Battlefield for Startup Asia Bandung 2012, our first ever open platform Hackathon, is ready for you, the developers and designers. It has been more than a month since our last update as we are hustling to prepare the best experience for you to enjoy the event. With this post I would like to update you guys on some important things:

• Judges: We have a great group of judges here: Andy Zain (the director of the Jakarta Founders Institute), who has been in the mobile industry for a god amount of time here in Indonesia; Hera Laxmi Devi (senior manager of portal and digital assets at PT XL Axiata, Tbk) will judge based on the content and what a telco would think of an idea; and Toshihiko Suyama (market development director DeNA Asia) will be a great help to us when great games are made here!
• FAQs: We have added answers to some of the questions many of you have been asking. I would recommend you check it out first, and if you have any more questions you can always e-mail us and we will respond within 24 hours.
• Challenges: Since our API partners announcement, we have added six new challenges with interesting prizes, namely: KotaGames (3 Macbook Airs), XL (a Samsung Galaxy S3 and further support), SoftLayer (an iPad, iPod Touch, and $36,000 worth of credits), Cacoo (a Samsung Galaxy Tab 2 10.1 and IDR 10,000,000, or $1028), DeNA (a new iPad), Vserv (will double your revenue after wrapping your app with its API for one month), Teamie (a Samsung Galaxy Note 10.1), GEPI (a Google/Asus Nexus 7), and Lazada Indonesia (a Samsung Galaxy Note 10.1 and an internship opportunity). For details on how to win, please go to the Challenges/Prizes page.

Along the way while preparing the hackathon, we announced our first ever roadtrip through six cities. That was a great experience for us to meet and chat with communities outside the capital city. We are six days away from our first ever Startup Asia in Bandung and we have butterflies in our stomach. How about you? See you soon!

International video site Viki.com has more than 1 billion videos viewed, and 200 million words translated into subtitles by its community. It isn’t limiting itself to translating English content – it has translated Korean dramas, Japanese anime, Spanish novelas, and Bollywood blockbusters. With user-generated content, it isn’t just about creating a community of avid viewers, it also means successfully crowdsourcing all that translation work. In this area, Viki has amassed more than 2,000 titles representing more than 14,000 hours of content.

For its biggest push into converting the online community into offline fans, Viki is partnering with SM Entertainment (KOSDAQ:041510), one of the leading Korean labels and talent agencies, to produce and mix an online vs offline experience – as seen at the recent SMTOWN Jakarta concert. Held on September 22nd, it brought together famous names such as Super Junior, Girls Generation, BoA, EXO, SHINee, and f(x). The concert sold out quickly and was attended by more than 50,000 people.

We can see some photos, interview, and concert highlight done by the Viki team. Below is Girls Generation saying a quick “hi” to you guys, the readers of TechinAsia:

Viki – which is backed by Greylock Partners, Andreesen Horowitz, Charles River Ventures, Neoteny Labs, SK Planet, and BBC Worldwide – has quite a following here in Indonesia. The country is now the main Asian market for Viki besides China. It has hired a strategic partnership manager based in Indonesia and is working together with one Indonesian telco. Plus, there’s a new head of business development for APAC based in China to show its intention in the region.

Indonesia is said to be the source of a third of the total traffic coming from Southeast Asia to Viki. Besides that, I see that Viki has also translated more than 1,000 videos into the Indonesian language, which is an amazing feat.

Disclosure: TechinAsia was one of the media partners for Viki at the SMTown Jakarta 2012 event.

Veritrans Indonesia held a press conference today in Jakarta to officially launch its payment system. A joint-venture between Veritrans Japan, Netprice, and midPlaza group, the payment system promises to deliver online transaction that is easy, cheap, and quick.

Sribu, the first merchant to implement the Veritrans Indonesia payment system, had nice things to say on stage. Its CEO Ryan Gondokusumo explained:

Veritrans Indonesia is able to bring us the pace and speed we needed. […] This payment solution certainly is very helpful to accommodate our foreign customers, it is very easy to understand on both the merchant and the customer side. Simplicity, product, and service delivered are very satisfactory. I’m glad we have trusted Veritrans Indonesia.

Ryu Kawano, CEO of PT. Midtrans [1] , or Veritrans Indonesia, said that Veritrans Indonesia is a payment UX company, stressing on the user experience as part of the payment system. Trying to simplify payments for merchants and customers alike. Consistency and easy navigation are also part of UX. At the same time integration with Veritrans Indonesia is quick compared to the traditional banks (7 days compared to 30-60 days). Internet connections in Indonesia aren’t always stable so Veritrans has built a landing page that has a lower load time, providing better usability.

Veritrans Indonesia has acquired several merchants in its first few months with Sribu (in August), KrazyMarket (in September), and Qeon Interactive and BerryBenka (in October). It hopes to add hundreds more to its payment system whether they are a startup company or a large multi-national company.

Question marks still linger whether Veritrans can help solve the payment problems that we are facing here in Indonesia e-commerce market. But it’s certainly encouraging to see more big players try to address the issue.

CEO of Veritrans Japan, Takashi Okita; CEO of PT. Midtrans, or Veritrans Indonesia, Ryu Kawano; CEO of Netprice, Teruhide Sato

Viki, the social startup that shows videos, music, TV dramas, and music concerts around the world for free has announced that it has partnered with Indonesian telco Axis to reach 17 million Axis customers in the country. The popular video site, which has been translated into more than 150 languages, now can be reached by the the mobiles telco’s customers on their phones via the Viki apps for Android, iOS, or on the Axis ‘NET’ site.

The leading international video site says it has over one billion videos and around 200 million words translated in the form of subtitles. Daniel Horan, chief marketing officer of Axis, adds:

Customers can now watch a fantastic range of TV programs, music videos, and concerts from over 20 countries like Korea, Japan, the US, the UK, all with Bahasa [Indonesia] subtitles and all for free. Most importantly, from their mobile anywhere, any time. It’s really simple.

The Viki app will also remember where you left off when you stopped watching the video, which is quite useful.

For this promotion, Axis users are able to watch Korean music videos by B.A.P, Girl’s Day, and K.Will as well as the latest Viki content such as the MBC Music Festival and MTV Wonder Girls. Axis customers also have a chance to win a Samsung Galaxy SIII courtesy of Viki.

This is a natural expansion for the Singapore-based startup (it has offices in San Francisco and Seoul as well) since Indonesia is becoming more mobile and is also spending more money on mobile data. Plus, the country contains many avid followers of Japanese anime and Korean dramas, so that content is sure to be popular. With investment from big names like Andreessen Horowitz and Greylock, it will be interesting to see how Viki will sustain its already impressive growth.

We announced our first road trip almost three weeks ago. It was an exhausting trip, but totally worth every drop of sweat and any money spent. We had more than 500 registered participants, with turnouts averaging 75 percent, more than expected.

The first half of the trip was smooth, and we held networking nights at Jakarta, Depok, and Bandung. Jakarta has many familiar faces as most startups or business people who regularly attended networking events were here. Depok had more students than the other two cities as University of Indonesia is located there. Bandung, on the other hand, had far more developers and designers turn up for the networking night.

The second week brought us to Jogjakarta, Surabaya, and Malang. Places that usually receive little to no attention outside Indonesia despite having decent startups born out of the cities. Jogjakarta is famous for its game developers, with more than a few game studios and Gameloft stationed there too. Surabaya has the most attendance from all the cities we visited, and if you do visit the city you can feel that it’s like Jakarta but cheaper. It has many local startups like WGChat, DheZign, and more. Finally, Malang has been much talked about lately with its low software production cost without undermining the quality.

This is certainly not going to be our only trip, and we promise to hold more in the future, bringing more value and exposure to the cities. To that end, we plan to soon cover some of the interesting startups we met on the road, so stay tuned!

To close this with a shameless plug, our hackathon at Startup Asia Bandung 2012 will be held on October 13th and 14th, which is three weeks away. We have many interesting challenges and prizes to be won. See you soon!

credit: Culture.com

Startup Asia Bandung is drawing closer as we roll into September. Tech in Asia will visit six cities in Java, helped along the way by local tech communities in each of the cities.

And where are we going? We will be headed to Jakarta, Depok, Bandung, Jogja, Malang, and Surabaya – where startups and developers thrive. In each city, we are hosting a simple dinner where everyone can meet up and make friends. We reckon its a nice way to set the tone for our Startup Asia Bandung Hackathon which will be later on, in mid-October.

In these sessions, we are expecting local and international companies, investors, and successful entrepreneurs to be with us. As such, you will get to meet more new friends and explore possible opportunities with them. These will be small, engaging, and fun meet-ups.

To join us simply head over to our EventBrite page and register yourself, your partners, or your colleagues to mingle with like-minded and interesting people over a fun dinner.

With over 65,000 design submissions, and around 16,000 designers on its network, Sribu promises to offer lower price rates compared to other crowdsourcing platforms, boasting a relatively high rate of 145 designs per contest. It also claims that its community of local Indonesian designers have proven track records in producing top quality designs which resulted in 98 percent customer satisfaction.

In addition, Sribu recently introduced a new feature that will help its clients to buy additional designs at half price through its platform. Ryan Gondokusumo, the CEO of Sribu, said that it has gotten a lot of request from clients who would like to buy additional designs from their projects, but they don’t want to spend a lot on the additional ones. To do this, for example, a client of Sribu who has a $250 project ongoing can get second/third design at a $125 price. This is a win-win solution for both clients and designers.

Regarding the company’s expansion abroad, Ryan added:

I choose to state global in my announcement to let the global market know that they can use Sribu now and there is no limitation whatsoever for them in terms of language barrier and payment system, so organically we hope people in US/Europe will use our service. While moving forward, our main marketing and penetration focus will still be in the regional market, I hope this clarifies the move we made. The primary reason why we go regional is to expand our channels and get more clients. Our business model gives us the flexibility to scale easily. The local market is huge but it will take more time and education to get them familiar with the [concept of] crowdsourcing.

Ryan also tells me that it will raise more funds in the next six months.

To help with the company’s expansion and global reach, it is working together with Veritrans as its payment gateway. Veritrans will be launched sometime soon in Indonesia with Sribu as one of its few initial partners. With a team of eleven, the startup has been funded by East Ventures [1] early this year and plans to expand its team as it serves a larger market.

The company’s name represents the character and culture that they’re trying to build, which is: relaxed, casual, fun, and always something that people are looking forward to, said Kevin Osmond, the CEO of Weekend Inc. Despite the laid-back name, though, Osmond promises that the company will always put its heart and core values into all its work and will treat every project like it’s its own product.

With the startup/entrepreneur background of the co-founders, Weekend Inc’s team has experience in creating products with great user experience and technology. Let’s meet them:

• Kevin Osmond, chief executive officer
  and internet entrepreneur who co-founded AITINDO, FILMOO.com, FIMELA.com, Bouncity & Tiket.com. Kevin plays an important role in creative thinking and business development towards company’s objectives and visions.
  Fun fact: One of Kevin’s wishes is to have life-sized C3PO & R2D2s in his living room.
• Richard Fang, chief creative officer
  for 7 years focusing on UI/UX design. Has been involved in several startups such as: Tasterous, Bouncity, and Tiket.com. Richard believes design is not just about making things beautiful, but it also making them functional and easy-to-use.
  Fun fact: Richard believes zombies do exist.
• Andoko Chandra, chief technical officer
  In 2004-2007, Andoko was one of the Bina Nusantara delegates representing Indonesia that won 1st place in the ACM-ICPC Kaohsiung Site and was a World Finalist in the ACM-ICPC Japan chapter. He has been involved in several banking and flight system and was the lead technical of Bouncity.
  Fun fact: In “Typing Race”, Andoko scored 111 wpm.
  (ACM-ICPC = Association for Computing Machinery – International Collegiate Programming Contest)

As hinted by me in a previous post regarding Weekend Inc’s first product, the company is hard at work on Printerous although the product has yet to launch. I got the chance to see the it (both a physical printout and the web app) and I would say that if Weekend Inc can hit an exact price line it should be able to do pretty well. Although I don’t see myself printing my own photos, I would definitely print and send some of the amazing photos other people have taken and uploaded.

We announced our upcoming Startup Asia Bandung: the Multi-Platform Hackathon three weeks ago. We have been getting a great response from developers and startup companies who are interested in the event. Hoping to disrupt and expose the talent in Bandung specifically, and Indonesia in general, the event has so far attracted more than 250 participants. You can find the list of participants here.

With this post we also would like to introduce our media and community, and API partners, who have agreed to help us put the spotlight on developers here in Indonesia.

Our API partners (more to come!):

• Tiket: offering a IDR 6,000,000 cash reward and Tiket.com points valued at IDR 4,000,000 for the best use of its Tiket.com flight/hotel/train/concert/movie API. Commission is available for each sale made via the Tiket. com API. Post-event challenge: Tiket.com is offering a grand prize for the app that uses the Tiket.com flight/hotel/train/concert/movie API and has the best sales one month after the hackathon.
• SixReps: will award IDR 5,000,000 cash and help promote for six months the best hack that’s using its API.
• Sent.ly: will give away a Google Nexus phone and three months worth of Sent.ly credits for the best hack built using its API. Post-event challenge: Sent.ly will give three months’ worth of Sent.ly credits to apps that use Sent.ly APIs and are successfully launched within two weeks of the hackathon

Our media partners (we are still welcoming more media partners):

• Aplikanologi
• GameSaku
• Gopego
• iCreate
• Kaskus
• MakeMac
• MalesBanget
• SGEntrepreneurs
• Sidomi
• StartupBisnis
• TeknoUp
• ThumbsUp
• WebGeek

Our community partners:

• Bancakan
• FOWAB
• GameLAN
• StartupLokal
• SuWec
• Stasion

More challenges are coming from our gold and platinum sponsors (to be announced) too, so stay tuned! At the same time, everyone at Tech in Asia and the Startup Asia conferences would like to wish you all a happy Eid, and an enjoyable holiday to our Indonesian readers!

Tokopedia, one of the oldest players around in Indonesia’s e-commerce industry focusing on the C2C market, is celebrating its third year anniversary today. William Tanuwijaya, co-founder and CEO of Tokopedia, has told us that at the end of the year they are going to move into a larger office and expand the team numbers beyond the current 38 people. The company has been enjoying sigificant expansion after investment from PT Indonusa Dwitama, East Ventures [1], and CyberAgent Ventures last year, and then Netprice this year.

The company, which we interviewed as well last year, has again put up some remarkable numbers despite having few marketing activities compared to its competitors. In total, Tokopedia has processed IDR 151,130,616,899 ($15,908,486) worth of transactions up until now, with the help of its third year result (IDR 115,162,774,221; $12,122,397). William shared that this third year’s growth has really improved significantly: in August 2011 the transaction value per month was only 2.83 billion IDR. But by July 2012 it had reached 18.94 billion IDR. The majority of the sales come from fashion and beauty products (not expensive compared to gadgets), which shows that the company has recorded a lot of transactions.

