The Quarter Safeguard team for firefighting in Nguyen Thai Binh Ward in Ho ChI MInh City’s District 1 is often called for help by locals.

The team has mini fire vehicles than can enter narrow alleys, and has helped put out dozens of fires since 2009 when it was first set up.

The vehicles are self-modified into mini fire engines, an initiative by Ly Nhon Thanh, the team’s head.

In 2002, Thanh was one of first to rush to the rescue when the blaze broke out at the International Trade Centre in District 1. The fire claimed 60 lives, but he said he saved 97 people.

“How painful and unhappy it was to see the bodies of adults and children being brought out of fires,” he says, explaining that after that disaster he wanted to do something.

He also saw fires in alleys so narrow that fire engines could not enter them. During those times he would think a smaller vehicle could be useful in saving lives and property.

He bought an old motorbike and other equipment such as a small water pumping machine based on the advice of firefighters at the district Fire Prevention and Fighting Police Division.

In October 2009 the first firefighting motorbike was ready for use. It easily entered small alleys and helped put out 14 fires in the next few years.

In 2016 he got a loan to buy a three-wheel vehicle which was later installed with a 1,300-litre water tank, a small water pumping machine, a ladder, a hose, and other equipment.

“The vehicle, only 1.3m wide and 1.8m long, very easily reaches fires in houses inside long, narrow alleys,” Thanh says.

A year after he fabricated the vehicle, he was contacted by overseas Vietnamese from a company supplying technologies to treat environmental disasters and they donated foam extinguishing agent F500, which stamps out fires rapidly.

“The agent especially renders toxic smoke discharged by fires non-toxic. It is very important because many people die due to toxic smoke,” Thanh says.

Last year he borrowed again to buy a motorbike for carrying a 400hp water pumping machine also donated by the same overseas Vietnamese.

He himself fabricated a device to connect the pump with fire hydrants on streets to spray water on fires.

These mini firefighting vehicles were used recently to put out a fire aboard a bus on Ong Lanh Bridge in District 1.

Thanh says he hopes never to use his equipment to extinguish fires because he just does not want a fire to break out.

His team is of great assistance to the fire brigade in reducing the loss of life and property in fires in the district.

Thanh has been honoured for his services.

His mini fire engine won the third prize in a contest last year called Community’s Ideas for innovative technology ideas, products and solutions.

The annual contest is organised by Kham Pha (Discovery) magazine and the city Department of Science and Technology’s grassroots level science management division.

Bui Van Quyen, vice chairman of the Vietnam Invention Association, hailed Thanh’s initiative for its high practicability.

Thanh’s team’s brief is to maintain social order and regulate traffic on the streets. He has personally helped catch thieves.

People in his ward say he is friendly and takes particular care of poor people.

He even helped a poor woman buy a vehicle to hawk coffee to earn money so that her son could go to university.

He says: “I try to do what is good for everyone. That is what Uncle Ho taught. I feel happy when they smile.

5G, as the fifth generation of wireless technology is called, enables vehicles to connect with the Internet, using cloud-based computing and storage for the next generation of autonomous vehicle solutions.

More auto enterprises have been partnering with information technology giants recently to better make use of resources and promote the development of 5G technology in vehicles, accelerating the layout of the future automobile industry.

In the latest deal, Great Wall Motor and China Mobile Hebei signed a cooperation agreement at the end of January, setting a goal that within the next five years the two giants will promote 5G applications in automobile manufacturing and intelligent transportation.

According to the agreement, China Mobile Hebei will set up and manage a cloud platform for Great Wall Motor to support the carmaker’s management, decision analysis, marketing, customer service and online operation.

The VV7 model of Great Wall Motor’s Wey brand, equipped with an intelligent control system based on 5G technology, can start, accelerate, brake and steer without a driver.

Great Wall is not the only auto enterprise to explore the 5G sector with IT companies.

In the middle of last month, Changan Automobile and Chinese tech giant Huawei unveiled their joint innovation centre, which will focus on 5G internet of vehicle, or IoV, and Level 4 autonomous driving technology.

As the first Chinese brand to achieve 2,000 kilometres of autonomous driving and to mass-produce Level 2 autonomous driving vehicles, Changan has been dedicated to the research and development of IoV for eight years and reached Level 4 autonomous driving.

Last year, the company said they would not produce new models without IoV and that it plans to mass-produce the models by 2020.

The Chinese government is also making efforts to promote regional 5G development. At the end of last year, Beijing became the major demonstration and application city of 5G IoV and plans to complete the construction of 5G IoV in key regions by 2020.

When Audi, BMW, Daimler, Ericsson, Huawei, Intel, Nokia and Qualcomm set up the 5G Automotive Association in 2016, Christoph Grote, senior vice-president for Electronics, BMW said: “We expect 5G to become the worldwide dominating mobile communications standard of the next decade. For the automotive industry, it is essential that 5G fulfils the challenges of the era of digitalisation and autonomous driving.”

