[autalpha]

As a Vietnamese American, I've always been interested in the Vietnam market since the number of internet user's growth is astounding! The country's literacy level is very high and majority of people are either online or trying to be online daily. But this is more of a developing country and the majority of regular Asian population.

The biggest problems I have with Vietnam and Asian developing countries right now, and this isn't unique to just Vietnam as far as I can tell: 1. The postal system isn't uniform/consistent throughout the country, so there's a real problem in mapping people with a clear home address. 2. Not having a clear home address combined with a lackadaisical sense of infrastructure planning, it's making things like loans and credits and ultimately credit card ownership is very difficult. So online transaction can be difficult. There is a population of Vietnamese population with ATM debit cards, but the commitment and buy-ins with online transactions are still at an early stage. As far as I can tell, most transactions to push money to an online vendor still go through a brick & mortar proxy (go to shop, load up on digital points --> pay with points like old school phone cards) 3. Speed/ownership of private internet connections is also an issue. A lot of the general population are still using the internet from internet cafe. As more and more people are getting personal internet connections at home, this is getting better; but it's a long way from where we are in the US. Imagine the early AOL modem era.

I don't disagree that the market is huge and there are countries and locations that are ready: South Korea, Hong Kong, Philippines and Malaysia etc. But the big market you're looking at are still made up of low to middle Asian population, which is getting ready but not there yet in term of online-marketing ready. FYI, a lot of successful services for Vietnam right now are mostly free or supported by ad revenue.

These are just a few of my personal thoughts though. Perhaps someone else with more solid data on Asia would really be insightful for everyone.

[duiker101]

And what about japan? china? This question came to my mind after i developed a small mmorpg for android and published it asking for beta testers, one of the people who contacted me was a chinese guy who explained me something i didn't know. They have many mmorpgs already published in the android market, and i never seen or heard of them. So i stared thinking of how many things we are doing parallel to them but without(except some occasion) touching.

I gained a lot from this experience and i think that opening to each other would be good for everyone but there are many obstacles, like language, different minds etc...

[autalpha]

I think Japan is definitely ready. Big cities in China is ready. But since the social classes gap is very wide between the rich and the poor and it may come as a surprise to a lot of people, but majority of the population in countries like China and Vietnam is poor.

Btw, I hear South Korea's internet is much better than what we have here in the US.

[vanni]

You heard well: South Corea 16.6 Mbit/s, USA 4.6 Mbit/s.

Source: http://royal.pingdom.com/2010/11/12/real-connection-speeds-f... - Raw data source: http://www.akamai.com/stateoftheinternet/