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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Isn’t Aryo a bit too young?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Credit: TheGlobeandMail.com

Path, a social network that is only accessible through iPhone and Android devices, has been growing in popularity in Indonesia for its more-private circle of friends (unlike Facebook it limits its users to 150 friends).

Credit: InternetWorldStats.com

But what about Facebook? Indonesia is famous for its Facebook frenzy; as the statistics above show, almost all internet users in Indonesia are Facebook users too. Some people say that Indonesians like to have as many connections as possible, which explains Facebook’s popularity, but Indonesian today are increasingly getting overwhelmed by the unknown brands and ubiquitous ads and promotions on their Facebook walls.

So when Path introduced its more private social network to Indonesian consumers, it is not surprising that Indonesians responded to it. When I asked friends what features they like most on Path, most of them said they liked to post photos and add what they are listening to, as the app’s “smart journal” concept easily lets users choose one of the following moments (photo/video, people, place, music, thought, sleep/awake) to share. That really is something new and different from Facebook.

But really, what makes posting a photo on Path so different from posting a photo on Instagram? Will they stop using Instagram, Foursquare,Twitter, Line, and Facebook once they start using Path?

Not really. In my experience, avid users of social media in Indonesia on average still have four to seven social networking apps installed and used actively on their smartphones, and indeed there are four social media services among Indonesia’s 30 most popular smartphone apps. Adopting one app doesn’t mean abandoning others. With that said, it’s not uncommon for Indonesian trends to shift rapidly, and that shapes the ubiquitous usage of multiple social media apps on their smartphones. Indonesian youth simply like to enhance their interactions with friends, colleagues, even their own parents in new ways. So when an app becomes trendy, everyone installs it to see what their friends are saying there. But by the same token, if it becomes passe, that’s when it’s going to get uninstalled.

With the great number of social media users in Indonesia and the ingrained culture of Indonesian consumers installing new apps as their friends do, there is no doubt that Path can continue to grow here in the short term. The challenge for Path, and other emerging social apps, is to retain all these Indonesian users once it has got them and to prevent itself from being discarded when the next trendy social media site comes along and people’s friends start to move there.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Harnessing K-pop power

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

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

Credit: blog.laptopmag.com

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Talking about MOL’s Southeast Asian market

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

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

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

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

The one millionth customer was Singaporean mum-to-be Kelly Nguyen, who was surprised by the Zalora team at her workplace, who handed over her order (a maternity dress) free of charge.

The Zalora crew also concocted a little infographic (below) to show some of its other stats. For example, the e-commerce service has shipped to 16,853 towns in the region so far, and over 23,000 new products are added to the site each week. To hold all that stock, the company has over 20,000 square meters of warehouse space, which is the equivalent of five football fields.

Zalora released its iPhone app last month, and attracted a further $26 million in funding back in March.

Credit: BlackberryCool.com

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

2. “Please check our blogspot for more information”

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

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

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

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

3. “Please call our handphone number”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Let’s help report those scammy sites

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

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

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

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

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

(Featured image source: unsuckdcmetro)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

1. The quote came from Aidil, not Emir.

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

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

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

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

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

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

(Sources: Detik #1 and #2)

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

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

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

1. Where are the incentives?

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

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

2. Sketchy definitions

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

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

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

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

3. Data centers in Indonesia are more expensive

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

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

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

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

4. Local domains

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

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

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

Fending off potential foreign players?

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

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

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

(Source: Kompas)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(Source: Detik)

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

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

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

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

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

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

Room for more newsstand apps in Asia

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

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

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

Cooking up a new app

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rocket Internet’s Asia-based food delivery startup Foodpanda has announced another major round of funding today. The new round is worth more than US$20 million with investment from Sweden’s AB Kinnevik, Russia’s Phenomen Ventures, and several other unnamed investors.

Foodpanda takes orders online from over 5,000 partner restaurants in nine Asian countries and employs 150 staff. It was launched in April 2012. The new funding will be used “to further accelerate growth and optimize customer service,” according to Rocket Internet’s Ralf Wenzel in today’s announcement.

Co-founder at Foodpanda, Kiren Tanna

Foodpanda co-founder Kiren Tanna recently told us that growth has been especially great for Pakistan, India, and Indonesia.