In its third year, Tokopedia also ranked as the 78th most visited website in Indonesia (according to Alexa), and as William said above this is an impressive achievement that the company achieved organically, without a huge marketing push. William also told me that actually, Tokopedia doesn’t even have any marketing or sales team as of yet.

William told us:

We are very happy with the result so far and be one of startups in Indonesia that consistently growing from year to year. This has fueled us to do even more in achieving our mission as one of the best internet companies in Indonesia. We would like to thank our members, team, investors, and everyone that is involved in making Tokopedia en route to a success.

We have been seeing some other e-commerce startups inside Tokopedia; asked about this, William told us that since its inception Tokopedia has always been an online mall concept and a distribution channel that enables individuals and small business owners to open and maintain their online stores easily. With hiking traffic and visitors, Tokopedia can be another channel for niche e-commerce startups; so far it is doing a trial with 3 sites: Krazymarket, TeknoUp, and DealGoing.

Starting in September 2012, Tokopedia also will close down “Adult” category which previously was added with certain limitations (only members who are older than 21 years old). The site will also hold a campaign against piracy, banning merchants who are selling pirated CD or DVD (software, music, movies, and games). At the same time, Tokopedia has promised to serve its members even better by creating an better mobile-site that can be accessed from any smartphone. Happy birthday to Tokopedia; hopefully it can be one of the success stories that inspires people here in Indonesia!

Agate Studio, a mobile gaming startup from Indonesia, has launched Football Saga 2 on Facebook. The sequel has a really important message for the players and for football fans in general, which is to unite support behind the currently sad state of the Indonesian National Team. Within two weeks, the game has garnered 8,500 registered players and is growing.

The company has dedicated almost half of its resources (30 out of 70 employees) to build the sequel to Football Saga. It took around six months in total to develop the Flash-based game.

Football Saga 2 gameplay is also different from the first one in that its interface is more user-friendly. It comes with new and exciting features such as the Gacha-inspired fortune box, regeneration, a skill card, and an improved club system. Dian Ara, from Agate Games, explained a little more about Football Saga 2:

We decided to develop this game to help [...] Timnas (Tim Garuda Indonesia), our national football team. We want to see Indonesian football unlock international achievements such as the Asian Cup or even the World Cup. Once, Japan’s football was as bad as our own, but they could improve thanks to the popular manga Captain Tsubasa. Inspired by the epic tale of Captain Tsubasa and Japan’s football, we want to emulate such a phenomenon in Indonesia. Since we are an independent game developer, surely we can do something for them through our creative work, Football Saga 2, and the video campaign Garuda Bersatu.

To monetize the game, the startup will offer the in-app purchase of “stars” for users to get power-ups, which can be purchased via various payment gateway companies that are working together with Agate Games. It’ll include payment methods like via SMS. Dian promises that you can still have fun whether you buy the stars or not. They are also providing in-game promotional slots for brands willing to cooperate.

It’s just in time for national Independence Day today, and hopefully the game will inspire Indonesians to support their national team no matter what! If you’re logged into Facebook, the game is at this link.

They’ve both left the company since and now focus on Adplus after two years of a journey which they shared with our audience at Startup Asia Jakarta 2012. Most of the employees (around 30) have all followed their footsteps and bring the experience and contacts to support the new startup.

From quite a lengthy chat with Adplus’ marketing and communication manager, Saiful Achmat, Adplus is trying to focus on really helping clients to reach their goals by providing products like:

• Cost Per Click (CPC): Advertiser pays for the number of clicks on the banner ad.
• Cost Per Visit (CPV): Advertiser pays for the number of actual visits driven to the landing page after clicking on the banner ad.
• Cost Per Lead (CPL): Advertiser pays for the number of leads generated by the ad. Suitable for insurance companies, banking, and such services.
• Cost Per Sales (CPS): Advertiser pays for the number of sales transactions generated directly by the ad.

So far they have clients such as Indosat, Telkomsel, Coca-Cola, Permata Bank, and more as a result of relationships with major advertising agencies in Indonesia: Starcomm, Magnivate, MPG, Maxus, Bubu, Narrada, OMD, Dentsu, Isobar, and Group M.

Saiful says of the digital ad spending potential in Indonesia:

Most of our clients plan to double their ad spending this year. It shows how their awareness on digital advertising is getting better. So far we managed to show them the effectiveness and the efficiency of advertising through digital media. According to our experience, this year, ad spending will still go to social media focus and display banner, but this time with some investment on the mobile advertising.

Adplus was kind enough to shared some data showing ad impressions they have measured in Indonesia in the past month or so. According to their figures, it appears as though Jakarta still dominates online in the country, with about 69 percent of the ad impressions coming from there.

Natali Ardianto, co-founder and CTO of Tiket, explains more about this new feature:

Tiket.com is trying to disrupt Indonesian e-commerce by being the first partner to sell train tickets online. We’re trying to help the Indonesian e-commerce industry, just like MakeMyTrip improved the India e-commerce industry. When India put train booking online, all the middle/lower class were forced to use the system. Thus because of this, Indian e-commerce industry soared because middle/lower class people experienced e-commerce for the first time, were happy with the result and continued to try other e-commerce services. We provide special promos, air conditioned economy, business and executive class, and advanced 90 days booking.

Although it is available on the official site too, Tiket provides a slicker and simpler user interface that will help users in the buying process. You can redeem tickets using an SMS code and a copy of your ID card (the official site needs a printed PDF). You can also select from multiple payment channels including bank transfer, BCA Klikpay, KlikBCA, and credit card. The company also claimed that it is the only partner which lets you choose your seats, and that’s certainly convenient. There’s a mobile version and mobile apps also ready through Nokia Asha.

Tiket’s API that is currently in private beta, and according to Natali, they are currently working with 28 developers from different platforms, looking for feedback on how to improve it. The commission structure is really attractive for developers, with payments made monthly with a minimum withdrawal of IDR 200.000 (US$ 22). So far, there are quite a few partners on the list already and some apps in the works on all platforms. The public launch is in September, we’re happy to say that Tiket will be one of the API providers for Startup Asia Bandung 2012 Hackathon.

The train tickets booking feature has really strengthened Tiket as a “One Stop Travel and Entertainment Gateway,” after it launched with hotel rooms, concert and event tickets, flights, and movies booking. And with the API launch, I really love how Tiket has turned itself into a platform for people to build on top of its services, especially when the Indonesian travel startups are beginning to spring up more frequently.

Movin Studio, a game and mobile app studio based in Jogjakarta, Indonesia, has just launched its first game. Called Rolling Babaa, it’s a child-oriented physics-based puzzler and is now available on the iTunes App Store.

The sheep, Babaa, loves to eat donuts and our objective is to help it get more donuts. How? By creating shapes, whether it’s circles, squares, triangles, or anything. It will automatically turn into an object that has gravity and you can use that to help Babaa roll along and get more donuts. Aside from the shapes, you can use hinges and nails to connect objects that you have created before (see the embedded video below to see it all in action).

The company itself consists of five people so far with programmers, artists, and sound engineers. Ali Iqbal, the company’s representative, also said that rather than aiming to be a viral game, Movin Studio is also concerned about its educational purpose and that its animations are suited to the target age. There won’t be any in-app purchases in the game so the studio will monetize by releasing two versions. The free one only has 20 levels, while US$1.99 will get you 50 levels with five different realms.

After trying out some levels of the free version, I find it quite interesting – yet the game isn’t really all that challenging. Maybe that’s because I’m not really the target market for the game, or it can be iterated or improved in the future to have more challenging levels.

You can start playing the game and rolling the babaa on your iPad, iPhone, or iPod Touch by downloading the free or paid version. Try it out and let me know your opinion in the comments.

Zodio

The concept of Zodio is almost the same as Yelp. It will provide places or points of interest (through partnerships with map providers), and users will bring content in the form of reviews (ratings and text reviews) and check-ins. What differentiates Zodio though, is that for each place you can see the overall rating and a separate ratings from just your friends.

To fuel the urge of users generating the content, the company is using a gamification element built-in with points and awards. Awards (or badges) can be earned by fulfilling/achieving certain criteria, at the same time there are also user awards that can be given from one user to another for generating good content. (e.g. ‘Rockin Photo awards’)

I do have some doubt whether the expansion can truly cover all of Asia because if we look at the site right now, most of the content is in Thai. Jai said that they will provide features to filter reviews/content by language as well as plugging in a translation API to provide rudimentary translations. Localization will be on the entire platform too to provide native UI for each countries. I would say they have a tough journey to expand and localize. Some countries already have a Yelp already (e.g. Indonesia’s Urbanesia or China’s Dianping), but we will surely keeping an eye on Zodio.

P.S: Thank you Quora!

Quran for Blackberry was one of the first apps by 7Langit, released three years ago. The app simply helps you to access the Quran online on your Blackberry so you don’t have to save it in your phone’s limited memory. The app shows Arabic content from Quran verses in a clear font, with translations based on those from the Ministry of Religious Affairs. You can also search a verse, or bookmark those you want to remember. During the holy month, the app’s active users have gone up by 400 percent, say its developers, and every day users read one million verse on average. The app now has 415,000 unique users.

The Teman Ibadah app was started one year after the Quran, with sponsorship as a revenue model (from Indonesia telco, XL) so users don’t have to pay to use it. In this app, the Quran has also been included with an additional recitation feature. A database of mosque locations in Java and Bali, a Wirid reading app, Ramadhan Blackberry themes, and greeting cards app are all bundled in the app. It is available for download from Google Play.

The two apps have been attracting great interest from national TV stations and the development company is preparing more things to come for this coming holiday as well. Previously, we featured Pulkam as a community to help people return home during the holiday, and we are expecting more to come from local startups in Indonesia.

Fazzione

Ricardo Santos, marketing manager for Fazzione told me:

Rather than a standard fashion e-commerce or a group buying site, we actually help the brand to finish up leftover inventory and from our side we don’t need to hold the inventory until the shipping starts. We see that Indonesia has the buying power for buying branded fashion and having learnt from ClubeFashion (Portugal company) we believe that this type of e-commerce will be a success.

The company, which has 700,000 members so far, has five campaigns on its site with one new campaign added daily. Fazzione has also been invested in by Nusantara Ventures and have been hiring fast. They have 16 employees on the payroll and plan to hire more as it scales. The partnership has also helped Fazzione reach a deal with Viva to hold a campaign on the Viva websites.

Targeting 2.5 million members at the end of the year, Fazzione not only wants to add to its members but create engagement through community. In its office they also plan to have a showroom on the first floor which showcases products from brands, and to hold monthly workshops.

For me, it is an interesting concept and I have always wanted to try flash sales site like Gilt Groupe and Fab. It’s good to see a local alternative for Indonesians. The problem would be bringing in new members and acquiring brands to hold campaigns on its site, especially international brands. With Nusantara Ventures on board, they have the experience of Shinta Dhanuwardoyo to help them venture out into the e-commerce war.

The store will sell mostly gadgets at competitive prices. Working together with Indokom, one of the gadget distributors at Roxy, Jakarta, TeknoUp will sell Indokom’s gadgets exclusively. Citra Purnawijaya, the CEO of TeknoUp, said that he believes since they have a community and reviews they are able to differentiate from competitors:

We had the idea of making our own store or e-commerce site for quite some time. We have been receiving more than a few calls to the office [from people] wanting to buy gadgets from us. We thought if we wanted to excel in the gadget category, we had to provide a one stop solution. So far we have been profitable by selling ads to big companies like Samsung, Indosat, and Djarum to name a few, and the e-commerce will be one of our revenue streams that we hope will eclipse the ads revenue sooner rather than later.

TeknoUp definitely isn’t alone in selling gadgets online, we have big players in Indonesia like GDP Ventures’ BliBli and Rocket Internet’s Lazada who both have the same niche. With 3.5 million page views, 500,000 uniques, and 65 percent returning visitors, we will see whether recommendations and reviews can convert to sales for TeknoUp.

@Pulkam, the Twitter account in which travellers can share their pulkam or mudik experience and discover new places to eat, is making use of the social traffic app Waze to help it in tracking the holiday traffic jams. Although it’s still 29 days (or 28 days if you have a different start time) before Ramadhan is over, the Pulkam team is starting to prepare for the upcoming holiday.

The way you can use Waze’s service is to invite people to use the Waze app, join the “pulkam” group, and then whoever has joined the group will automatically be broadcasting info to the @pulkamMC Twitter account. That Twitter page will act as a data bank which can be organized and retweeted by the main @pulkam account. The best thing is how it creates a map on the web at Waze, so we can see the location of commuters. Founded in 2009, Israel-based Waze has doubled its user numbers to 20 million in the last six months, and has also raised $30 million from Kleiner Perkins and Li Ka-shing. This convinced the team over at Pulkam to make use of the app.

Pinot, one of the Pulkam team members, explains to TiA:

Basically at Pulkam […] we always love to experiment with new online technology that can help people to commute faster and safer. As in previous years, Pulkam will be a community hub that helps commuters and then helps to share any Ramadan activities in their hometown. Three main things that we do is traffic info, travel info, and culinary info.

Social media has been changing our daily activities, and this is just another great example of a neat use of social media – especially in Indonesia. It not only helps commuters during Ramadhan, the busiest time of year for travelling, but also this account helps people to explore local travel destinations and culinary treats. Tech in Asia sends out our best wishes to all of you who celebrate the holy month!

Get the Waze app for BlackBerry, iOS, Android, or Symbian from its homepage.

The company with the pink bird, Flamingo, simply helps you by listing curated packages which offer unique travel experiences. Travellers can choose by using the filter “by interest” on the site, or they can select a place or a spot based on a specific activity, for example snorkelling off Komodo Island, camping in Raja Ampat, and so on. Compared to conventional travel agents, Flamingo claims that it also offers flexibility in the numbers of people in a tour group, which can be as few as five. To help travellers feel even more comfortable and to support the local community, Flamingo also works with local guides in every destination it covers.

Bernardus Sumartok, CEO and founder of Flamingo, adds:

Up to the end of 2011 in Indonesia, we have more than 30,000 travel agents. But from that number, we only have a few online travel agents. We use local guides so that our users can get the best and unforgettable experience which they will bring back home. We also have reviews which help even new travellers access full information about a destination and plan a great travelling time.

With this launch, Flamingo is working together with GantiBaju (the founder of which we interviewed earlier today!) to create a marketing campaign based around a T-shirt design competition. It takes “fun experiences in your city” as its theme, and runs July 17th through to August 7th. The startup hopes this competition can be one of the ways it promotes local destinations. Three winners will get a chance to travel to Sabang with the Flamingo team.

