Indonesia Digital Byte (IDByte) 2013 has found its 12 startup finalists derived from four Indonesian cities. I caught up with Khailee Ng (pictured right) from social news network Says.com, one of the judges who selected those finalists. All the way from Malaysia, he saw and scored the startups who made their pitches at the Yogyakarta, Bandung, Surabaya, and Jakarta roadshows. I asked him what the startups could specifically improve based on what he saw at the competition. These are his thoughts: (Disclosure: Tech in Asia is a media partner of IDByte 2013)

First, he addresses the fact that there’s a good amount of tech talent in Indonesia, as can be seen by the number of startups who pitched at every city, and that they have the ability to execute their products and services well. “Not many markets have the abundance of tech talent I saw on this roadshow,” says Khailee. He adds, “The founders here are also incredibly passionate about their products. And this passion will help them evolve to realize their potential.”

Second, Khailee saw opportunities for startups to do better pitches next time around. He identified four common pitching mistakes during the roadshow:

1. Not indicating traction at all.
2. Not giving a clear idea of what the product actually is.
3. Not building the case for market potential.
4. Spending way too much time trying to tell the world how the internet is awesome or mobile is huge. With only five minutes allowed for each IDByte pitch, some startups spent 1.5 minutes on this topic where they should really be saying how big their startup can be.

On the bright side, all of the above are an easy fix. The startups can read up more information about good pitches online and get more feedback on their pitches. Khailee noticed that there were a few really good pitches, and he noticed that many came from Founder’s Institute. Of course, the pitching problem and advice above are applicable not only to Indonesian startups but also to startups in general.

(See also: 5 Interesting Startups That Pitched at IDByte Jakarta Roadshow)

Third, he believes that more tech entrepreneurs should seek more connections with people from the other industries, even build startups together with them. These people have a lot of good connections too, and have access to funding. Furthermore, they also want to connect with more tech talent. Khailee quips:

The business crowd complain there’s no tech talent. The tech crowd complain there’s no funding or marketing help. But these two groups co-exist right in front of each other. It’s about time they got out to more events and said hi!

Khailee’s company, Says, recently agreed on a merger deal with Malaysian giant Catcha Media Berhad to develop a digital advertising business together. He founded a company that was acquired by Groupon and now he is an entrepreneur-in-residence at 500 Startups as well as being an active angel investor.

The 12 startup finalists will make their pitches in front of venture capitalists including Dave McClure from 500 Startups in June. It will be broadcast on national television.

The Indonesian tech scene will be followed closely in the coming years. With more companies eyeing the huge market potential here, it is no wonder that this has caught the attention of quite a few venture capitalists. I met with one of the youngest VCs in Indonesia, 26 year old Aryo Ariotedjo, the managing partner and founder of Grupara, to talk about his company and how he selects his portfolio companies.

Grupara is arguably one of the most active VCs in Indonesia this year. This year the company has announced investment in two startups: Maskool.in and Lolabox, and Aryo told me that they still have plans up their sleeves for this year. So what kind of startups is Aryo looking at? He said the kind of startups who can bring in cool products that he would want to buy when putting himself in the consumers’ shoes. He added that the people behind the company are very important too; he likes the founders to be smart and dedicated folks.

What Aryo means by dedicated is that the people are focused on growing their one startup, and not losing track by developing another startup at the same time. I’ve seen quite a number of entrepreneurs doing that here, and Aryo argues that when that happens, then the progress of one of the businesses will be hindered. He added that having founders with unique traits helps too; for example, he mentioned founders who have very likable personalities and who are very well suited to be the face of their companies. The very well-groomed founders of Lolabox are good examples when it comes to good representation and branding of their beauty box business.

When it comes to approach, Aryo likes to think that he is a “hands-on” person. This is done through the three-month incubation that he enforces for his portfolio companies. Those first three months are intense, but after that, Aryo won’t intervene with the business that much, but said that he will constantly help and challenge the startups to get to the next level together. Besides Aryo, there are a few guys from outside Grupara like Rocket Internet’s Stefan Jung and Weekend’s Richard Fang that will help coach the startups.

When I asked what Grupara’s strengths are, Aryo answered that his connections to offline businesses might be one of the company’s advantages. Aryo has quite a few connections in industries such as energy, food and beverage, consumer goods, entertainment, and government. He added that if he doesn’t have a particular connection that his startup needs, he takes it as a challenge to get acquainted with that person. He likes the idea of connecting the industries together.

Isn’t Aryo a bit too young?

The question of Aryo’s age has time and time again been raised (especially in Asia) to question his expertise at running a VC firm. This is the same guy who – as Aryo himself admits – was virtually unknown in the tech world just two years ago. What in Aryo’s background makes him a good VC for people to consider?

The first reason is quite obvious. Being backed by several investors including energy company Medco, Grupara has good amount of cash to be invested on startups, from the incubation phase to Series A funding. The fact that Aryo commands the trust of Medco at his age is already impressive.

Taking a look at Aryo’s background, he said that he was a businessman. He started his first company, Grupara Energi, trading natural resources in the energy industry, at the age of 21. While still in his university years, he has connected with a lot of people beyond his age and brokered many successful deals. At one point he found that the tech industry is a place where he could help build value-added products for Indonesia. The country needs more world famous products and the tech world can be a good place to start.

Being a new kid on the block, Aryo went to the USA to learn the trade of the tech VC world. He connected and received guidance with some notable big tech players in Silicon Valley and Boulder Colorado. This happened throughout the year of 2012, and now Aryo is one of an accredited VCs in the US.

Aryo said that his coworking space Freeware helps him build his tech connections. In that place he met numerous tech entrepreneurs – like Veritrans’ Ryu Kawano and Koprol’s Fajar Budiprasetyo – that are interested to join his cause of building the tech ecosystem in Indonesia. They became coaches as well as friends to the startups making their trade at the office.

Aryo stresses that Freeware is a neutral place for everyone. Although the place was pioneered by Grupara, now 80 percent of the office costs are being covered by the 12 startups there. Some of the startups making their Freeware their home include Ideosource’s Kelir TV and Project Eden’s Telunjuk, neither of which are Grupara portfolio companies. But of course, Aryo is open to the possibility of making an investment in the startups at Freeware one day.

But Aryo isn’t the only young VC running around Asia. We recently wrote about another young CEO running a VC firm in South Korea. He is 32-year-old Jimmy Rim.

Indonesian game developer Touchten today released a soccer app for Android that’s proving to be quite a head turner. This soccer game is quite special because it is developed together with legendary Brazilian footballer Zico. For those who don’t know who that is, Zico is the 1980s equivalent of Cristiano Ronaldo. Zico has also made a name for himself in Japan, earning the nickname “God of Soccer” there.

The brand-new game, which is titled Zico, is a casual 3D free kick game that also tells the story of Zico’s footballing career. There are three big stages inside the game located in Brazil, Italy, and Japan, countries where Zico played professional football. For now the only available stage is the first one, with Italy and Japan being released later.

How did an Indonesian game developer get the chance to work with Zico? Touchten CEO Anton Soeharyo said that they were introduced to NDV Consulting’s Fernando Vasconez by a Singaporean friend. They had chemistry straight away and immediately agreed on the deal. The Zico game is made in collaboration with Brazil’s 213 Sports.

During the game launch today, Zico has also made a video greeting to Indonesian soccer fans, particularly those from Indonesia’s largest online community Kaskus, which is Touchten’s launch partner. The game itself will be heavily promoted by Zico in his home country Brazil, including during Brazil’s Confederations Cup, World Cup 2014, and Olympics 2016.

The game will be pre-installed on eight to 10 million mobile devices in Brazil in preparation for the sporting bonanza in the country in the next few years. Zico is first launched in the Japanese market in commemoration of the 20 year anniversary of the J-League.

Anton said at today’s launch event that he wants to show that Indonesians can do something on the global stage. He thanked everyone including Zico and the other Brazilian partners for making this project come true. The Touchten team is actively pursuing other intellectual property products with famous people like Zico.

Zico comes at a price of US$0.99 on Android. You can download it on Google Play. The iOS version will come soon.

In this day and age when a lot of people are connected online through popular social networks like Facebook and Twitter, one might ask if they can utilize that connection in the offline world. Some have come up with ways to do that like using NFC and RFID, so let’s look at an Indonesian startup which is focusing on the latter feature called Wooz.in ¹.

CEO Ario Tamat tells us that the company has been around since 2011, connecting around 40,000 offline users online for its corporate clients. He explained to me that Wooz.in has three business models, the first – which is Wooz.in’s original product – is applying RFID features into clients’ offline events and projects. These projects include making a bracelet with an RFID chip installed in it (pictured below), and the bracelet need to be scanned first if users want to use certain products inside the event like photo booths or games. When the bracelet is scanned, it automatically updates the user’s Facebook and Twitter accounts. The data gathered during this event can also be beneficial for the client.

Second is applying the feature as a loyalty program for SMEs. One of the companies taking part in Wooz.in’s program is restaurant chain Holy Cow. The RFID chip for the restaurant comes in the form of a necklace, which will earn users a virtual flag for every scan on Holy Cow’s premises. A few functions like automatic updates to users’ social network accounts and data mining work similarly here too. How much would it cost for SMEs to use Wooz.in’s services? It could be as little as IDR 1 million (US$100), depending on the number of users and usage frequency.

Third is licensing Wooz.in’s service to agencies abroad. Ario says that they now have two overseas agencies using Wooz.in’s licensed services. In this way, the overseas agencies can offer Wooz.in’s RFID expertise to their clients.

Regarding competitors, Ario said that he has seen quite a few other companies replicating Wooz.in’s technology. But he believes that replicating technology alone won’t be enough to beat Wooz.in because there are other factors that need to be put into consideration such as execution and idea innovation. Ario explains that they consistently offer new approaches to clients when using RFID, so there’s definitely huge potential to be explored from using the technology. Replicating them alone won’t be enough to beat Wooz.in, he believes.

With the vision of connecting the offline and online world, the team is now working to implement NFC chips for future projects. Ario says there are other ways to connect the offline and online world too, like face recognition tech. Of all those possibilities, NFC will be the team’s first priority this year.

Indonesian consumers are brimming with confidence as high as the sky right now, the highest in the world according to the latest study by Nielsen. This extends, of course, to properties. In that sector, Indonesian property portal RumahKu (meaning “my home”) is looking to help Indonesians find their desired properties online.

RumahKu was first launched in February 2011 during the property boom in Jakarta, says co-founder Robert Adrian. Back then, the existing property portals were still deemed unsatisfactory by the founding team, and because of that they decided to partner up and build RumahKu to help other people who are also looking to buy a place.

What makes RumahKu special compared to its competitors today? Robert says that the startup is doing its best in providing top notch customer service as well as building the back-end engine so that it can bring the most relevant results to users. He details a few more unique features of RumahKu, such as a way to put old listings back up, unlimited photos for each listing, unlimited listings for property agents, sales reports that calculate commission for agents, and traffic reports.

RumahKu records 360,000 monthly visitors on average with close to 40,000 premium registered members who most of them are from property agencies. What’s impressive, according to Robert, is the growth as the site’s monthly visitors grew by a factor of three compared to the same time last year; memberships grew 85 percent. At the moment there are around 38,000 property listings on the site, with most of them located in Java and Bali. The startup has gained quite a number of Facebook fans too, with 300,000 so far. From time to time RumahKu holds offline events like expos at popular malls across Indonesia.

RumahKu earns its revenue from premium memberships and banner advertising. The startup is fully self funded and is planning to jump into the e-commerce business model too in the future. The startup is facing stiff competition from rivals Rumah123 and RumahdanProperti (both acquired by Singapore-based IPGA). People who are looking at investing but not moving in could also make use of property crowdfunding site CrowdBaron.

Indonesian-made photo app PicMix revealed today that it passed the 10 million user mark last month, around three months after the app reached eight million users. PicMix is now available on Blackberry 10 thanks to a new app, which is quite natural seeing that the app met its viral success on Blackberry’s legacy platform.

Founder Calvin Kizana, who is at the Blackberry Live 2013 event in Orlando, Florida, told us that they’re going to introduce physical PicMix gift cards soon (pictured right), which can be used to top up virtual money inside the PicMix app to buy things like premium frames, filters, and stickers. The gift cards will be sold at Indonesian convenience stores such as 7-11, Lawson, AlfaMart, and Carrefour. Internet cafes in big cities like Jabodetabek will also sell them.

The cards are touted to be priced at IDR 20,000 (US$2). The gift cards are made in partnership with online payment service IndoMog which also sells game vouchers at the convenience stores mentioned above. The gift cards will complement PicMix’s online sales which are already available worldwide via credit card, PayPal, and local carrier billing.

If you happen to be at the BlackBerry event, you can head over to the PicMix’s booth to find more information about the startup.

It’s a fierce battlefield for chat apps in Indonesia. Today, Japan-based Line is going to roll out new ads featuring Indonesian celebrities Agnes Monica and pop group Nidji on TV in Indonesia. Those two celebrities are very prominent here as they are among the few who have represented Indonesia globally. But this latest move means a lot more in the Indonesian chat app battle, especially with regards rival KakaoTalk.

Let’s look at Line’s two newest marketing stars. The first is Agnes Monica, who has the biggest Twitter follower count for a celebrity in Indonesia. Which celebrity has the second biggest Twitter account here? None other than KakaoTalk’s TV ad star Sherina Munaf. Agnes now has over 7.5 million Twitter followers while Sherina has close to 6 million.

Indonesian pop group Nidji is also very famous here. Their hit singles have gained them huge popularity amongst teenagers and children, so much so that the band’s involvement with a cigarette campaign generated complaints from the national commission for child protection a few years ago. The band’s Facebook page has 465,000 likes.

Harnessing K-pop power

Those two stars will complement Line’s two other promo stars, Maudy Ayunda and K-pop singer Siwon. And yes, it is interesting to see a Japanese company choosing a Korean celebrity to star in its Southeast Asian ad campaign, with the latter celebrity being used to counter the K-pop fever brought by KakaoTalk’s Korean stars BigBang.

Today, Line representatives pointed out that its messaging app has gone back up to the number one spot for free apps in Indonesia on Android. But on iPhone, KakaoTalk is still ahead of Line in the country. The new TV ad starring Agnes Monica and Nidji will start airing today.

Credit: blog.laptopmag.com

I remember a few years ago that there was this constant rumor that Blackberry was going to allow its popular Blackberry Messenger (BBM) service onto the other platforms like Android and iOS. While a lot of people really hoped that it was true, realists were arguing that Blackberry would never do something like that. Why? Because the main thing that keeps people from ditching their Blackberry phones is BBM. But last night, Blackberry dropped a bomb by announcing that BBM will be available on iOS and Android this summer. What does this mean to a lot of Blackberry users in Indonesia? Relief and utter happiness, I believe.

I took some time to ask a few of my friends about what their thoughts were about Blackberry’s latest decision, and none of them said that they’re going to appreciate the Canadian company’s gesture by buying the Blackberry 10 devices. Quite the opposite, they were all very relieved that they will no longer have a reason to shoulder the burden of carrying their Blackberry phones. (From what I can see, people over on Twitter seem to feel this way too).

While CEO Thorsten Heins said this move is a “statement of confidence,” he might need to consult a different analyst. As much as people are using Blackberry phones in Indonesia, a lot of them are hating the handset’s experience. The legacy handsets that they’re using crash and need to be restarted on a regular basis, and the OS is laggy. A lot of Indonesian users are coping by using another handset, often an Android device, at the same time. But using multiple devices every day isn’t a pleasant experience either.

Granted, a lot of my friends haven’t used the Blackberry 10 device. Of those who have, quite a few of them are very happy with it. But now that BBM will no longer be exclusive to Blackberry handsets, why would anyone want to purchase a Z10 over a Samsung Galaxy S4 or an iPhone 5? The three handsets are in the same price range, and when it comes to customers’ confidence, the latter two brands have a better track record for customer satisfaction.

Looking over to see what the rest of Indonesians feel about Blackberry’s latest decision on Twitter, I found a tweet which summarizes an interesting irony quite well. It is written in Indonesian, translated to English it says:

It’s BBM news, but the trending topic [in Indonesia] is iOS and Android.

Multi-platform BBM won’t arrive for a few months, but after hearing this news, many Indonesians will be happier than ever to purchase other devices even before the upcoming Blackberry Q10 and Q5 will be released, because they know that they can soon bring their BBM contacts onto any device.

I have to give credit to Blackberry though for having the guts to go through with this move. I predict that the platform will still be the king when it comes to physical QWERTY keypad devices. But if people are looking to get their hands on phones with big screens, then Blackberry will definitely have a tough time competing.

Today payment service MOL announced its partnership with Indonesian mini-mart retailer Alfamart, Alfamidi, and Lawson. Starting today, gamers can purchase MOLPoints’ game vouchers at those markets, which in total have over one thousand branches spread all over Indonesia.

In Indonesia, MOLPoints is considered a payment gateway for purchasing Facebook game credits. In fact, the payment service company claims that it sells the cheapest Facebook credits compared to the other Facebook credit sellers in the country. It is still cheaper to purchase the credits directly with credit card, but if you don’t have one in Indonesia, then MOL should be at the top of your mind.

MOL has also partnered with several entities in selling its game vouchers including online payment store partners like i-Pay and Gudang Voucher, as well as telcos Indosat and Telkom Indonesia.

Talking about MOL’s Southeast Asian market

As MOL CEO Ganesh told us that Indonesia is the company’s top priority this year, I dug deeper into the reason by speaking with MOL representatives Rivai Adidharma and Jaka Kristandi. They confirmed that Indonesia will be the most important market for the company, alongside Brazil. Both countries have a huge population as well as a lot of gamers. Rivai explained that India, though it has larger population, doesn’t have many gamers.

In terms of revenue in Southeast Asia, MOL’s biggest revenues come from Thailand, Vietnam, and Malaysia. Particularly for Malaysia, the ones generating the highest ARPU there are the Chinese gamers playing Chinese language games. While Indonesia hasn’t generated that much ARPU, its number of users is quite impressive. Though it was not revealed how many of MOL’s users are Indonesian, Rivai and Jaka said that out of its 700,000 global Facebook fans, around 400,000 of them are Indonesians. The Indonesian fan page is also picking up growth with 79,000 likes.