The food delivery startup is run in conjunction with the similar Hellofood, so that the two services collectively cover some cities in 27 nations.

There’s plenty of competition in this sector in Asia for Foodpanda. Hungry netizens can make use of HungryDelivery and Dealivery in Singapore, and there are four strong homegrown rivals in Vietnam’s major cities.

China’s UCWeb and its UC Browser app for mobiles have more than 400 million users worldwide with 100 million outside of China. Today at the Global Mobile Internet Conference (GMIC) in Beijing, UCWeb announced that it will invest RMB 3 billion (more than $480 million) over the next three years. The project is codenamed/abbreviated ‘GEEK’ and will focus on four things:

• Global expansion: Focusing on Brazil, Vietnam, Russia, and Indonesia. CEO and founder, Yu Yongfu also said that UCWeb will be opening up offices in these four countries very soon.
• Open Ecosystem: UCWeb will continue to strengthen its platform and replicate local success overseas. UCWeb says that its gaming platform has more than 20 games which are generating more than $150,000 each month right now. 200 million clicks are registered every day across all versions of UC Browser.
• Evolved monetization: Searching for new revenue streams while sustaining the growth for gaming content. In 2012, more than $15 million was generated from the games platform.
• Technology Know-how: Integrate with the cloud and scale to support new extensions and services in the future through technology advancement.

UCWeb CEO Yu Yongfu talking at GMIC2013 this afternoon.

To fuel UCWeb’s GEEK plan, CEO Yu said that the company has more than RMB 1 billion ($161 million) in cash and is already profitable. UCWeb’s revenue has doubled in the last three years and is generating revenue from ads (50 percent) and games (50 percent). The profit margin for ads could be as high as 85 percent, he added. If needed, CEO Yu claims that there are a lot of investors who are hungry to invest in UCWeb.

UCWeb, as we have written before, is poised for IPO in 2013. But in the interview with CEO Yu today, he said that he would rather delay going public to avoid unnecessary pressure from investors. Yu also said that UCWeb isn’t interested to get acquired and be part of a larger company. So while Baidu may be actually interested in UCWeb, it seems like Yu isn’t willing to let go.

UCWeb currently has more than 1,500 staff across the world and is looking to add another 1,000 more people in the coming three years.

(Photo of Yu from QQ Tech)

This is part of our coverage of GMIC 2013 in Beijing, running today and tomorrow (May 7 and 8). For other stories from this event, click here.

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

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

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

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

Lending a hand

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

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

We’ve seen crowdfunding been put to use for zany gadgets and enacting positive social change, but we’ve not yet seen it being used for investment purposes. But Crowdbaron wants to change that. It’s a Hong Kong-based startup that wants to make investing in real estate as simple as booking a hotel online. Aimed at folks who want to bolster their personal investment portfolio, the idea is that buying a small stake in one or numerous properties lets you take advantage of surging property prices in several countries.

While you are buying a share in a property, this is not a sort of timeshare for the 21st century and so you won’t be staying in the apartment or villa in which you have a stake. This is purely for the profit. So you can spread the risk, Crowdbaron lets you take as little as a one percent stake.

Crowdbaron is aiming its platform at users across Asia, with an initial focus on customers based in Hong Kong, China, and Indonesia. Founder and CEO Saeed Hassan explains to us that the startup is “targeting a less wealthy target group” than would normally take a 100 percent stake in properties – a phenomenon seen recently with wealthy Chinese snapping up properties (and potential escape routes) in Australia, the UK, the US, and many other nations. Instead, Saeed says the site is good for “middle income families who are saving for the future, and who have been burned by the stock market and are frustrated by low interest rates”. He adds:

For these individuals, there is little chance they can purchase in Hong Kong or elsewhere. This group is very large and are willing to enter shared purchase arrangements – because it opens the door to potentially higher and stable returns they otherwise wouldn’t be able to afford. It’s about lowering the entry barriers and getting more people involved.

Aside from making a profit from rising property prices, Crowdbaron investors can also earn revenues from renting out their properties, which will be unfurnished to save hassle for the crowdfunded landlords. Saeed points out that these properties will remain managed by Crowdbaron through its network of property agents, and is also responsible for finding tenants. In the event of a property being empty, Crowdbaron promises to pay investors their share of rental revenue anyway.