The travel industry is one of the biggest industries in Indonesia that is waiting to be disrupted – and we have seen quite a few local startups that are trying to do just that, such as PegiPegi. Flamingo will go head to head with Valadoo, which received investment from Singapore’s Wego and relaunched just a few days ago, and also there are new players like Burufly. Competition is in fact great for the ecosystem and I can’t wait to try each and every one of them.

WSIS was created in 2003 to bridge and to stimulate the digital industry by selecting and promoting the best mobile content. This year’s submissions should be from a company, organization, or individual that is actively involved in the mobile industry in Indonesia. The application has to work on any major platform, be a product that is already on the market, and have been released between 2010 and this year.

The categories in this global competition are:

• m-Business and Commerce
• m-Government and Participation
• m-Learning and Education
• m-Entertainment and Lifestyle
• m-Tourism and Culture
• m-Media and News
• m-Environment & Health
• m-Inclusion and Empowerment

You can make your submissions either on Bubu.com’s Facebook Page or bubu.com website.

Shinta Dhanuwardoyo, the founder of Bubu.com and also a country national expert for WSIS, added:

This year we have more time to market this event through social media and the press. Me and my team will select eight candidates up to the requirements with potential to compete with other candidates around the world. I’m very optimistic that Indonesia can advance and be a strong [candidates] compared to other nations, not only in this competition.

We look forward to seeing which services are chosen to represent Indonesia, and wish them all the best of luck in advance!

We just received word that PriceArea, the largest price comparison search engine in Indonesia, just announced that it has raised an undisclosed amount of Series B funding. This new round brings the valuation of the company to ‘a couple of million’ hinted Andry Suhaili, the CEO of PriceArea. Among the investors in this round are GREE Ventures and Sony’s So-net which marks their first investment in Indonesia. The plan is to use the additional funding to expand PriceArea’s current operation and marketing activities.

The company, which was founded back in April 2010 and launched the following May. PriceArea raised its first seed round and Series A round from East Ventures [1], and so far has around 22 employees (around nine are engineers). The company also plans to make a major push into the Southeast Asia market by customizing PriceArea products and services according to specific market demands in each country. Tatsuo Tsutsumi, partner at GREE Ventures, commented on the investment:

This round of funding is perfectly timed to grow PriceArea to meet the market demand and expansion plan to Southeast Asia.

Andry Suhaili, CEO of PriceArea, also added:

We are extremely excited to have two reputable companies such as GREE Ventures and So-net share in our vision. We look forward to tapping into their experiences and technology as we plan to take PriceArea into global expansion.

Currently PriceArea has 5,000,000 listed products and 75,000 merchants (online and offline retailers) which is massive compared to its competitors. Recently they also have introduced ITeCS, awards for Indonesia e-commerce players. With GREE and So-net joining forces on its board, PriceArea’s expansion to Southeast Asia should be a little easier.

ITeCS (which is short for Indonesia Top E-Commerce Sites), will evaluate more than 2,500 e-commerce sites (most of which are aggregated by PriceArea) across six categories: best design, best innovation, best payment solution, best B2C electronics sales, best social media campaign, and best small- to medium-sized enterprise (SME). The nominations process has started since earlier this month and will end later this week. So far they have received over 1,000 nominations. After all that ends, the voting will start and then go on until September 10, 2012, followed by the long-awaited awards night on October 18, 2012.

The winners will be judged by both public voting and selected judges, which will make the public – or, rather, e-commerce users in the country – get involved actively by voting for his/her favourite e-commerce sites. PriceArea has a referral feature to help nominees to pool their votes and drum up more support. Not only that, there will be points and rewards for the most active voters/users in this award. PriceArea is also giving out IDR 3 million (US$325) weekly in total to the top referral starting 2nd August to boost the number of voters.

At the same time, the ITeCS awards will make a special page for articles regarding the Indonesia e-commerce industry and at the same time publish interviews with the selected nominees, thereby helping spread knowledge and information about these e-tailers in Indonesia. After the making of idEA, this is another positive move for the e-commerce ecosystem in Indonesia. PriceArea itself is still growing quickly and I’ve heard that it is about to announce something interesting soon, so stay tuned!

Bouncity

Launched one year and one month ago, Bouncity clearly had great expectations and was seen as one of the region’s strong products that could make serious revenue. It was even included in the three startups from Indonesia that pitched at Echelon 2011, when Bouncity was only one month old. The service reached 300,000 users in one year (right before the acquisition) and set a milestone of being the first startup involved in a nationwide campaign with Mizone that saw it being promoted in more than 7,000 outlets of the Alfamart group.

Qeon Interactive itself is a game publishing company which officially launched around two months ago focusing on bringing games from Korea, Japan, China, and Taiwan to the Indonesian market. At launch, Qeon introduced a first-person shooter online game called Shadow Company. Qeon Interactive is part of the MidPlaza group (which will add an e-payment system soon) and is supported by Biznet.

When asked what is the lesson learned from this startup journey, he answers:

Startups need founders who are strong, solid, ready to do the dirty jobs, and also share the same vision. Funding isn’t everything for a startup, but also requires good planning and great execution in order to achieve success. This experience is an expensive lesson to take.

With this acquisition, and Yahoo shutting down Koprol, plus other local LBS startup like this one, I’d say that such apps just don’t work here – except Foursquare. Now, Kevin Osmond together with Richard Fang (who has also quit Tiket.com) co-founded Weekend Inc., a design and technology studio which provides startup development and consulting services. They will launch a new startup early in August 2012, and I have a feeling it’s this one. Stay tuned as we will keep updated with the latest startup from Kevin and Richard.

The free sticker pack is labeled as “Telkomsel Blob & MyAppsMall,” and contains cute emojis/emoticons you can use while chatting with your friends or family, just as with other sticker packs. But in this pack, Blob, the Telkomsel character, is being used as the main selling point.

Line has passed 45 million users and has generated $4.38 million in sales from the sticker shop alone in two months.

NHN Japan is not alone though, with Tencent planning to push its WeChat and Qute apps in Indonesia. Plus there’s KakaoTalk (which also has Tencent backing ) and which is also expanding here, trying to cut the market share of the incumbent BBM. Ready to type more messages, Indonesia?

Jakarta-based MM Cab is hoping to replicate the success of Uber, the private taxi/limo service from San Francisco. But MM Cab is bringing a lot more speed and glamour to its business by using Ferraris and Porsches. And so the yellow-liveried Ferrari model pictured here – the 360 Modena, which is not the very latest breed of Ferrari’s mid-engined V8s – could be taking you home. Albeit quite slowly through Jakarta’s notoriously awful traffic.

MM Cab soft-launched yesterday. The map on the company’s homepage suggests that it has four supercar taxis so far. The Porsches are Boxster S (2011) models. You can also interact with the firm on Twitter. MM Cab promises well-trained drivers who really know the city, and uses a normal taxi rate so it will be affordable for most middle-income people. It aims to expand to other big cities in the near future.

To promote the service, MM Cab is giving out free rides to anyone who can “catch” the taxi from now until July 18th. That’s where its afore-mentioned map comes in handy. And the effort has been paying off so far, with the hype around the Ferrari and Porsche cabs making people curious, talking about it a lot on Twitter. After the promotion, the service will be launched officially.

I believe since folks in Indonesia, especially Jakartans, tend to be relatively early adopters then the service will be fully booked before you know it. MM Cabs are not as technologically equipped as Uber, however, in areas like mobile payment. I believe with time – and greater smartphone adoption in the city – that will improve.

New pilot on Infinite Sky?

Infinite Sky, the latest game from Indonesian game studio TouchTen, has reached more than 100,000 downloads in five weeks. At the same time they have also released a new version of the game which includes new features such as new pilots (it has been hinted that one of the new pilots is going to be a character from Indonesian legends), more game-play modes, and shorter loading times. The 3D airplane shooting game is also now available on Android after initially launching on iOS.

We also just got some news from Anton Soeharyo, the CEO of TouchTen, that his studio has reached several milestones on the iOS version: listed 36th in terms of downloads in free apps, 19th in games US app store, 7th in action Games (beating Jetpack Joyride by Halfbrick, Subway Surfers by Kiloo, and Temple Run by Imangi), and 9th in arcade games (as you can see from the screenshots).

This is a remarkable achievement from an Indonesian game studio and really proves that the emerging country has top talents to do great things and fare well even outside their home market. In addition, we understand that the Ideosource portfolio company has just moved to a new office too. What a month they are having over at TouchTen – congratulations from Tech in Asia!

ClickTRUE, a startup based in Singapore focusing on helping brand owners with online strategy such as design, experience, search, and conversion, has just raised series A funding from Nusantara Ventures. The startup recently expanded into Indonesia, setting up its clickTRUE Indonesia subsidiary. The locally-sourced funding will differentiate the digital agency from its rivals, said CEO Jackie Lee today.

It is an obvious move for a Singapore startup to expand to neighboring Indonesia. Indonesia has most of the wishlist ticked for any internet company – moreover a digital agency – in that it has a young and social population, internet usage is increasing, and digital ad spending will reach US$10 billion this year. It explains why Google has presence here now too.

With this investment, Shinta W. Dhanuwardoyo, founder of Bubu.com and managing partner of Nusantara Ventures, will sit on the board of directors of clickTRUE Indonesia. With years of experience in the digital industry, this will only aid the expansion of clickTRUE. Shinta said in an announcement this morning:

There is so much potential for growth in Indonesia. clickTRUE has the expertise and tools to help businesses in Indonesia click their way to success. With the evolving internet landscape, it’s still very exciting for me to be a part of this even though I’ve been doing this for years. This is exactly what we need for Indonesia to move forward in terms of performance marketing in the digital space

With the rise of internet literacy, usage, and spending, Indonesia’s definitely a place to expand. We have seen JWT expanding through acquisition, and I believe these moves are just the start of the capital inflows. At the same time, this also marks the first series A investment by a local venture capital group in Indonesia, and I definitely hope to see more local startups get investment from them too.

BeliFurniture, which means “buy furniture” in Bahasa Indonesia, is a startup that (surprise!) focuses on selling furniture online in the country. Founded in January 2012, BeliFurniture.com claims to be the biggest office furniture reseller in Indonesia with 5,000 products posted. Co-founder Ronny Hartanto, tells us via e-mail:

When we started this business, many were skeptical about sustainability. However we were convinced that this business is going to be successful due to the fact that most traditional stores in Indonesia are using brochures, because there are too many products to display in their stores. Therefore buying online is definitely a much easier choice. Our biggest competitive advantage is that we publish our entire [range of] product prices online, unlike other offline/online stores where heavy negotiations are needed just to reach a selling price.

With 95 percent of its products being office furniture, it’s only natural that 90 percent of the customers are coming from corporations, even though its approach is B2C. With around 50,000 unique users, BeliFurniture claims its sales have been doubling each month and are growing very quickly. Because of low credit card adoption and other payment problems in Indonesia, most of the process still happens offline.

Going forward with a vision to dominate the furniture market in Indonesia, the ten-person team has a mission to help educate people that buying furniture online is easier, cheaper, and safe. Although the startup doesn’t necessarily need funding, it has been approached by several venture capital groups, and is open to any funding opportunities to “super charge” its growth.

After months of rumours floating around, finally the news is out: Yahoo is shutting down its social network Koprol effective August 28, 2012. Most people saw this coming after it laid off thousands of people, including most of the Yahoo Koprol team back in April. Once hailed by Indonesia’s president, Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, Koprol now is being retired by the internet giant.

Koprol is an Indonesian location-based social network founded by Satya Witoelar, Fajar Budiprasetyo, and Daniel Armanto. It was bought by Yahoo back in May of 2010. It was one of the few success stories here in the Indonesia startup scene and is often mentioned when discussing the tech scene here. But even with recent new features, millions of total users, and business pages to create revenue, they are being thrown into the deadpool. Yahoo’s official statement explained:

In line with Yahoo!’s focus on more quickly innovating with our core products and properties, over the coming quarters, we are shutting down or transitioning a number of products that did not meaningfully drive revenue or engagement. After carefully reviewing its product portfolio, Yahoo! has decided to discontinue Koprol effective 28th August, 2012. Users will be notified of the shut-down and the process of retrieving their online data starting June 29th, 2012.

I guess this is the way startup life goes, right? It’s a roller coaster ride with ups and downs, and for every startup that closes down, more than a few new startups are born. I’m definitely expecting a lot from the Koprol alumni in the near future. As for Yahoo Koprol users that are still active and want their data (posts, check-ins, images, and reviews), they can export the information through m.koprol.com/export.

[Photo: Digital Trends]

To use the SMS inquiry service simply text an SMS to 3789 from any carrier you use with the following format:

• For mobile phone inquiries: Telunjuk hp <brand> <type>
• For laptop inquiries: Telunjuk laptop <brand> <type>
• For tablet inquiries: Telunjuk tablet <brand> <type>
• For plane ticket inquiries: Telunjuk tiket <origin> <destination> <date of departure>

Redya Febriyanto, the CEO of Telunjuk.com, commented on the new feature:

We bring this SMS inquiry feature by working with all the telcos in Indonesia to make it easier for Indonesian people to shop, which aligns with our tagline “Our Best friend to Shop.” We realized that even with internet user growth, there is still a huge number of people without internet access. This SMS inquiry is one of our strategies to educate people and introduce the use of the internet.

This feature can be really useful when we have a mobile and don’t have internet access. And it’s really good that Telunjuk is reaching out to the lower-end market too. One thing to worry about is the complexity of the format though, because if we need to remember the format every time it might impede the feature’s adoption. As one of the Project Eden portfolio startups, Telunjuk is actively looking for funding to accelerate its growth.

Ohdio is a startup from Indonesia that wants to disrupt the domestic music industry by offering an online music streaming service. It’s available only for web right now, having gone into live beta just a few days ago.

As an online music streaming service, Ohdio works like YouTube for music. You can play any song in its database anytime without installing any app. To use Ohdio, you need to sign up first, after that you can add songs to the ‘Jukebox’ and just play them.

After exploring the service, I noticed the collection isn’t really complete even for recent songs (where’s my Sheila on 7?) as they have only worked with three major labels. But Yoga Nandiwardhana (the founder of Ohdio) and his team are working on it. So for now you can play some songs from Dewa 19, or if you are in your 30s you might prefer Katon Bagaskara. What about Western music? Or Korean? Yoga said that they are focusing on Indonesian music for the time being.

For the interface and user experience, I like Ohdio because it is clean and easy to use. The search bar is also prominent so users won’t have much trouble searching the songs. So is Ohdio trying to be the Spotify of Indonesia? Yoga Nandiwardhana, the founder and CEO of Ohdio answers:

We’re not trying to be the something-something of Indonesia, really, because we believe that Indonesia has a unique music listening and online behavior, so applying some foreign concept directly to the local market just won’t cut it. For the freemium model, let’s put simply that we will give some more enjoyable experience to paid users. We only allow people to put two songs in their jukebox to be played without registering, since we’re in beta mode, we’d like to get people to get the experience first. If you stick around for a little longer, you’ll find out that you need to register to explore the service. For the official launch and mobile app, I cannot disclose that yet.

