Vietnamese IT product wins gold at ASEAN ICT Awards

Monkey Junior is a foreign language teaching programme for four to ten-year-old children with a huge audio-visual collection. It won the prize for Applied Products on Mobile Devices category at the Vietnamese Talents Awards on November 19.

Nearly a week later, the product went on to receive the gold prize in the best start-up category at the ASEAN ICT Awards. This is the first time a Vietnamese product has won this category.

The ASEAN ICT Awards (AICTA) is a project approved at the ASEAN Telecommunications and Information Technology Ministers Meeting in 2011 to honour creative, practical and high quality products that can promote trade between ASEAN members.

This year, the awards were held in Brunei on November 25.

Dao Xuan Hoang, creator of Monkey Junior, wins gold at ASEAN ICT Awards

Dao Xuan Hoang, head of Early Start Company said, "We’re very happy and honoured as we just received a prize at the Vietnamese Talent Awards a week ago and a gold at AICTA tonight. This is a prestigious award and it will encourage us to work harder."

Hoang had said that their start-up process was difficult with no clear result after pouring in money and efforts in two years. But the members had kept encouraging each other and looked forward to the future. Hoang went on to say that Vietnamese Talent Awards were a great launchpad and hoped that more people would know about their product.

"We have received lots of feedback from the judges to further complete the product," Hoang said after the Vietnamese Talent Awards.

He aimed to promote the product internationally. The group will continue to add more languages to the product.

Monkey Junior also won the first prize for an education app at the Global Innovation through Science and Technology Competition 2016 in the US before participating at the Vietnamese Talent Awards.