Zheng Xiaolong, an auto industry analyst, said in an interview with China Business Network: “5G technology will not only promote the development of autonomous driving, but also have a significant impact on the entire transportation and urban planning sectors.

“More importantly, it will also effectively reduce the maintenance costs of operators through the IoV calculation in vehicles, which can achieve a win-win situation.”

This trend will only continue to grow stronger as society moves toward an autonomous driving environment.

When self-driving vehicles go mainstream, drivers and passengers will have more free time to watch movies, play games and participate in other activities that demand a large amount of bandwidth from the 5G network.

According to IHS Markit, the IoV market will have 72.5 million related vehicles and is expected to reach a value of 1.48 trillion yuan ($221 billion, Bt6.9 trillion) worldwide by 2025. The market will maintain a high growth rate of more than 10 per cent every year.

Phan Anh Tuan of the Electrical and Electronic Engineering Faculty at the HCM City University of Technology and Education and his schoolmates developed a walking cane with a smart device.

“This stick has clever features like a GPS navigation device, flashlight and an alert when users fall. It sends information on their location to their relatives via text messages,” Tuan said.

Vietnam is one of the fastest ageing countries in Asia, according to Tuan. By 2050, the number of people 60 years and over will triple from 8.9 per cent to over 30 per cent or 32 million people. The number of people over 80 will also triple to over 6 per cent of the population.

 According to a national survey on the elderly in Vietnam conducted in 2011, more than 56 per cent of the elderly were assessed as weak and 6.7 per cent very weak.

The main problems they face deal with joints, muscles, and bones, Tuan said.

“However, most of the walking sticks used by the elderly are very rudimentary, so we wanted to create a cane combined with smart devices,” he added.

Their initiative won a prize in a contest held by the USAID BUILD-IT & Dow Vietnam STEM Programme: Engineering Projects in Community Service (EPICS).

“After the contest, we will ask our universities to commercialise the smart walking cane for the market,” Tuan said.

Do Thi Thu Hien, a student in the Mechanical Engineering Faculty at the HCM City University of Technology and Education, said the students never gave up, even though they had to try several times to develop the stick.

Tuan and Hien’s team included many students from different faculties, so they were able to learn from each other, including academic knowledge and soft skills. “Project-basing learning is interesting. We can learn how to solve potential problems,” Tu?n said.

EPICS is an international award-winning, designed-based, service-learning programme founded at Purdue University in 1995. It is recognised as the model of service learning where students not only learn by doing, but also by creating.

Working together, the United States Agency for International Development’s (USAID) Building University-Industry Learning and Development through Innovation and Technology (BUILD-IT) Alliance, implemented by Arizona State University and the Dow Vietnam STEM Programme, supports student-led innovation and service learning at Vietnamese universities.

The USAID BUILD-IT Alliance is a five-year public-private partnership founded to support world-class engineering programmes and create work-ready graduates in Vietnam.

The alliance has over 16 industry partners and 11 Vietnamese university partners. Collaboration between the Alliance members strengthens university-industry linkages, and introduces project-based learning programmes such as Engineering Projects in Community Service into Vietnamese STEM programmes.

In other EPICS contest held last year, a team of students from HCM City University of Technology at the Vietnam National University HCM City made a long-sleeved T-shirt from wood fiber which is resistant to ultraviolet rays.

Many other innovative products were also exhibited at the contests.

Besides university students, high school students have also developed innovative ideas. Their products won prizes last year in a contest titled Community’s Ideas, which encouraged individuals and organisations to come up with innovative technology ideas, products and solutions for socio-economic development.

The contest was organised by Kham Pha (Discovery) magazine and the city’s Department of Science and Technology’s Grassroots Level Science Management Division.

Mai Quoc Huy, a ninth grader at Ban Co Secondary School in District 3, made adjustments to an electric bicycle with electronic equipment so that it became a “smart” device.

A magnetic stripe card activates the lock of the bicycle, which is charged by solar energy. Its lights are turned on by a sensor when nighttime falls, and when a driver turns left or right the indicators turn on. The bike can run up to 25km per hour.

Bui Quoc Du, a teacher at Le Thi Hong Gam Technical Education and Career Consulting Centre, said: “Many young people are very creative. They have innovative ideas. But it is not easy for them to turn the ideas into real products because they don’t have much money to buy materials for research.”

The tech giant said it will meet consumer demand for bigger screens and higher resolution through its two-track strategy of quantum-dot light-emitting diode TV and micro-liquid crystal displays.

This year, Samsung has added 98-inch and 55-inch QLED 8K TVs to the existing lineup of 65, 75, 82 and 85-inch screens.

Samsung launched QLED 8K TVs in Korea, Europe, US and Russia last year.

In 2019, sales will expand to 60 countries. Starting with Europe on Tuesday, the firm will invite potential clients to its “Samsung Forum,” which is to be held in three locations in different global regions through March.