The company received investment from East Ventures [1], so I think Ohdio will have a good chance to build the music library and scale the service. Many Indonesians are waiting for this kind of product, but at the same time I wonder how much easy it will be to convert free users into premium ones.

ARTX 2012 is the “first augmented reality event” in Asia – so claims the organizer Augmented Reality & Co (AR & Co). The event was held on June 15 and 16, and featured exhibitions, seminars, and an augmented reality competition. The promos for it sounded fun, so I dropped in. It saw 1,500 in attendance, and was held at Bina Nusantara university in partnership with Kibar Kreasi and Kompas.

The exhibition itself showcased some of the best usage of augmented reality technology by brands in Indonesia. We had Indosat, Djarum, Telkom, Disney, Qualcomm, LG, Kino Toys, Dancow, Lee Cooper, Kompas, and Nissan. In total there were 16 exhibitors. Managing director of AR & Co, Peter Shearer, explained more:

As a digital industry player, we want to help educate the people about the development of augmented reality technology in Indonesia and its usage in more than just one sector. AR&Co, as a pioneer of augmented reality development in Indonesia, is proud to be able to showcase and hold this event. This shows that Indonesia’s products can compete with anyone’s out there and we hope that more are coming – especially from students.

As for the seminar, they had Michael Budi (CEO of AR & Co.), the afore-mentioned Peter Shearer, Ignatius Hardanto Subagyo (business director at Kompas), and Yasha Chatab (business development director at WIR). All were talking about augmented reality implementation and its future prospects in Indonesia. ARTX also held a competition to develop augmented reality apps both on mobile and PC for high school students and university students.

There haven’t been many startups developing augmented reality technology in Indonesia. One notable one might be Cherrypicks, which has a subsidiary company in Indonesia. It has really nice products and a number of clients already. I would definitely love to see more augmented reality implementation, especially coming from our own local startups.

Startup Asia Jakarta 2012 was different compared to our Startup Asia Singapore, especially as we hosted a Hackathon this time. The 24-hour event had around 200 developers in attendance, and 32 Android applications emerged when the dust had settled.

We had developers coming from Depok, Bandung, Jogjakarta, and even Malang all the way to Jakarta. The hackathon took place at the same venue as Startup Asia Jakarta 2012, but since it was held in another room, it didn’t quite get the spotlight it deserved, with participants working all night long and sleeping on floors hacking at their apps.

The hackathon started with a brief introduction from Tech in Asia, and then continued with presentation from 7langit, CloudyRec, Urbanesia, and SkySQL. After the session, participants were then given the green light to start hacking until 10:30 am the next day. From the start until the end, all of them looked really enthusiastic and some even didn’t sleep until 4am in the morning to finish their app.

All the applications were given three minutes pitching time in front of the judges at the end of the hacking session to decide the three winners. The judges were Erwan Mace of Google, Aung Sithu Kyaw of CloudyRec, and Selina Limman of Urbanesia.

The first winner for the Hackathon session was D’livery – an app that you can use to order foods from your smartphone targeting restaurants and fast food outlets. They can also collect user behavior data and push ads. The app was created by students from Bandung Institute of Technology.

Second place went to JualDisini, a m-commerce application with a slick interface which you can use to sell things via smartphone. One roadblock, however, is that they still haven’t used any payment gateway.

Third place was taken by 123 Rider, an app that will help you tackle traffic in Jakarta by carpooling. Users can just post their destination via smartphone, and say how many passengers that can fit in that car, and then publish to the internet. All of them were also given a pitching time in front of the Startup Asia Jakarta audience after the Startup Arena pitches.

The winners were given some fancy prizes too, as you can see from the list below:

• 1st: $200, new iPad 16GB WiFi, $500 Biznet credits and 1 million IDR Rakuten voucher
• 2nd: $150, iPod Touch (8 GB), $300 Biznet credits and 500,000 IDR Rakuten voucher
• 3rd: $100, iPod Touch (8 GB), $150 Biznet credits and 300,000 IDR Rakuten voucher

Congratulations to all the winners! For those investors or interested parties who want to connect with the winners or the rest of the developers, feel free to drop us a line to get in touch.

Wujudkan

There are more than a few startups out there doing crowdfunding but Wujudkan is different. It is launched in a country which its tech ecosystem is still new; where founders have to try to find a solution to make the crowdfunding work. Coming from diverse backgrounds – technical, finance, legal – they are trying to combine all of their knowledge to make Wujudkan take off in Indonesia.

Five of Wujudkan’s 12 projects have finished their fundraising campaigns. It involves a curation process and helps to shape each campaign in a way that will catch people’s attention. The first and the biggest project, Atambua, reached its goal just a few days before the campaign was scheduled to end. Working together with famous filmmaker Mira Lesmana and Riri Riza, it set an ambitious goal of IDR 300 millions(US$32,100) for a movie that will be recorded at East Nusa Tenggara.

Mandy Marahimin, co-founder of Wujudkan, tells us more about the project:

Having Atambua reach its goal is a huge milestone for us. It really was the effort of teamwork. Not just from the Wujudkan team, but also from Mira Lesmana and Riri Riza. We all relentlessly campaigned, blogged, tweeted, and email everyone in our address books, even meeting them offline. Yes, it is an achievement, but we still have a long way to go. What the success of this project showed me is the beauty of crowdfunding. It is not about you, it is about everyone AND you. It’s like falling in love: you have to open up and risk yourself getting hurt, but when you do and you love fearlessly, you will always get bigger returns.

As the first-moving crowdsourcing startup in Indonesia, Mandy believes that Indonesians are familiar with the concept of crowdfunding but still have a barrier of trust in doing internet transactions. The trust is starting to increase lately though, and Mandy wants Wujudkan to be up there and ready to ride the wave when it comes. Mandy told us that Wujudkan itself is currently fundraising and looking to hire a few more people to add to the small team she has.

Infinite Sky puts you in pilot’s hot seat to defend the sky by defeating enemies and the big boss. With four choices of planes, it can be upgraded along the way with the coins you gain, or buy with in-app purchase. If the 100 missions available on Infinite Sky don’t satisfy you there, then there is an endless mode that you can play as well.

TouchTen, which raised funds from Ideosource last year, has created other well known games such as Hachiko on iOS (which was mentioned by Eric Schmidt on his trip to Indonesia), and it has worked with a music label to create a web based game TouchJam.

As the 14th game for TouchTen, Infinite Sky has reached over than 53,000 downloads and has 10,000 downloads per day so far. The company’s CEO, Anton Soeharyo, believes that it will be another success. To download Infinite Sky from your iOS device, drop over here and grab it.

Photo: euronews.com

Indonesia’s Twitter timeline in May was filled with various topics and themes. But the National Education Day on May 2nd as well as Lady Gaga were the top trends last month. Indonesians were tweeting about their hopes, suggestions, and criticisms for Indonesia’s education system, and its always promising to see the public involved in such an important discussion.

Meanwhile Lady Gaga also filled the timeline last month because of her concert fiasco which at the end was cancelled which disappointed all her ‘Little Monsters’ in Indonesia.

As her concert neared its scheduled date, more Islamic hardliners groups in Indonesia rallied against her. After much negotiation and lengthy process, the Lady Gaga management team decided to cancel the concert which was going to be held today. This made a lot of Indonesians disappointed and angry with the government because of how powerless they are compared to the hardline groups.

Accoring to SalingSilang, other popular keywords in May also included Indonesian Idol participant Dera who was eliminated, another participant called Deon was also frequently mentioned. People were also actively discussing the much-anticipated, The Avengers movie. The movie picked up more steam on Twitter as Indonesia opened its first IMAX studio at Gandaria City Mall, Jakarta.

[Source: SalingSilang]

Kompas, the biggest and the most successful newspaper in Indonesia, celebrates the four-year anniversary of its online news portal with a new feature: the Kompas.com Facebook Timeline. Officially launched yesterday, it is the first local news portal to integrate the Facebook Timeline feature in this way. It helps Kompas.com readers to share interesting or useful article links to friends and family on Facebook without actually clicking the share button, making it a more seamless experience.

To activate the feature, you can simply click “Connect to Facebook” on the Kompas.com homepage and login to your Facebook account. After you are done, every article that you read on Kompas.com will be shared to Facebook. The company reassures folks that it will not spam your friends’ feeds because the content will be aggregated into one column. The Timeline app also shows your friends’ activities on the Kompas site.

Edi Taslim, vice director of Kompas.com, explained:

This newest feature of Facebook Timeline on Kompas.com will help our readers find more articles that have been read by friends or colleagues that most likely have the same interest. Kompas.com readers can also see their friends’ activities on Kompas.com and get the same information like them.

Kompas started its offline-to-online strategy back in 1997 with Kompas Cyber Media, which turned into a subsidiary in 1998. Kompas Cyber Media has successfully beaten its challengers in the online portal space. In 2008, Kompas Cyber Media was reborn as Kompas.com, a news portal that has brought the trusty newspaper brand online. In this fourth year anniversary, Kompas.com is holding several fun contests and challenges such as the OrangeDotterz mission, 1M Facebook photo contest, the afore-mentioned Facebook Timeline, and T-shirt design competition with a total prize of more than 100m IDR (US$11,000).

Disclosure: Kompas.com is our Official local media partner for Startup Asia Jakarta 2012 and Edi Taslim will be speaking at one of our Coffee Chats. Please see our Statement of Ethics on how we remain independent from partners and advertisers.

Wego announced yesterday that it has officially launched in India. In addition to establishing headquarters in Bangalore, it has launched a localized site called Wego.co.in. The company expands to India with the aim of helping people travel domestically or overseas by offering services such as aggregating reviews, comparing prices, and checking the availability of flights and hotels.

It is not only expanding its services to India, but it also has localized its content with integration into multiple languages like Hindi, Gujrati, Punjabi, Tamil, and Bengali. So far, this has proven to be a successful method with Wego India scoring a total value of US$17 million a month in booking leads for travel partners.

Jackson Fernandez, Wego India’s general manager, explained more to Tech in Asia via e-mail:

India has always been a market of keen interest for us. Especially because we always have had a lot of Indian users on wego.com. Hence moving closer to the market was a logical step ahead. In the run up to the launch, we have set up a team in India, headquartered in Bangalore and also have presence is four other cities. The travel market in India is intensely competitive with a good number of online players, LCCs, and large hotel chains. This becomes like an ideal market for us where customers are price sensitive and there are a large number of players to choose from.

Wego in India has tied up with all the major travel players with an intent to bring the whole range of travel content to our customers. The intent is to use India as an anchor to fuel our growth in the Indian subcontinent, working more closely with regional players and ensuring that we have the right partnerships to bring the best of international and local content to our customers.

With a similar strategy in Indonesia, Wego now has a presence in the second and third most popululous nations which is really a good move from the company. With both India’s and Indonesia’s growing middle-class and internet penetration getting higher and higher, Wego will likely see strong returns from being early and aggresive in these two markets. Do you agree?

Wego, a travel search engine company here in Asia, has made an investment in Valadoo.com, a social commerce startup focused on curated travel packages. With Indonesian travellers as its target market, this move to pick up Valadoo shows Wego’s commitment to expansion in Indonesia. The size of the investment hasn’t been made public.

Valadoo, which pivoted from a Groupon clone into an e-commerce site, curates its own packages and travel getaways with a focus on domestic destinations. But there are international destinations too. Its products include exotic dive packages in Raja Ampat Papua, Derawan Kalimantan, island hopping experiences at Pantai Belitung and Karimun Jawa, and for international travelers they have shopping trips to Hong Kong and Singapore.

Valadoo also has two key differentiators in its ‘Valadoo Travel Consultants’ and ‘Jelajah.’ Valadoo Travel Consultants consists of experts that help fulfill customers’ needs by customizing trips according to what they want. Jelajah is a digital journal by travellers which is written and edited by the Valadoo team themselves. It has many avid followers on Facebook and on Twitter, and serves well as a consumer touch-point.

In this deal, Jaka Wiradisuria will continue as CEO of Valadoo while Wego co-founders Ross Veitch (CEO) and Craig Hewett (CCO) will both join the Valadoo board of commissioners; Graham Hills (managing director of Wego Indonesia) joins the Valadoo board of directors. Valadoo will remain as an independent business while it will benefit from Wego’s resources and expertise to scale.

Graham Hills explained more on the deal:

Valadoo recognised early the demand among urban Indonesians to explore and enjoy domestic travel. The country is in a discovery phase and the tourism network is rapidly expanding to cater to it, but the options need to be affordable. Valadoo therefore has a great proposition and a talented team.

Wego launched a Bahasa Indonesia version of its site at the end of last year and is aggresively expanding its domestic operations by partnering with local travel agencies and businesses to enhance its offers for hotels and flights. The newest addition is locally relevant deals and packages, which is – in my opinion – the reason for this investment. The travel startups scene in Indonesia is definitely getting hotter!

Apps Foundry has officially released its SCOOP app on the Android platform. SCOOP was initially an iPad-only app that allows users to download and read magazines. Its debut on Android comes eighteen months after its launch.

SCOOP for Android has a different user interface than its iOS version, but it also has adopted some features that aren’t available on iOS, such as a payment options for bank transfers or PayPal, and optimization for low-end Android phones.

Willson Cuaca, the CEO of Apps Foundry, explained more:

This is a significant improvement because there aren’t many mobile applications in Indonesia that are using bank transfers to sell digital content and this is running without e-currency. This system is needed to adapt and fill users’ need in Indonesia. For this Apps Foundry has worked together with Finnet, a subsidiary of Telkom. SCOOP is also optimized for low-end Android phones with slower processors and smaller memory and it is available for 16 different Android phone screens.

In terms of content, the SCOOP team says it has added around 90 80 percent (Correction: 80 percent is the correct figure, as informed by the company.) of local magazines in Indonesia and plans to add to that in the future. It has brought some well known publishers such as Gramedia Majalah Group, MNC Group, and McGraw-Hill from the United States. The startup also powers the Samsung eReading app in Indonesia.

Apps Foundry now has four products on the market:

• SCOOP for iOS – which has successfully distributed more than 1 million magazines via iPads and iPhones.
• Samsung eReading powered by SCOOP – an exclusive Android app for Samsung, the newest version of which will be released together with the Samsung Galaxy S3 in the country.
• SCOOP Interactive – an interactive iOS newsstand based on HTML5 that will carry over 10 magazines.
• SCOOP for Android – the new baby, now available for tablets and smartphones runing Android 2.2 to 4.0.

With plenty of funds and claiming to be already profitable, Apps Foundry has also acquired media startups/blogs Makemac and GameSaku. Though it initially built a reading platform, those two media acquisitions suggest that Apps Foundry is trying to build around its own content, although it’s still unclear what its next steps and products will be.