Interestingly, MOL consistently earns its biggest revenue in Indonesia from Facebook credit sales. But there are times when voucher sales from just one game can beat even the rest of the other MOL games. That game is Crystal Legacy. One other game which sells a lot alongside Crystal Legacy is Voomga’s Mythic Saga. MOL’s highest ARPU in Indonesia is derived from the MMORPG users.

Rivai also revealed that MOL has around 2.7 million users in all of its 12 country markets. And out of all of them, a staggering 2.1 million people are active monthly users of MOL. The payment service company has been very aggressive in building its regional presence recently. Last month, MOL acquired 50 percent stake at Vietnamese online payment gateway NganLuong, and acquired another payment service company in Indonesia called AyoPay the previous month. Its movement has been felt in countries such as Turkey, Australia, and New Zealand too. This is all geared toward bringing the company closer to a better IPO next year.

Credit: BlackberryCool.com

BlackBerry users around the world might be questioning their loyalty after another outage of the popular BlackBerry Messenger (BBM) service happened a couple of days ago. It was widely reported that the service was down for users living in the Asia Pacific region between Sunday night to Monday morning, and today BlackBerry Indonesia finally acknowledged ¹ the downtime and offered an apology.

The most interesting part of the story, in my mind, is the statement given by the Indonesian ICT minister Tifatul Sembiring on this latest incident (as reported by another Detik article). Mr. Sembiring said he is disappointed that the company did not notify its users sooner about the setback, and he added that BlackBerry sales have decreased by 70 percent in Indonesia. There’s no source to back up the minister’s claim, however.

According to various users on the Crackberry forums, the BBM outage happened across Indonesia, Australia, Hong Kong, Thailand, India, the Philippines, Singapore, Vietnam, and Malaysia. Customers’ trust in BlackBerry in that region must have been shaken up again. The same BBM service suffered an even longer downtime last October.

BlackBerry is up against Android, iOS, and Windows Phone as more Indonesians switch to smartphones.

(Sources: Detik #1, #2, and Kompas)

Today I received an SMS which claimed to be from Rocket Internet owned online shop Lazada. The SMS talks about “crazy discounts” that you can check out on a Lazada Blogspot page (pictured above).

Yes, it’s very easy for you tech savvy readers to discern that the SMS is a scam, but there are numerous other people in Indonesia who fall prey to these simple tricks. When I accessed the site, the hit counter had already reached 89,000 page-views.

Let me break down a few characteristics of the worst online scams in the country, specifically ones related to e-commerce that seem to be targetting unwary people these days. Here goes:

1. Super good offers which are too good to be true

The SMS I received told me that Lazada was selling several gadgets at crazy discounts. An iPhone 5, which is normally priced at IDR 7 million (US$723), is being sold at half the price, it claimed. There are other offers too, like a simple “You’ve won a brand new car! Check our website for more information about how to claim it.”

If you think that those offers look too good to be true, then it most probably is a scam. If you think you’ve never entered into a contest but have supposedly won something big, then it could well be a scam too.

2. “Please check our blogspot for more information”

The other simple way to tell if something is a scam or not is to look at the website they invite you to see. The one I got linked to was Lazada04.blogspot.com.

Popular online brands like Lazada don’t use free Blogspot addresses like that, so it is definitely a fake. The “Lazada04” name is also an easy tell.

Besides Google-owned Blogspot, there are other free blogging platforms that are commonly used for scams, such as Jimdo and Webs.com. Note that there are reports that the scams have gone up an ante by using paid websites as well, which is similar to phishing scams that lure people to log into fake banking or social media pages.

Genuine offers and prizes will only be announced through the company’s site, or perhaps its official Facebook brand page.

3. “Please call our handphone number”

This is also another obvious tell-tale sign. Big brands do not have mobile numbers, let alone BBM pins. If the contact number is given in such a way, then it ‘s a scam for sure.

These last few months have seen quite a few scams made under the name of Indonesia’s biggest telco, Telkomsel. The best way to know if it’s a telco-related scam is by looking at the contact number. If the message is sent by the telco, then the sender info automatically says that it is from that company, even if you’ve never saved it to your contacts. Or sometimes telcos will use short numbers like 777 in sending those SMSes. If you receive an SMS from a conventional mobile number but it claims to be a telco, then it’s a trick.

This Telkomsel scam site – under the domain name Hadiah-Telkomsel.blogspot.com – is another good example of the worst scam websites in the country. It gives out a handphone number for people to contact, and for God knows why, the site puts pictures of Jakarta governor Joko Widodo alongside former president director of Telkomsel and the national police chief at the bottom of the homepage.

4. “Please claim your prize ASAP or we’ll give it to someone else”

These scammers are pretty good when it comes to manipulating people and making them panic. Very often such offers, especially lottery wins, are only valid for the next couple of days. So ‘winners’ must act fast. Quite a few of these ‘lucky winners’ though, don’t have internet access, and so they will simply call the given number to ask for information. And that is when the scam happens.

Never panic – you need to be fully rational in handling these situations. If you do make the call and the person on the other end asks you to transfer some amount of money first for “administration” or “tax” purposes, you should either hang up the phone immediately or at least swear at that scammer first.

I remember one TV show that explained how a former con man scammed people out of their money. The idea is always the same: promise victims big amounts of cash in an easy way. Be careful when you’re being promised such an offer/prize.

Let’s help report those scammy sites

Those are the common tricks circulating around Indonesia’s booming e-shopping industry right now. Quite a few people always fall for these, so much so that it’s one of the reasons why the government will require Indonesian e-commerce sites to use local data centers and domains.

People do get scammed online. It is quite understandable though because only 30 percent of Indonesians have internet access. Having a lucky break by winning a brand new car is also something that doesn’t happen every day. Curiosity kicks in, combined with lack of internet knowledge (and access), and so there are definitely people getting screwed every day.

We can do a few things to help make the web a safer place for all. First is to help spread the word about the scammy websites and their tricks. Second is to report them to Google with the link here.

Let’s give those scammers a good lesson in how they can’t ruin the web.

(Updated on May 16th: The email address cybercrime[at]polri[dot]go[dot]id is not a valid email address of the Indonesian cyber crime police unit. You will need to directly report to the police station for now. We’re sorry for the inconvenience.)

(Featured image source: unsuckdcmetro)

Today Singapore-based Loan Garage, a startup that aims to help people get loans online, announced that it has launched its Indonesian platform KreditAja.com. It’s interesting to note that the expansion arrives only two months after Loan Garage made its full launch in Singapore. The Indonesian version looks to be off to a great start as Loan Garage has secured a partnership with Indonesia’s Ministry of Economic Coordination (KUR) to distribute loans and microcredit worth $3.7 billion in Indonesia.

The KreditAja website looks identical to the Singapore version. Its video tutorial is still just in English, but the Indonesian version will be made available within two weeks time. Just like the Singapore version, KreditAja is an online platform for both borrowers and licensed lenders to conduct transactions. Details such as the interest rate of the loans can also be seen and compared within the site.

Although launched today, Kredit Aja will start its operational phase tomorrow with three banks as lenders. Three months after that, the platform will bring in the rest of the KUR bank partners onboard. Loan Garage CEO Aidil Zulkifli said that they earn money from commissions made from successful loan applications, premium subscription listings, and later on, advertising as well. The team will also introduce value-added services after they have amassed data on consumer financial behavior.

Led by country manager Emir Yamin, six out of nine of the Loan Garage team are stationed in Indonesia. Loan Garage is backed by private investors from various backgrounds like investment bankers and cloud computing specialists. Talking of the personal finance market and the team’s plans, Aidil ¹ added:

The personal finance market in emerging markets is ripe for disruption and there are many inefficiencies in the market for us to take advantage of and arbitrage. It is not as sexy or cool but it is easy for us to monetize. At the same time, all of us come to work excited with the prospect of building a product that could help in the financial inclusion process in emerging markets and help the average person on the street make a better life for him/herself through financial and credit empowerment.

We don’t want to say much, but one thing that is for sure is that we won’t just be in the personal loans vertical.

KUR itself distributed $3.5 billion of loans to Indonesian individuals and SMEs through banks in 2012. And since the beta launch in December, Loan Garage has processed over $500,000 of personal loans.

There have been other startups doing business in similar fields across Asia like Lenddo in the Philippines. Loan Garage itself is one of the startups that competed at Startup Asia Jakarta last year.

1. The quote came from Aidil, not Emir.

I’m not sure how people in general think of Business Software Alliance (BSA), especially those living in developing countries and are cramming their computers with illegal softwares. Washington-based BSA is in a group whose activity is centered around getting people to use legal software products. Yesterday Detik reported that BSA, together with the Indonesian police, is getting its hands dirty by raiding a few companies in Indonesia. And, boy, a lot of them got busted.

The raid, which happened in the industrial sectors of Subang, Bogor, and Cikarang two months ago, busted as many as 20 companies. There were more than 400 computers running illegal softwares of Adobe, Autodesk, Microsoft, and Symantec worth around US$177,000.

BSA is also stepping up its effort to gain people’s participation as the company promises bigger prize money, as high as $10,000 for people who can snitch on companies that are using illegal software. A BSA representative told me that the company people can report on must have at least 50 computers running on at least two illegal softwares. Normally, the reward promises cash as high as $5,000, but it doubled to $10,000 until June 15th.

One of the reasons a lot of people use pirated software here is simply because of the overwhelming price of the genuine product. People living in developed countries can earn $100 in a few days, while capital city Jakarta’s minimum salary in 2013 is $220. How about the minimum salary in the other regions? It can be as small as $100.

With that huge financial gulf, it is normal that companies choose to save their budget by using pirated software. A lot of people understand and share this same problem, and that’s why it’s normal for people to look the other way too.

Can the increase in prize money for ratting out companies help convince a few people to tell on their employers? Perhaps. Especially the disgruntled employees I presume. I’m not really sure if it’s possible, but I guess a better way to convince people to start using legal softwares are by making them more affordable. But oh well.

(Sources: Detik #1 and #2)

Rebright Partners, a Japan-based incubator and one of the parties behind Indonesian VC firm Batavia Incubator has recently launched its new investment fund for startups in Southeast Asia. It has secured two investment deals with the first being made to online ad platform Adskom, which we talked about last week. We spoke with Rebright Partners CEO Takeshi Ebihara (pictured right) to find out more about the fund.

Ebihara first explained that there will be no conflict of interest with another VC firm Batavia Incubator. Batavia Incubator will focus on Indonesian startups with an eye on the domestic market, while Rebright Partners itself will focus on startups who are looking to target multiple countries in Southeast Asia. He explains further about the fund:

Our fund LP investors are Japanese well track recorded entrepreneurs and Corporations. So that the portfolio company can expect LPs wisdom insights and networks to grow own business. In that sense, the fund can be said Super Entrepreneurs Fund.

Regarding the kind of startups they target, Ebihara says that he wants to invest in internet startups as well as those covering the mobile space like media, e-commerce, and mobile apps. Ebihara prefers consumer internet service primarily, and that investing in the B2B business model is a rarity. He admits that Adskom is one of such rare cases. Does Ebihara consider himself as having a hands-on approach to his startup portfolios? He says yes:

In most of investment cases we take the lead position and in some cases our partners will be seated on board. Though we do not deny being in the non-lead minority sometimes.

Talking about the startup scene in Southeast Asia

Ebihara himself said that he has been watching the region closely as mentor for the Founder’s Institute in offices like Jakarta, Singapore, Ho Chi Minh City, and Kuala Lumpur, and that he likes what he sees. The scene around the region is getting hotter, Bangkok’s current situation reminds him of Jakarta two years back, there are more and more startup accelerators and co-working spaces spotted in Kuala Lumpur. “It is worth trying to find young talented hackers and entrepreneurs in this region,” said Ebihara.

He ends it with an invitation: “If you are a startup or entrepreneur trying to cover large Southeast Asian Internet and mobile space, we are now accepting applications.”

The debate in Indonesia about the upcoming government regulations for the e-commerce industry is still ongoing. While the regulations are now official, they won’t be enacted until the ministry regulation drafts (RPM) ¹ are specified and finalized.

Those regulations – to be fully enacted in 2015 – have the potential to really complicate and hinder the e-commerce industry in Indonesia. The e-commerce players here, represented by the Indonesian e-commerce association (Idea), voiced their concerns to the government at a public discussion held a couple of days ago.

Kompas did a good job yesterday in summarizing the big points of discussion during that talk. Here are four of them:

1. Where are the incentives?

If the government wants to support the e-commerce industry, rather than creating further regulations, the industry will be better off if given incentives. At least the government should also provide the latter.

East Ventures co-founder Willson Cuaca ² explained that the Singapore government is more focused on building the infrastructure rather than compiling regulations. The government gives funding incentives to help the startups as well as building the infrastructure like tens of thousands of free WiFi spots all over the country.

2. Sketchy definitions

The other concern is about the sketchy definitions laid out on the new regulations. Two definitions in the spotlight here are for “electronic transactions” and “public service.” First, there are quite a few online activities going on around the various e-commerce business models. For example, there aren’t any transactions between the buyer and seller happening inside C2C marketplace TokoBagus so, in this case the company acts only as a platform. Is TokoBagus culpable of the government’s regulations concerning the online transaction clause?

‘Idea’ demands the government clarify which processes are deemed as electronic transactions.

‘Idea’ also does not agree on the point where e-commerce players are specified as public services. Head of public policy and government relations of Google Indonesia, Shinto Nugroho, argued that e-commerce cannot be put in the same place as a hospital. He said that all the activities and processes happening inside the e-commerce trade are fully private, and everyone has freedom whether they want to shop online or not.

According to other definitions of public service mentioned on previous regulations like the UU no. 25/2009 and PP no. 96/2012, e-commerce players cannot be classified as a public service.

3. Data centers in Indonesia are more expensive

The argument from the government side is this: Indonesian e-commerce sites need to use local data centers for security purposes. if there is a violation of law due to e-commerce activities, then the government can easily investigate the matter by looking into the internet data stored inside the local data centers. The same cannot be achieved if the e-commerce players are using data centers in other countries.

Fact of the matter is, most of the e-commerce players in Indonesia use data centers in other countries because they are more affordable. Multiply Indonesia country manager Daniel Tumiwa and Biznet Network president director Adi Kusma said that the cost of local data centers here is two times more than the ones abroad.

This is where the issue of incentives arises again. The government should take a deeper look into the fate of the e-commerce industry.

There is one exception to this regulation though, and that is if the players are using tier 4 data centers, then it is okay to use foreign ones. That’s because there aren’t any tier 4 data centers yet in Indonesia.

4. Local domains

There is also a clause obligating the nation’s e-commerce sites to use local “.id.” domains. The reason behind it is similar to the data center argument, which is for e-commerce security for the public.

Tokopedia co-founder William Tanuwijaya – together with some of the other players – don’t agree with this clause, arguing that it can hinder local e-commerce sites from competing globally. He pointed out an example that even China – whose internet industry is filled with a lot of local content – doesn’t mandate the usage of local domains for business.

Daniel asked if there are a lot of frauds and scams happening in the e-commerce sector, and if that is just a really small portion compared to the industry as a whole. The government official answered that there are a lot of reports lodged with the government concerning such security risks. But who knows what the authorities mean by “a lot”.

Fending off potential foreign players?

All in all, the e-commerce industry players are hoping that the upcoming regulation can be more supportive than being a hindrance. But so far, it is looking more like the latter. There is still hope that the government can amend some of the clauses to better suit the needs of the industry.

On the other hand, there is this theory that the lengthy certifications and data center requirements are done in order to stave off further competition from foreign e-commerce businesses gunning for the Indonesian market in light of the upcoming ASEAN Free Trade Area (AFTA) in 2015.

We will definitely keep you posted on the progress of this e-commerce regulation.

(Source: Kompas)

While we were doing our usual browsing of the web we stumbled on something very interesting: a new site by China’s Baidu (NASDAQ:BIDU) that’s an Indonesian version of its web links portal Hao123. Just like Baidu’s other Hao123 sites outside of China, the new portal for Indonesia uses Google’s search engine rather than Baidu’s. Baidu declined to comment about this stealthy launch.

Baidu also runs its Hao123 portal – which is a sort of web directory like AOL or Excite – in other Asian and Mid-East countries in their local languages, like Vietnamese, Japanese, Thai, and Arabic. Plus it operates in Portuguese for Brazilian netizens.

Like all such web directory sites, Baidu’s Hao123 monetizes from advertising and paid links. The Indonesian site has links to local web favorites such as Kaskus and Tokobagus, plus lots of other local and global media and social sites. It’s not clear if those are all paid link. Of the five search options on the Baidu Hao123 site, three lead to Google searches, while ‘video’ leads to Youtube, and ‘music’ goes to the notorious piracy site 4Shared.

Earlier this year, another Chinese company made a move into Indonesia when Tencent president Martin Lau was cautious in saying that it’s in talks with local company MNC Media about the possibility of launching a search engine in the country.

While it’s not guaranteed that Indonesia will see the launch of Baidu’s search engine any time soon, Baidu is doing research into Southeast Asian languages at its new Singapore R&D lab, so it’s core search engine could finally expand to somewhere other than China and Japan.

Baidu, which is China’s top search engine, has been looking overseas a lot more in the past year; aside from that lab, it has launched antivirus products for Southeast Asian markets, and zoned in on north Africa and the Mid-East with its mobile browser app.

A few months ago we reported that the Indonesian telcos were planning to build a chat app platform together to battle the aggresively expanding foreign chat apps like WeChat, Line, and KakaoTalk. We questioned how the various telcos could actually work together to build it without it being a management nightmare.

Well, a couple of days ago Indonesian telco Indosat revealed (via Detik) that the company is readying itself – alone – to launch its WhatsApp-inspired service in the third quarter of this year at the earliest. The app will convert the chats from a smartphone device into SMS when being sent to a feature phone. In that way, the company will get to keep some revenue from the SMS industry.

The telco is going to build the application with a local third-party developer. The company is still in the process of choosing the developers now. The Indosat representative said that they are doing this to help the local developers too.