Video contents shot in lower resolution become clearer when played on Samsung’s QLED 8K, with the help of its exclusive artificial intelligence-powered quantum processor that creates new pixels to fill in the picture.

“Population is on the decline and the market is stagnating. But if you look at big-screen TV sales, there is remarkable two-digit percentage growth every year,” Han told reporters at the firm’s research and development facility in Suwon, Gyeonggi Province.

London-based information provider IHS Markit has predicted 8K will account for over 10 per cent of the market for TVs with a screen size of 60 inches or greater by 2021.

When running idle, the QLED 8K TV uses the “magic screen” function for camouflage. The standby mode that mimics wallpaper or ambient colours is predicted to cost users 7,000 won ($6.20, Bt195 ) in electricity fees annually when run for three hours a day throughout the year.

The QLED 8K 85-inch model is currently priced at 26.7 million won — more expensive than the latest models of Hyundai Motor’s Avante, Kia Motors’ K3 and SsangYong Motor’s Tivoli.

Despite the hefty price tag and giant size likely to take up most of a living room wall, Samsung is confident the premium TV market will thrive.

“Depending on how chipmakers catch up, more firms will launch 8K products,” Han forecast, “I expect full-blown competition in the 8K market from 2020.”

Declining to offer a specific sales target for 2019, Han vowed Samsung would maintain the No. 1 position in the domestic consumer electronics market that it took from LG Electronics last year.

“Market domination happens not just when sales rise but when it becomes a widespread desire among consumers to own a product,” Han said.

“In that respect, the 8K TVs will yield faster results than 4K TVs.”

Unlike LG, which introduced rollable TV screens at Consumer Electronics Show 2019 in Las Vegas in January, Han indicated no form factor changes for Samsung displays. He only elaborated that the company’s customisable 8K micro-LCD modules will allow consumers to create their own screen ratio.

Japan’s music company Avex Inc plans to launch a smartphone-based payment app as early as this summer, giving users points they can exchange for exclusive goods or concert tickets.

The new service is aimed at fostering closer ties with music fans, and Avex will call on other music firms to join in. Avex’s app is called “entame (entertainment) wallet.” The company will award points based on how much digital cash, called “entame coin,” that users spend at shops or online.

It will also reward people who view footage of their favourite artists or share articles on social networking services. The company plans to allow users to exchange their points for exclusive products or to obtain tickets to music concerts and special events.

 Avex is aiming to see payments totalling about Y450 billion ($4 billion, Bt126 bIllIon) in 2022.

By giving points, Avex seeks to analyse what fans do and what they’re interested in, so as to expand their business outside selling music. According to sources, Avex will invite other parties, such as music companies and entertainment agencies, to participate in the project. The sources said Avex will not use the customer data exclusively, but will provide it to each partner company.

The project is partly spurred by the sense of crisis in the music industry over the rise of music streaming services. IT giants such as Apple, Amazon and Google offer monthly music subscription services, which have become so popular that domestic sales of music CDs are on a downward trend.

In general, when users listen to music or watch video with a music streaming service, a fee is paid to a music company. The customer data it can obtain, however, is limited to age and gender, which prevents the company from enhancing its marketing based on customer preferences.

“Record companies need to transform their business from selling songs and CDs to offering comprehensive services including managing live performances, selling goods and coordinating events,” a music industry expert at Okasan Securities said. – The Japan News

Capital for microloan app to serve the underserved

Cambodia-based digital microfinance start-up Digicro Pte Ltd has raised $300,000 (Bt9.4 million) in seed capital from the Tokyo-based Showcase Capital Co Ltd to help it develop their microloan service mobile application, according to the firm.

The microloan service, provided through the mobile application Spean Loan, is developed by Spean Luy Co Ltd, a subsidiary of Digicro. The firm was founded by Yuta Nagano last year, which also runs a financial comparison site Spean Luy allowing users to compare interest rates offered on loan products by local lenders.

Nagano said more than 60 per cent of Cambodians have access to Internet but many of them still cannot get a loan because they lack official documents or collateral, or they live in a remote area where banks don’t operate.

“Our team developed Spean Loan to serve those underserved through our app. The instant approval will help micro entrepreneurs get their daily working capital and people who need emergency funds,” he said.

The app will enable borrowers to apply for small loans ranging from $50 up to $1,000 without paperwork or an office visit. Spean Loan uses machine learning to build a credit scoring system and evaluate a client’s ability to repay.

Despite getting $300,000 in seed capital from Showcase Capital, the start-up is awaiting regulatory approval before launching the app.

Financial technology (fintech) start-ups are still at a nascent stage in Cambodia.

The first fintech organisation in the country, the Cambodia Fintech Association, was established in August last year in anticipation of a boom in phone-based monetary services.

Cambodian fintech start-up Clik announced in November that it has raised $2 million in seed funding led by Limestone Technology and OpenWay, along with several angel investors from the Kingdom’s retail sector.

The company expects to launch operations in the second quarter of this year as soon as it receives a Payment Service Provider licence from NBC. – The Phnom Penh Post