When civilian government replaced military rule in Republic of the Union of Myanmar, it ended censorship that had, among other restrictions, banned news websites and social networking such as the video sharing site You-Tube. Twitter and Facebook were subject to blocking on occasion and in 2007, the ruling junta blocked Internet connectivity completely during that country’s street protests.
When 50 years of censorship and Myanmar’s economic isolation came to an end, the country attracted entrepreneurs eager to tap into a consumer population that lagged far behind in access to many services, including communications.
Vancouver’s Rita Nguyen, cofounder ofSQUAR, Myanmar’s first social media network that launched earlier this year, was among them. She talked to The Vancouver Sun’s Gillian Shaw about the challenges of launching a social media network in another country and in a language she doesn’t speak. Here are edited excerpts from that interview:
Q: Can you tell us about your background and how you ended up starting a social media network in Myanmar?
A: I emigrated here from Vietnam in 1979 when I was two. I was one of the boat people that fled in the middle of the night after the war. I grew up in Campbell River mostly but pretty much all over Vancouver Island. It wasn’t until I went to university, to UBC, that I settled in Vancouver for a long period of time.
Q: What did you do when you graduated from the University of B.C.?
A: I got my degree in genetics. I went into sciences because my parents wanted me to be a doctor, as many Asian parents do, and then I decided that I didn’t really want to do that so I finished my degree and got my first job at what at the time was called Seagate Software; it’s now SAP down in Yaletown. I was doing their events. That’s when I first hit the technology scene. That was back in ’99 and I’ve never really looked back from there. Right before I went to Asia I was working for Electronic Arts in the Burnaby campus. I was the online director. Basically I built the online team out here; I started as an online marketing manager. This was before Facebook and Twitter existed. We were building websites with commenting capabilities. From there it grew and grew and social media became a big deal.
Q: Is SQUAR the Twitter of Myanmar?
A: There are big language barriers over there. I would liken it (SQUAR) to the Google Plus community. It is more around interest groups and conversations around Internet groups, rather than one sentence trying to have a conversation on Twitter. There are a few Burmese nationals on Twitter but they are very, very few. Most of them are on Facebook but they go to Facebook directly, there’s no third party application out there. The few Burmese nationals on Twitter mostly converse in English and English is not very well penetrated in Myanmar, not in the youth sector anyway.
Q: So you came up with the idea of creating a social network in that language for the people?
A: I was looking at really early models in Vietnam and Malaysia and other Asia territories and trying to figure out the problems the nationals were having at the time. With Myanmar I knew it was going to be similar. They would be challenged in those early days to try to find real information, it was really easy to find news and journalists’ stories but if you think about just living, just surviving – like where do I find milk, what’s going on, how do I raise my kids – finding things like that is much harder to do in a disconnected society and those are the types of conversations I wanted to kickstart in these early days.
Q: How many people are on SQUAR right now?
A: We’ve got about 10,000 now and we are growing about 10 per cent organically month over month.
Q: Are you mone tizing SQUAR yet?
A: Yes, through sponsorship. We started monetizing three months after we went live because big brands wanted to partner with us. We weren’t expecting to do that until next year. We don’t have advertising. I don’t have a banner. I don’t believe in that kind of stuff. I don’t come to online marketing from an advertising perspective; I come to online marketing from a partnership and community experience, a user experience perspective. We are doing things like running contests and promotions for these brands. We don’t have straightup ads.
Q: For a Canadian launching a social network in Myanmar, what are the challenges?
A: The biggest challenges for me were actually on the tech side and not the cultural side.
Q: You don’t speak the language (Burmese). How would you even know when you had hostile users on your network and how do you cope with that?
A: We have to rely heavily on our community managers. We had to be really clear about the things that were considered bad enough to be taken down. You don’t want to take down everything obviously … as long as it’s not really hate speech or derogatory it’s fine. I had to do a lot of training with my community managers. In the first couple of months everything was being translated for me. I was reading through hundreds of thousands of posts and just making sure it was all clean. Mostly it was not a problem. We started to introduce language filters in Burmese and that got a lot better. It triggers emails to a bunch of us when certain words turn up in Burmese. It has helped a lot.
Q: How did you fund the launch of SQUAR?
A: I actually go seed funding. Myanmar is incredibly expensive because of the real estate and the Internet. … As an example, office real estate is New York City prices – it is between $90 and $100 a square metre and it is 12 months down, cash. I had to get seed funding. I did that through a couple of private equity groups and angel investors – some in North America, some in Vancouver and a few in Asia, Singapore and Taiwan, specifically. The nice thing is the staffing is very, very cheap. People in Myanmar make an average of about $100 a month. Our staff are anywhere between $200 and $1500 a month. My development team is in Vietnam. We have about 16 people in total, 50 per cent in each country. Overall staffing is 90 per cent local, whether local to Vietnam or Myanmar.
Rita Nguyen, co-founder of SQUAR, Myanmar’s first social media network. (Nick Procaylo/PNG)
Q: What is your market? How widespread are smartphones in Myanmar?
A: Apparent ly there ar e around 60 million consumers and they are all very young and there is a huge, huge working class. Forty-seven per cent of the population is under the age of 25, so there is a massive consumer class that is coming – that’s what we are excited about. Right now SIM cards are $1.50 technically but there are not that many of them in the market because the infrastructure is so old the one company that is in there right now can’t handle it. SIM cards are being sold on the black market for about $250 to $300. Two years ago SIM cards were $2,000. … Earlier this year the government granted a 15-year licence to Telenor of Norway and Ooredoo (out of Quatar). Once they have their licence in hand they have nine months to get 75 per cent of their infrastructure up, so SIM cards will be available for $1.50 and there will be a lot of them available. That is a game changer as far as I’m concerned. We’re waiting for that to happen.
