Fate with digital physics
While working for Google in Silicon Valley (USA), Huy Nguyen returned to Vietnam during the COVID-19 pandemic and fell in love with working in Vietnam. With early experience in blockchain from years of working in many countries around the world, in 2020, Huy Nguyen co-founded a start-up on the blockchain platform.
In 2021, this start-up started to launch several solutions related to blockchain technology. In October 2023, Phygital Labs Company with the digital physics solution Nomion was born, immediately followed by the race to put digital physics into application and exploit the market.
Huy Nguyen explains that Phygital is a fairly new concept in the world, combining physical products and digital products. This is a solution to move the real world to the digital space to create new values in the digital space from data and assets in the real world.
Phygital Labs' core solution is Nomion - formed by applying RFID (Radio Frequency Identification) and blockchain technology to connect real products with the digital world, thereby creating valuable digital products, ensuring transparency and uniqueness of products in both real and digital spaces.
At the same time, Phygital Labs' ecosystem applies LiDAR (Light Detection And Ranging) and VR/AR (virtual reality, augmented reality) technology. Thus, Nomion identifies real products, even intangible products, and from there creates unique digital products and then puts these products into digital space, providing intuitive product experiences with compelling stories about the product's history, making it easy for global customers to access both real and digital products.
Explaining how the Nomion solution creates digital value in real life, Huy Nguyen gave an example: if a customer wants to buy something sold in India or Egypt, they have to go there to buy it, if they buy it on e-commerce platforms or online sites.
It is very difficult to distinguish between real and fake. Having a digital ecosystem, products with digital identities will greatly increase the value of the product. The value of the product can increase 5, 7 times because this is a product that has been identified by the owner and the reputation of the owner, guaranteed by digital identification.
"The Nomion solution not only identifies objects but also identifies cultural products, spaces, architecture, etc. to create a new source of revenue and increase the value of real-life products" - Huy Nguyen emphasized.
The Nomion solution has contributed to increasing the product value by 50% for Le J' - a specialty coffee brand established in 2018 under The Le's Brothers Coffee Corporation. Before the chip was attached, the price of each bag of specialty coffee was 800,000 VND/package/200g. After the chip was attached and identified, the unique story of a farm with an area of over 10 hectares growing special standard coffee quickly spread globally. Immediately after that, the product value of the Le J' coffee brand increased and was sold for 1.2 million VND/package/200g. Or with Ortho, one of the pioneering digital fashion brands, applied the Nomion solution to the Starlight sweater collection, allowing the owner to embroider their own NFT with
3D printed frame on shirt and chip attached to shirt to create uniqueness of the product... 300 limited edition Ortho Starlight sweaters sold out within 24 hours at 660 USD/piece.
"For the Vietnamese market, just the unique Vietnamese handicraft products alone are a huge "warehouse" to go out to the world via digital and physical channels and bring outstanding value" - Huy Nguyen said.
Must sell Vietnamese products at higher prices
Since the beginning of 2023, Huy Nguyen's team has been tirelessly traveling to many provinces and cities across the country to talk about digital identification, digital physics and the benefits of applying this technology. It is not easy to convince potential partners to understand, believe and accept to test a new form of business, but with perseverance, up to now, Phygital Labs has collaborated with Non Nuoc stone carving village (Da Nang) to digitally identify fine art products; cooperated with a number of units in Hue to identify antiques...
"To make it easier to visualize, I am willing to make samples, attach chips, and create landing pages for the product so that customers can experience the product first without charging a fee. Thanks to that, Phygital Labs can spread its products" - Huy Nguyen said.
Talking about the reason for choosing to start a business in Vietnam, Huy Nguyen frankly said that if Phygital Labs were developed in the US, the opportunities would be lower for those in Silicon Valley, where there is a lot of competition and they are too knowledgeable about technology. Meanwhile, it can be said that in Vietnam, up to this point, Phygital Labs is the only one.
"In the Nomion solution, the chip is one of the components that connects the real product to the digital world. In previous generations of semiconductor chips, blockchain was not combined because it was quite weak. Only recently have people researched a new type of chip that is powerful for digital connection. Phygital Labs integrates solutions from blockchain technology onto the chip and has built a separate blockchain infrastructure, along with VR, AR, metaverse technology... to develop digital physical products. Thus, Phygital Labs is one of the first companies to follow this path" - the young CEO explained.
The Phygital Labs team is on a journey to connect a digitally transformed Vietnam with the world. Huy Nguyen believes that digital physical technology is the gateway that helps the company connect with the world and bring Vietnamese products to the world. According to Huy Nguyen, in developed countries, cultural assets have been properly valued and have increased over time and demand... Meanwhile, purely Vietnamese products have not been properly valued, even very low compared to their true value. Therefore, Phygital Labs is part of the value chain that brings Vietnamese products to their true value and then increases the value with digitally identified products. He believes that he can bring leaps in value to Vietnamese products.
After Vietnam, this technology company is targeting Southeast Asian countries. This is a market with a large population and good technology acceptance. "Many investors in Silicon Valley really like the company's model and want to invest, but I want to build Phygital Labs myself for at least 2 more years. Later, if necessary, we will raise capital" - Huy Nguyen said.
CEO Phygital Labs admits that starting a business in a field that is so new in Vietnam has many difficulties but also many advantages. In the past, when Grab or many other technology services were first launched, not many people imagined that it would become familiar and essential to life as it is today. Nomion Technology or Phygital Labs Company, which specializes in digital identification, increasing the value of real products through digital physical processes... can also do the same. According to him, Vietnam's advantage is that it has many products and heritages that have not been identified, so in 2024, the company will focus on the Vietnamese market, bringing as many Vietnamese objects as possible to the digital space, forming a large segment in the digital economy.
"I want Phygital Labs to become a world highlight in 5 years, people will remember that Vietnam has companies that can make products that keep up with and go with the digital world."
(Huy Nguyen, CEO Phygital Labs)
Source: https://nld.com.vn/khai-pha-cong-nghe-moi-196240205143045763.htm
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