Get the new SCOOP Newsstand for Android from Google Play.

Disclosure: Willson is part of East Ventures, an investor in this blog. See our ethics page for further details.

A tech ecosystem usually consists of startup founders, angel investors, VCs, government, universities, media, and communities. What often happens is that most people focus only on the entrepreneurs and the ones who invests in them — angels or venture capitals. But local communities are where all of these stakeholders meet, and there are more than a few startups being born or getting investment out of such meetups.

We have at least one strong startup community in each of the big cities across Indonesia, starting with StartupLokal in Jakarta, FOWAB in Bandung, Bancakan 2.0 and Gamelan in Jogjakarta, SuWec in Surabaya, and Stasion in Malang. They are holding regular meetups periodically to give updates about what is happening in the ecosystem and quite often they have a session to showcase newest product launches.

We will have five initiators from these communities talking on stage on the first day of Startup Asia Jakarta 2012:

1. StartupLokal

StartupLokal community is a community that based in Jakarta which acts as a melting pot, gathering start-up founders, digital industry enthusiasts, investors, and media, giving them a chance to collaborate in one way or another. This community started in April 2010 and has been growing since then. The StartupLokal community held Jakarta-based regular monthly meetups, in total 25 up until this month. It also has launched Project Eden, a startup incubator/accelerator aiming to provide pre-seed investment.

2. Bancakan

Founded back in February 2010, Bancakan is a gathering for all Jogjakarta startups and developers. They have already held more than nine meet-ups to date. It also manages Hackerspace YK, inspired by Bandung’s Hackerspace by FOWAB. Bancakan is Javanese term referring to ‘gathering’ or ‘eating together’

3. FOWAB

Bandung in West Java, Indonesia’s third largest populated city, is well-known as a creative city. It is also a high-tech city, as Insitut Teknologi Bandung, arguably Indonesia’s finest technological campus, is there. It’s not surprising to know there’s a creative tech community in Bandung too. FOWAB is community for creative people who get connected through the Internet in Bandung, so in a sense FOWAB is not exclusively for IT startup people only. FOWAB is for everyone from the creative industry who has the same vision to make Indonesia a better country and a better place to live. Since its first meetup in February 2010, FOWAB has held eight events. It has also created shared workspaces for creative workers named Hackerspace Bandung. It has held Geek Fest, a SXSW-like conference at the end of March 2012 and plans to make it an annual event.

4. Stasion

Stasion is a Malang, East Java-based local startup community that aims to build synergies among the members who work in digital business and technology. Founded in March of 2011, they have so far held four meet-ups and three public workshops. ‘Singo Edan’ is the term often referred to Arema FC, Malang’s beloved football club. Lately Malang is making a name for its developers after some hackathon/developer days that have been held there.

5. SuWec

Surabaya, East Java, is Indonesia’s second most populated city after Jakarta. So it’s expected that this city will have several tech communities as well. SuWec is a community for web industry practitioners folks in Surabaya. It helps and connects like minded people to collaborate and work together. Since its founding in September of 2009, SuWec has been a regular monthly event.

Not only will our speakers talk in depth about what their community is and what are they doing to help startups in their respective cities, but they will also discuss the advantages and disadvantages of being in their city. They will also speak to the difference between startups in these cities, and their plans to help the Indonesian startup ecosystem.

Interested to know more? Get your tickets to Startup Asia Jakarta 2012! Or if you have an interesting product or idea that you believe can wow the judges and audience, please register your startup for the Startup Arena competition and win US$10,000!

Launched in December 2010, Fimela.com is a web portal dedicated solely to Indonesia’s modern, tech-savvy, and mobile women who want a combo of news, fashion, and family tips. The services has launched its own e-commerce site called FimelaShop.com which will be focusing on exclusive fashion brands, kids and toys, and home. It will not only be selling them, but it is giving a 30 percent to 70 percent discount for a limited time.

We can see the similarity of the model to Gilt Groupe, Fab, and Home Decor in Silicon Valley.
It has the key ingredients of the content and traffic, which they can convert into a loyal customers at fimelashop.com.

Dian M. Muljadi (the founder of Fimela.com) is working together with Octovate Group – a creative entrepreneur group which incubated creative businesses in film, digital media, and startups – to create this commerce site. The site was also born with the help of Kolibrii.com – an e-commerce consulting firm. With her first e-commerce business now launched, Dian Muljadi commented on the occasion:

We can see there is an increase of the tendency to make use of practicality of online media to shop. Online shopping isn’t niche anymore. I see [the] need of an e-commerce that is focusing on fashion and lifestyle products, and that is why at Fimelashop.com we initiated to be a branded sale e-commerce.

Fimelashop.com will be under the direction of Lila H. Cokronagoro who will take a general manager position. FimelaShop will have the following brands on its site for now: Metro Department Store, Mazze, Upper East, Missoni, Herve Legger, Robert Rodriguez, Yongki Komaladi, Bubble Girl, Adidas, Disney, Looney Tunes, Nickelodeon, Vivere, Neoflam, Akebono, and a total of 170 more brands.

With the power of content and catered towards women, all eyes wlll be on FimelaShop to see whether the flash sales model works in Indonesia.

Multiply has officially announced that it has moved its corporate headquarters from Florida to Jakarta after first confirming the move back in January. At the same time, Multiply also replaced Peter Pezaris with Stefan Magdalinski as its CEO.

With 15 years of e-commerce experience, Stefan has previously managed e-commerce for MIH (a subsidiary of Naspers Group) in sub-Saharan Africa and he is the co-founder and CTO of Moo.com.

With this experience he is happy to help Multiply move forward:

I’m very excited to be working with the existing Multiply teams in Indonesia and the Philippines and become part of our new operations here. Having worked in Nigeria and Kenya recently, it’s wonderful to be operating in such developing markets as Indonesia and the Philippines. My immediate objective is to recruit and assemble a world-class local technical development team to be based with me in Jakarta, and together build the best e-commerce platform in the region, if not the world.

One huge event that Stefan will be focusing on immediately is Multiply ShopFest. Multiply Shopfest is an event by Multiply intended to add flavour to the e-commerce market here. Dubbed as the first online shopping festival in Indonesia, it will have virtual queue, super sale, sampling, product demos, and even an auction system. It will be held for two weeks and every activities will be rewarded with points which can get you everything from shopping vouchers to the new iPad for the grand prize.

Multiply has been focusing on social commerce and Indonesia is a huge target for them despite the challenges that exist for such business in the region. Multiply is heading the idEA – Indonesia e-commerce association, and we can see Multiply getting even more aggresive this year to grab an even bigger slice of the e-commerce market.

PegiPegi, a brand-new Indonesian online travel store, launched a few days ago at an event in Jakarta. Three companies – PT. Alternative Media Group, Altavindo, and Japan’s Recruit Co. – have joined forces to create Go Online Destination (GOLD). The companies are making an effort to participate in improving the tourism and e-commerce sectors in Indonesia. It comes just a few days after the official launch of rival site Tiket.

The launch of PegiPegi.com was overseen by Indonesia’s minister of tourism herself, Mari Elka Pangestu. She noted the great possibilities for developing this space:

We plan to boost local travelers because it is a very lucrative market, and has huge potential for the improvement of tourism and the creative economy. The total number of trips made by local travelers has reached 245 million – that number will keep increasing as middle-income families keep getting higher payrolls.

PegiPegi – which, says the press release, has 36 billion IDR ($4 million) in capital – is hoping to make the hotel reservation process easier and at the same time provide competitive prices as well. Davy Makimian, the CEO of PegiPegi, said at the launch event:

We are really proud to be able to do this. Hopefully with the launch of PegiPegi.com it can be an important part of Indonesia’s tourism industry and at the same time making the government’s plan a success by optimizing local travelers and the creative economy potential.

After e-payment startups flooded onto Indonesia’s startup scene, now we’re starting to see more and more travel startups as well. The afore-mentioned Tiket launched just last week, and I’ve heard a rumor there will be another local travel site that’ll launch this month as well. This trend, if it continues, will likely be a good thing for the industry as a whole.

Riki Suliawan(Qeon) and Im Jun Hyok(Doobic)

Qeon was recently launched at the Scusa Intercontinental Mid Plaza Hotel, Jakarta, where it also featured its first game, Shadow Company. Founded back in June of 2011, Qeon Interactive will focus on publishing games from Korea, Japan, China, and Taiwan into the Indonesian market.

Qeon Interactive’s marketing director, Andrian Pauline, explains a little more:

With the launch of this company, we want to give gamers the highest level of convenience and satisfaction by leveraging on our gaming social network platform and world class customer services that will enable our customers to achieve a maximum level of gaming experience.

Supported by Biznet [1], Midplaza, and Perkom, Qeon’s first game is called Shadow Company. Working with Doobic game studio from Korea, Shadow Company is a first-person shooter (FPS) online game, but it has more features and gameplay compared to other online FPS titles out there. The differences lie in the game mode, skill mode, and graphics. Shadow Company has a mode whereby you can have four teams playing against each other on one map, while on the skill side there are individual skills, tactic requests (like calling a helicopter) and weapon operations (fast reload). As for graphics, it uses the Unreal Engine enabling PCs with even moderate specifications to play. Shadow Company is also on Qeon SNS (social networking service) where people can share their achievements, avatars, or chat with each other.

Doobic has been developing the game for three years, with 60 employees working on the title (80 employees in total, some of the development was outsourced to China), and it is their first game on the market. When asked whether they are making any games on mobile or tablet, CEO Im Jun-Hyok explains that most of the Korean game studios only make online PC games. Qeon Interactive’s CEO, Riki Suliawan, explains a little more about getting Shadow Company:

The story of how we are able to get Shadow Company is really interesting because at that time Qeon had nothing while they were already working with Nexon. I think Jun-Hyok saw a passion inside of me and here I am, able to launch a game company of my own which is my dream ever since I was a little. If I was asked whether we would like to be GREE or DeNA, of course, why not? But we still have a long way to go and we are learning along the way.

Social gaming companies like GREE and DeNA make huge revenue each and every year. Indonesia has a big gaming and internet industry, plus the market is expected to mature in the next few years. And that aligns with Qeon’s long term goals to be the first Indonesian social gaming platform.

The official association for e-commerce sites in Indonesia – or idEA – has launched, with an event held at the Kempinski Ballroom, Jakarta. The operational board consists of Daniel Tumiwa (of Multiply) as coordinator, Arnold Egg (of Tokobagus) as vice coordinator, with its secretary office at One Pacific Place, Jakarta.

Daniel Tumiwa, coordinator of the idEA operational board, introduced the association thusly:

It is our honor to introduce idEA, the association of e-commerce in Indonesia. As you can see by our logo, it has a 360 degree arrow on the dot, and this means we want to turn the noise in social media into actual spending power in e-commerce. We want to keep improving and expanding but at the same time trying come with a clear regulation together with key parties, such as government, and be the association to accommodate the aspirations of e-commerce sites in Indonesia.

The potential of Indonesia e-commerce is huge, with 55 million users, 52 million small and medium businesses, and with 57 percent of online users doing shop online. With that in mind, it has a vision to make Indonesia the biggest digital economy in southeast Asia, and contribute significantly to the economy as a whole. The mission is to educate the market and the users, and to promote and develop human resources for the e-commerce industry.

The association also explains the types of e-commerce in Indonesia, which are marketplace, classifiedss, online retail, and daily deals. For an idea of some companies that fit in these category, see the following list:

• Marketplace: Blibli, Multiply, Plasa.com, and Tokopedia
• Classified ads: Tokobagus, Kaskus, and Berniaga
• Online retail: Bhinekka and Gramedia.com
• Daily deals: Dealgoing

We hope that with the formation of a legal and official association of e-commerce in Indonesia, it will serve to educate the market, boost the industry, and improving the whole startup ecosystem. The only thing really missing is an e-payment, which is the question everyone is asking about the e-commerce industry, Daniel added that they are open to the e-payment players to join the association in the near future.

Our Startup Asia Jakarta 2012 event will have feature e-commerce panel. Are you coming?

Tiket's official launch in Jakarta (Image: Techinasia staff).

Tiket has officially launched its site today at an event at Pad 28, Jakarta (pictured above). Soft-launched six months ago with movie tickets, concert tickets, and hotel bookings available, now it has added flight ticketing to complete its tagline of being a “One Stop Travel and Entertainment Gateway.”

Unfortunately for the team, the Tiket.com servers are not handling the pressure well, and the site is currently down.

In those past six months, Tiket has grown to cover 550 hotels in 50 cities in Indonesia, concert ticket booking for 14 events (added to the site on 31 January 2012), and sold over 3,000 movie seats. For its new service, Tiket has 48 flight destinations so far with 3 carriers: Lion Air, Sriwijaya, and Batavia.

Gaery Undarsa, managing director of Tiket.com, described his entrepreneurial journey whilst speaking on stage:

Tiket.com was born out of our inspiration after seeing the online booking and e-commerce positive trend. We love traveling and we see the [online retailing] problem in Indonesia as an opportunity – we are trying to think how to help people book and buy tickets seamlessly. Our vision is trying to be the best integrated booking and ticketing site in Indonesia, and by adding the new service it is aligned with our goal.

Along with the new flight bookings, Tiket has several key features such as the ability to mix and match your travel itinerary, lots of online payment options (including credit cards and bank transfers), and 24-hour support via phone or online chat.

The travel and entertainment industry in Indonesia is definitely in its early stages and ready to be disrupted. Tiket has helped to push that disruption by making the online retailing experience frictionless – yet it has some room to improve as well, such as living up to its promises of giving the best prices for its hotel bookings. It needs to add a native mobile app for lots of platforms alongside its mobile-optimized website, since Indonesia is a mobile first country. What do you think about the newly launched Tiket.com?

There have been concerns about Zalora’s general performance since it launched. And the news of Nadiem Makarim, managing director at Zalora Indonesia, resigning from the company didn’t come at a great time. I thought it would be nice to learn the situation straight from Nadiem himself. My first question to Nadiem was to find out how Zalora Indonesia is doing. The answer from him? “It’s good.” He added:

Zalora is definitely scaling quickly and hiring a lot of local talents from all over the world, but the majority is local talents. It has been a pleasure to oversee the growth of Zalora Indonesia from ground zero until it [the current count of] 80 employees.

Nadiem declined to share any form of statistics about Zalora. So “why quit Zalora?” is the logical next question. For this, Nadiem put on his entrepreneur hat. He explained to me that leaving Zalora Indonesia makes sense as he is eager to create a company which he actually owns. After all, he is an entrepreneur at heart and the temptation to build another startup for himself in Indonesia was just too great. He explained that Zalora confirmed to him the potential of the Indonesian market. His next venture hasn’t been decided but he did say that he would like to spend more time on his first startup, GO-JEK, and at the same time explore other ventures in the tech and social media space.