Crowdbaron is split between a team of four in Hong Kong, and a further four in Jakarta, Indonesia. More sales staffers are being added this month, and a Madrid office is being prepared. While its investors are mostly in this region, it’s open to global investors aside from, for tax reasons, the UK and the US. Crowdbaron’s properties are currently spread across London and Jakarta, with more in Madrid and perhaps some US cities being added soon.

Real estate crowdfunding could turn out to be one of 2013’s hottest startup – and investment – trends. I notice that US-based RealtyMogul also looks promising, and recently won a bunch of awards and plaudits.

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

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

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

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

Samsung top in Indonesia?

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

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

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

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

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

Don’t forget about Blackberry

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

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

(Sources: Kompas and Detik)

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

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

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

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

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

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

The LivEpicly kitchen

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

After months of testing it out in South Korea and Japan, the messaging app KakaoTalk is today launching its social gaming platform for users in Indonesia and Vietnam. Along with this, a number of third-party game developers have created Indonesian and Vietnamese language versions of their social gaming titles that integrate with KakaoTalk.

Five games are ready today for the messaging app’s users in Indonesia and Vietnam: HotDogStudio’s Everyone’s Game for Kakao, Com2uS’s Tiny Pang for Kakao, LIVEZEN’s Astrowings for Kakao, GameZen’s BirdPang for Kakao, and CraveMob’s Hunter Cat for Kakao (pictured).

KakaoTalk has been pushing hard into both those Southeast Asian markets in the past few months, even spending on a big budget TV ad campaign for Indonesians that fused K-pop with one Indo pop star.

Korea-based KakaoTalk has just over 80 million users, and the startup made $7 million in profit last year, despite being up against web giant rivals like NHN (makers of Line), Tencent (WeChat), and Facebook Messenger.

The KakaoTalk Game Platform launched in its home market last August and soon showed its worth by propelling a number of its supported games to the top of Korea’s gaming charts. It then rolled out in February in Japan (Update: Also in the US since last November).

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

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

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

500 health tips a day from your friendly doctors

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Partnerships with XL Axiata and Yahoo Indonesia

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

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

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

Here are a few interesting startups that we saw:

Beautiplan.com

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

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

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

Unyu

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

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

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

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

Cariii

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

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

Soccer Ticker

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

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

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

Tandif

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

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

Here are the rest of the startups that pitched yesterday:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Multiply Helped Indonesia’s E-commerce Industry Grow

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

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

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

(Source: Andisboediman.blogspot.com)

Delhi-based Zomato seems to be expanding its restaurant reviews platform at a fair speed. After launching in London in January, the startup then went to Manila in March and most recently down to Johannesburg earlier this month. At that kind of pace, it’s probably time for the startup to be thinking about its next move. Speaking over the phone with CEO and co-founder Deepinder Goyal, he confirms that there’s already a target in sight – Jakarta, the capital of Indonesia.

Zomato plans to launch its Jakarta restaurant listings in late July. There are already two staffers in the city of 10 million people and the plan is to hire a mostly local team, oriented around content and sales. Having already done their homework, Deepinder reckons that Jakarta has about 18,000 eateries of all kinds – including the city’s many excellent coffee shops. Of course, Zomato wants them all to be listed, but it’s not yet clear how many will be on the site by the time of launch.

Learning Indonesian

With such a large base to cover, Deepinder says that Jakarta is Zomato’s biggest ever single city to tackle. Another new challenge to face is that it’ll be Zomato’s first ever launch in a language other than English. While the company is internally testing Hindi for the 13 cities it covers in its home nation of India, the Jakarta launch will be the first public unveiling of a new language on the site. That means getting Bahasa Indonesia right (linguistically and culturally), and that puts even more of an emphasis on finding the right local staff.

As nice as Jakarta is, why choose that place? After all, there are a lot of world-renowned foodie cities in the region that make more obvious choices for a listings and review service. Deepinder tells us:

We love going into markets where there’s not much smartphone penetration or web usage so we can build the market around us – and help build up the market.

That’s how Zomato grew to a claimed 70 to 80 percent of the eatery online listings market in India – and why its first two targets in Asia (outside of native India) were Colombo (Sri Lanka) and Manila. It’s no coincidence that they’re also markets with little in the way of solid competition. Deepinder freely admits this too; apart from London, he says, the competition has been “fairly simple and easy.”