If the plan comes to fruition, then Indosat would definitely prioritize its own app, including possibly giving more affordable pricing for its own messaging app. It still remains to be seen if the telco will be able to develop something better than WhatsApp, Line, and KakaoTalk in such a short time. Chinese telco China Mobile built its own messaging platform a few years ago called Fetion; after initial success, it soon started to it lose out to rivals like WeChat in the chat app battleground.

(Source: Detik)

(Updated: We tinkered with the headline a little bit).

While we occasionally see apps being put at optimistically premium prices, a few developers dare sell their app above the US$100 mark. Meet Indonesian developer team Mahoni and its flagship iOS app Themis Reader. The team claims that the app is the most expensive one made in Southeast Asia, and that it is actually selling. How much is the app? $300.

Themis Reader offers close to 10,000 legal documents and regulations made by the Indonesian government. Of course, those who use the app are people making their living in the legal profession, and Mahoni’s Santoso Suratso argues that these people, whether they be judges, attorneys, or law makers, are making huge money. $300 is nothing to them.

The inspiration behind this expensive app came when the team was dealing with a law-related issue. At that time, their lawyer had to use lots of law books and there was this problem when an associate had gone home with one of the needed books. Santoso thought that there must be a better way for them to look up those regulations.

The journey to build Themis Reader is also a grueling one; Santoso explained that it involved 10 Macs, 10 full time staffers, and two years to get the app into what it is today. In between, the team also had lawyers overseeing and advising them on the app development. So the effort and capital required to build the app itself were quite significant.

The team updates Themis Reader every week. It has every regulation made by the Indonesian central government, but Themis Reader still doesn’t have regulations made by each district. Santoso is happy to say that they’ve achieved profit from its Themis Reader app.

Room for more newsstand apps in Asia

Besides Themis Reader app, Mahoni also creates e-book apps for businesses. They have had quite a few Indonesian celebrities onboard like religious leader Aa Gym and motivator Andrie Wongso commission Mahoni to build their apps. The team has built its own e-bookstore apps too for segments like religion and children.

Santoso tells me that the e-bookstore apps will continue to be developed seriously by the team. Regarding rival Scoop’s investment by publishing giant Kompas Gramedia recently, Santoso said that so far there is no different treatment given by Kompas Gramedia when publishing their books on Mahoni’s apps. Whenever possible, writers and publishers would want to make sure that their books are available on as many platforms as possible. So there still be room for Mahoni here.

Mahoni will look to revamp its newsstand apps with more features later this year to help stand out from the competition. Santoso then teased that the app won’t only act as a store in the future, but also as an entertainment platform.

Cooking up a new app

One interesting thing Santoso told me is about the company’s line of cooking recipe apps. One of its many recipe apps, the fried rice recipe app once reached the second spot on iTunes’ overall app ranking in Indonesia. It all started when the team wanted to help a lady share her cooking recipes with the world, and help her earn money out of it. Mahoni helped with the app development – including taking pictures of the dishes – and marketing.

Santoso said that they are now compiling all their recipe apps into one big Asian recipe app, and are targeting it at the international market. All of the profits are of course shared with the cooks. Santoso likes to see this side of the business as doing social good for housewives.

Mahoni records 2,000 daily downloads across its 50-plus apps. They are on course to achieve the target of 500,000 downloads for this year.

Today we received word from Indonesian startup Ticket Solutions that the company is now generating revenue of over IDR 4 billion ($400,000) every month using ticket booking platform Tiket’s API. This is definitely a great feat for a startup that only launched its first app last August.

Ticket Solutions’ Marcella Einsteins tells us that half of the revenue comes from the company’s flight ticket sales from Indonesia Flight, while the other half mostly comes from ticket sales for train and hotels. Ticket Solutions now has close to 500,000 users.

Marcella explains that the reason for the company’s fast growth is because they were able to help people book various on-demand tickets. She gives the example that a lot of people ordered tickets for a Super Junior concert with their Indonesia Events app; and then the startup’s app for booking train tickets also gained a huge boost because it was released before the annual Muslim holiday Lebaran where a lot of people travel back to their home.

Today the startup also revealed its iOS app for Indonesia Flight. Based on user demographic, Ticket Solutions believes that the potential income from iOS users can become even bigger than that from current users who are mostly on Android. Ticket Solutions is now developing Indonesia Flight for other platforms as well, like Windows Phone and S40.

Tiket’s open API has definitely brought some nice cash for its merchants. We understand that the company is targeting to achieve a break even point in October. Here are the screenshots of the new iOS app:

Indonesia has had its moments when it comes to making scary movies, but those days are long gone thanks to the crappy sexualized horror movies popping up every month or so. On the bright side, we might see the gross-out glory days back, but this time in the form of a PC game. Arguably the hottest horror game in Indonesia, DreadOut has received a lot of publicity both nationally and internationally. Now the game studio is asking your help to make the project come true through crowdsourcing site Indiegogo – and by voting for it to get onto Steam.

Developed by Digital Happiness, DreadOut tells the story of an Indonesian high school girl venturing through creepy landscapes equipped with only a smartphone camera as weapon. Yes, that doesn’t tell a lot about the storyline, but the mystery is part of the chilling thrill. Inside the game you will find numerous Indonesian spectral characters like tuyul and pocong as ghosts.

Game producer Rachmad Imron told us that the reason they’re building this game is because they like horror-themed entertainment very much, and that a lot of people share their enthusiasms about it. The team is betting that high quality games are slowly moving in a new direction by moving to platforms such as Steam Box and Ouya. Besides that, 3D PC games represent a less saturated market than the usual 2D mobile games.

Rachmad explained that most of the team members are 3D artists, and that they’ve been working on animation for years prior to DreadOut. So far, the game looks really scary. It is touted to be one of the six upcoming games that look terrifying by the Bloody Disgusting blog, alongside other famous titles like Amnesia: A Machine for Pigs. The DreadOut demo game has been played by numerous online game testers like PewDiePie as well.

Lending a hand

There are a few ways that you can help the DreadOut project. First, you can help spread the word about the game to your friends. Second, the team is seeking funding for DreadOut on Indiegogo. Digital Happiness promises a few rewards like becoming one of the games’ ghosts for a certain level of funding. Third, you can also vote the game on Steam. Or fourth, if you have a nice office in the area, the team consisting of 17 people from Bandung is looking for a new place to work.

The game has been in development for two years, and it will be released late this year. The game demo is out, and you can play it on Mac and PC.

The Samsung Galaxy S4 officially launched today in Indonesia. Kompas today quotes Febri Rusli, the product marketing manager of Samsung Indonesia, as saying that the 5,000 stocked phones for pre-orders are all sold out. The pre-order period started two weeks ago, but Febri said that the stocks of new Samsung Galaxy S4 phones was effectively snapped up in the first week of that period.

In contrast, around 7,000 Blackberry Z10 and iPhone 5 phones were sold during pre-orders here. But that is because the two companies stocked more phones in the country during the period.

Samsung (005930:KS) claims to be the king of the smartphone market in Indonesia, saying that four out of five Android phones sold in the country are Samsung devices.

Of course, the more Samsung Galaxy S4 models sold here means bad news for makers of cheaper big-screen smartphones, such as the Chinese handset maker Oppo, which expanded its company reach to Indonesia recently. Will they still get a lot of buyers here in Indonesia?

Samsung top in Indonesia?

Research firm IDC gave us an overview about the Indonesian mobile phone market. Here’s what they had to say:

IDC can say Indonesia’s mobile phone market is a very good market with a very healthy year-on-year growth, which we can see already from 2011 to 2012 when we booked 15 percent year-on-year growth. IDC also forecasted that the Indonesian mobile phone market shipments will reach close to 60 million units – and 14 percent of them being smartphones.

We also asked IDC about how popular Samsung handsets really are in Indonesia. An IDC representative explains to us:

As for Samsung, they are definitely one of major players in the Indonesian market. They will be in the top five smartphone players in Indonesia. They have been one of the global vendors that are able to target every market segment in Indonesia, from screen size, and price point. from the recent IDC Indonesia mobile phone tracker data, we can see Samsung has recorded 10 percent drops due to the slower demands in the market and it is expected to bounce back in Q1 2013 with a very strong growth in the smartphone segment.

IDC didn’t verify if Samsung is top in Indonesia. But Andreas Rompis, vice president of Samsung Indonesia told Detik that Samsung is already the number one mobile phone brand in Indonesia. He also mentioned that research firm Gfk backs the claim. The company also claimed to be the biggest vendor based on sales generated from both feature phones and smartphones.

Don’t forget about Blackberry

I’m curious what Blackberry’s next move will be, especially for the middle and lower tier market. The handset’s domination on the lower and middle tier is waning thanks to the existence of affordable Android handsets like the ones Samsung sells. If there are fewer people using Blackberry, then the Blackberry Messenger (BBM) ecosystem which binds people into sticking to that phone becomes weaker too. Don’t forget that chatting apps like WeChat, Line, and KakaoTalk are becoming more popular here too, and they can act as alternatives to using BBM. Those apps now have their own BBM-like data packages from mobile telcos too.

With the Blackberry Z10 already launched, the next move will be its hard keyboard phone, the Q10, which might appeal to the nation’s hardcore messagers. We’re eager to see what will happen then.

(Sources: Kompas and Detik)

I guess one of the common problems when going to a popular diner is when you need to queue. Being hungry, all the while looking at other people eating nice dishes – it can be a gruesome experience. On that end, a group of Indonesian people are trying to solve that problem by launching its restaurant online booking service in Indonesia called LivEpicly.

As its name implies, LivEpicly is looking to make your life more epic by making the act of reserving a table a lot easier. All the bookings can be made for free, and the earliest booking you can make is three hours in advance. So far it is only available for Jakarta diners.

I gave LivEpicly a try and saw some things I like, such as plenty of food pictures thrown into my face on the restaurant index. The system to make bookings is quite simple too, and I was able to make my reservations online in less than five minutes. I received a call from LivEpicly about half an hour after I made my booking at Nanny’s Pavillon. The LivEpicly guy pointed out that there is a minimum spending of IDR 100,000 (US$10) for weekend bookings made at that restaurant.

I asked founder Joseph Simbar about this and he assured me that Nanny’s Pavillon is the only restaurant to enact that policy for weekend bookings. They are doing their best to offer free bookings without any minimum spending. At the moment LivEpicly has 15 restaurants onboard ¹.

Users can also order flowers and cakes to be prepared as part of your table reservation. People can also add some requests that the LivEpicly site will pass on to restaurants. I can imagine those features being very handy for birthday parties and other special events.

After being live since October, now there are 90 people being seated by Epicly every month.

The LivEpicly kitchen

All of the bookings can be made for free. Even better, each honored booking will grant a person 100 points which is equivalent to IDR 1,000 (10 cents). That might not be much, but it’s an added value to users who make their bookings on LivEpicly.

How does the team earn money? From the restaurants’ side. The team has created an electronic booking system (EBS) that sorts out reservations in real time and charges them for this service. For the users’ side, it’s all free. But the team marks users who don’t show up for reservations and implements a three-strike policy. After three bookings are wasted by one user, that account will be blocked. The team has also put in place preventive measures for unwanted hacks.

The team is invested in by Systec Group. LivEpicly will be looking to expand to Bandung restaurants soon. The startup will release its iOS app by June, and then an Android app will follow suit.

While LivEpicly claims that their service offers the first real-time online reservation service for restaurants in Indonesia, this type of service is already common elsewhere. Singapore’s Chope, which offers a similar service to Singaporean diners, raised $2.5 million last month.

From the left – Daniel Armanto (CTO of Adskom) and Italo Gani (CEO of Adskom)

It seems like the online advertising industry in Indonesia is definitely heating up. The fact of the matter is that Indonesia’s digital ad spending is still a lowly one percent compared to overall ad spending, but it is forecasted to have significant growth in the coming years. Understanding that, Indonesia’s Italo Gani (former CEO of ad network Adstars and chairman of InboundID) and Daniel Armanto (co-founder of social network Koprol) are now building Adskom.

What problem does Adskom solve? The current advertising business model in Indonesia demands partner-like ad networks to compete with each other to gain the available ad spots on publishers’ sites (pictured below). There are two problems with the model.

The first, from the publisher’s side, is that when an ad has reached its quota, it gets turned off automatically, and publishers will not earn any money until they activate another ad on that same spot. The second, from the ad-network’s side, is that they have to compete with each other for the ad spaces. Adskom’s first product, which is a form of supply-side platform (SSP) looks to solve those issues.

According to Adskom, with this new SSP publishers can now automate the ads’ back-end, which solves the first problem. Second, now ad networks can have access to all publishers’ ad spots because it is now aggregated by the Adskom system (pictured below).

Furthermore, the system will also calculate the effective cost per thousand views for each network’s ad on a particular publisher’s spot. In that way, both ad network and publisher can optimize the online ad spending and income better. The whole process can be automated, or if the publishers want to do it manually, they can choose which ad from which network they want to show. The SSP will calculate which ad is optimum for that particular publisher. From a lay person’s point of view, Adskom’s SSP will become an alternative to Indonesian website owners having to work with multiple ad-networks.

Adskom is also announcing having closed a seed round of funding from Rebright Partners, a Venture Capital firm in Japan, and is looking to operate mainly in Indonesia and in Singapore. The service will be fully launched in the early third quarter this year.

Italo claims that while the SSP business model is quite common elsewhere, it is still almost non existent in Indonesia and Singapore, perhaps even in Southeast Asia.

In related industry news, a new mobile advertising agency called ad2c opened its regional office in Indonesia.

The report notes that the best newcomer, in the eyes of Chinese netizens, is Tottenham Hotspurs’ Gareth Bale. Interestingly, Spain’s La Liga players are a lot more popular than those in the English Premier League (BPL). La Liga’s top six most popular players on Weibo have eight times – yes, x8 – the number of followers compared to BPL’s top eight players.

One interesting thing to note is that Japan’s Hidetoshi Nakata – who retired a few years back – is the fourth most popular European player on China’s leading social networks. Although he’s Japanese, he’s played in a few European clubs like AS Roma and Parma in the past.

The last time the Mailman Group, which helps celebrities do social marketing in China, assessed football mania on Weibo, it noted that European football clubs have 15.6 million supporters online in China.

Here’s the infographic for you football fans:

For more fun graphics like this one, check out previous entries in our infographic series.

There are times when you might not be feeling well and have some medical questions, but you’re not sure that those questions are even worth the trip and perhaps money to go to the doctor. There are also times when distance becomes an issue. This is where Dokter Gratis (meaning “free doctors”) comes in.

Dokter Gratis is an app for people in Indonesia to get a live consultation with a doctor. I gave the app a try and I was able to text-chat with a doctor after being put on hold for just a bit. The doctor I talked to answered a few basic health questions. There are a few chatroom topics for people to choose from, like general health, diabetes, women’s health, and baby’s health.

The service so far looks good as a first step before making a decision to go to a hospital. I have confirmed with the team behind it that Dokter Gratis is 100 percent free, this is despite the written explanation on the terms and conditions page that only the first week of use is free.

500 health tips a day from your friendly doctors

There are two teams who helped produce the app. The first is Warung Kreasi which develops the app. Second is Medika Consulting which takes care of the chat function and social media operations. Dokter Gratis is also a partner of Singapore-based medical social platform Blabla Doctor.

At the moment there are 12 general practitioners to respond to all the chats every day. Working in shifts, it’s claimed that a doctor has the capacity to handle about 1,000 chats per day. The app has so far been downloaded 130,000 times with around 500 chats happening each day.

Another medical-related app developed for Indonesians is Dokita, which was created by Jakarta Founders Institute graduate Aibilities. There is also a medical website created by a group of Indonesian doctors called TanyaDok. All in all, there are more online health solutions being made available here, which must be good news.

Dokter Gratis is available on iOS, Android, and Blackberry. Or you can also do a live chat via its website here.

Brand24 then monitored the spikes in conversations that happened for local airlines Garuda Indonesia, Lion Air, and Batavia air. Garuda was mentioned a lot of times when South Korean pop groups 2PM, Sistar, and Infinite made their flights to Indonesia with the airline. But there were also spikes in terms of mentions for the wrong reasons. A Lion Air plane crashed just off Bali’s coast a few weeks back, while Batavia Air was in figurative deep waters regarding the company’s bankruptcy.

Monitoring these online conversations as well as the social sentiment among Indonesian netizens, Lion Air and Garuda Indonesia were discussed more than AirAsia Indonesia. At least in the past two months.

The same company released another infographic last month, which was about how social Jakarta folks really are.

Here is the infographic on the nation’s airlines on social media:

For more fun graphics like this one, check out previous entries in our infographic series.

From the left – Anuj Khanna Sohum (founder and chairman of Affle Group and ad2c), Takayuki Hoshuyama (CEO of D2C), Harris Thajeb (president director of Dentsu Group Indonesia), Roy Simangunsong (country ambassador of Yahoo Indonesia), Wijaya Santoso (head of mobile advertising of XL Axiata), and Madan Sanglikar (co-founder and managing director of ad2c)

Mobile advertising agency ad2c officially opened its regional office in Indonesia yesterday. The company – which comes from a joint venture between Singapore’s Affle Group and Japan’s D2C – first started up in India last year. The company hopes to help grow the mobile advertising industry in Indonesia, which is still very small compared to other more developed nations like Japan. How much is Indonesia’s spending on mobile ads? Less than one percent of the country’s entire ad spending.

We spoke with ad2c co-founder and managing director Madan Sanglikar about what kind of ads Indonesians expect to see now that the company is here. He said that the company will definitely bring ads to all mobile devices – so that includes feature phones.

Explaining the strategy to advertise to feature phone users, Madan says this includes triggering these users to make calls to the advertising companies. In India for example, ad2c promises a certain social charity effort – perhaps like building a well in rural areas – for every pledge people make by calling the company. These calls are free to make, and after people make their pledge, then the company can ask callers to listen to a promotional offer. I don’t think we’ve seen this kind of strategy put in place in Indonesia before.

One other example given by Madan is more familiar to Indonesians, which is value added services (VAS). If ad2c sees that it’s important to offer VAS such as football updates three times a week to Indonesian users, then ad2c can approach other parties like Nike or ESPN to help build the VAS content first. And then after the company delivers a few such VAS to Indonesian phone users, a sports-related ad will be played. The same model works for feature phone users in rural areas, but perhaps with different content.