Nadiem also believes that the current Zalora Indonesia leadership team will carry on the momentum (led by 2 ex-McKinsey consultants with entrepreneurial experience, Catherine Sutjahjo and Amrit Hassaraam) emphasizing that Zalora is doing well. He also thought that he learned enough from this Zalora journey, which is the main goal of why he accepted the position in the first place. He had the chance to build a mega startup and work with some of the best talent across the region. Speaking about lessons learned at Zalora, Nadiem pointed to three things:

1. The speed of execution at Rocket Internet is key to its success
2. High sensitivities of Indonesian consumers to specific pricing shifts, prices, discounts, and promotions
3. Talented & highly analytical team members makes a big difference in validating data collected from the market

So what’s next for Nadiem? A holiday is definitely in the pipeline. But he has already started exploring several venture options. He tells us that GO-JEK is now open to the possibility of funding to accelerate growth despite being already profitable. The company does have the potential to become a successful startup as a support platform. But Nadiem admits that it is probably harder for GO-JEK to scale as quickly as a fully tech-based ventures

GO-JEK now has 15 full-time employees so far, boasting 450 drivers in 151 locations with 6,000 unique users. Besides the B2C model, GO-JEK also has a growing B2B model which caters to e-commerce sites and corporate level services. For example, not only are drivers becoming dedicated cash-on-delivery agents for e-commerce ventures, they are also become sales agents to street kiosks for Multinationals like Danone. In the future, GO-JEK might even consider monetizing the “foot-traffic” of its Go-jek drivers by allowing advertisements on its bikes.

Whether Zalora Indonesia is really doing well remains to be seen. The market will eventually decide.

Nikkei BP (Nikkei Business Publications) is going to hold Game Networking Jakarta on May 28 at the Grand Hyatt Jakarta Ballroom. Nikkei BP, also the organizer of the annual Tokyo Game Show, said the goal of this networking event is to bridge the Indonesian and Japanese gaming companies, with a particular focus on the smartphone industry.

There has been a significant rise in social gaming in correspondence with the rise smartphones, and Japanese game developers are rushing to produce and create games, and they’re hiring too. Yet, there has been a shortage of domestic developers. And with that in mind Nikkei BP is trying to help Japanese gaming companies to make partnerships with Indonesian mobile and social game developers.

Along with platinum sponsors such as Konami(NYSE:KNM), GREE, and SEGA, Nikkei will also try to bring big names from Japan such as Capcom, Sony Computer Entertainment, Square Enix, Tecmo Koei, and Namco Bandai Games among others. This is a huge opportunity for the Indonesian game industry to learn from the best and create relationships to be able to make it in the global market.

The registration for attendees from Indonesia is free and those who are registered will be invited to the Tokyo Game Show Business Day in Japan. The agenda of the event will start with business meetings and conferences from 10am until 5.30pm and will be continued with a networking party until 7.30pm. I believe this is a must attend event for Indonesia game developers and companies. It will be interesting to see how many partnerships will be born out of this networking event.

Stilomo and Ifetcha have both successfully raised funding from angel investors. There hasn’t been a figure attached to the investments, but from what I’ve heard from the founders it is enough for them to launch and market their products. Both Stilomo and Ifetcha were part of the first graduates from the Jakarta Founder Institute, and graduated just two months ago.

Stilomo is – or, rather, will be – a mobile app that allows users to get promotions/deals by sharing them to social media accounts. Founded by Stanley Octavian, Rebecca Agiestha, and Nick Yudha, they are trying to differrentiate their startup from Groupon, LivingSocial or any group buying services by providing small- and medium-sized business owners the virality and traffic to their stores from these shared deals. It has a clear business model, and reminds us of the similar Singapore startup that is doing quite well called GSpot. Stilomo is currently developing an Android app, to be followed by Blackberry and iOS apps later. The beta version of the Android app will be released in May, and the startup will launch to the public around June.

Ifetcha is a dating service that helps users connect and interact with new people around them using its LBS app. Targeting 91 million single Indonesians, the startup was founded by the trio of Muhammad Ikram, Yady Guitana, and Jidesh Veeramachaneni, and will utilize social and gaming aspects into its mobile app. There will be virtual goods for sale as part of its revenue model, which will allow users to woo a potential date. My colleagues in China note that such apps are doing well amongst Chinese 20-somethings, such as Momo, and Mix.

I contacted both startups to get to know more about the funding rounds:

Rebecca, co-founder of Stilomo, explained:

We can’t mention its amount or even the range. But we can assure that the number is best-suited for us to kick-starting the company at its earliest stage. At first, we are focusing on product development, then we build our sales force to grab cooperation with some merchants, and we also plann some strategic alliances with telco providers, handsets, media or any other party that we believe could bring us to a higher level. We are only targeting merchants who are restaurants and in the food and beverage category in the first 6 months, then we’ll become available to any other categories like fashion, retail, and so on. In the long run, Stilomo allows people not only to hunt exciting promos, but they can explore the city business listings, and interact with their friends in a playful way. For merchants, Stilomo simply switches your customer to be a personal buzzer for your brand via social media.

Yady, co-founder of Ifetcha, told us:

We cannot disclose the details of our funding but it will be used mainly toward product development and refinement. We are currently focused on building our application and will launch a closed private beta at the beginning of May.

It is a solid recognition of the Jakarta Founder Institute’s graduates to get angel funding in less than three months from finishing the program – not to mention they haven’t even launched! I’ve also heard that the same angel investor actually approached all the graduates with regards some financial backing, but for now only these two have been confirmed. Meanwhile, Jakarta Founder Institute is currently opening its second batch and will close its registration on May 12, 2012 – go sign up for it here.

The Association of Asia Pacific Advertising Media (AAPAM) will hold what it has dubbed its “Big Break Session” for startups for during the Asia Pacific Media Forum (APMF) 2012 event. The session will be a chance for startups across Asia Pacific to present their work in front of leaders in the marketing and communication industry. Five startups will be chosen by a selection committee, which consists of the following notable individuals:

• Shinta Dhanuwardoyo (managing partner, Nusantara Ventures)
• Kevin Mintaraga (CEO, XM Gravity)
• Ricky Pesik (managing director, SatuCitra)
• Jerry Justianto (new media director, Masima Corp.)
• Andi Sadha (CEO/partner, Activate Media).

They will scout and invite five start-ups to present at APMF 2012. When asked about why this session was added to the forum, Kevin Mintaraga, the head of selection committee, answered:

It is because more of advertisers spend more and more dollars in the digital space. The annual growth of ad-spend in digital is growing significantly compared to other media. Moreover, clients/advertisers see an added value on pushing their digital creativity by using new channels. We are very excited to host this session and to give the stage to these new startups for five minutes each to present their capabilities and to spark brand engagement ideas.

The requirement for the startup to be accepted by the committee is that it has to be a company that has already launched, has a good advertising platform, and can reach certain a target market. The startup will be given a free entry to the event and they are going to receive regional exposure among CMOs, marketing directors and managers, agencies (digital, media, advertising) and a lot of key decision makers for digital ad spending.

APMF itself is a biennial event that is always held in Bali. This year will be the fifth series of the event. The fifth APMF this May 23 to 26 is estimated to host approximately 750 participants, including marketers, media owners and agencies, with 75 percent from Indonesia and 25 percent from the surrounding APAC region. The forum is focused on discussing the dynamics of the media industry, and will have thought provoking presentations from the following speakers, as well as others:

• Agung Adiprasetyo (CEO, Kompas Gramedia)
• Rory Sutherland (vice chairman, Ogilvy Group UK)
• Peter F. Gontha (media visionary, Group Publishers BeritaSatu Media Holdings)
• Bhaskar Das (president, The Times of India Group, Bennett, Coleman & Co. Ltd.)
• Akimasa Baba (general manager at Dentsu Media HQ, Dentsu Inc. Japan)

Here's the new Blackberry Curve 9220, snapped in our hands at the Jakarta launch. Click to enlarge.

At the X2 Club in Jakarta this afternoon, RIM (NASDAQ:RIMM) officially unveiled its latest addition to the Curve series, the Blackberry Curve 9220 (pictured right). It can be bought for IDR 1,999,999 ($222), an entry price which is more affordable for the lower-end phone market that should make it attractive to some younger Indonesians.

The Blackberry Curve 9220 – with its tagline ‘Stop missing out’ – will try capture feature phone users who are starting to move towards smartphones. Some new features in the Curve 9220 include a dedicated button for Blackberry Messenger (for faster access to your BBM), the new OS 7.1 (which will come as an update for the Blackberry Bold 9790, 9900, and Curve 9380 in the coming months), longer battery life compared to other BBs, and – last but not least – FM radio built-in.

Hastings Singh (pictured below), managing director of RIM South Asia, explained:

The new Blackberry Curve 9220 is a huge improvement for feature phone users, it will give a great mobile experience with social networks platform built around it. To add more integration, we even added a dedicated button for Blackberry Messenger, a feature that is demanded by our users […] Over the past few years, Indonesia has shown a lot of love for Blackberry, and we love them back.

How huge is Indonesia’s love for Blackberry? It is the top selling smartphone, now has over 4,000 retail points of presence over the next year, and to date, claims the company, it has created over 6,000 jobs here.

With the Curve 9220 targeting the lower end of the market as well as younger consumers, Indonesia is definitely the right market, where half of the population is under 30 years old, and 5.5 million of them in Jakarta alone. That was emphasised a great deal by RIM at the launch presentation. To be even more specific, 39 percent of the population is between 10- to 24-years old, and RIM is trying to capture exactly that segment. Will it work? Maybe. But in my opinion, for the long term Android and cheaper iPhones can seriously squeeze that market share of RIM. That’s exactly the kind of dire situation the Canadian phone maker is facing across Europe and the US.

Hosted in Bandung, the Windows 8 Boot Camp by Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT) a few weeks back produced no less than 44 applications for Windows 8. All of the applications, which were made by top Indonesian developers, and are ready to compete in global markets through Windows Store. All of the applications will be launched at the same time as Windows 8 launch in Indonesia, rumoured to be around the fourth quarter this year.

The three-day workshop consisted of application development using the latest features of Windows 8, including Metro Apps, Live Tile, and Charm Bar. It was not only developing a concept, but developers had a hands-on experience building Windows 8 applications where they saw their ideas materialize into prototype apps.

Farid Zulkarnain, the EVP of business development of Navcore Nextology, a partner of Microsoft Indonesia said:

In this workshop, we prepared and will keep preparing top apps to be able to crack the market. Indonesia has a high competence and a lot of talented web developers who can apply their skills directly with HTML, HTML5, JavaScript, and CSS to build Windows 8 Apps. The workshop was successful and a lot of developers are interested to join the next one.

The Windows Store approach will open opportunities for Indonesian developers, not only to reach PC users but also tablet users and even game consoles (Xbox). One highly regarded developer, Batista Harahap, CIO of Urbanesia also applauded Windows 8:

If you compare to other platforms, Windows 8 could provide a richer UI/UX. In addition, the context you want to display can be driven (by push notification) from the server thus eliminating the pulling mechanism. From concept to production, a lot of development time is saved.

Microsoft is faced with the the challenge of ensuring those who access the app from PC, tablet, and X-Box will have the same experience. This can lead to confusion for developers, similar to what happened with Android. So we’ll have to wait and see how Microsoft can push Windows 8 as a attractive platform for developers, and specifically, how the developer community receives it in Indonesia.

Remember those bubble puzzle games back in the PlayStation era? Now you can play on the web. Brought to you by Agate Studio, Blob Blob Battle has launched on Viwawa.com. So far it has gained lots of traction in Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, Australia, and USA.

In Blob Blob Battle you shoot bubbles out of cannon into a stack of colorful bubbles. If you can hit three or more bubbles sharing the same color as the bubble-bullets in one shot, those bubbles will vanish and your stack becomes smaller.

To differentiate Blob Blob Battle and other bubble puzzle games, they changed the stack. The stack will rotate and the bubbles will move according to your shooting momentum. This unique mechanical aspect enhances the game-play and makes it more fun.

Three modes are available for you to play: Practice Zone where you can hone your shooting skill first, Open Battle Zone where you play in a two-player match against another player for two minutes, and Endless Zone where you play against another player without a time limit, the game ending when a player’s bubble hits the window’s wall.

You start the game in the lobby. Here you can create a room for two, and then wait for another player to join the room and to play against you. Alternatively, you can enter one of available rooms created by other players. In the lobby you can also view your own profile where you can see your level, gold, and the money you have collected from winning matches, which you can use later to buy power-booster items from the shop.

To play, you can register for free on Viwawa.com] then head to Blob Blob Battle in the games directory.

Blob Blob Battle took two months and team of five to develop, and will earn revenue from the in-app gold currency that Viwawa provides. Although when I asked about a breakdown of the revenue sharing, they were unable to share those details. We all know that Agate Games is famous for its mobile games, but this is not the first time they created a game for the web, they have a Facebook game called Football Saga as well.

PicMix, which stands for ‘pictures’ and ‘mixing,’ is all about pictures and photos. You can mix pictures and photos with filters, frames, stamps and ornaments (coming soon) then share it to social networking services such as Facebook, Twitter and BBM. People love to take photos and share it with others, being commented, and liked, especially Indonesian.

We asked the founder about the difference between PicMix and other photography apps:

PicMix comes with some interesting features. For example there is a Mobile Photo contest, advanced frames, premium frames, stamps, and decors. We also keep enhancing our photo filters. In our next releases, we are adding more analog photography filter and films. All of these features for sure will keep our community excited and engaged. So far, we have successfully maintained the ‘stickiness’ factor in this community. We just provide the basic frames, filters and tools, but if you take a look at those photos uploaded to PicMix, you will amazed that our users are so creative in combining frames and filters to become a beautiful work of art! As a creator for PicMix, every single day, we feel awe at the creativity coming from our users.

In short, it is [similar to] Instagram but with a more personal touch to cater most users needs and most of all, the user uses PicMix to express their creativity with the tools.

So far they have over 7.5 million photos uploaded by more than 1 million members with 32,000 new members signing up every day. 40 percent of the members are coming from Indonesia, with Venezuela in the runner-up position with 10 percent. South Africa is next with nine percent.

In the future, its 2.5 version, which hasn’t been released, will have new features such as branded frames (Spongebob, Dora the Explorer, and Avatar to name a few). At the same time they will expand from the Blackberry platform to iOS, Android, J2ME, Symbian, and Windows Phone to complete the full circle. They will have to fight it out with BibbyCam as the Instagram for Blackberry. But personally I’ve been playing around and posting some pictures with PicMix for now!

Google (NASDAQ:GOOG) has officially launched its office in Jakarta today, and has chosen Rudy Ramawy to be the country head. Now that Google is here, it aims to boost the whole tech and internet ecosystem in Indonesia and to help local businesses get online. Yet the company hasn’t revealed where its new office will be precisely, but we’ll find out soon enough.

