain. "Play games (Scrabble, bridge, chess, go, Battleship, Connect Four, doesn't matter)," suggests Xie (for a ninja-level brain boost try to play without looking at the board to exercise your working memory). "Play Scrabble with no help from hints or books," concurs Altucher.

5. Have smart friends.

It can be rough on your self-esteem, but hanging out with folks who are more clever than you is one of the fastest ways to learn. "Keep a smart company. Remember your IQ is the average of five closest people you hang out with," Saurabh Shah, an account manager at Symphony Teleca, writes.

"Surround yourself with smarter people," agrees developer Manas J. Saloi. "I try to spend as much time as I can with my tech leads. I have never had a problem accepting that I am an average coder at best and there are many things I am yet  to learn ... Always be humble and be willing to learn."

6. Read a lot.

OK, this is not a shocker, but it was the most common response, so though it might be a less-than-surprising answer, reading definitely seems essential. Opinions vary on what's the best brain-boosting reading material, with suggestions ranging from developing a daily newspaper habit to picking up a variety of fiction and nonfiction, but everyone seems to agree that quantity is important. Read a lot.

7. Explain it to others. 

"If you can't explain it simply, you don't understand it well enough," Albert Einstein said. The Quora posters agree. Make sure you've really learned what you think you have learned and that the information is well and truly stuck in your memory by trying to teach it to others. "Make sure you can explain it to someone else," Xie says simply.

Student Jon Packles elaborates on this idea: "For everything you learn — big or small — stick with it for at least as long as it takes you to be able to explain it to a friend. It's fairly easy to learn new information. Being able to retain that information and teach others is far more valuable."

8. Do random new things. 

Shane Parrish, keeper of the consistently fascinating Farnam Street blog, tells the story of Steve Jobs' youthful calligraphy class in his response on Quora. After dropping out of school, the future Apple founder had a lot of time on his hands and wandered into a calligraphy course. It seemed irrelevant at the time, but the design skills he learned were later baked into the first Macs. The takeaway: you never know what will be useful ahead of time. You just need to try new things and wait to see how they connect with the rest of your experiences later on.

"You can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only  connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future," Parrish quotes Jobs as saying. To have dots to connect, you need to be willing to try new things — even if they don't seem immediately useful or productive.

9. Learn a new language. 

No, you don't need to become quickly fluent or jaunt off to a foreign country to master the language of your choosing. You can work away steadily from the comfort of your desk and still reap the mental rewards. "Learn a new language. There are a lot of free sites for that. UseLivemocha or Busuu," Saloi says. (Personally, I'm a big fan of Memrise once you have the basic mechanics of a new language down.)

10. Take some down time.

It's no surprise that dedicated meditator Altucher recommends giving yourself space for your brain to process what it's learned — "sit in silence daily," she writes — but she's not the only responder who stresses the need to take some downtime from mental stimulation. Spend some time just thinking, suggests retired cop Rick Bruno. He pauses the interior chatter while exercising. "I think about things while I run (almost every day)," he reports.

Read more: http://www.inc.com/jessica-stillman/10-small-things-you-can-do-every-day-to-get-smarter.html#ixzz38pPI5j40

Con đường đi đến thành công

"Thành công và hạnh phúc không phải là món quà miễn phí. Tùy thuộc vào kích cỡ quý khách phải trả một cái giá tương ứng..."

Câu chuyện kể về cuộc gặp gỡ của một anh họa sĩ nghèo và vị thượng đế

Chàng trai mang đến cuộc gặp những thắc mắc về sự bất bình đẳng, về sự phân hóa giàu nghèo,...

Chàng trai lấy mình ra làm ví dụ và hỏi thượng đế rằng vì sao chàng ta đã cố gắng nhưng kết quả đạt được vẫn là con số 0. Trong khi đó, bạn bè lại đạt được những thành công rực rỡ

Thượng đế cho chàng trai biết rằng, chàng ta đã không cố gắng hết mình, không những thế, chàng còn hay nản chí và bỏ cuộc giữa chừng

Thành công và hạnh phúc giống như một món hàng, để mua được món hàng đó, bạn phải trả bằng sự nỗ lực và cố gắng không ngừng nghỉ.