Madan stresses that the company will only use advertisements that are relevant to the target market – and also ones the company thinks will be interesting for them.

Partnerships with XL Axiata and Yahoo Indonesia

During the ad2c press conference, there were also people from Yahoo Indonesia and telco XL Axiata on stage. Though ad2c works on all mobile carriers, XL Axiata was the first carrier who jumped onboard with ad2c, and Madan explains that XL Axiata will be more open in sharing its data with ad2c due to their collaboration.

As for Yahoo! Indonesia, Madan explains that ad2c has previously collaborated with Yahoo India, and is now bringing that partnership here to Indonesia. ad2c helps Yahoo promote its products within ad2c’s services, and in return, ad2c uses the various Yahoo platforms to promote ad2c client products.

All in all, Indonesians can expect to see more ads thrown in their faces from their mobile devices – but hopefully relevant ones. For advertisers, this is one major new option for reaching people on their phones.

Here are a few interesting startups that we saw:

Beautiplan.com

Beautiplan is a social network platform for beauty enthusiasts in Indonesia. People not only can post their articles, photos, and videos inside the website, but they can also shop online too. What’s impressive about this startup is the founders and its partnerships so far.

The founders are experienced Indonesian serial entrepreneurs Denny Santoso (founder of fitness websites SixReps and DuniaFitnes), Sanny Gaddafi (founder of social networks like 8Villages and FUPEI.com), and most interestingly, the Puteri Indonesia of 2008 Zivanna Letisha is also on the team.

Inside the one month beta phase, the team has partnered with Puspita Martha International Beauty School which has around 350,000 alumni every year. They will become Beautiplan’s potential users. The startup has also tied a deal with Yahoo! Indonesia SHE to help publish the Beautiplan articles. The startup will be launched next month.

Unyu

I found this startup’s business model to be the simplest one to understand. Unyu lets feature phone users to use cute emoticons inside their SMS (pictured above).

Users would first need to download Unyu app on their phones (work on a lot of devices including WAP, Java, Symbian, Blackberry, Android, and iOS). And done, every SMS that comes in will go into the usual SMS default folder on phones and also into Unyu’s SMS app.

To use Unyu’s app, users would need to subscribe first, they can do so on daily, weekly, or monthly basis. Unyu team told me that they are hoping to offer free SMS for every subscription made, so people can chat seamlessly as if they’re using Blackberry Messenger. I’m not sure how the telcos will react to that, but putting in stickers into SMS is a simple idea yet can also be a very effective product.

Unyu will be launched in a few months time. The product is developed by developer Aiti Corp.

Cariii

Cariii is a search engine that can be accessed via SMS. People living in rural areas can use the service to look for people, company, price, and job. The team is charging people for each SMS search.

A similar service looking to offer information to people living in rural areas is 8Villages. But the startup doesn’t offer search engine feature like Cariii. The startup will be launched next month.

Soccer Ticker

Yes, this is the same Soccer Ticker app that we’ve talked about a few times before. This one gets an honorable mention here due to the interesting data it offered. While co-founder Vincent Putera couldn’t reveal the user numbers during the event, he did reveal that his app is on one percent of the whole Blackberry 10 devices shipped so far. Soccer Ticker will also be pre-installed on two handset brands, and this is predicted to help the app activation go from 10,000 to 15,000 every month.

Its users also enjoy using the app too. Out of everyone who downloaded Soccer Ticker, 80 percent keeps on using it. In average, each user spends five to seven minutes when using the app to check football updates whereas during prime time – football matches – the average time of people using the app spikes to around 45 to 60 minutes.

Concerning monetization, Soccer Ticker will become a platform for football brands marketing programs like contests. There will also be premium features like advanced statistics of each player and behind-the-scene footages in soccer world.

Tandif

Tandif offers human services to moderate your content. Whether it be forum, Facebook group, or Twitter. There are other more automated products on offer too, like sentiment analysis and automated content filtering.

The team will offer its services in four languages: Indonesia, English, Arabic, and Portugese. And yes, Tandif has hired people in Brazil and Portugal to cater the market there as well. There aren’t a lot of Indonesian startups that decide to jump straight to other markets early on. The service is yet to be launched.

Here are the rest of the startups that pitched yesterday:

• Bintang-ku lets users shorten its phone numbers using the ‘*’ symbol. For example, the shortened phone number is now *8989. And this is available for individual users as well as businesses. The big problem is, this doesn’t work on cross-carriers. So Telkomsel users can’t contact Indosat users with the shortened numbers. Bintang-ku is developed by PT. Kuantum Bisnis Solusi.
• DealPOS offers users a more integrated point of sales machine. The startup pitched at our Startup Arena in Singapore earlier this month.
• VoutNow is a social platform where users can ask and people to vote about anything and with pictures for better comparison.
• BagiIlmu.org (means “share knowledge”) is a social network and e-learning startup. The team has collaborated with a few lecturers in Bandung to help build the content. This is a business though, and it charges premium users like schools who would like to use it. Because of that, personally I don’t think BagiIlmu should use the “.org” domain because the domain is better suited to non-profit businesses. Perhaps like KhanAcademy.org.
• Social recommendation site Rockto is the company behind men fashion store Maskool.in. The parent company itself offers brand activation services to businesses through social media. Rockto now has 25,000 members.
• Akubu is actually part of Hompimplay, which caters to B2B e-commerce business model. During the event, Akubu pitched its mobile platform services for businesses to use. The team offers templates for profile app, online store, and celebrity store.
• KulinerPlus ¹ is a culinary search engine website. The startup also offers an Android mobile app which has augmented reality features inside it.

[Update: Andi has written the English version of his blog. You can see it here.]

The demise of e-commerce site Multiply in both Indonesia and the Philippines is one of the biggest shocks of the year so far. We’ve written our thoughts about it, as have others. One blog post that I found interesting is this one by Ideosource founder Andi S. Boediman yesterday. The original is written in Indonesian; we’ve received permission from Andi to paraphrase it in English here.

Andi starts by talking about the e-commerce scene in Indonesia. He says that it is looking very good right now. In 2012, the internet users here has passed the 60 million mark, and five percent of them – around three million people – have bought something online. This figure is outside the purchases made for airlines, hotels, and concerts. And the future looks bright as the internet adoption rate, as well as the online transactions, will increase significantly in the next five years.

According to Andi, the decision to close Multiply came not from a lack of e-commerce growth, but from a strategic perspective of investment. He echoed our own explanation of Multiply’s business model as part of the problem, pointing out that Multiply’s shipping subsidies cost the company a lot of money.

Basically, Multiply wasn’t making much money and it was going to take a long time for it to reach a desired level of profitability. Even if Multiply’s persistence had come to fruition, it would have been easy for rivals like Tokobagus to simply copy the company’s business model at that point. Tokobagus is doing quite well anyway though, and it seems that it is investor MIH’s main e-commerce asset in Indonesia.

Multiply Helped Indonesia’s E-commerce Industry Grow

Multiply’s demise may not be a bad thing. In fact, Andi believes that it can benefit the e-commerce industry in Indonesia. Multiply’s downfall means that a lot of its high quality human resources will suddenly disperse to the other e-commerce businesses and they will share their knowledge and experience in running the business.

Andi recalls his own experience when he departed e-commerce site Plasa.com. The founding group that he gathered have now become leaders in various internet and e-commerce companies. The same thing happened when social network Koprol was disbanded and when news site Detik got acquired too. The industry grows more quickly when company breakups speed the proliferation of high-quality talents.

These high-quality human resources now have the option to either work at another company or start their own e-commerce startups. Either way, that’s a good thing for Indonesia’s e-commerce market.

(Source: Andisboediman.blogspot.com)

Friday’s news about e-commerce site Multiply closing down is a shocker. No one could’ve predicted this. Just last December we met up with CEO Stefan Magdalinski and Indonesia country manager Daniel Tumiwa, and they were enthusiastically talking about the future. Everyone was geared towards 2013.

A lot of people in Indonesia’s startup scene are also in shock. They told me how they’ve just met with the Multiply’s higher-ups and discussed about the company’s plans and new features to be launched. It seems even the people inside Multiply are in shock as much as we are. Why on earth did this happen?

Multiply’s transitional setback might be one of the main reasons.

The chaotic transition

The e-commerce site officially rebranded last month, complete with a brand new logo. But the transition was not a smooth one. This comment made by one of the sellers explains how difficult it is to sell products under the new system:

• The site only shows some of her product listings since the transition. It is most probably an error.
• After a buyer orders lipstick, there is no information about which color she ordered.
• It is quite difficult for the seller to contact her buyer. The new site no longer has comments or a private message feature. She can only send an email to her buyer.

That comment was made on April 5th, around two weeks after the new site launched. There was also the issue of sellers not receiving their money from the sales made on Multiply. That case has apparently been solved by the company, but a few people have lost faith in Multiply as a lot of their phone calls and emails went unanswered even after the incident.

It also seems some sellers’ conversation history with their buyers went totally bust. This comment made by one of the sellers says that she has built her contacts for over three years, and now it is all gone. She also added that her whole product listings on Multiply, which were listed on Google’s first page, is now gone.

On a personal note, even Multiply’s terms and conditions page now looks very confusing. The page mixes both Indonesian and English, and it doesn’t make Multiply look like a company that has control of its operations.

Two months ago, Multiply was ranked 17th in the Philippines and 47th in Indonesia. At the time of this writing, the company is now ranked at 50th in the Philippines and 344th in Indonesia.

Very high burn rate

Credit: wondergressive.com

Of course, in the end it will always be about money. Besides lots of money to fix the whole fiasco described above, Multiply would also need time to reclaim the long-built reputation and faith from its sellers and buyers alike. That’s a huge setback for sure.

According to an unnamed source, Multiply is the number one e-commerce site for one of Indonesia’s largest bank BCA. In fact, the revenue Multiply records is twice as much as the second placed BCA e-commerce partner. That means Multiply is recording very huge transactions over the past years, but because of Multiply’s business model it also means that the company is burning huge amount of money too.

Multiply doesn’t take any transaction fees from its sellers. This was originally done by previous CEO Peter Pezaris as Multiply’s promotional program for its brand new e-commerce service in 2011. But since then, it has been extended up until today. So Multiply hasn’t taken any transaction fees from its sellers in the last one and a half year.

That is more or less similar to what rival Tokopedia does, but Multiply offers something more. The latter site offers delivery fee subsidy of IDR 25,000 (US$2.5) for every IDR 100,000 ($10.3) minimum transaction on selected items. A lot of popular items get this offer, and that would mean that Multiply is burning a lot of money in subsidizing these delivery offers to a lot of its users. Thus the higher the transaction, the higher the cost for Multiply. Just like the free transaction fee, this subsidy offer has been in effect since 2011.

Refocusing efforts

According to the explanation given by Stefan, Multiply shareholder MIH remains optimistic about the e-commerce industry in Indonesia and the Philippines, and has increased its funding to other portfolio companies TokoBagus and Sulit.com.ph. That “increased funding” could mean MIH’s strategy changed to focus its funds on more promising companies. Perhaps MIH has decided that backing up Multiply was no longer worth the effort.

The cost to propel Multiply into the kind of company it was before the shutdown was quite high. Rebuilding its reputation and spending more of that money may no longer be the logical option. Rather than patching up your weaknesses, you might be better off putting that effort into your strengths. For MIH in this case, its strengths are TokoBagus (ranked 14th in Indonesia) and Sulit (ranked 8th in the Philippines).

A lot of Multiply users are also quite shocked and sad about this. Just last month we saw more blood shed by Japan’s e-commerce company Rakuten in its joint venture project in Indonesia.

Besides those two companies, we’ve also recently seen two popular Indonesian startups Koprol and Saling Silang raising white flags too. Could these be just the start of natural selection setting its course here in Indonesia? What do you think?

Indonesian design crowdsourcing marketplace Sribu ¹ is revealing a few interesting stats about its progress, including the recent milestone of attracting over 25,000 designers onto its platform.

All those 25,000 designers have produced over 135,000 designs for Sribu’s clients. The company so far has had more than 500 clients. According to my math, that means that each client gets an average of 270 designs. Furthermore, Sribu is also proud to announce that the company has paid out a cool US$100,000 to designers on the platform. So far it is looking quite good for the startup which only come into inception one and a half years ago.

Founder Ryan Gondokusumo explained to us about the startup’s plans to expand:

Our goal in the future is to penetrate deep into regional markets with the positioning as an online graphic design company that provides Asian flavour.

Sribu’s recent collaboration with Visa has definitely been geared towards that end. Ryan explained that he is going to upgrade and launch a few features which can help boost the company’s client acquisition plan. One of those features is an affiliate program. This is already available in beta form today, and it will be fully launched next month. Ryan says that Sribu is open for potential collaboration with suitable partners.

Earlier today fashion e-commerce site Zalora launched its iOS shopping app for users in Southeast Asia. On the same day, the company’s Indonesian branch also revealed to us some updates about its progress and upcoming plans.

Zalora Indonesia managing director Hadi Wenas says that the site’s traffic now reaches up to 200,000 visitors every day, which is a good increase on November’s 150,000 daily visits. 20 percent of those visits come from mobile devices, with the mobile purchasing conversion rate being less than half of that. Hadi hopes that the new app could boost the mobile conversion rate up to three times, and targets 10,000 app downloads within the next three days.

If you’re wondering when Zalora Indonesia will launch its Android app, the answer is next month. But Hadi says that the upcoming app is for Zalora Indonesia only. Its Blackberry app will come in the near future too. Hadi emphasizes that the company’s focus this year is on mobile. You might recall Zalora launched its mobile-specific site just a few months ago.

Zalora Indonesia has also been quite busy in between. Today the company announces its co-promotional effort with Indonesia’s largest telco, Telkomsel, by launching the Zalora Simpati Fashion Zone program. This entitles Simpati users to get discounts from Zalora, among other things. Hadi teased that by the end of May, they will have a cooperation with a large female community as well as have celebrities onboard to push sales even more.

The Rocket Internet portfolio company recently laid off 20 percent of its staff in Indonesia. The laid off people were given full severance packages, an additional one month salary, and recommendations to potential employers. Hadi explains that after going through the early days of trying out a lot of things at Zalora, now they understand better what needs to be done, and they need to be more efficient in doing so. This lead, he explains, to the lay-offs. The current team is 150 people.

So far it doesn’t look like money is a problem for Zalora. The fashion e-commerce company received US$26 million from German retail company Tengelmann Group last month.

India-based mobile gaming developer and publisher Zapak Mobile Games made an announcement a couple of days ago that it has now passed the 100 million user download mark from all of its game titles on the Nokia Store. How many of Zapak’s game titles so far on Nokia? Over 350. The company notes its huge increase from 50,000 download mark passed just 14 months ago.

Currently ranked first on India’s Nokia Store, Zapak discloses that its most popular game is T20 Cricket 2012 with 7.76 million downloads, with Border War Face Off at second place with 5.83 million downloads. Nokia India representative Gerard Wego believes that Indians love games. With over 80 million downloads occurring on the Nokia India Store every month, one of its most popular categories is gaming.

Besides having its games on the Nokia Store, Zapak also showcases its games on its mobile site. A Reliance Entertainment Digital (the parent company of Zapak) representative told us that the mobile site has roughly three million unique visitors every month. The team will focus on creating local content that can be connected with its Indian audiences.

When it comes to mobile games, Reliance Entertainment Digital is eyeing a bigger market than just India. The company has made its presence felt in Canada, the US, as well as Korea and Japan. Its international gaming division Reliance Games – which primarily builds smartphone games – has announced its full acquisition of the mobile gaming division of Funnel Japan and the majority acquisition of Korean gaming studio Bluesom a month ago.

The big picture, the representative said, is to cater to the first generation of mobile device users in India while strengthening the company’s footprints in the international market.

Indonesian comedy band Project Pop is quite famous in Indonesia. Since the group’s debut on TVs with its previously named group Project-P in the 1990’s, they have become quite a household name here. Yesterday, the band announced the launch of a game titled Power Pop which features members of the group as characters.

The game itself is built by local developer Own Games. This Power Pop game is built for Nokia Asha Full Touch phones and will cost you IDR 5,000 (US$0.50) for the full version. Power Pop is a 2D side scrolling action game where you are the main character and must fend off invading pirates which are looking to steal the island. Yes, it’s not a typo, the pirates are indeed trying to steal the island. not invade. That’s the kind of wacky premise that suits Project Pop just fine.

Each game character comes with its own special attributes, like Tika Panggabean’s dogs and Yosi’s basketball. One of the trademarks of Own Games’ titles is its mascot, Tako, which shows up in each of its games. This time Tako is a secret playable character after you complete the game. The team insists that for each and every project, Tako must be involved as this is Own Games’ personal touch. This kind of idealism has led to the studio rejecting a few offers to build games for other parties.

Pitching with a tweet

Own Games founder Eldwin Viriya told me that the game was released two weeks ago, and in that short time it has been downloaded over 18,000 times on the Nokia store. He also talked about the story of how his team got this project in the first place: by pitching with a cold tweet.

Eldwin sent a tweet to one of Project Pop’s members, Tika, to ask if she’s interested to build a game together. The following day, the group was meeting Project Pop’s manager. But it took quite some time and persuasion to get Project Pop onboard with the game idea.

Own Games has so far built eight titles, all aimed mostly at Nokia users and/or Nokia’s Symbian OS. The developer won the recent Lumia Apps Olympiad in Indonesia with its Windows Phone game called DragManArds. The startup was also one of the winners at Ancol’s Coding on the Beach competition.

You can give the game a try here. The band also sells some Power Pop merchandise which can be shipped worldwide from here.

Image source credit: berita.upi.edu

Since the Indonesian president joined Twitter as @SBYudhoyono just 11 days ago, his official account has now reached 1.56 million followers. With that number, Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono (SBY) now effectively becomes the number one Asian nation leader on Twitter, beating the previous most-followed in the region, Philippine president Benigno Aquino III (now 1.46 million). The Malaysian prime minister (1.49 million) has also passed Aquino to take second place.

