Vietnam’s Binh Duong Province is located in southeastern Vietnam, immediately to the north of Ho Chi Minh City (HCMC). The province constitutes the southern economic zone of Vietnam, and many Japanese companies—mainly manufacturing enterprises, including small and medium enterprises—are investing there. Becamex IDC Corp (a Vietnamese state-owned developer) and Tokyu Corporation (a Japanese company) established Becamex Tokyu, a joint venture company, in March 2012. As a smart community strategy, Becamex Tokyu is promoting Tokyu Binh Duong Garden City, which is a development plan integrating new urban development. The Becamex Tokyu Bus, which is a wholly owned subsidiary of Becamex Tokyu, operates the new transportation system KAZE Shuttle. In addition, Binh Duong Province has developed a smart community strategy centered on energy establishment in urban development, information and communications technology infrastructure development and utilization, the elimination of physical waste in infrastructure construction, and smart traffic. In this chapter, by using his field work as a basis, the author examines the current status of, and issues faced by, development of the smart community strategy in Binh Duong Province in Vietnam.
Part of the book: Urban Agglomeration
In the modern information society, it has become possible to develop new business models that utilize ICT (information and communication technology) in various industrial fields, industries, and business sizes and types. Crowdsourcing is attracting attention as a new business model in this society. In crowdsourcing, business persons are using Internet websites (crowdsourcing platforms) to generate orders for new business activities, such as “order work to an individual” and “require job orders”. In addition, through the utilization of crowdsourcing, the lifestyle of workers is also changing with the provision of new job opportunities. In other words, crowdsourcing offers a new working style to a wide range of people. Thus, the spread of crowdsourcing has created new options for how individuals work and live. In the modern information society, crowdsourcing is a new business model that links a business person (orderer) and a worker (contractor) through a website. In this paper, we outline this new business model for the information society, and discuss the current situation of crowdsourcing, which looks to further influence lifestyle changes in the future. We propose a new business model using ICT, and consider the current situation and potentialities of crowdsourcing, which has elements that may result in major changes in the nature of employment in the future.
Part of the book: e-Services