Chỉ cần một phút lơ là hay nản chí, muốn bỏ cuộc giữa chừng, ngay lập tức, mọi thứ sẽ trở về vạch xuất phát

Với những thông điệp ý nghĩa, bộ ảnh "Điều kiện của thượng đế" đang được chia sẻ rất nhiều trên các trang mạng xã hội

Five Top VCs Pick The Ten Biggest Tech Trends Of The Next Five Years

Baked into the venture capital model is an assumption that any individual venture capitalist is going to be wrong way more than he or she is going to be right.  But if you get five of them together, with a couple hundred spectators as a crowdsourced backstop, you can come up with some pretty accurate guesses about the future.

That’s the idea behind the Churchill Club’s annual Top 10 Tech Trends dinner. Each year, five prominent VCs are asked to present two predictions apiece that are not yet overwhelmingly obvious but will have massive impact within the next three to five years. Then they vote on each other’s predictions, and the audience weighs in, too.

That timeframe is crucial, explained FORBES publisher Rich Karlgaard, who co-moderated this year’s discussion (along with our technology editor, Bruce Upbin), which took place Thursday night in Santa Clara, CA. It’s easy to see where things are headed in the next year or two, and hard to remember what anyone predicted 10 or 20 years later. Three to five years falls into the awkward in-between — and is coincidentally the period in which venture investments are expected to start to prove out.

Last night’s prognosticators were: Ping Li, general partner, Accel Partners; Rebecca Lynn, general partner, Canvas; Mike Maples, managing partner, Floodgate; Bryan Roberts, partner, Venrock; and James Slavet, partner, Greylock. Here are their predictions, with selected snippets of the discussion. Read all the way down to see which one got the most votes.

1. The business applications we use today will be reinvented by Ping Li. Enterprise software today is terrible because the people who buy it aren’t the end users. “We’ve been suffering with these applications for decades now,” said Li. But that can’t last. The same forces that produced Facebook, Uber and Twitter will soon yield enterprise apps that are, if not quite as addictive, at least not such a chore. Li: “It’s going to feel a lot more like the consumer applications we use and love outside the office.”

2. Digital disintermediation of banks, by Rebecca Lynn. With Bitcoin, Robinhood, Lending Club and other fintech startups attacking the financial services sector, banks can’t survive, said Lynn. “They’re too big to fail, and frankly, they’re just too big to compete.” While they won’t go away entirely, “what I see banks becoming is just a completely commoditized product. They’re at the end of the value chain.

Maples: “I don’t think they’ll go away, but they’ll be around the way mainframes are today — they’ll be important, but not that important.”

3. Smart home networks, by Mike Maples. “I think in the next five years there will be hundreds of millions of smart new home networks,” Maples said. It will start with smarter wifi networks, an area ripe for disruption: “Right now, I think Linksys and Netgear basically just call China up and say, ‘Can you make the box in my color so I can sell it?’”

James Slavet: “Right now the smart home is definitely a B-to-G [ie. business-to-geek] phenomemon. The question is what will make it mainstream.”

4. The health insurance industry mimics Kodak and goes “poof!” by Bryan Roberts. “Insurance companies as we know it go away,” predicted Roberts. “Nobody likes them, nobody trusts them. They send you like 45 pieces of paper once a month in the mail.” Instead, companies with more than 500 employees will contract with healthcare providers directly, while the government will pick up much of the slack.

Lynn: “I voted yes because I just want to believe so badly, but it seems like everything in healthcare is so dysfunctional.”

Li: “It feels like it needs to happen, but it seems like an industry that won’t turn over in three to five years.”

5. The last-second economy, by James Slavet. Mobile on-demand services will become popular well beyond taxis and food delivery, extending to areas like knowledge work and healthcare. “The core concept is that with smartphones, we’re all transacting with compressed planning cycles and addictive ease,” Slavet said. “If you get sick at 2 a.m., rather than going down to urgent care, you’ll be able to pull up your phone and have a consult with a doctor on demand.”