It has been spotted that there’s a great resemblance between President Yudhoyono’s Twitter cover picture and that of the number one world leader on Twitter, US president Barack Obama. Is it a coincidence? Probably not. Check it out:

Here come the jokers

With the huge growth in SBY’s Twitter followers, now there are several fake SBY accounts popping up, perhaps trying to get a few unaware Twitter users to follow them, or perhaps just to entertain with a little satire. The biggest presidential parody accounts are @SBYudonono ¹ and @SBYudhoyno

While the first parody Twitter account tweets occasional political jokes and brands itself as “Pak Nono,” the latter account tries to make its tweets look as if they come from the president. This rogue account sometimes makes formal greetings to Indonesian citizens, and at other times jokes around, such as advising followers who are not in a relationship to not get ‘friendzoned’ by their crushes on the weekend. Those accounts have gained 28,000 and 26,000 followers respectively.

One other genuine SBY-related Twitter account worth mentioning is @PresidenSBY which was created in 2008. This account tweets about the president’s formal activities and has received over 150,000 followers.

Outright imposters

There are also accounts that look to impersonate (but not parody) the original SBY account, such as @SBYudhoyonox, @SBYudhoyono0, and @SBYudhoyono2day. These imposters all claim to be the president’s official accounts, and copy the original tweets made by SBY. @SBYudhoyonox also slips in its own tweets like asking followers if they think the national exam should be abolished. It seems the owners of the latter two accounts have given up on continuing their effort, as @SBYudhoyono0 has only made three tweets, while @SBYudhoyono2day stopped tweeting a couple of days ago. The three of them have 11,000, 7,000, and 4,500 followers respectively.

There are also other SBY-related accounts which are not active, but still gain quite a number of followers. These are @SBYudoyono which has posted zero tweets but has over 13,000 followers, and @SBYudhoyono_ which was created as early as 2011, made five tweets, and has around 5,800 followers.

Indonesia is definitely very social, especially on Twitter, but some users are proving to be a bit clueless in following these low quality, fake accounts. Remember folks, there is only one verified account for the Indonesian president, which is the one that was greeted on Twitter by porn star Vicky Vette.

Today Netpreneur.co.id, a blog dedicated to advising people how to run a business, is officially launched today in Indonesia. The site is developed by Achmad Zaky, the founder of e-commerce platform Bukalapak, who tells us that Netpreneur is a standalone project outside Bukalapak that acts quite like Bukalapak’s corporate social responsibility (CSR) project. Netpreneur is built to help people get entreprenurial knowledge and information, as well as inspire them to become an entrepreneur.

Achmad explains that Netpreneur has different teams from Bukalapak. Furthermore, as Netpreneur has this vision to help grow the Indonesian entrepreneurial ecosystem, he is open to discuss any topics that crop up on the site. That includes talking about success stories of people using Bukalapak’s competitors, such as Kaskus and Tokopedia.

You might remember a similar Indonesian site full of business advice called StartupBisnis. Its founder Rhein Mahatma gave me an update about the company, saying that StartupBisnis now gets around 2,000 daily visitors. The startup has also launched its job posting feature as well as holding some offline events like workshops and seminars with the focus on discussing the e-commerce industry. Achmad said that Netpreneur also hopes to hold offline events to help educate and engage the Indonesian audience.

Entrepreneurship brewing up in Indonesia

There were three other speakers during the launch event to talk and encourage people to become entrepreneurs. One of the things discussed there was about the shift of mindset that Indonesian people are now more proud to be running their own business rather than working for somebody else. There is also this phenomenon called the ‘amphibi revolution’ where quite a few people in the country are starting to work and run a private business at the same time.

Indonesia is indeed a great market to be in right now. And having more information sources and resources about running businesses can help people take action on that opportunity. For those who are looking to open their respective businesses, you can give Netpreneur a look.

Bukalapak’s progress

During today’s event, Achmad also shared with me some numbers about Bukalapak. The e-commerce site now has about 100,000 daily visitors, with each of them averaging 10 page-views. This means that there are around one million page-views clicked on Bukalapak every day. At the moment Bukalapak sits at 151st position in the country’s web ranking according to Alexa. The startup itself is invested in by GREE Ventures and Batavia Incubator.

As for Bukalapak’s other project, which is muslim women’s e-store HijUp, Achmad revealed that the startup has now become an official content partner for YouTube and now boasts over nine million views of the company’s videos so far.

One of Perang Mistis’ cards – Rangda

Today, Indonesian game developer Agate Studio launched its newest game made for feature phone users in Indonesia. Called Perang Mistis (meaning “mystical battle”), the game is released on Agate Studio’s new feature phone gaming platform called Gempon, which was soft launched last week.

As with other feature phone-based games, Perang Mistis offers a simple social gaming experience. In this one you will earn ghost cards and use them to fight the other ghosts in this mystical battle. Early on, you will first get to choose one of three Indonesian ghosts, like tuyul and jelangkung. You can combine your ghost cards and battle with the other online players too.

An Agate Studio representative told us that they created Indonesia’s newest feature phone gaming platform, Gempon, because they want to build a better gaming ecosystem in Indonesia. The platform first went live five months ago, but only last week was it launched to the public with its payment system supported by the country’s biggest telco, Telkomsel.

So far there are over 10,000 members on Gempon. Its monthly active user-base is also around the 10,000 mark, with about 1,000 daily active users. There are 10 games available to be played on Gempon. This includes Agate Studio’s flagship game Football Saga and Agate Jogja’s Mayapadha. Gempon is fully in the Indonesian language.

Foreign players

The Agate Studio representative remarked that there is something ironic about the Indonesian game market so far. Essentially, foreign players are making more money here while local developers are having problems doing so. He added that Gempon will focus on bringing more local developers onboard, as well as helping them monetize their games.

The foreign players the studio rep could be referring to include Singapore-based Kotagames which now has around six million users. Another Singaporean feature phone gaming player looking to make a mark here is FunSpot, which just tied a payment partnership with the same telco that supports all three feature phone players mentioned here – Telkomsel.

The feature phone market in Indonesia is still a big one with space for more to join in the gaming sector. According to Jakarta Founder Institute director Andy Zain, out of 280 million mobile phone connections in Indonesia, 115 million of them are online. But only a mere 30 million of them subscribe to 3G data packages. This means – according to my math – that feature phone gaming platforms like Gempon, Kotagames, and FunSpot have around 85 million 2G users to be shared.

Indonesian game developer Touchten announced today that the company has made a soft launch of its mobile game publishing platform. Its first publishing deal is with Indonesian game developer Tinker Games. The latter game developer is one to look out for in Indonesia, snatching one of the awards at the Indonesia Game Show 2012 and is part of Systec Group portfolio companies.

Touchten is publishing two games from Tinker Games, they are Paws! Cat Attack and Soccer Girl Adventure. Both are paid, casual games, and will be published under Anton’s account on iTunes. Tinker Games CEO Panji Prakoso explains this latest partnership with Touchten:

We know that Touchten already successfully launched a bunch of games for iOS, Android, and also the web. Touchten also created solid distribution channels for the mobile gaming industry, which will be a huge advantage for our games to be published by TouchTen.

For now, the two newly published games are not integrated with Touchten’s loyalty points feature powered by Gimmie World. But CEO Anton Soeharyo explained that they will treat all of their published games as if they’re Touchten’s own games. The Touchten team will offer its loyalty point feature, telco and e-money payment system, a promotional budget, and mentoring and consulting services to its platform partners.

Touchten has been one of the most successful Indonesian game developers, with its Train Legend title breaking into the top five overall free iOS app chart in the US market recently. The game company has around five million users for all its games with around 700,000 monthly active users. While there are arguably many other Indonesian developers who can build very nice games, they may still need help in terms of marketing those games in the West. A lot can definitely be learned from Touchten’s success.

The publishing platform will be fully launched, hopefully including all of the mentioned features, next month. Here are the videos of the two games that Touchten is now helping to publish:

From the left: UKP4 head Kuntoro Mangkusubroto and DKI Jakarta vice governor Basuki Tjahaja Purnama

Lapor, the newest technology product made for Indonesian citizens to report wrongdoings in public services, including those dodgy extra administration ‘fees’ incurred here and there, is doing a fine job. Earlier today, the DKI Jakarta provincial government has signed an agreement to jump onboard the Lapor service. At today’s event in the capital, I got to discuss the service a bit deeper with the ones who built it: the President’s Delivery Unit of Development Monitoring and Oversight (UKP4) ¹.

Since November, the Lapor website has received about 60,000 visitors and over 222,000 pageviews. In average, the service receives 376 reports of corruption or misdeeds every day, with 27 of them having passed the validation process for further follow up. There are 749 comments made by regular folks who made 1,578 back-up of the claims submitted to the site. Lapor is now cooperating with 61 Indonesian government ministries and units, as well as today’s show of support from the Jakarta provincial government.

Jakarta authorities have actually cooperated with Lapor since January, and today’s agreement signage was just a formality. Vice governor Basuki Tjahaja Purnama said that as the capital city of Indonesia, Jakarta must be the national example for other provinces to follow – and that includes being integrated with the Lapor system. The Lapor team will be looking to add Ambon municipal and the Indragiri Hulu district in the near future.

What happens when there’s a report made to a non-cooperating provincial government? The Lapor team will still conduct a follow-up with the user, but they can only give advice about the normal bureaucratic procedure. Each province has its own autonomy, so the Lapor team cannot intervene unless the provincial government has agreed to cooperate with this system.

How does Lapor work?

So how does Lapor work exactly? After a report is filed, Lapor will verify it in the space of three days. If the report is valid, then the team will make a follow-up and solve it in 10 days’ time. The valid report itself will be handled by the related government agencies. If the report is deemed invalid, but you still want to make your case, then the public discussion feature inside the Lapor website can help support your cause. You can see the overall back-end process here:

Those stated processing days are, of course, the ideal situation. UKP4 head Kuntoro Mangkusubroto said that the Lapor team will make a follow-up to a related government agency about each valid report. If the agency doesn’t respond in one month, then the Lapor team will report this to the president’s office.

Most of the reports are made via SMS. People can do so by texting it to 1708 ². The system will automatically convert the SMS report to a website report format, where people can support and comment on it. If the user doesn’t have an internet connection, they can still view their thread’s progress by texting “TL (space) report number” to 1708. Reports made via the website or apps will receive a follow-up via email, whereas reports made by SMS will receive follow up via SMS. Which makes good sense.

Inaccurate reports?

There are concerns that perhaps Lapor can be misused to report the wrong person or to victimize someone. The team said that they will first validate all of the reports and the respective related agencies will make a thorough follow-up on each of the valid ones. So they won’t blindly trust all the given reports that come to the system. Furthermore, there is this social feature whereby other people can help verify if the report if valid or not by looking through the comments made on it.

It’s not every day that you see the Indonesian government building such a well thought out product and system. I am quite impressed with the details the UKP4 team pays attention to, including the service’s overall design.

I have stated my concern about the government’s ugly website designs in the past, but Lapor is in a different league. A UKP4 representative told me that it may be because most of the team members are still quite young, just 25 to 33 years old. Most of the team also has working experience in a private sector before joining the UKP4.

Whatever the reason, UKP4’s Lapor system looks really good. Almost everyone now can report any wrongdoings via SMS. Even better, harnessing the very social nature of Indonesians, they can also help the government verify the reports via the website’s social features.

Now if only the Lapor app comes pre-installed within the country’s handsets, and perhaps also come bundled with popular internet packages, then I can see no reason why Lapor cannot become a powerful weapon to fight injustice. The presidential’s own working unit is the driving force behind its creation, so they can definitely make that happen.

Indonesia has Korean fever. Sensing an opportunity, Korean fashion e-store Thehallyu rolled out an Indonesian language version of the site last month. And just a few weeks after the launch, Thehallyu now hits weekly sales of more than US$10,000 globally since its launch in December.

(Clarification: While the site has been up and running since December, Thehallyu only started to sell its wares in March.)

Founder Kim Min-soo explains about this decision to target the Indonesian market:

Based on research results, the Korean wave in Indonesia is larger than in neighboring countries, not only from the scope of entertainment such as music and drama, but also fashion and lifestyle.

Most of the products are made in and shipped from South Korea, and to make sure its operation in Indonesia runs smoothly, Thehallyu partners with Inlite Indonesia. The local partner has expertise in digital marketing research and consulting.

At the moment, there are only women’s fashion items being sold on the site, but the company plans to launch its men’s fashion in a couple of weeks. The site looks very simple and clean, and you can browse through its catalog either by brands or item categories. So far, the site offers over 5,000 products.

The products aren’t cheap, though. The average price is around IDR 300,000 ($31). But Kim says that Indonesia’s average expenditure on online shopping is IDR 500,000 ($51) per transaction right now, which means that the store’s product pricing is still in-line with the market. Thehallyu’s main target consumer is those aged between 18 to 35 years old.

Look, we avoided mentioning Gangnam Style… D’OH!

Thehallyu also offers discounts of 15 percent and 20 percent for resellers and wholesalers for a spending minimum of $500 and $750 respectively. So they are implementing both B2C and B2B business models.

One thing that the site still needs to work on is its payment options. It accepts PayPal, but not a lot of Indonesians are using that. If users opt to pay via credit cards, they need to do so in US dollars. The Thehallyu uses only BCA bank for its accounts in Indonesia, which will incur a small administration fee if transferred through other banks. The team is looking to add more payment options soon, with Mandiri Clickpay looming big on its agenda.

Besides Indonesia, Thehallyu targets France and Japan too, and you can change the pricing currency according to the corresponding nation. Thehallyu offers a flat shipping rate of $18 worldwide, but if users make purchases above $150, then it will be free.

TheHallyu is one of the latest vertical e-commerce sites popping up in Indonesia. And just like the lingerie site OgahMahal, those stores serve a niche and will have their own loyal customers. The Korean appeal helps a lot in Indonesia these days – something that chat app KakaoTalk is also emphasizing in its Indonesian marketing.

How does Gotcha make its money? Ads. The pictures you drag and drop are often branded ads of a newly launched product. And Gotcha can even show a banner ad when the mouse hovers on the picture icons as shown here:

Co-founder Aditya Putra explains that the cost per click (CPC) and cost per thousand (CPM) ad process lets advertisers adjust their campaign products, while website owners will get commission from each ad impression.

The idea for Aditya to develop his own version of captcha came when he was having spam problems when moderating his high school alumni website even after using a text-based captcha system. After asking quite a few people about their experience of using the common captcha, most of them agreed that it doesn’t work that well. Luckily Aditya understands HTML5.

He argues that his gesture-based captcha can work better than the regular one. The one Gotcha offers offers a better user experience too, he said. Gotcha works on any browser because of its HTML5 origin, even on mobile. Aditya adds that it’s very easy to install Gotcha on non-CMS websites as well as on WordPress and vBulletin CMS sites.

But of course, Gotcha isn’t the first company to use pictures for captcha verifications. Adit names KeyCaptcha, Picaptcha, and SweetCaptcha as having a similar business model. He believes that execution will be key to stand out against the competition.

Gotcha will be fully launched next month. The current beta version is still being tested to make sure there are no bugs and that the UX runs smoothly on any type of site.

(Updated on April 18th: BeautyTreats launched last month. The article incorrectly stated that the startup launched on the same date with Lolabox. We apologize for the confusion.)

Lolabox, a startup that offers monthly subscriptions for boxes of beauty products, launches today in Indonesia. The company is founded by two ex-Rocket Internet employees, Christian Sutardi and Cynthia Chaerunnisa, both of whom will look to disrupt the beauty and make-up industry in the country by being one of the first movers. Of course, it already has a couple of rival startups to deal with.

Lolabox has been incubated by and received invested from Grupara, which is the incubator’s second investment this year after men’s fashion store Maskool.in. The beauty box startup also has Yazid Faizin and Pandu Wirawan as digital marketing partners, both of whom are co-founders of advertisement network Adplus. Furthermore, design and technology studio Weekend has joined in to become Lolabox’s tech partners. So far the company has deals with more than 15 beauty brands.

Christian says there will be others following in the beauty box sector in Indonesia. When that time comes, he believes Lolabox can still survive:

Lolabox will always be awesome even if heavier competition appears, because of our extreme focus on beauty brand satisfaction. Every single meeting helps us to understand the brands’ needs even more and we try to come up with great solutions. Actually we have improved our offer to brands a lot as we understand that better relationships help us to secure the latest and most exciting products for our members.

Apart from that we will provide amazing original content in our e-mag (LolaMag) and various social media channels. The box is just the beginning of an exciting journey – right now we can’t reveal too much though.

New rivals: BeautyTreats and VanityTrove

Indeed there are already other competitors looking to grab the same market niche with similar products here in Indonesia. They are VanityTrove Indonesia and BeautyTreats. The latter officially launched just last month.

BeautyTreats is developed by Romeo Reijman, the one behind sexy football news startup DewiBola, and his celebrity sister Rebecca Reijman. Romeo explains that it started offering beauty boxes as early as last month, and once sold 250 box subscriptions in just six days. The startup now has 937 members.

Updated: I misquoted Romeo about him saying the word “better” when he just said “cheaper.”

Romeo believes that BeautyTreats offers more affordable products and has a strong Facebook community with lots of female followers. In reality, they both offer different beauty products and there’s enough room in the market for such competition.

Indonesia looks like it will become a new battleground for emerging beauty box and other ‘subcom’ startups. Singapore has seen its own beauty box business model blooming, with VanityTrove, Bellabox, Glamabox, and the newest one being the Little Black Beauty Box.

Image source credit: berita.upi.edu

Indonesian president Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono – also known as SBY – has finally made his first tweet on his brand-new Twitter handle, @SBYudhoyono. Since that first presidential tweet a couple of days ago, he has gained over 700,000 followers already, and has made 27 tweets so far. Can SBY gain enough followers to become a top ten Twitter account among world leaders?

Just like US president Barack Obama, Yudhoyono puts his own initials on the end of tweets that come personally from him. So far, the president has put his newly-minted Twitter account to good use, assuring travelers that he has already made contact with the transportation minister to investigate the recent Lion Air crash in Bali. Another topical tweet assures his followers that he has discussed with the education and culture minister about the lateness of national exams in 11 Indonesian provinces.

SBY has also used his Twitter account to greet other Indonesian public figures on the service, such as former vice president Yusuf Kalla @JK_Kita, religious leader Yusuf Mansur @Yusuf_Mansur, and Indonesian ambassador to the US, Dino Patti Djalal @dinopattidjalal. The president also responded to a few Indonesian citizens who asked about the government’s dedication to developing the country’s poorest region, Papua. So far so good.