By shaping and recruiting a local team here in Indonesia, it will also go along with Google’s vision to make its services into something that can help the daily lives of people here. For example, there’s already Google Maps Indonesia, Google Voice Search in Bahasa Indonesia, Google Translate, and a localized Chrome Web Store.

Rudy Ramawy (pictured below, right), the country head of Google Indonesia, said in a statement issued this evening:

I’d like to thank our users and partners for the positive responses, the trust coming from our users in Indonesia is very precious for us. Our presence here shows Google’s commitment to be closer to our users and partners so we can enhance our positive contribution to the society. I see Google as something that is already a part of our daily life, for example I saw my daughter searching for a ticket to Bali using her voice, my mother asked me to look up on Google Maps a route where there’s no traffic jam, things like that. My daughter even asked me – daddy, how did people do their homework before Google exist? That question itself is proof that Google has changed the world and we want to keep doing so.

Before Google has even opened its office in Indonesia, it has launched several programs already with local partners. Namely, Bisnis Lokal Go Online was rolled out back in January aiming to help small- and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) to make their products/services available online. So far there are only 75,000 such businesses out of 17 million that have a website. Tomorrow, Google Indonesia will hold a seminar for 1,000 SMB owners to educate them on this issue. Google has also worked together with several local companies like Kompas, Kapanlagi, Gramedia, BliBli, and TouchTen to name just a few, for its Chrome Web Store.

Some Google products have also been improved for Indonesia; for example, Google Voice Search, complete with support for commands in Indonesian, has been launched on several platforms including Android, iOS and Blackberry. Since 2011, Google Maps users can also see the traffic situation on Jakarta’s roads so they can plan their trips wisely. And Google Places is open to local businesses to register for free.

Google has also executed several events and programs: there is Family Safety Day where Google worked with the Ministry of Communication and Information Technology to make its products safe for family to use, and then there’s the Indonesia Google Business Group in Jakarta and Jogjakarta, a community that helps companies understand how to use Google’s products and technology. Finally, there’s Google DevFest, an annual event where Google invites developers in Indonesia to crack open Google’s products from a developers’ point of view.

Google’s expansion shows that Indonesia has enough potential to put legs on the ground there even though it has a regional office in Singapore already. It wants to be closer to the place where they have such a large – and young and very mobile – user base. Hopefully, Google’s presence in Indonesia will open more doors, promote local content, and make it easier for local companies to work together with the search engine giant. Who knows, maybe in the near future we can also see other Silicon Valley companies, say Facebook for example, opening offices here in Indonesia too, instead of things going the other way around.

This is an interesting space since there are not many startups trying to provide this kind of service in Southeast Asia. Indonesia, the Philippines, Thailand, and Malaysia are among the list of countries that FoodPanda will cater to, but it has Singapore as its headquarters like its sibling site, Zalora.

According to SGEntrepreneurs, it has to go heads-on with HungryDelivery and Eatit.sg in Singapore, ChefXP and FoodbyPhone in Thailand. I also found Klik-Eat in Indonesia, Delivery.ph in the Philippines, and RoomServiceDelivery in Malaysia when I tried to Google local online food delivery services.

FoodPanda Indonesia has 81 partner restaurants so far in Jakarta ranging from Nobuzen, 4 Fingers, Trattoria Il Sale, and even local foods such as Bebek Goreng Surabaya. I believe it has a good chance to be big in Indonesia, especially since people have grown weary of call centers for ordering food delivery, an experience that often sucks. Ordering through the internet can be frictionless and faster, especially if done via a mobile app in the future.

There hasn’t been any major startup challenging this problem because people believe it needs a lot of capital to handle such an array of restaurants, and to market the service well. FoodPanda clearly has the capital as one of the Rocket Internet’s startups and I believe if it can bring on board lots more restaurants in a short time, and then even more people will consider using it. And use it often.

Rocket Internet recently launched fashion e-commerce site Zalora, and now it has brought out another e-commerce venture that’s focused on selling electronics. It’s called Lazada. The word ‘lazada’ itself is the Spanish word for loop, and it is another clone made by the notorious Samwer brothers, ostensibly following Amazon’s model this time. Which is a polite way of saying it looks almost identical to the old Amazon.com before its recent refresh – or to the current UK version of the site (pictured above). Based in the Middle East – Dubai to be exact – Lazada has so far launched in Egypt, Indonesia, the Philippines, and Thailand.

Lazada.com will focus on electronic products such as cellphones, TVs, software, computers, and cameras. In Indonesia, there are several brands that have partnered with the new site so far, including Acer, Apple, Blackberry, Canon, Lenovo, Nokia, Samsung, and Sony. It offers free delivery to anywhere in Jakarta thanks to Go-jek Indonesia, just as we saw with Zalora Indonesia. Again, this is not a surprise since the CEO of Rocket Internet Indonesia is Nadiem Makarim, who’s also the co-founder of Go-jek.

For Lazada to win the market in Indonesia, it will face the likes of local e-commerce mall BliBli, as well as Japan-based Rakuten’s Belanja Online, the latter of which has been going all out recently to build brand recognition and gain market share.

Companies like Amazon or Zappos haven’t been focusing on the Middle East or Southeast Asia region, which gives Rocket Internet a window to execute quickly in the hopes of being eventually acquired. It might set an example and a precedent for cloning big names and localizing similar services on an almost indistinguishable webpage.

What do you think about Rocket Internet’s operations in Indonesia and other emerging markets? Let us know in the comments!

One of the moderators from Indonesia (who asked not to be named) shared that moderators had been given the responsibility of screening a list of those Twitter users from Indonesia who have many followers. As I understand it, Twitter has 606 users on the list to be verified for now.

Although there is no specific minimum amount of followers needed to get verified, he hinted that those who are famous or widely followed are the ones who will be initially verified. The process of screening by the moderators will be by checking the website listed at a user’s bio (it must be a personal website, and cannot be a profile like About.me urls, or any other for that matter), and then they will look to see whether there is a Twitter widget or a link pointed to their Twitter account on the website. Last but not least a user has to have a Wikipedia page, and a link from the Wikipedia page to the user’s website or Twitter account will be a big help too.

It’s interesting to hear how this process works, although we don’t know if this is the way Twitter does things in other countries or not.

Google (NASDAQ:GOOG), which promised to open an Indonesia office last year, is finally taking some action on it. It’s late to fulfill its promise, but never too late I guess. Tech in Asia has been invited to attend the opening of the Google Indonesia office on March 30th, next Friday.

Indonesia has shown much potential over the years, having the third-largest group of Facebook users – and the fifth-greatest number of Twitter users – in the world, and Google certainly doesn’t want to miss out on all that. The number of internet users is rising and most importantly, ad spending is rapidly moving to online.

But I know, some of us think that potential is still potential, when will it ever be realized? With Google coming in big, hopefully, that would help foster the ecosystem here a little.

At the launch event, Google will introduce its country head for Google Indonesia and will likely explain how it will play in the country. Personally, I’m quite curious whether the office will be as fun as the other Google offices across the world – we will be sure to update you guys as we know more next week.

On a somewhat related note, Google will not be the only internet giant making its way into Indonesia. Chinese company Tencent has just recently opened an office there as well.

After a launch event at Planet Hollywood, Jakarta, the social news and beauty site Updaterus is officially open to the public after months of being in beta. Along with a few upgrades to its core features during the testing period, Updaterus now mixes beautiful peoples’ profiles and news aggregation all into one.

Updaterus.com simply shows the profile pictures or avatars of its female users, along with their social networking links. Men can then check out those beautiful girls’ profile pictures, and everyone can catch up on some news at the same time. Visitors to the site will be shown the profile picture of a girl along with an option to ‘heart’ (or ‘like’ on Facebook) the picture; women who have received the most hearts will win prizes in weekly, monthly, and yearly contests.

Discussing Updaterus' long road to launch, from its beta last September, at the Jakarta event this week.

Now that the site is live, there’s more of a focus on news events. Updaterus has a RSS news aggregation panel beside the pictures ticker. This will help people who want to read headlines without having to search for the news, with the option to click on the link, bringing more traffic to its partner news sites. Updaterus has also integrated social media so users can just log into their Facebook or Twitter accounts without having to go away from the site. Weekly winners/beauties will also be interviewed and shown on the Updaterus TV section.

Jonathan Marga Luhur, the CEO of Updaterus, said at the launch event:

We are more than happy to have finally launched Updaterus.com. All of the girls that will be shown aren’t only pretty but also inspirational. We hope to be able to show their inspiring side on Updaterus TV, and at the same time be a part of the Indonesia digital scene that is useful to users by getting recent news, accessing social media, and a unique way to keep track of time while appreciating Indonesia’s beautiful women.

Here’s a brief teaser video for Updaterus, featuring famous model Stella Rissa, that focuses on the fashion and beauty side of the site:

Zalora, a clone of Zappos by Rocket Internet has gone live in Indonesia, as well as in Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand, the Philippines, Vietnam and Taiwan. Like Zappos, Zalora wants to be the place to shop for shoes and fashion online.

I specifically looked at Zalora Indonesia, which is acquiring fashion brands and merchants quickly. At the same time it is building its name with Google and Facebook ads and so far has been pretty successful in doing so. It has several brands on its list already, ranging from (X)S.M.L to Nike. It also has more than 55,000 likes already on its Facebook page.

Razi Thalib, the VP of online marketing and product, explained a little more about Zalora Indonesia when we asked whether or not it’s a Zappos clone.

We don’t have any thoughts on [that]. Our only objective is to become Indonesia’s best online fashion mega-store. Our goal to bring style and fashion to everyone. Branded products form a big part of our goal but is not our only focus. It is a difficult challenge (regarding payment system) and to be honest we’re not sure we can solve them [that]. We do hope that by attempting to solve the challenges for e-commerce locally (e.g. mass awareness, payments, logistics et al) Zalora will help pave the way for a positive shift in Indonesia towards mass online shopping adoption.

With Go-jek Indonesia as its logistic partner and Nadiem Makarim (co-founder of Go-jek) sitting as CEO of Zalora Indonesia, we can be sure Zalora Indonesia will not be having problems regarding its promise to give free shipping and returns if you are unsatisfied with the products you bought.

E-commerce in Indonesia is a land of competition but the potential is huge only time can tell who the winners of the battle will be.

Startup Asia Jakarta will hold a panel regarding e-commerce in Indonesia. Please join us.

Location-based messaging platform Harpoen just launched few weeks ago. Although it is currently only available in Jakarta and only on iOS, Harpoen really excites me as it is a fresh startup and not a me-too product. It was 100 percent brain-stormed, coded, designed, marketed, and was launched from the founders’ dining room table in Kuningan, South Jakarta. We talked to John Patrick, the CEO of Harpoen, to learn more about the app.

1. Can you explain to our readers, who you are and what made you come to Indonesia?

We are four co-founders: two Indonesians and two foreigners. Obviously, I am one of the foreigners, but “foreign” needs to be contextualized because I have spent my entire post-university adult life – more than seven years now – in Indonesia. I originally came to Indonesia when I was 23 years old with a volunteer program affiliated with Stanford University. I then worked with some great entrepreneurs before joining a big private equity firm in Jakarta. Our other “foreign” co-founder and developer, Ty Kroll, has also spent many years in Indonesia and loves Jakarta. He’s a brilliant and super creative award-winning developer. Our Indonesian co-founders, Yudha Kartohadiprodjo and Agatha Simanjuntak-Ellis (my wife) would also chuckle at the question. Yudha comes from a very deep digital and print media background, and Agatha comes from an editorial, communications and entrepreneurial background. So we didn’t really “come” to Indonesia. We’ve been here all along.

2. What is Harpoen?

Harpoen is a location-based messaging platform; communication on the basis of where you are, rather than merely who you are. We think this is an important distinction, and we are one of the first companies to really do this. Harpoen is a bit “anti-social” in the sense that when you leave a message, anyone can view or comment on it, and vice-versa – the only catch is that you must be in the same general location. It’s not instantaneous and it’s not a broadcast to the whole world; it’s more elegant and private.

There is a bit of nuance to all of this, and it has a lot to do with the accuracy of GPS as well as introducing an intuitive and simple way to manage a lot of information across always-changing locations. The launch version of Harpoen was fairly “light” in terms of tools to help users instantly connect with the information and other users they want to connect with, but we are working on some of these features now, and they will be released very soon.

3. Where does the name Harpoen come from?

Harpoen is an old spelling of a harpoon – a spear used to hunt whales. It is a very direct act to throw a harpoon. To “harp” about something also means to talk a lot about it. Like, “that guy is always harping on about The Beatles” or whatever. We wanted a name that was about directness and action, and besides, we like the way it sounds too.

4. You have launched only on iOS so far, quite a bold move since there are only a few iPhone users in Indonesia.

We experimented for a few months at the start with Blackberry. Then we had this epiphany when we looked at Xcode as well as the Android SDK. We feel that iPhone’s market share is going to grow quickly in Indonesia. So the decision to go iPhone was based on that and by the simple fact that all iPhone screen sizes are the same. Plus, the iPhone is a truly beautiful device. If someone had told you ten years ago that there would be a phone this powerful, with all these applications, and that it only had one button… They’d be like: “no way.” But that’s the point. It’s always “no way” until it becomes that way.

5. Will you still launch on other platforms?

Absolutely. We are looking forward to Android development, and that opens up a lot of new and exciting possibilities for our users. We need to study Windows Phone and understand that side of the market a little more as well.

6. How are you going to make money from this?

I’ll defer to Paul Graham’s writings, where he advises that you become useful first and make money second. If and when Harpoen becomes useful, there are a lot of possibilities in terms of enterprise and premium services, location-based analytics, and so-forth. We have a closed-beta architecture for most of this already, but are now totally focused on making our platform useful, relevant, exciting, and cool for our growing numbers of users.

7. Are you bootstrapped or have you raised funding from any investor?

We are 100 percent bootstrapped. It’s just us sitting around our dining room table. Access to capital is important, but so is selecting the right capital. There are many ways to skin this cat. We’re going to do what is best for the platform and for our users.

XM Asia Pacific Pte Ltd announced that it has acquired PT Magnivate Group, one of Indonesia’s most successful (if not the most successful) digital and social media marketing agencies. This move will help extend XM’s reach to one of the largest advertising market in Asia.

Magnivate, which will be renamed as XM Gravity, will still be led by the CEO and founding partner Kevin Mintaraga. With around 100 people employed by XM Gravity, they are going to maintain their market leadership with global and local clients such as Danone, Unilever, Frisian Flag, Samsung, and Indofood. Founded in 2008, they have reached a total of 3 million brand fans today. Kevin Mintaraga commented on the deal:

This is the opportunity for our people/talent to have regional exposure and to support XM Asia regional expansion plan. In the near future, XM Indonesia office will take on an important role in XM’s regional growth plan, especially in social media marketing space.

