Recently, ThinkZone successfully connected two strategic cooperation deals between corporations and startups: FPT Smart Home and OLLI jointly developed the pure Vietnamese Virtual Assistant project; Vietnam Airline and EMDDI cooperate to cover the nationwide airport taxi network.
THUAN VIET VIRTUAL ASSISTANT DEVELOPMENT PROJECT, USING 100% VIETNAMESE TO MAKE LIFE EASIER
In the world today, there are successful virtual assistant models such as Siri, Alexa or Google. These software act as assistants by responding to commands from the user's voice, providing information, entertainment and supporting daily tasks. With positive signs about the model's ability to succeed, the scale of the above voice recognition models is estimated to reach 27.2 billion USD by 2026. Vietnam has been applying these models several years ago, however, inadequacies in voice recognition due to language differences mean that these products cannot understand Vietnamese correctly, leading to some inconvenience for users. Therefore, the Vietnamese market is looking forward to pure Vietnamese virtual assistant products that integrate Vietnamese.
Therefore, OLLI - a startup specializing in smart devices that integrate Vietnamese virtual assistants, decided to find strong resources to realize this purely Vietnamese support product. Accordingly, with the connection from ThinkZone Ventures, OLLI and FPT Smart Home are official signed a strategic cooperation agreement Together with FPT Smart Home, we co-develop the Virtual Assistant project, aiming at practical benefits to serve all Vietnamese families.
FPT SmartHome and OLLI aim to research and develop a pure Vietnamese Virtual Assistant project, bringing practical benefits to users' lives, helping them live more comfortably and sustainably. With the combination of FPT SmartHome's voice-controlled home AI technology and OLLI's ecosystem of smart devices integrating Vietnamese virtual assistants, along with the compatibility of the development orientation of strategic projects and long-term connection potential of the two units, this cooperation event will bring Vietnamese users solutions and services that are not only diverse in applications, but also ensure comfort and convenience when experiencing.
NEW STEPS IN OPTIMIZING AIRPORT TAXI SERVICES NATIONWIDE
According to statistics from 2022, the number of passengers at all Vietnamese airports ranges from 70 to 80 million passengers. Although customer demand for calling cars is high, the number of taxis at many airports is still not met, especially during holidays. Vinasun in 2022 has launched many attractive policies to attract drivers to participate in airport driving and old drivers to return to work, such as increasing discounts up to 65% for drivers, increasing attractive revenue distribution to fully meet customer needs at the airport.
The strategic cooperation between VietnamAirlines and EMDDI is a big step forward to solve the problem of taxi shortage at the airport. EMDDI is the online vehicle dispatching technology platform with the largest number of participating taxis in Vietnam with more than 50,000 participating taxi drivers nationwide. VietnamAirlines is Vietnam's national airline with the largest number of customers traveling to the airport in the country and covering flight routes nationwide.
With this cooperation, VietnamAirlines passengers can easily book a ride to airports nationwide through the EMDDI application. At the same time, passengers also enjoy many incentives and benefits when using the services of both sides. This is an important step in developing the airport taxi network in Vietnam, contributing to improving service quality and passenger experience when taking flights with VietnamAirline while also optimizing EMDDI's taxi network.
“1+1 IS BETTER THAN 2” – STRATEGIC COOPERATION BRINGS VALUE TO BOTH GROUP AND START-UP COMPANIES
Cooperation deals connected by ThinkZoneVentures not only increase support resources for startups but also create practical economic values for national corporations from exploiting excellent ideas and technology from startups.
ThinkZone believes that such cooperation opportunities will be the driving force for startups to have more breakthroughs in products, increasingly meeting customer needs. Most importantly, the products will have support from large corporations, creating good momentum for the company's development journey in the next stages. Thereby contributing to promoting the development of the startup ecosystem in Vietnam and creating more value for society.
Vietnam is currently one of the fastest technologically developing countries in the world. According to the Southeast Asia Digital Economy report by Google, Temasek and Bain & Company, Vietnam's digital economy market reached 14 billion USD in 2020 and is expected to increase to 52 billion USD by 2025.
Facing this wave of development, connecting domestic resources from large corporations to Vietnamese technology startups will be the "key" to help solve the major challenges that Vietnamese technology businesses face and support the startup community on the journey to becoming unicorns and creating value for society. With each cooperation deal, large corporations can share experiences, provide financial support, provide infrastructure and expand markets for startups. Startups can learn, collaborate, innovate and develop products and services that are new and relevant to market needs.