Not following porn stars

The response to the president’s new venture into the Twittersphere is mostly positive. Amusingly, one of many greetings to SBY came from porn star Vicky Vette, who tweeted at the Indonesian president (it has since been retweeted over 700 times):

At the time of writing, the president’s Twitter account seems to grow by the tens of thousands per hour. Attracting 700,000 followers is no small feat, and already the president has beaten the follower count of ICT minister Tifatul Sembiring in just the two days since joining. A few Indonesians now wonder if SBY can beat Indonesian celebrity Agnes Monica to become the biggest Twitter account in the country. SBY will need to gain 6.5 million more followers to do that.

SBY vs Obama

In comparison to other world leaders who have a Twitter, SBY may well already be in the top twenty, beating the likes of Indian prime minister Manmohan Singh and Australian prime minister Julia Gillard. So far, SBY is ranked third on Twitter among Asian world leaders, just behind Filipino president Benigno Aquino III, and Malaysian prime minister Najib bin Tun Haji Abdul Razak. If SBY is gunning for the top then it will be very challenging to get close to Barack Obama’s 30 million followers.

While I believe it’s just a matter of time until SBY becomes the biggest Asian nation leader on Twitter account, he won’t be able to beat Barack Obama. That’s because SBY’s presidential period will be over by next year, and he’s not eligible to go up for re-election again.

It is great to see how technology is being used more and more by important figures. It allows them to interact with people better and even send out important news and messages in real time. I hope this can set the trend for future Indonesian leaders to do the same – to listen to and speak with citizens online.

Corruption is quite big in Indonesia. It’s very much normal – and even a habit – just to look the other way when we are dealing with government officials here. We have to follow their orders, and if not, we won’t be able to get anything done by a public service. This includes paying more “fees” for a lot of things, like unauthorized administration fees, or simply just to “motivate” the officials to deal with our matters more quickly.

Thankfully now we can do something about it and report them quickly using the government’s latest online reporting system called Lapor (meaning report in Indonesian). Basically if people want to report improper conduct done by any public service, they can do so with this online service. The service is launched by Open Government Indonesia, an initiative to promote transparency, public participation, and innovation across government departments, and is coordinated by government unit UKP4.

I gave the service a try and so far it looks very promising. The website has a clean and simple look. Users can register themselves easily with Facebook or Twitter, and they can then use the service.

Filing a report on the site is very easy and effective. You only need to choose one of the public service categories, then fill in your report and send it. There is an option for you to upload any supporting files too, like pictures or videos of the reported misconduct or act of corruption. Users can then opt to make the report discreetly, and also remain anonymous.

Users can also file a report without going online by sending the report via SMS to 1708. In fact, about 50 percent of the reports made come from handphone messages. And just to make sure Indonesians have all the access they need to participate on Lapor, there are apps for Android, and Blackberry, with an iOS version to come soon.

Indonesia is very social, and Lapor also has social features. Users can look up reports made by other people (there’s also a “hot reports” section shown on the right side of the website), comment on them, share, and even support them. But sadly you can’t “unsupport” a report after you clicked the support button.

So far there have been some success stories derived from the service. One guy reported that he had to wait two months to change his ownership certificate details, while the correct procedure states that the process only takes about five days. Only 50 minutes after he made the report on Lapor, the user received a follow-up from the online service that he can already get his certificate back – in line with the promised procedure. You can see a few more success stories from Lapor here.

I am personally very excited with this new service. Now at least Indonesian citizens have some power in their hands to fight against injustice happening in our public service system. If this goes well, I can imagine our public service getting a lot better because the officials would be afraid of being reported by users.

Satu Layanan launches officially too

Open Government Indonesia project also fully launched its government information portal service called “Satu Layanan.” The only notable difference the portal has compared to its beta version is the number of government information services within it, which has grown to 111 from the previous 50. But I find the site’s implementation isn’t exactly totally up to par. When I tried to access information about business licenses, it prompted me back to the homepage instead. So far the site says that there are around 72,000 visitors that have accessed it.

All in all, the government’s effort to cater to more Indonesian citizens using technology is getting better by the day. If the implementation is as good as the idea, then I can definitely see these two services being used routinely by many Indonesians.

(Source: DailySocial)

Credit: Googleblog.blogspot.ca

Google (NASDAQ:GOOG) announced yesterday that that its Google Apps will be used for educational purposes by 10 million Malaysian students, teachers, and parents. Furthermore, the government will also ‘deploy’ Chromebooks to be used in the country’s primary and secondary schools. VentureBeat believes that the government chose Chromebooks because of their relative affordability. All of this is to support Malaysia’s 12-year education blueprint.

The government plans to provide 4G internet access, a virtual learning platform, and a minimum 10:1 ratio of students to computers to all 10,000 schools in Malaysia. Those Chromebooks will definitely help the students get more familiar with computers, and of course will also make sure Google is very much central to people’s lives starting in the early school years.

Google Apps for Education has gained quite a few partners across the Asia Pacific region in the past few years. Among them are Thailand’s Khon Kaen University, Indonesia’s Petra University, the Philippines’ Commission for Higher Education, Singapore’s Ministry of Education, and India’s University of New Delhi faculty of management. There are currently 3,000 schools worldwide that are using Chromebooks for educational purposes.

(Source: Google via VentureBeat)

Credit: Kompas.com

About two days ago, someone spotted an under construction store at Indonesia’s Pasaraya Blok M – a shopping center in Jakarta – with a sign that says “Apple Store Open: 16 Juni 2013” complete with Apple’s logo on it (pictured above). We’ve known for quite a while that Apple is indeed going to open an office and perhaps a store too, so will this be the company’s first official Apple Store in the country? Most probably not.

Aulia Masna, chief editor of DailySocial and former editor in chief of Macworld Indonesia argues (as quoted by Kompas) that there are a lot of details that the upcoming store misses. First is that the announcement uses Arial font, which is not the kind of font Apple usually use for its ads. According to AppleGazette, Apple uses Myriad Pro Semibold font.

The second obvious fact is that the store mixes both Indonesian and English language in its announcement. The month of “Juni” is in Indonesian, and Apple wouldn’t do that.

Third mistake is that the sign gives away too much information. IfoAppleStore explains that Apple only acknowledges the location of an upcoming store about seven to 10 days prior to the grand opening – and that’s usually accompanied by an announcement on the retail section of Apple’s site. This store is months away from completion.

Fourth, an Apple official store should have a minimum of 2,000 square meters of space, and the one at Pasaraya is much smaller than that, having around 100 meter squares. Furthermore, Apple wouldn’t open its first official store at a place like Blok M. I don’t have anything against the place, it’s just that you won’t find wealthier Indonesians at that mall. A better spot for an official Apple Store would be Pacific Place mall which has a Lamborghini store on the ground floor.

THIS is what a real Apple store banner looks like, from a new Hong Kong store last year. Image by Casey Lau.

The last mistake, which comes to be the most obvious one too, is the fact that the upcoming Indonesian Apple Store is using a cheap banner. No way does it look like the kind of banners that Apple uses for its upcoming official store announcements (pictured above).

So this looks like an authorized (or unauthorized) reseller of Apple gear, and they are trying to get as much attention from this stunt as possible. And it worked.

As in many other developing countries, there are a lot of intellectual property infringements happening in Indonesia. Should Apple do something about this over-zealous usage of Apple’s logo, Aulia believes the reseller will be issued with a cease and desist order, and will need to have the sign replaced.

Whatever happens, there’s no such thing as bad publicity, right?

Credit: Kompas.com

Credit: Kompas.com

(Source: Kompas)

Indonesia’s Soccer Ticker app, which was the overall winner of the Blackberry JamHack Asia competition recently, is proving to be popular with global football fans. The app is still positioned first in the Blackberry AppWorld for the “football and soccer” category, as it has been since launch on January 30th. Co-founder of app maker Inspira Solusi Indonesia, Vincent Putera, told us that its top four user areas are the UK, Canada, Saudi Arabia, and Indonesia. These people most probably are still a bit drowsy from watching the Champions League action last night.

Besides updating its Blackberry 10 app about twice a month, the team is now working hard to bring the Soccer Ticker experience to Android soon. Vincent explains that they will keep some exclusive features for Blackberry 10 devices, such as sharing app content with friends via BBM.

The app itself now supports major European leagues including the ones in England, Spain, Germany, Italy, France, Champions League, and the Europa League. Its other latest updates include a lite Twitter client that can stream football feeds and has embedded social interactivity. I personally find the app’s live betting updates an interesting feature. One of the top priorities for Vincent is to end the season strongly and be fully prepared for the upcoming World Cup next year.

Asked about what he thinks of the recent Blackberry Z10 launch in Indonesia, Vincent said that he thought it was a successful one:

All the telcos supported it, and the media talked about it, so I think it was a successful launch. Some people like it, some people don’t, and some people are waiting for Q10, but that’s normal.

At the same time, the reality is BlackBerry no longer has the appeal it used to have two to three years ago. Gone are the days when BlackBerry would launch a product, and people would literally step on another human being to get in line.

Original image credit: berita.upi.edu

The Jakarta Globe reports today that the Indonesian president, Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono (SBY), will launch his own personal Twitter account soon. It is still undisclosed what Twitter account name the president will use, or when it is going to be launched. Presidential spokesperson, Julian Aldrin Pasha, explained to the paper how the Twitter account will be managed:

The tweets will be directly from him. There will be a team who helps manage the account but every time the tweet comes from the president, there will be a special code to let people know it is from him.

This special code might simply be the president’s initial, which is also used by Twitter’s most powerful user, US president Barack Obama, to let his followers know which tweets come directly from him. It is going to be interesting to see how the upcoming presidential Twitter account deals with the surge of tweets created by the 29 million strong Indonesian Twitterers every day – and specifically how SBY will handle online criticism and protests.

The spokesperson added that SBY fully understands about the criticism he will face in real-time on Twitter. The president is apparently willing to respond on Twitter if there is misleading information going round on the net. One current controversy surround the president is about his questionable tax returns. That will definitely have a place on the president’s upcoming tweeting agenda.

SBY will find a number of government officials recommended to him upon signing up for Twitter. There’s incumbent Jakarta vice governor Basuki Purnama and ICT minister Tifatul Sembiring – the former now has 181,000 followers and the latter has 540,000.

Another Twitter account for the presidential palace @istanarakyat (meaning “the people’s palace”) was launched two days ago. It tweets about the president’s informal activities as well as news about the palace itself. It has already attracted more than 4,000 followers.

With this, SBY will add the tally of world leaders who have a Twitter account.

(Source: The Jakarta Globe)

Popular video sharing site Vimeo was blocked by Indonesia’s largest telco Telkomsel for a short while. And while it was still being blocked, the only reasonable answer that the company’s customer service and staff had was that Vimeo was somehow associated with the only thing that is being widely censored in Indonesia: porn.

As the third largest democratic country in the world, the news media here can still talk about anything that they want (albeit with a few ‘discouragements’), even when it is related to the first family’s dodgy tax returns. One of the reporters of the above article tweeted about his experience being contacted time and time again by the president’s staff. And The Jakarta Post office was heavily discouraged from publishing the article. But still, the government couldn’t do anything other than that, and the article was published, putting the president in the spotlight.

But as the second largest Muslim populated country in the world, it is still very sensitive about pornographic material. The ICT minister Tifatul Sembiring (being also a representative of an Islamic-oriented political party, the PKS) has vowed to curb porn in Indonesia. This is the same minister who has blocked more than one million porn sites, and was even able to force RIM (now known as Blackberry) to filter porn on its Blackberry handsets two years ago.

Just last week Tifatul also made a request to Twitter to see if the US-based company can censor porn-related tweets to protect Indonesian children from accessing those sites. Twitter’s new country-by-country censorship policy might be able to grant that request, but so far there is no update about the enquiry.

Getting past the censorship?

While porn sites are definitely being blocked by the Indonesian government, interestingly porn site Xvideos is sitting securely at the 48th spot in Indonesia according to Alexa’s rankings. There are indeed ways to overcome the censorship like changing the DNS address, using proxy servers, or using VPN services. And you could do those on your mobile phones too.

Though sometimes the government and telcos get it right concerning which sites should indeed be blocked under the nation’s anti-porn laws, there are times when they get it wrong. Vimeo is one such example – it’s an artistic site crucial for young filmmakers in the country to get global, creative exposure.

Indonesia is still a democratic country which respects your freedom of speech – but with a religious twist. But when an unfair block happens, young web users know that there are ways to still access whatever is being censored.

Singapore-based mobile social gaming and entertainment company FunSpot announced today that it has signed a partnership agreement with Indonesia’s largest telco Telkomsel to bring FunSpot’s services in neighboring Indonesia. The agreement, according to the statement, will see FunSpot providing Telkomsel’s customers with a fully integrated mobile social gaming network in the Indonesian language and nine mobile social games. It looks like this latest deal will pit FunSpot head to head with another mobile social gaming platform Kotagames (by TMG) for the Indonesian market.

With around 125 million Telkomsel subscribers in the country, there’s still plenty of room for the two companies to share. But it seems like their battleground is not only in Indonesia as they are both eyeing stakes in the Southeast Asian market. Note that Singaporean telco Singtel has invested in Kotagames and it also owns a 35 percent stake in Telkomsel. This could make FunSpot’s partnership with Telkomsel a little tricky as there is a potential conflict of interest.

One thing that could make FunSpot more appealing than Kotagames though, is the company’s feature which lets users share media files via the website. You can see some of them being shared and commented on by a few users in FunSpot’s Indonesian mobile site here. I don’t think that feature is available on Kotagames.

Kotagames itself is definitely keeping its presence felt in Indonesia by currently holding to six million users so far, with around 90 percent of them as feature phone users. With the huge pie in Indonesia, FunSpot’s emergence in the country shouldn’t deter Kotagames’ 10 million user target by the end of this year.

Sirgoo Lee (pictured right) is a very nice guy. He’s the co-CEO of Korea-based chat app KakaoTalk. When he went onstage at our Startup Asia Singapore event last week, he spontaneously said that he was really excited to be there, even before being introduced by interviewer Willis Wee. He went on to reveal important figures about the company’s yearly revenue and profit – something that few startups opt to divulge. So I was pleased I got the chance to meet Sirgoo in person after the conference to talk about the company’s expansion plans to Indonesia and Vietnam.

Sirgoo explains that KakaoTalk’s strategy is to let the general public know and at least try using the app. Whatever happens after that – either people will choose to use KakaoTalk more, or test rival apps – lies with the users themselves. He said that the biggest challenge so far is to convince people to take that first step to try KakaoTalk. Today, thanks to the high-profile, star-studded TV ad campaign the company is running in Indonesia, the app is now sitting at the top spot in the overall app category in the country’s iTunes and Google Play stores.

Sirgoo explained that since the TV ads aired in Indonesia on March 29th, KakaoTalk has received around 100,000 downloads every day. Which means that there are now at least one million Indonesians who have tried the app. The app’s progress in Vietnam is speeding up too, ranking fourth on iTunes and 13th on Google Play right now.

Searching for local partners

While the company is being very serious about expanding to Indonesia and Vietnam, there aren’t any KakaoTalk offices yet in either country. We understand that there are only two KakaoTalk representatives who have been sent to the latter country. Why? Sirgoo explained that those staffers will focus on initial marketing plans and will look for local partners.

Not only are they looking for local deals for KakaoTalk’s localized content, but the teams are looking for a big local partner to help them get going in each country. Sirgoo gives an example of how they signed a joint venture agreement with Yahoo Japan to help promote the app in the territory of homegrown rival Line.

Sirgoo says that they haven’t found this kind of partner yet in Indonesia and Vietnam. Such a partner, he explained, must have very good understanding of online services, and have strong influence in each local market. KakaoTalk’s rival WeChat has signed a partnership with Indonesian media giant MNC Media earlier this year, forming a joint-venture called MNC-Tencent.

Why BigBang?

I was curious why the startup company chose Korean boy band BigBang to be KakaoTalk’s TV ad stars. Sirgoo says that it’s not only the group’s youth appeal and influence that made the company chose them, but also BigBang’s depth of artistry and wider pop appeal. In this way, he sees the band as being like the Kakao app.

Another strength that KakaoTalk wants to keep up is the way it tailors its apps based on the audience. The company will not use the same strategy it uses in South Korea in other countries, and instead aims to attract a substantial user-base first while analyzing what users in new nations like or dislike. One of the reasons KakaoTalk isn’t pushing too many games to Indonesian users is because the company is unsure whether its new users like to play mobile social games or if they hate getting game requests from their chat buddies. A further localization effort is seen in how the company compresses its stickers and animations to cope with slower Internet speeds in Indonesia – this can also be implemented in Vietnam of course.

The future

Sirgoo believes that while the killer product on desktop internet is search engines, the killer product on mobile devices is messaging apps. And with more people using mobile devices, they will also demand that mobile devices can do everything that they can do on desktop machines. This includes games, shopping, and many other things.

The co-CEO believes that gaming and shopping success stories – two avenues that KakaoTalk has ventured into, he said – is just the beginning. Though Sirgoo declined to reveal what the team has in store next.

He believes that KakaoTalk is a platform for people from various industries and many countries to collaborate. This extends to not only games and stickers, but also to other bigger possibilities in the future. But his first priority is definitely to build up a big enough user-base in new nations first.

Singapore-based startup ShopBust offers an interesting way for shoppers to earn money by doing what they love the most, which is by shopping. How does the team do that? Founder Saad Kamal is now speaking onstage on our Startup Arena event, explaining how exactly the team aims to give money to shoppers all the while offering businesses some insights to its frontline activities.

The concept is quite simple, users first register as a ShopBust “mystery shopper” and then select an available assignment from the site. These assignments are scenarios that clients asked ShopBust do at selected retail outlets, with some of them include making purchases at the store. After the user gets approved for a particular assignment by the team, and have done the scenario, then the user will receive the “mystery shopping fee” which covers the purchase and a bit extra.

Typically, a regular mystery shopper will then review the store’s performance in areas such as staff appearance, friendliness, engagement, wait and service time, cleanliness, the store’s appearance, and overall on-site customer experience. The shoppers themselves will be curated based on location and social media profiling so that ShopBust’s clients get the kind of demographic the store owner wants to hear from.