In addition, Zomato’s CEO guides the startup to new cities where he feels restauranteurs or corporations are most willing to pay for ads, which is the main monetization channel. Thus the Zomato team doesn’t fret over the rate of smartphone usage in a particular area, and instead follows the money into a relatively immature metropolis where the lifestyle food sector is lacking in online resources.

25% of restaurants shut down each quarter!

Check out the menu before even arriving – click to enlarge.

After a month in Manila, how’s Zomato faring there? Deepinder says that the Metro Manila site now gets 10,000 pageviews per day, and that’s rising 25 percent per week. “It’s the fastest growing market for us,” he observes. After launching with 9,000 listings, the site now has 10,000 establishments on file.

Interestingly, about 25 percent of all restaurants on the site shut down each quarter – but more are opening up, resulting in a net gain. “It’s a lot of effort,” Deepinder admits, “But we have processes in place to deal with it.” Indeed, he concedes it can be a scaling issue for the Indian startup, as the content side of the business is labor intensive, and the ad sales are mostly done offline.

But the Manila team seems to be on top of things: it’s able to add 60 to 80 new locations each day, and processes 1,000 menus (scanned menus are a particularly useful feature on the site) per week, which are a mix of brand-new menus or updates.

Right now, the Manila team is made up of 12 people, though it’s not the final country team, as five of those are Indian staffers, and most of them will inevitably want to return home. So the goal, we’re told, is for Manila to have a fully-fledged local team there, and that takes about six to 12 months to form. “We’re building a pipeline of country managers,” Deepinder points out, but that takes years of personal growth and experience within the company, and then final training for each new country manager takes three months. That’s the same process that’ll happen in Jakarta.

Singapore? The US?

With Zomato preferring emerging markets, it doesn’t seem very likely that Singapore will be added to its roster anytime soon. There’s already Yelp in the Lion City, and local startup Burpple made an interesting move into this area earlier this month.

But one very mature market is being eyed up by Deepinder and the Delhi crew: the US. While not a definite green light, the co-founder says that, in the event of venturing into the States, they’ll use their experience in London to help shape their approach to another western market. One deciding factor is the success of the London site. After launching that at the very start of this year, it already has 250,000 visits per month. If that can rise to be the top foodie reviews site in that city, it could well signal that they’re ready for a push into the US. “We’ll know in four to six months time.”

Zomato has 260 employees around the world right now, with just over 200 of those being in India. A further 200 will be added in that nation this summer in an apparent push to speed up the processing of both its content and ad sales teams.

So, Jakarta readers, are you keen for the launch of Zomato in the city this summer?

Tokobagus founders Arnold Sebastian Egg and Remco Lupker left the company back in August last year. But Arnold and Remco will be happy to hear that their online classified listings site continues to grow under the management of Michal Klar.

Each month, Michal says that “well over 10 million Indonesians” are recorded visiting Tokobagus with a total of 1.8 million ads now active on the site. Tokobagus continues to grow but Michal remains tight-lipped about Tokobagus’ key stats. Tokobagus continues to spend heavily on both online and offline advertising. If you are in Indonesia, it’s likely that you will see a Tokobagus commercial on TV (see an example below), and even in places like elevators.

Most online business people will be skeptical about the conversion rate of offline ads to online users. Since Tokobagus has been doing it consistently for such a long time, the efforts much have somehow paid off. Michal confirmed that traditional advertising proved to be effective and measuring its impact is highly complicated. When asked how much Tokobagus is spending on advertising, Michal says it will be the last number that he will ever share.

With MIH as its latest backer, the site isn’t at all focused on being a profitable venture yet. When talking about revenue, Michal is confident that ads and premium listings for sellers are the right paths to generate revenue. Case in point: Craigslist, the world’s largest online classifieds site, makes more than $100 million each year. A fast growing Russian classified site, Avito, recorded 40 million monthly unique visitors generating over $30 million revenue in 2012.

Tokobagus currently has just over 100 employees in its newly furnished office, with one-third each working on IT, marketing, and quality control.

