Community

[Steve]

Vietspace's Web Community Links A People Scattered Around the Globe

By ANH DO Special to THE WALL STREET JOURNAL INTERACTIVE EDITION
6/26/98


Boston architect Long Tran finds a boyhood friend through a Vietspace
feature about Vietnamese students in Los Angeles. Scientist Tien Kieu
scans the Web site's headlines in Melbourne seeking economic news
about the land he left behind.

And in a cozy Paris suburb, mother and daughter Kim and Lana Bui sign
on to Vietspace to read folk tales, the lilting tones of the woman
explaining to the girl how their race originated in "100 Eggs, 100
Children."

"I look at this as a fusion of two worlds," says Mrs. Bui, 48 years
old. "The idea that one can use modern technology to teach
old-fashioned morals and link our children to the past is marvelous."

Vietspace keeps tabs on a lively, evolving population and averages
10,000 hits a day from Web surfers young and old. The Vietnamese
virtual community is tying together a people that has been scattered
all over the globe as a result of war.

Users are so enthused about connections they're making through the
page, which started as a California family business, that they're
sending news from various corners of the world each week. Tidbits
filter in from Russia, Canada and Japan, while political updates
arrive every day from Vietnamese journalists working out of
Washington, D.C.

"We couldn't do it alone. Organizations and individuals help by
contributing and by word of mouth," says Minh Manh, who with her
husband and his brothers -- all armed with high-tech degrees and
Internet know-how -- set up Kicon, named after Vietnamese revolutionary
Ky Con, but spelled Kicon to resemble "icon" in programming lingo.
Kicon (pornounced "key-con") pieced together Vietspace just over two
years ago.

Kicon's entrepreneurs thought an on-line community could unite
refugees who fled Vietnam when the war ended in 1975, giving them
access to information about their interests and each other. Pooling
$150,000 in family savings, they bought high-speed computer equipment
and rented a three-room office in Garden Grove, a few miles from
Little Saigon -- where nearly 2,000 immigrant businesses form the
heart of the Vietnamese overseas community in California's Orange
County.

Ms. Manh, husband Thach Le and his brothers, Tuong and Thanh, began
their community by contacting Vietnamese-language radio and newspapers,
putting those businesses on-line and broadcasting live Webcasts to the
audience Kicon wanted to target across the U.S., Asia, Europe and
Australia.

"In southern California, there's a lot of information for anyone
interested in Vietnam and the Vietnamese. But if you live in smaller
Midwest communities or more remote locations, there's little or
nothing," says Ms. Manh, 34 years old, who has a Ph.D. in electrical
engineering from Indiana's Purdue University.

With limited capital, the family and a marketing friend formed casual
business contracts, using their technical expertise to craft home
pages for small companies and local groups. They often waived their
fee until the venture pulled in advertising, and then split the
profits.

To succeed, analysts say, virtual communities targeting a particular
ethnic group must develop relationships with non-Internet
organizations and use that to boost their business.

"The key expense is member acquisition," says John Hagel, a Silicon
Valley consultant and co-author of "Net Gain: Expanding Markets
through Virtual Communities. "Think about it in stages. Start
segmenting to find the people who would be most attracted to this
kind of community. In many cases, it's often the young, or the ones
in their 20s who are more computer-aware and who might be the earliest
people to adopt this."

Mr. Hagel says that such communities take advantage of a
geographically dispersed audience to build what he calls "a critical
mass of customers."

He says virtual communities are more than just a social phenomenon:
what begins as a gathering connected by common interests evolves into
a group with influential purchasing power. In this cloister, members
exchange information on such things as a product's price and quality,
allowing the on-line business more leverage in negotiating with
vendors and getting their participation.

Kicon may be moving toward that goal. Vietspace automatically links
Vietnamese around the world to news ranging from politics and arts to
literature and film. One section is devoted to kids and another to
music, featuring releases from the hottest overseas performers,
including the "Paris by Night" recordings that are taped in different
countries and selling out in video stores from San Francisco to
Saigon. And the site plans electronic commerce ventures to sell books
and compact discs.

>From those humble beginnings, Vietspace has since grown by leaps and
bounds. Kicon now has three full-time employees, with a part-time
staff of five.

Among its followers, the page now attracts a huge segment of
Vietnamese baby boomers in their late 30s and early 40s -- smart and
PC-oriented, with many working in the science and health professions.
Tien Kieu, who conducts research for the University of Melbourne's
School of Physics, says he likes the convenient, up-to-date contents
and multimedia format of Vietspace and visits it almost weekly.

"Since we all want to do something for the community and our country,
it's best to have some kind of medium to exchange ideas and concerns
and come up with common goals," says Jamie Nguyen, a New York
University dental student. "Besides, information is power, and the
best way to get information is through the Net."

As in better-known on-line communities such as Geocities and The
Well, there's a strong face-to-face element to Vietspace, aside from
electronic dialog. Frequent Vietspace chat rooms invite users to
interact with the famous and the controversial, such as Gen. Nguyen
Cao Ky, Vietnam's former prime minister, who now makes his home on an
island near Seattle.

But unlike the more mainstream sites, Vietspace tries to stay neutral
on issues that tend to inflame their fellow immigrants, such as
criticizing the Communist government in their homeland and its record
on human rights.

"If I go to film a student protest, I show the whole clip on-line. I
don't edit the tape," says co-creator Thanh Le, 29 years old. "The
Internet ... gives us an opportunity to at least participate in the
community that has the biggest Vietnamese population outside of our
own country, and it allows different generations to get involved at
the same time."

Older immigrants tune in, he says, to hear the likes of VNCR, the
highly rated Vietnam California Radio station operating next door to
Kicon, while youngsters learn Web skills in school, then go home and
get their parents on-line.

Internet entrepreneurs have tried to analyze Kicon's formula,
searching for their community-building secret. In California's
intensely competitive market, several smaller companies such as
Vietline and Little Saigon Net are offering similar community models,
with an emphasis on entertainment, religion, making friends, and, of
course, politics.

The Kicon folks feel they may be on the right track because of their
versatility.

"Even though we focus on Vietnamese interests, this is not the only
thing we do," Ms. Manh says. Kicon shies away from being labeled
"ethnic-specific," pointing out that the Vietspace Web site generates
just 20% of its revenues, while 80% of the company's earnings
actually come from developing software for clients such as local
businesses and the Tennessee Valley Authority, the world's largest
electricity generator.

Moreover, the company recently introduced a real-time chat system for
international languages, using Java and Castanet push technology to
avoid the usually cumbersome process of typing non-English fonts such
as Thai, Vietnamese, Arabic, Russian or Japanese on a keyboard. The
focus is always on what they can do next. Its pet project focuses on
using animation to teach American-born children how to speak and read
Vietnamese via the Net.

All the while, users continue to log on to Vietspace.

"The Web site lets us expose ourselves, especially if we want to know
what the people from our country are doing, what they're talking
about," says Mr. Tran, the Boston architect. "Naturally, this makes me
think that cyberculture not only relates to real life, it seems
destined to always be a part of our life."

Copyright c 1998 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
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