Saad explains that they now have about 12,350 members to help run the startup’s operations in Singapore, the Philippines, and Indonesia. They have so far signed a couple of clients in the region and got a deal to run a pilot with two big fast-moving consumer goods brands and consumer electronics brand.

So far, ShopBust’s private beta is now operating in Singapore, Indonesia, and the Philippines. The team’s concept has received a good response so far, encouraging more than 12,000 people to sign up to be a mystery shopper.

Judge Nobuaki Kitagawa asked how they can convince retailers better than the current mystery shopping business models. Saad answered that they promise 48-hour full report, rather than a 10 to 12 weeks traditional reporting time. He added that they promise real-time data to clients.

When asked by judge Yasuhiko Yurimoto asked how they can convince retailers to use ShopBust’s services, Saad explained that it isn’t that hard to do so because retailers are already familiar with mystery shopping business model, ShopBust can simply do it better with more technology behind it.

This is a part of our coverage of Startup Asia Singapore 2013, our event running on April 4 and 5. For the rest of our Startup Arena pitches, see here. You can follow along on Twitter at @techinasia, and on our Facebook page.

There are a lot of mobile messaging apps on the market right now like Line, KakaoTalk, and WeChat, to name but a few. Nonetheless, more and more vertical chatting apps are emerging, believing that there is still room for them to grow. The latest is Hoozin. Hoozin is an Israeli-made chatting app that hopes to fill in the gap in capturing the sensation of real-life group conversation in its messaging app.

Co-founder Udi Zohar is presenting now onstage at our Startup Arena event here in Singapore. Let’s see how they can convince the judges that their chat app has a place among the crowd.

The biggest differentiator with Hoozin is its group interaction feature, which dumps the traditional linear feed messaging approach and puts in Hoozin’s own group messaging design (pictured right) which the team believes is more fun and dynamic. They believe that real life group dynamics are not linear and much more fun and varied, and Hoozin’s group messaging allows users the possibility of engaging with more than just one or two users within the group.

Hoozin is still in beta right now and is defiantly targeting the Asian market. In the near future, they plan to add more things like group games and animations. And just like other general chat apps, Hoozin plans to bring in money from in-app purchases and partnerships with local brands.

Hoozin received quite some tough love from the judges. Judge Nobuaki Kitagawa asked if the only differentiator with bigger players like Line and KakaoTalk is Hoozin’s group feature, in which Udi answered that the group feature alone is quite important. Judge Jeffry Paine wasn’t impressed with the app. He suggested the team to pivot to do group dating instead that could make the app better.

This is a part of our coverage of Startup Asia Singapore 2013, our event running on April 4 and 5. For the rest of our Startup Arena pitches, see here. You can follow along on Twitter at @techinasia, and on our Facebook page.

You might have heard a bit about 8Villages. Not only has the startup been interviewed by us, but also by the BBC, which is a rare feat for a small company in this region. The startup offers farmers in Southeast Asian rural villages access to important information about farming-related topics like weather forecasts and crop prices – stuff that’s crucial to crop yield and farm profit. CEO Mathieu Le Bras and Sanny Gaddafi is now onstage at our Startup Arena event, and he is looking to convince the judges that he deserves to be the champion.

8Villages is now operating in Indonesia. Its main customer product is called LISA (Farmers Information Service) and farmers can subscribe to it using their basic mobile phones. Through LISA, not only will the farmers be able to receive the agricultural-related information, but they will also be able to ask their own questions and get expert advice.

8Villages uses its channels to connect brands and businesses to its users and earns revenue from that. So far, 8Villages has cooperated with two of Indonesia’s biggest telcos, Telkomsel and Indosat. The team has also secured its first large corporate client and has seen revenues generated out of it. They are on track to enter the Philippines in the upcoming season.

The judges mainly asked about how the business is going right now. Mathieu explained that They have three clients putting in US$6,500 every month. These clients are big multinational corporations. Regarding 8Villages’ cooperation with telcos of Telkomsel and Indosat, they are at initial agreement of 50-50 revenue sharing.

This is a part of our coverage of Startup Asia Singapore 2013, our event running on April 4 and 5. For the rest of our Startup Arena pitches, see here. You can follow along on Twitter at @techinasia, and on our Facebook page.

As one of the biggest payment companies in Southeast Asia, it is going to be interesting to hear what MOL founder Ganesh Kumar Bangah has to share about how he started his company. And most importantly, what his company plans to do in the future. Interviewed by Willis Wee, this is what Ganesh has to say:

#15:21: MOL’s annual revenue is US$300 million, with 60 million transactions in a year.

#15:22: Ganesh raised funding of two million Ringgit from Berjaya Group in its early days. Out of Berjaya Group’s 30 investments, he was one of the two to survive. About MOL’s biggest investment made by Malaysian billionaire Vincent Tan, now Vincent owns over 80 percent of MOL. “When you raise a lot of money in the beginning, you increase your overhead, and after you do that, it’s difficult to turn it down.” So it is good to be conservative in spending, explained Ganesh.

#15:23: Ganesh gives advice to fellow entrepreneurs: persevere, don’t lose focus. A lot of people give up early on. Back in the days, internet connection was not as big as now, if Ganesh gave up in the first eight, 12 months, he wouldn’t be here now.

#15:24: Focus on games is important, and the social aspect inside it too. Before Zynga arrived, Ganesh suggested Friendster to put in social games, but it was ignored.

#15:25: “We bought Friendster not to beat Facebook, but to buy its assets, its brand.” The moment after Ganesh bought Friendster, everyone recognizes his company as the one who bought Friendster. Before the Friendster acquisition, MOL had around 200,000 registered users with a few of them spending $60 a month. After the acquisition, MOL gathered 2.7 million registered members in three years, in which six percent of them spend $60 a month. Friendster patents had some value as well. It was sold to a big social network… maybe Facebook, but Willis was the one who said that, not Ganesh.

#15:27: Tons of developers out there need marketing, and now Friendster is a channeling arena for developers to launch games.

#15:28: Talking about MOL’s acquisition to Indonesian payment gateway AyoPay, he explained that AyoPay is similar to MOL, but in Indonesia. MOL has had presence in Indonesia for one to two years, and AyoPay was distributing MOL points during that time. Ganesh sees that they can broaden the relationship to the next level.

#15:29: The next five to eight years, Ganesh will change Indonesia’s game play to mostly physical card games compared to online gaming.

#15:30: “At this time and age, we need to have Southeast Asian focus which has 600 million people. Its demographic is similar to China and the US.” Ganesh said that if you’re not considering tp go global, at least eye Southeast Asia. Malaysia is small.

#15:31: MOL was once a listed company, but not anymore. Coping with its shareholders became problematic. They gave back shareholders good return, and cut some losses. Maybe next year MOL will go public again.

#15:32: On MOL’s future plans, there’s something about Vietnam which is associated with payment. The press release will come soon. Willis couldn’t break Ganesh to reveal anything more.

#15:34: About things Ganesh would do differently if he could do it all over again, he said that he went for easy money too fast, like going to new region, selling his company [share] too fast, or even listing his company. This can decrease your company value, explained Ganesh. You need to aim medium to longer timeline.

#15:35: “I do angel investment, but in areas I’m good at.” Ganesh doesn’t invest in advertising, because he doesn’t do that.

This is a part of our coverage of Startup Asia Singapore 2013, our event running on April 4 and 5. For all our newest Startup Arena pitches, see here. You can follow along on Twitter at @startupasia, and on our Facebook page.

Singapore-based cosmetic and skincare e-commerce startup Luxola announces today that it has received series A funding from GREE Ventures for an undisclosed amount. The startup will use the funds to help its expansion plan across Southeast Asia as well as growing its product offerings.

Luxola founder and CEO Alexis Horowitz-Burdick said that they hope to expand to Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand, and the Philippines. e27 explained that Luxola has become GREE Ventures’ biggest investment as a Southeast Asian company. And that this falls into GREE Ventures’ US$ 25 million Asia fund.

Luxolaʼs founder and CEO Alexis Horowitz-Burdick

As mentioned, Luxola’s customers are women. And we know that GREE Ventures does believe in putting its money in e-commerce businesses, including Indonesia’s Berrybenka which targets women as well. This latest investment can complement those two portfolio companies to be the women’s answers to online shopping in the region.

Today Luxola also revealed its two new senior executives Christine Ng as chief marketing and product officer as well as Adrien Barthel as general manager for Indonesia. Prior to this investment, Luxola had raised S$740,000 funding from WaveMaker Labs, Singapore’s National Research Foundation, and angel investors. GREE Ventures itself has invested in an Indonesian women’s fashion online shop Berrybenka. This latest investment could be a signal to bridge those two businesses in Indonesia.

By the way, Alexis was one of our panelists speaking about women in tech startups at our Startup Asia Singapore event. She was quite straightforward in giving her answers and had some support from the audience for her views. And this latest news is a testament that women can indeed excel in the tech startup industry – not that we had any doubts at all. Her suggestion for fellow female entrepreneurs: be tough, in every way.

Onto the next sharing session, we have Indonesia’s Andy Zain to share about his country’s startup ecosystem. Andy is the founder of Mobile Monday Indonesia and the director of Jakarta Founder’s Institute. Here’s what he got to say:

#12:51: Titled “Looking for startup worthy for Indonesian market.” Andy kicks things off by sharing a few Indonesian data. With a population of 240 million people, Indonesia is an interesting and pretty much connected market. With 280 million mobile phone connections in the country – more SIM cards than the human number, Andy joked – 30 million of them subscribe to 3G connection.

#12:52: Andy carries more than one phones at a time, and there are about 80 percent mobile phone ownership in Indonesia. The PC or laptop ownership is at a really low five percent.

#12:54: Indonesia is very passionate, they don’t only follow trend, but they also help create trend. Like Blackberry, Indonesians also help to shape the usage. Back in America, it is used by corporates, but in young Indonesians use it to socialize and have fun. That’s why Blackberry in Indonesia isn’t in boring black color, but on “bling-bling” fun color.

#12:56: Indonesia is a trend creator as the citizens are really fast in adopting technology. Indonesia conquered the UK and France when it comes to Facebook users. What drives them? The reason people use data on their phone because it’s very cheap, said Andy. It costs US#2.5 to get 1GB data. Singapore has two or three times the price.

#12:58: 50 percent phones sold in Indonesia cost below $50. In average, mobile phones are priced at $90. You need to understand what device that they are using to approach them. 30 percent of the phones used in the country comes from local brands. The ads coming out in Indonesia mostly come from local brands.

#13:00: Only 25 percent of people have access to bank accounts, with only 16 million credit cards are around. The latter number is going down, not up, because the government is regulating the requirements for people to own credit cards.

#13:02: A few banks are trying to be creative, offering people to have a bank account without needing to have a bank account. People can now send fund to anyone as long as they have a phone number. They would only need to have a bank account if they want to withdraw the money. Another solution offered is Blackberry Money.

#13:04: 55 percent of Indonesians are below 30 years old. The next ten years is going to be very interesting. Looking at the population pyramid, a lot of people are going to grow into middle class, even bigger to other markets in Southeast Asia. Talking further details about devices, inside the next three years, feature phones are still going to be big. Nobody cares about feature phone markets, nobody are coming in and understand those area.

#13:06: A lot of Indonesian startups fail. Why? Because they don’t focus on mobile market. A few of them focus on only 10 million Blackberry users, a few of them focus only on smartphone markets.

#13:08: Andy Zain shares survival tips when building your business in Indonesia. You need to create everything works on mobile phones. A lot of Indonesians are first time internet users, so you need to make the steps very simple. Most assumptions are wrong, like Blackberry is big. No, only half of them are using data connection, and only half of them are using full data packages. 95 percent Blackberry users are only using it for chat.

#13:09: ARPU is very low, selling things above 30 cents will be very difficult. Indonesians are quite price sensitive. You also need to have access to different distribution centers, particularly local ones. Don’t just count on being available on one big portal.

This is his slide if you’re curious:

This is a part of our coverage of Startup Asia Singapore 2013, our event running on April 4 and 5. For all our newest Startup Arena pitches, see here. You can follow along on Twitter at @techinasia, and on our Facebook page.

Currently onstage now is the founder of Thailand’s e-commerce site Tarad.com, Pawoot Pongvitayapanu or Pom. Interviewed by Willis Wee, Pom talks about the lessons he learned after Japan-based e-commerce giant Rakuten bought a majority stake of Tarad in 2009.

#15:02: Tarad is a marketplace and it was started in 2001. Pom said that it was the worst time to start a business because Thailand was having a crisis then.

#15:05: Pom said that – if based on newspaper reports – Rakuten bought majority stake on Tarad for US$3 million. He said that everything changed after Rakuten came in. Now that they’re working with Rakuten, everything has to be in numbers, everything has to be punctual. “We have morning meeting, each team has daily communication, and every person has to submit report every day,” said Pom.

#15:07: KPI tree is important, we break down our target numbers like traffic and buyer convertion. Each KPI belongs to each department, and each department’s KPI is broken down to each person.

#15:09: You can download Pom’s KPI spreadsheet through his personal website Pawoot.com. But it needs some translation effort.

#15:12: Most people work for money, but if you’re working for another reason which is bigger like to empower the society, it is better as you are more purpose-driven. “Rakuten made us believe that we can grow and change the lives of the society and country. It is important to us.” Before getting acquired, Pom didn’t have that way of thinking.

#15:14: Rakuten CEO Hiroshi Mikitani inspired Pom. “If you’re working in Rakuten, you know everything.” It is because the employees always communicate with each other every day.

#15:17: It was very hard to convince people to shop online, but after getting acquired by Rakuten, credit card has become the majority of online payment method on Tarad. If Pom had the chance to do it all over again, he would run his company just like Rakuten does.

This is a part of our coverage of Startup Asia Singapore 2013, our event running on April 4 and 5. For all our newest Startup Arena pitches, see here. You can follow along on Twitter at @techinasia, and on our Facebook page.

Japanese game developer and publisher Nijibox announced on Monday that there are a few personnel changes for the company’s key positions. During this opportunity the company also told us about its latest development: it’s got five million users.

Since Nijibox’s inception in November 2011, the company has gathered an average of 400,000 active users every month across its 46 game titles. 18 percent of users downloaded the game directly onto feature phones, 42 percent from smartphone downloads, and the rest comes from Nijibox’s partnership with gaming platforms worldwide.

Nijibox has achieved quite a feat in Indonesia too, reaching 1.5 million users in December, only five months since the company launched two game titles, Monster Fantasia and Costume Fantasia, last year. Both are card battle games, Monster Fantasia lets you play as a monster tamer and save the world while in Costume Fantasia, you get to save the world by rescuing beautiful ladies first. The company’s monthly revenue in Indonesia also increased 620 percent in that five month period.

Nijibox recently launched its third Fantasia card battle game title in Indonesia called Legend of Fantasia. Set in the future, you get to save the world by fighting off alien invaders.

Founder and CEO Yoichi Aso now holds two more strategic positions as president and representative director. As TMG founder Alvin Yap puts it to fellow entrepreneurs, we hope Yoichi can still get enough sleep.

Students are using internet in the van. Image courtesy of Kompas.com

Though being the third largest democratic country in the world, corruption is still quite big in Indonesia. And now Detik yesterday reported that the ICT ministry’s effort to push internet penetration to the country’s rural areas is being called into question following allegations that the IDR 2.4 trillion (US$246 million) budget is being misused.

The people’s representative (DPR) Commission 1 is proposing to put the ICT ministry’s program on hold until it is thoroughly audited by the supreme audit agency (BPK). The commission argues that the program isn’t meeting its targets and expectations. For example, the equipment used by the “internet vans” – mobile internet cafes that are driven to remote areas – called the District Mobile Internet Service Center (M-PLIK) are not meeting its standards. And some of the vans are not being used properly, with a few of them becoming electricity billing collection vehicles instead.

With the target of building and spreading 1,907 M-PLIK vehicles, 1,061 of them haven’t been realized yet. The progress to build 5,748 District Internet Service Centers (PLIK) is a lot better, with only 418 more to be developed. ¹ This government program started back in March 2010. So it is normal to ask a few questions about the slow progress given the huge budget the ministry has.

In another effort to push internet into rural areas, starting May 1st, the Management of Indonesian Internet Domain Names (PANDI) will launch ‘.desa.id’ web domains to be used by the smallest government unit, villages. PANDI hopes that this will help push more distinctly rural Indonesian content rather than more urban-oriented dominated content.

(Sources: Detik #1 and #2)

Developed by a team based in Bali, email app MailBird launched its public beta version yesterday. Cited by media like LifeHacker and TechCrunch as being similar or simply inspired by the prominent email app Sparrow for Mac, MailBird can be a good email alternative for Windows users.

MailBird is a good option if you’d like to use a slick email client similar to Sparrow on Windows. It has similar design, good overall functionality and ease of use.

One unique thing about MailBird is that it offers third party developers the ability to build and sell new features on top of the app. It now supports Google Calendar and Dropbox (pictured below), and co-founder Michael Bodekaer told us that they are looking to integrate with other popular ‘getting things done’ apps. Another upcoming feature is an email dashboard called “Wingman” which lets you monitor your productivity, measuring – for example – the time you spend on composing emails.

Since becoming one of the finalists of Sparxup 2012, the MailBird team has been quiet thus far testing its private beta version among 3,824 users. And now that it’s out for the general public, Michael is optimistic that they can get one million users by the end of 2013.

Co-founder Andrea Loubier believes that what sets Mailbird apart from the rest is its focus on Windows platform and not messing it up by wanting to be on every OS. The choice to be on Windows is also a calculated one as Andrea identifies that the OS still holds 92 percent marketshare worldwide.

While Mailbird’s premium version would cost you $12 per year, you can give the app’s free version a try here. That version includes ads and “sent by Mailbird” signatures. The team also plans to roll out a business version to cater to more than five people, and will charge $9 per user every year. And even before the app was publicly beta launched, Mailbird already had quite a few users pre-ordering the product.

Global outsourcing online marketplace Freelancer, which connects people to freelance jobs posted worldwide, is making an effort to bring in more members from Malaysia with a localized language feature that launched just last week. The company is looking to assist with the country’s eight year plan in catalysing growth and income of its SMEs with jobs offered on the site. At the moment, 97 percent all business establishments in Malaysia are SMEs.