According to Kevin, the average growth rate of digital advertising businesses in Indonesia during the last four years is around 90 to 100 percent per year, with digital advertising taking a 3 to 4 percent chunk of all Indonesia advertising expenditure. The estimated size of Indonesia total advertising expenditure in 2012 will be 9 to 10 billion USD, which will only bodes well for both XM Asia and XM Gravity.

Kevin Mintaraga also added his comment about his “exit” for the company he founded:

I am grateful to fulfill one of my career goals, but more importantly to have achieved this with partners and a team who always go an extra mile together. It’s simply a priceless life experience. I don’t have any specific advice from my experience, but one thing I realized that it takes passion and a dream to step on the first stone — but it takes commitment and attitude to finish the race.

Microsoft Indonesia and the United States Embassy through USAID have launched iMULAI 4.0, an annual ICT-based business innovation competition. Taking place at @america, Pacific Place Mall Jakarta, the event is in its fourth year, and aims to encourage Indonesian startups to submit their ideas for new products or new services that can help entrepreneurs do business.

Participants can start submitting their business plan to the iMULAI site [1] right now. This year, ten winners will receive $300,000 worth of backing from Microsoft’s (NASDAQ:MSFT) BizSpark platform for IT startups (instead of fifteen winners and $250,000, as occurred at last year’s iMULAI 3.0), some new hardware, and free participation in a special bootcamp to help them develop their business innovation. The most rewarding aspect might well be the opportunity to present their products to a group of local and global VCs.

With innovation as the focus of this competition, iMULAI will help startups bring their ideas to fruition and give them exposure. USAID mission director Glenn Anders commented on the competition:

We know that technology innovation stimulates improvement in business productivity. By giving entrepreneurs the tools they need to succeed, we are also promoting economic growth and prosperity in Indonesia and the global market.

iMULAI had quite a following last year and this year will likely draw even more interest from the community. I am hoping iMULAI can be a launchpad for startups in Indonesia to kickstart their products rather than just being a business innovation competition. But yes, we need founders in the country, and hopefully it won’t be the same people pitching the same products. I’m expecting some fresh ideas that solve real problems here in Indonesia.

[Image source: @america on Flickr]

Backed by the Nokia Siemens Network, Creatary consists of an API to put in your app that connects to the telecom company’s infrastructure. That way your app can draw on telco features such as SMS, location, and carrier billing, allowing users to, say, use their phone bill to pay for usage of an app. So it can help you solve the problem of monetizing your app. Plus, it works independently of the kind of phone or OS that the user has.

So far, Creatary has cooperated with Indosat (NYSE:IIT) in Indonesia and also TIM (NYSE:TSU) in Brazil (both with roughly 50 million subscribers) so that app devs in both those countries can draw on those resources. Now in private beta at Creatary.com, the site is being prepped for launch later this month. We talked to the startup’s Anand Jhingan (pictured below), who works on global strategy and alliances, and asked him to explain more about the upcoming service:

1. How many employees do you have right now? Is your team expanding?

Anand: We are actually a startup firm but lodged inside of Nokia Siemens Networks (NSN). There was an internal competition on innovation, and more than 200 ideas were submitted by NSN personnel globally. Of these, around 15 were short-listed and from these just six were given the go-ahead to be incubated further. Creatary was one of these finalists, and still functions as a full-fledged startup within NSN. Our team is global with the development cell based in California and sales and marketing across the globe – in Singapore, Brazil, the UK and India; and we are rapidly expanding. The Creatary team is extended by several cells and numerous resources within Nokia Siemens Networks which provide various kinds of support to our activities.

2. So far you have presences in Brazil and Indonesia. how many other countries will you target?

NSN has a vibrant relationship with over 600 operators in more than 150 countries, and one of the core ideas behind Creatary was to leverage these relationships while bringing value to our telecom customers. Via these relationships we introduced the idea with a multitude of telcos and the response from them was overwhelming. This helped the Creatary concept to obtain the firm backing of NSN management. Currently we are actively bringing additional operators on board and plan to have several integrated in 2012. In parallel, we are firmly focused on creating a complete end-to-end ecosystem from developers to operators in Indonesia as we see the high level of growth and appetite for innovation in this region.

3. Payment systems have always been a tough nut to crack in Indonesia. So, through your API, does it mean that developers can easily charge users through operator billing?

That is exactly what it means! We are well aware of the online payment issues and Indonesia is not alone as several other up-and-coming markets have the same issue. Very few people have credit cards and the ones who have them also are not very keen on using them on their mobiles. Globally it has been proven via various studies that people see their mobile bills as an extremely trustworthy source for payments. We factored this into our plans and by March 2012 we will have the payment API that allows developers to charge users on their mobile bills from within their apps and/or services.

4. Will Indosat be the sole partner for Creatary in Indonesia?

As of now we have partnered with Indosat for all of their 50 million plus subscribers but it is not an exclusive relationship and we are open to adding more operators.

5. How easy it is to integrate Creatary API into an app? Do you support all the platforms?

It is as easy as using any other web-based API. We have simple video tutorials on the site that explain the whole process while actually executing it in around five minutes. Not only do we support all the platforms but even once you enhance your app/service by using our APIs, your app/service can continue to stay wherever it is as well as be available through the same channels that have already been in use. The app developer does not need to change anything. Over and above, we are also offering free promotions for a limited number of the initial apps.

6. How is the payment split between Creatary and the app users/developers?

We want our platform to be a clean, transparent, and fair medium for app developers around the globe and the best way to prove this beyond doubt is to ‘put your money where your mouth is.’ Details about payment splits can be found on the website once you become a member. Creatary offers a very generous end-user price to developers across the board for all apps/services as well as all charges made inside the app/service.

Although as we know, revenue shares across the world differ greatly, we will be working hard to deliver this kind of aggressive revenue share to developers globally to make sure this is a viable channel for them.

7. When do you plan to officially launch?

Although we are already live and adding more and more developers daily, at this point we are doing so by invitation only. Developers can write to me and ask for an invitation code. Our official announcement and launch event is planned for the March 2012 time frame. Another important note that I would like to add is that Creatary makes use of OAuth and REST thereby bringing telco assets into the web world but also at the same time ensuring security features such as subscriber opt-in. In light of the recent moves by the BRTI, our platform offers automatic complete compliance with the new regulations. This additional benefit Creatary offers to its partners enables them to fully focus on their apps/services and their monetization.

DeNA onstage at Net Impact in Jakarta.

CyberAgent Ventures Indonesia held its Net Impact Conference less than a week ago in the Grand Hyatt hotel, Jakarta. It is CyberAgent Ventures’ initiative to help improve the local startup ecosystem and to share knowledge between successful foreign companies and Indonesian entrepreneurs.

Big names from Japan such as DeNA, GREE, and of course CyberAgent itself were present, while Vietnamese companies such as NCT, Teamobi, and VNG were also there – since CyberAgent Ventures has a big presence in that country. What was different about this event was that Tencent and Sina, two of China’s biggest social media companies, were speaking for the first time in Jakarta.

Some key takeaways:

DeNA has a $5 billion market this year which is very high growth. It took only four years to do that. Top 20 titles from Mobage, the DeNA platform, see $1 million per month in sales. The company aims to boost its platform by focusing on certain regions, like China. Yesterday it recruited Sina Weibo as a distribution and login partner on its Mobage platform.

GREE is pushing its Gree Global Platform (GGP), which is the culmination of last year’s OpenFeint acquisition. The new platform puts its social games, mobile social games, and social networking service on one platform across multiple devices. It has partners in China and Korea, as well as game developers like Ubisoft and Gameloft, to name just a few.

With 190 million users in more than 100 countries, GREE aims to formally launch the GGP in April or May of this year. The company also shared some know-how at the Jakarta event, such as how it bases every decision on raw data, and how it updates games every week (day or even night, since these are online games not console-based ones). It also aims to spread profitable game-building know-how over the years as it grows; it currently has 1,200 employees and more than 12,000 global developers.

Tencent is an all-round internet giant in China: it has news, email, a search engine, online games, QQ browser, and the QQ IM which is being used by 380 million folks across all major platforms. Tencent also has its eye on Indonesia with an aim to get people onto its Qute (a group messaging app for feature-phones that’s said to be better than WhatsApp or Blackberry Messenger), and also its QQ Browser for mobile.

Sina onstage at Net Impact in Jakarta. Click to enlarge.

Sina might have gotten lucky with its Weibo service, which started as a simple Twitter clone, but it’s definitely not just a regular clone. Grwoing to about 300 million registered users in just two years, it now encompasses online browser games, a virtual currency, online storage, brand pages, charity pages, online polling, and so much more. Sina representatives in Jakarta revealed they will have a $200 million developers fund, enhanced Weibo for enterprise, and a plan to build an online payment platform as well (as its virtual currency is now tied to third-party solutions).

Vietnam’s NCT shared about how it started as a music website and then evolved into a platform where you can find services like matchmaking, e-commerce, social networking, or even online payment. VNG is also doing what all the major social games companies are doing – making itself into a social games platform.

Net Impact was definitely one of the best conferences in Jakarta yet (I’m stressing that last word), but it definitely was not perfect either. Most of the keynotes felt like they were hard sells for the company, whereas what I think we need is to learn how we, as Indonesian entrepreneurs, can take in their experience and build our own success stories. Still, props to the CyberAgent Ventures team for holding this Net Impact Conference.

ThoughtBuzz is expanding its presence to both the Philippines and Indonesia. The Singapore-based startup, which makes a web app for monitoring, analytics, and intelligence about your social media networks, has revealed the news on its site.

The startup says it offers “the technology and the expertise for brands to make sense of all the conversations happening on social media on one simple platform” – but that’s a crowded marketplace already. We talked to the company’s country managers for the Philippines and Indonesia, Jonas De Los Reyes and Abang Edwin respectively, who are both former Yahoo employees, regarding the expansion.

1. What makes ThoughtBuzz different from any other social media analyzing platforms?

Edwin:

Thoughtbuzz is fast, user-friendly and very accurate; we localize our reporting requirements as our clients need. It offers a complete package from the dashboard to the reporting system with crisis management alerts too.

Jonas:

What defines ThoughtBuzz is its end-to-end solutions. ThoughtBuzz is not only offering a tool for companies to monitor social media, neither is it only offering social media analytics. It can offer both. The company is also focused on providing local support in the countries where it is present. This definitely sets us apart from other players.

2. I saw that you have lots of clients already, especially in Singapore. But how do you measure your success?

Jonas:

ThoughtBuzz was founded in Singapore in 2009 so it just follows that the majority of the clients will be from there. The number of clients is definitely one indicator of success but it’s not the only thing we measure. I think for us, the bottom line is how our services have enabled our clients to connect their social media initiatives to their business goals and helped them reach it.

3. So ThoughtBuzz is expanding to the Philippines – any specific reasons why there before, say, Indonesia?

Jonas:

ThoughtBuzz has no where else to go but expand! From Singapore, it expanded to Malaysia then India. It only makes sense that it also expand to the fastest growing and most active social media markets in Southeast Asia, particularly the Philippines and Indonesia. In terms of prioritization, both are priorities, it just so happens that expanding to other markets are very reliant to finding the right people and the right partners, and the Philippines just happens to be the first to be set up, but closely followed by Indonesia

Photo from Thomas Arie, OrangeScale on Flickr

4. Social media has a very broad meaning today. Are you restricted to only Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn, or do you measure Tumblr or even the recent craze, Pinterest?

Edwin:

What we can do is monitor anything or anyone with a social presence on the internet. Our platform covers blogs, forums, and websites within the region and on an international scale. That includes, of course, Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, and other social media sites.

5. Both of you are former Yahoo guys. How does this help ThoughtBuzz?

Edwin:

Yes, both of us used to be in the same team in Yahoo, handling social media and community management. Since we [were] at the front-line to users, we know the their characters, so it has helped me a lot – especially to get clients to understand the importance of monitoring social media for their business. Jonas is a great colleague to work with, he is always full of ideas and is also very forward-looking in developing innovative tactics and strategies, and adapting them to cater for each country’s specific needs.

Jonas:

Edwin and I have been colleagues since 2008 when I joined Yahoo (he joined Yahoo in 2007) and our work there was both in social media and community management. So there’s definitely a huge advantage in coming on board ThoughtBuzz and bringing our experience to the table and helping win our respective markets for ThoughtBuzz.

Edwin has been a fun and awesome team mate at Yahoo so I’m excited that we get to continue working here at ThoughtBuzz. We may not be sitting in opposite cubicles anymore, but we still have fun working together and collaborating in what we do via Facebook, Twitter, Kik, and so many other platforms.

6. What is the target in 2012 for ThoughtBuzz?

Edwin:

To be a thought leader in the social media monitoring industry in our respective countries, and to help companies achieve their business goals. To get all that, we’ll play a great part in their strategizing and monitoring.

Jonas:

The main target of ThoughtBuzz this year is to win our respective markets. We believe 2012 is the year of social media measurement. Companies and brands are seeing the need to connect their social media efforts to business goals, to actual ROI. To do that, social media monitoring and analysis will play a crucial role in their strategies and efforts. That’s why we’re here, to provide them with the services they need to be able to do that.

Telunjuk launched its startup website at an event at Plaza Indonesia, Jakarta, a few days ago. Aiming to help its users to compare prices when they are shopping for gadgets or looking for plane tickets, this site could also be a friend for shoppers who’re browsing product specs, or who want to find something at a desired price on any online store.

With auto crawling technology to collect the data, Telunjuk provides the info in real-time to its users, covering numerous Indonesian e-commerce sites. The product search engine covers laptops, mobile phones, and airline tickets. One of the main features is PriceAlert which will send a notification to shoppers when the desired product’s price decreases to be within range of the shoppers’ budget.

Redya Febriyanto (pictured above), CEO of PT. Telunjuk Komputasi Indonesia, said at the launch:

We are very excited to have officially launched Telunjuk.com today to support higher quality shopping […] Telunjuk.com will provide product recommendations, pricing, and shopping places that suit shoppers’ needs, and do it easily and quickly. Previously, shoppers needed to spend hours comparing products on many site to find the desired product. That is why we present this solution.

You can access the main website and mobile site to browse the three categories in full, or searches for the cheapest airfare can be done via Twitter by sending a tweet containing the departure and arrival cities and the date, such as: @telunjukdotcom Jakarta Shanghai March 25. In the future, Telunjuk will be accessible via its own mobile apps for Blackberry, Android, iOS, and Windows Phone.

Although PriceArea is another startup doing pretty much the same thing, Telunjuk can add greater competition in this sector. Telunjuk is the second startup under the guidance of Project Eden to have officially launched, after the SpotDokter launch a few weeks ago. This is a great sign that Project Eden is now getting up to speed after months without any real activity. Project Eden is also planning to open its co-working space to the public so it can be a creative hub among the nation’s startup founders.