Li, in strong agreement: “The marketplace effects are really powerful. These things are not taking years to happen. They’re taking months.”

6. Cyber attacks targeted at the home, by Ping Li. As Maples’ prediction about the ubiquity of smart home networks comes true, it will make homes an inviting target for cybercrooks and terrorists. “Imagination does not need to run too far before you see the scale and the scariness of the attacks we’ll be facing,” Li said.

Roberts, semi-agreeing: “The question becomes whether or not with one terrorist attck you can hit a million homes. If it becomes that fluid, sure. But no one cares about my home. It’s too small a unit of destruction.”

Maples, agreeing: “I think the average hacker is much less idealistic than they are capitalistic. They just want to get easy money. It feels to me like a good hacker could own a ton of houses if they’re patient about it.”

7. The future of healthcare begins with data (from your gut), by Rebecca Lynn. Big data, informed by a fast-growing understanding of the genome and the human microbiome, will radically improve the efficacy of medical treatments, said Lynn: “I think we’ll see more true breakthroughs in healthcare in the next three to five years than we’ve seen in the last 20.”

Dissenters:

Slavet: “The question I have is that a lot of the information is still pen and paper and in filing cabinets…I think it will happen. I just don’t know that it will happen at scale in the next three to five years.”

Robert: “I think the issue is our understanding of biology. I think we know like a single-digit percentage of biology. That’s the long pole of the tent here.”

Maples: “Unfortunately I believe our healthcare system is screwed up in the same way our education system is screwed up…There are all kinds of reasons common sense stuff doesn’t happen.”

8. A female founder creates a company with a $50 billion exit, by Mike Maples. “We’ll see a woman start a company that succeeds on the scale of a Google, Facebook or Twitter,” Maples said. “I tend to come at this question not from an affirmative action point of view. The world will change when somebody wins. Just win, baby. The core to my argument is the conditions exist now in a way they haven’t before.”

Roberts, dissenting, pointed out there just aren’t enough $50 billion companies created to be confident one will come along within five years. “If you lowered it to $5 billion or something, I’d agree in a heartbeat.”

 9. Spot pricing for healthcare procedures, by Bryan Roberts. Dynamic, demand-adjusted pricing, already in use by airlines and now by peer-to-peer taxi services like Uber, will next come to healthcare. “Why on earth wouldn’t you get a cheaper price if you’re willing to go in at 8 o’clock on Friday night rather than lunchtime on a Wednesday?” Roberts asked.

Lynn, semi-agreeing: “I think there’s a whole business around just utilizing MRI machines outside the 9-to-4:30 [window]…Going to the doctor might be more like getting your hair done” — ie. patients will go to providers they know and trust, regardless of cost or convenience.

Maples: “I just sort of reject the premise that they’re trying to find market-clearing prices and be more efficient, because otherwise I wouldn’t have to wait with my daughter in the emergency room for three hours to have somebody look at her for five minutes and say ‘You’re OK.’”

10. Credit cards are the new app platform, by James Slavet. Credit cards are “ubiquitous but pretty dumb,” Slavet said. Soon they’ll be able to connect directly to the cloud. “The big opportunity for disruption is right in front of us. It’s in our wallets.”

Lynn, dissenting: “In fintech, consumers are really lazy. I don’t think you’re going to move the needle by adding new features to credit cards unless it’s about the rate.”

*******

Those were the ten predictions. Two of them, smart home networks and the last-second economy, got unanimous votes of approval from the panelists. Those were also the two predictions most popular with audience members, who voted with their phones by using Poll Everywhere. Both received an 87.2% “yes” vote, but Slavet’s last-second economy was the winner by 1/100th of a percentage point — earning him top honors and the hat to go with it.

Source: http://www.forbes.com/sites/jeffbercovici/2014/05/30/five-top-vcs-pick-the-ten-biggest-tech-trends-of-the-next-five-years/