There are around 50,000 Freelancer users in Malaysia, and regional manager for Asia, Evan Tan, told us that they plan to increase that to 300,000 by next year. The company aspires to do this by launching more features targeted towards the Malaysian market, such as the recently rolled-out Bahasa Malaysia language service.

Most of Freelancer’s jobs come from English speaking countries like the UK, the US, and Australia. As English is a widely spoken language in Malaysia, a lot of Malaysians are well able to use the site’s features effectively already. Internet penetration in Malaysia is good at about 60.7 percent, or around 17.7 million people being online. Evan adds:

We’re supporting the Malaysian government’s goal to become a high income, advanced nation by 2020, by making top talent as well as high-quality work accessible to Malaysians.

Before stepping into Malaysia, Freelancer expanded to neighboring Indonesia last year, rolling out localized language support for the country. It has seen significant growth of over 60 percent in only three months, with more than 100,000 Indonesian users currently.

Although Indonesian e-commerce site Tokopedia moved its office last month, the company chose an interesting date – today, which is April Fools’ Day – to announce its relocation to the media. But this announcement is no prank – Tokopedia has really relocated to a bigger space to accommodate the team’s growth.

CEO William Tanuwijaya told us that the team now has 40 people and he expects the number to keep increasing in the near future. He also took time to explain Tokopedia’s vision, values, and culture to users. With the vision of shaping a better Indonesia via the internet, the company also cherishes the friends it meets during the process with its “nakama code” [1].

William also shared that according to the latest Alexa report, Tokopedia (now ranks 55th in the country) has taken the lead over other notable e-commerce sites such as Multiply (75th), Qoo10 (310th), and Rakuten (#583th). He also revealed that Tokopedia has become Mandiri Bank’s biggest partner in terms of transaction frequency in 2012, beating the domination of the nation’s airlines. Mandiri Bank is one of the largest banks in Indonesia.

Besides Tokopedia, local payment gateway Veritrans Indonesia also relocated its office recently. The team has grown to 28 staffers and they too are expecting great things to happen in the Indonesian e-commerce industry.

Bali-based game developer Dragon Game Studio has been quite busy recently, releasing its first-ever two games in the last couple of days. The new startup is using the hype around two global dance crazes in its first game, called Harlem Shake Vs. Gangnam Style. The second title is Don’t Steal My Banana. We talked with the studio’s co-founder, Sweden-born Jonas Johnsson, who says he decided to build his life with his wife and co-founder Joan Johnsson in Bali whilst also taking a plunge into the gaming industry.

I gave both games a try and saw that they both have the same kind of quirky graphics which are quite nice. Both are casual games; Harlem Shake Vs. Gangnam Style! is a very simple one. You just need to tap at the correct time while listening to the beat of either the Harlem Shake or Gangnam Style songs. Jonas says that they made their own versions of both the songs so that they won’t have too much trouble with intellectual property rights.

Don’t Steal My Banana is also quite straight-forward, but I found it more fun with interesting character level-ups and weapon alternatives to choose from. In the game you need to protect your giant banana from the horde of animals approaching you by throwing fruit – including with Indonesian speciality, the durian.

Jonas says that those two games are just side projects for Dragon Game Studio. Their main project is the upcoming BaliFied – Word Game of the Gods. He explained further:

It shows the love we have for Bali and we’ve turned some beautiful Balinese scenery into graphics which are used as backgrounds in the game. It’s going to be our masterpiece and we are planning to release it in June 2013.

Any game that showcases Indonesian culture sounds great by me. Until then, you can download Harlem Shake Vs. Gangnam Style for free on iTunes or Google Play. You can also give Don’t Steal My Banana a try on iOS and Android.

Image source credit: joinnetworkmarketing.files.wordpress.com

(Update: The Indonesian ICT minister Tifatul Sembiring tweeted earlier today that the Vimeo blockage is done by each Internet Service Provider.)

It has been a strange morning today as there have been numerous reports from Telkomsel customers in Indonesia that they can no longer access Vimeo because it is blocked by the provider (pictured below). Though others on the same ISP report that they can still access the video-streaming site. I talked with a few friends of mine and this is what I got from them: Vimeo is accessible under Telkom Speedy, an internet service by Telkomsel’s parent company Telkom, but Vimeo can’t be accessed under Telkomsel’s mobile 3G network. Why is the site blocked by Telkomsel?

The most probable reason any site is being blocked by Telkomsel, the company’s customer service told me, is that because it is affiliated with pornography. A similar statement was also given by Telkomsel’s Twitter account this morning, saying that if Vimeo has prohibited content, then it is blocked by Indonesian authorities. That is weird, because if it’s inaccessible at the order of Indonesia’s ICT minister, then why is Vimeo not blocked by other 3G providers too? At the time of writing, 3, Smartfren, and internet service providers like Telkom Speedy and Fastnet all allow access to Vimeo. So far it is only Telkomsel that has this problem.

Too much skin on Vimeo?

Vimeo is a weird target among video hosting sites for such a ban ¹.

There is no porn inside Vimeo, but there is nudity – apparently so long as it’s artistically justifiable. As a user-generated content site, there might be people who try to upload explicit material to Vimeo, but the site has made it clear that it prohibits such videos and will have them deleted when found. While the same thing applies to other video sharing sites like YouTube, I think Vimeo is by far one of the last video sharing sites you’d browse if you’re looking for porn.

Why? Because Vimeo usage is geared more towards professional film-makers and documentaries as it only allows people to upload videos that they created themselves or at least have necessary the licensing rights to publish. It’s all quite carefully curated. This explains Vimeo’s low number of users in comparison to Google’s video sharing site.

Crunching through user numbers and video uploads, the probable number of porn videos being uploaded on Vimeo pales in comparison to what YouTube receives every day (though YouTube deletes explicit content too). If porn is the reason behind Telkomsel’s ban, then YouTube should’ve been the one blocked first before Vimeo. And I think Telkomsel understands this too.

If nudity is porn…

I did find some nudity on both Vimeo and YouTube, but I did not find porn per se during my – ahem – research. Indonesia’s pornography law states that any form of communication in any media which can arouse sexual desire and/or violates the community’s morality norm is considered to be porn. That last part I highlighted because it is quite vague, and under that vagueness, nudity, even if it’s for artistic purposes, could also be construed as porn.

But this censorship has more cons than pros right now. Because not only are there a lot of Indonesian professional videographers who are using Vimeo every day – either to upload or to find inspiration – there are quite a number of fascinating videos on Vimeo which are worth seeing. Of course, Telkomsel’s ban means that Vimeo’s embedded videos will show up blank.

Right now, Vimeo is ranked 131st globally in terms of website popularity, and 351st in Indonesia.

Telkomsel is the largest telco in Indonesia, garnering around 121 million users back in October, making the telco the seventh largest in the world. 121 million users is about half the number of Indonesian population of 250 million. Surely quite a few of them are artists, film-makers, or fans of short films who watch Vimeo videos from time to time. I hope that other Indonesian telcos won’t bring this ban to their 3G – or home internet – services.

What do you guys think? Is censoring Vimeo the right thing to do?

(Hat tip to Ferdinand Zebua for this tip, and Rizqi Djamaluddin for the news)

IndoTelko reported yesterday that Indonesian telco Axis has launched its e-payment gateway called “Bayar Pake Axis” (meaning “pay with Axis”). For now, users can associate their credit cards with a Axis number, and they will be able to purchase the telco’s top-up phone credit easily through their phones. New users can register via the Axis website or its Facebook page.

In the near future, Axis’ payment gateway will also be integrated with debit cards and more bank accounts. There is no explanation if Axis’ payment gateway will let users purchase goods outside of Axis’ network.

Meanwhile, another Indonesian telco, Telkom has recently announced that it too is going to launch a new payment gateway to its e-payment products next month. This feature will allow users to cash-out their mobile e-wallet through any ATM without having a bank account. The feature will be available on all Telkom’s payment gateway products like T-Cash, Flexi Cash, Delima, and Mobile Cash.

Indonesia’s payment systems are definitely getting more integrated these days. Just last month, Blackberry also launched its payment gateway BBM Money in Indonesia.

(Sources: IndoTelko #1 and #2)

Stilomo, one of the first graduates from the Jakarta Founders Institute, launched its mobile site for daily deals last month. The startup’s site not only lists its own food and beverage promotions (where users get to use free coupons by sharing on social media sites), but Stilomo now also lists current deals from nearby companies like malls and banks. That’s quite helpful for shoppers, and shows that the startup is comfortable enough to help connect people with anything, even if it’s not actually a deal that Stilomo makes any money from.

The mobile site looks nice, and the startup tells us that there are now around 2,500 Stilomo users. The team’s iOS app should be launched in the near future. The startup’s current goal is to list food promotions scattered across the country, and put them into one convenient place in Stilomo. I think this is definitely helpful as people here usually have more than one credit card (which usually leads to lots of promotions and discounts), and so Stilomo can help update shoppers about the latest deals.

Stilomo launched its Android app last October and raised angel funding two months earlier. Though I for one think that there are already too many daily deals site in Indonesia, Stilomo’s food directory can prove to be a differentiator in the market. At least it can help generate foot-traffic for stores and in return that helps promote Stilomo’s own deals to retailers.

TV advertisements have proven to work very well for chat apps in Indonesia. China-based WeChat and Japan’s Line have been propelled to the country’s top spots on iOS and Android app stores thanks to their ads. And now Korea-based KakaoTalk is going to make its mark on the country’s TV sets by airing a TV ad campaign in a couple of days. Will the ads be significant in disrupting the chat ecosystem here? Yes, I think so.

Let’s first agree that TV ads do work to gain nationwide visibility and users in Indonesia. The country’s internet penetration is still at a relatively low 24 percent right now, which means that to engage with the other 76 percent of the nation (which amounts to around 190 million people) you need to use more traditional media, like TV. A study by BCG Perspectives shows that “most, if not all, households throughout the country own a television, even those at the bottom of the pyramid of demographic groups, and it remains the most important source of information for consumers. Indonesians trust television commercials.” Line’s and WeChat’s current rankings in Indonesia’s app sites are a testament to that.

But with Line and WeChat airing their own TV ads ahead of the Korean messaging app, how will KakaoTalk’s advertisement beat them? The answer lies with KakaoTalk’s choice of ad stars.

First of the two is Indonesian celebrity Sherina Munaf – who has the country’s second most-followed celebrity Twitter account with five million followers. She’s joined in the ad by Korean all-boy band BigBang, whose 11,000 concert tickets in Indonesia were sold out in a mere fifteen minutes. Those two stars will be able to attract quite a number of fans to try out KakaoTalk. While Line and WeChat are targeting Indonesian teens with Maudy Ayunda and singer Giselle, a great many teens – i.e.: girls – might fancy BigBang instead.

Also, let’s not forget how Korean fever in Indonesia which has inspired a few Indonesian Korean-style pop groups like SM*SH, Cherrybelle, and 7Icons, who have quite a large number of fan base themselves. The number of Korean TV drama series still being aired in the country prove the popularity of Korean pop culture as well. If KakaoTalk’s association with Korea proves to be successful, and Indonesian remember KakaoTalk when they think of Korea, then it will be a big boost.

Of course, Line is tough competition due to its social games or because a lot of friends are already there. Same goes for the full-featured WeChat, with things like voice chatrooms and video calling, especially when those more social features are now available on Indonesia’s popular smartphone Blackberry now.

At the time of writing, KakaoTalk is ranked outside the top 50 spots in both Google Play and iTunes in Indonesia, according to AppAnnie. Let’s see how those rankings will change in the coming weeks.

Yesterday, the fiasco made by Indonesian telco and handset manufacturer Smartfren made news all over Indonesia as the company’s internet connections have gone haywire over the last couple of weeks. In fact, the media blowout was big enough to get the Indonesian ICT minister Tifatul Sembiring to personally ask Smartfren about what really happened. And so finally, the company released an official statement.

The release states that a Smartfren submarine cable located between Bangka and Batam islands was cut by an oil ship anchor on March 23rd. It was Smartfren’s main cable route for global internet access. What’s worse is that a few hours after that incident, Smartfren’s two backup networks, called Trans Sumatra, got cut too as there was an avalanche in Palembang city that disrupted Trans Sumatra’s west route, and a construction process by a third party accidentally cut Trans Sumatra’s east route as well. It’s was a total disaster and that resulted in Smartfren’s internet access operating at 10 percent capacity over the last few days.

Interestingly, the information Smartfren released is a bit different from the version given to – and then tweeted by – Tifatul during his inquiry. He said that Smartfren’s submarine route got cut on March 15th, not March 23rd, and it brought the company down to 60 percent capacity. The avalanche happened the following day, and Smartfren’s other backup route got disconnected on March 17th. The company then used an additional submarine cable from a third party on March 18th but unfortunately it was cut as well on March 23rd.

Smartfren hopes that they can operate at at least 50 percent capacity as of today with the restoration of one of Trans Sumatra’s network routes and the addition of a third party’s network. Smartfren apologizes for the inconvenience experienced by its customers.

Angry users

Looking over Smartfren’s apology and explanation about the situation on its Facebook post, a lot of users are still disgruntled. They lamented the fact that the explanation came only after the ICT minister took matters into his own hands and inquired about it. Indonesian media Detik backed this claim by saying that none of Smartfren’s higher-ups were even reachable before the Indonesian government intervened.

The users are also demanding compensation from the company. One user calculated that since Smartfren’s monthly data plan costs IDR 99,000 (US$10), counting based on its five million data users the company earns around IDR 16.5 billion ($1.7 million) of revenue every single day, revenue that isn’t in line with the company’s promised service. The company has responsibility to quickly give explanation whenever there is a major problem, users say.

A few users also pointed out that they had been having internet problems since two weeks ago – which supports Tifatul’s explanation and not Smartfren’s – and said that apologies do not cut it at this stage if the company wants to hold on to its customers. Smartfren still has some explaining to do regarding the one-week timeline difference that has arisen.

Compensation is possible

So what about compensation? Tifatul said that they expect to hear the full report from Smartfren and if the fiasco is found to be the telco’s fault, then it will be compulsory for the company to offer compensation to users. Guilty or not, Smartfren itself is also considering offering its users some form of compensation in the hope of appeasing its angry customers.

Following this blowout, the company has increased the capacity of its Surabaya-Jakarta internet route. Smartfren is also looking to build more of them in the next couple of years to cope with its user growth.

Back in December 2006, local telco Telkomsel had a serious issue with its communication network and was unable to cater to the increasing volume of usage at the end of the year. The telco issued an apology and gave its users compensation in the form of bonus program extensions and discounts.

The submarine cable incident actually affected another Indonesian internet service provider too: Telkom Speedy. But unlike Smartfren, Telkom Speedy’s backup routes remained undisturbed and it could still serve its users sufficiently. There were a few complaints posted to Telkom Speedy’s Facebook page during this period, but the number of complaints pales in comparison with what Smartfren has received from its customers.

Credit card adoption in Indonesia is still very slow, with only 13.4 million credit cards issued up until 2012, which makes up a 4.5 percent penetration rate with most holders having two credit cards. The advantage in having one is that there are some online stores offering installment payments if you pay via your credit card. Indonesian e-commerce site Kreditmart looks to offer similarly convenient installments for everyone, even if they don’t have a credit card. The site’s been operational since 2008 and co-founder Chintya Fransisca believes that they are the first one to offer such services in the country. How does it work?

Kreditmart sells a wide variety of expensive goods, including heavy machinery, construction vehicles, and electronics. Some of the products cost as much as IDR 20 million (US$2,056), and you can choose to buy those products via installment program.

Kreditmart cooperates with numerous leasing and multi-financing companies to take care of the company’s credit payments. They will also help Kreditmart in screening installment applicants and to remind them about payments. Customers can then get a plan for how much money they’ll need to pay every month, according to the number of months and the down-payment options available on the site. Some of the installment plans can cost you an additional 20 percent interest rate, but others have a zero percent interest rate.

Chintya explains that, just like at a bank, customers need to first submit documents about where they live, where they work (they must have a job), and about their family.

There is always a risk that customers run away with their goods, but it has been minimized thanks to the said screening process. She also believes that a lot of people who apply for credit payment online already have good financial background and are working at good companies. They also have good characters. She doesn’t imply that they are all angels, but the risk is low.

Getting back to business

Kreditmart has seen impressive sales as the company recorded an average of IDR 700 million ($72,000) sales revenue every month in the first two years with around 350 monthly credit customers. That number is achieved after the company rejected 30 percent of credit applications.

But during that time, Chintya said that they were busy with the other online shops and didn’t put too much focus on Kreditmart. The team then decided to get back to running Kreditmart again after seeing a few big companies venturing to similar e-commerce businesses, and Kreditmart just started selling its goods again last month and has recorded IDR 100 million ($10,280) month’s revenue already, which is a nice start.

In the future, Kreditmart hopes to offer its own credit facility outside its partnership with the aforementioned finance companies. They hope that by doing that, customers can get easier approval and, in return, generate greater revenue. She also hopes that this plan can lower Kreditmart’s interest rate for a few products. Chintya believes that the risk to offer their own credit services is manageable.

The team plans to build more warehouses at big cities in Indonesia so that they can lower the delivery cost for some of their large products. The focus this year is to cater to customers in Java island.

Kreditmart’s pros and cons.

This is the first time I’ve heard about Kreditmart, and it looks like the company’s credit payment system is working very well. There are still a few places on the site that look a bit messy, like its FAQ page, and some product categories that are still empty. Chintya explains to us that they are still building the website, but it looks like it is progressing very slowly.

I also compared the prices on Kreditmart with other Indonesian e-commerce sites and found that generally Kreditmart’s products are more expensive. On the other hand, Kreditmart has a few products that are difficult to find on other sites like supermarket refrigeration cabinets and construction tools. Of course, if people or small businesses are looking to purchase online goods via installments but don’t have a credit card, then Kreditmart is an attractive choice.

Besides Kreditmart, a few Indonesian online shops are starting to offer similar installment payments too. Gadget e-commerce site Bhinneka and Bintang Mandiri being the two of them. So far, Kreditmart is a self-funded project, and the team is open to potential partnerships.