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

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

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

The chaotic transition

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

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

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

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

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

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

Very high burn rate

Credit: wondergressive.com

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

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

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

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

Refocusing efforts

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

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

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

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

Inside Foxconn’s factory. (Image credit: qz.com)

After some delays, it looks like Taiwanese company Hon Hai – commonly known as Foxconn – is set to build a plant in Indonesia. According to Reuters, Foxconn is looking to seal the deal with the Indonesian government next month. It was also reported that Foxcon “has no plan to export phones from Indonesia and will not make Apple products there.” Rather, it is the Indonesian domestic market that Foxconn is interested in, which a spokesperson claims is a $2.4 billion market for phones.

There’s no news on where the plant will be, but the government is willing to provide tax incentives if it were to be built outside of Java island, presumably to take jobs to less developed regions. With Foxconn coming into the country, it could create one million jobs in the nation, which certainly could be good news.

For folks who are interested to take a look at what’s inside an average Foxconn factory, check out this video.

(Source: Reuters)

We’ve received news from several readers that social network turned e-commerce marketplace Multiply is shutting down.

According to an email sent to Multiply merchants (see below), the site will be online till May 6, and will discontinue all operations on May 31. With further searching, you will find announcements on its Southeast Asia/Philippines and Indonesian sites.

Multiply’s merchants are advised to move to a new e-commerce marketplace. In Indonesia, there’s no shortage of choice of marketplaces, including Tokobagus, Kaskus, and Tokopedia. The news comes as a huge surprise as many would have thought Multiply is growing pretty well.

It was just last year that Multiply said it will discontinue its blog operations, move its headquarters to Jakarta, Indonesia, and move full force into e-commerce. Back then Multiply also revealed that it had 100,000 Indonesian sellers and around 75,000 Filipino sellers.

We’ve contacted Multiply’s country managers in the Philippines and Indonesia and will update if we hear from them. Here’s the letter sent out to merchants today:

Dear Multiply Merchant,

We regret to inform you that Multiply will be closing the marketplace on May 6, 2013 and discontinuing all business operations by May 31, 2013.

Multiply will maintain normal site operations through May 6th and will wind things down through to the end of the month. We will use the rest of May to make sure that all accounts are settled and that you receive all funds you earned on the platform. We hope this provides you time needed to identify and migrate to alternative ecommerce platforms, settle all payments on items bought and delivered, and try to minimize disruption to your business.

In order to ensure that all your earnings are disbursed to you in full prior to May 31, we will cut off buying activity on May 6, 2013. This will ensure that all orders have sufficient time to be completed and delivered to your customers before the end of the month.

If you have a Trust Badge, please contact our customer support team and we will ensure that you receive a pro-rated refund for the remaining time on your subscription.

If my team can be of any assistance to you during this transition, we will do our best to help.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Rakuten Indonesia site.

Nikkei first broke the news last month that the joint venture between MNC and Rakuten (JSD:4755) is over in Indonesia. We reached out to both MNC and Rakuten but no one wanted to speak about the situation on the record. The e-commerce site Rakuten Belanja Online is still running, though who knows what’s going on behind the scenes with MNC and Rakuten. This morning Rakuten finally broke the silence, sending us an official statement from Toru Shimada, senior executive officer and head of Asia HQ, who said:

Two years ago, Rakuten launched Rakuten Belanja Online in Indonesia with our JV partner MNC Group. We are very pleased with the growth of the business, where today we offer the widest range of products from Indonesia’s top merchants, as well as the tremendous response we have seen from Indonesian merchants and consumers alike.

From the beginning, we recognized Indonesia’s potential to become one of the biggest e-commerce markets in Asia, and our confidence in the market has only increased in the last two years. With the launch of Rakuten’s regional headquarters in Singapore last year, we are now able to accelerate the growth of our businesses around the region and will be increasing our investment in this exciting market.

We believe that through deepened focus and investment, we’ll be well positioned to not only accelerate the value that our B2B2C model and e-commerce platform brings to both empowering merchants and consumers, but also help spur the evolution of the Indonesian e-commerce landscape.

It’s a pity it doesn’t explain exactly what happened between MNC and Rakuten. But at least we now know Rakuten will still continue to be in Indonesia.

Rakuten told the media that it will not be commenting further on this issue. But the company did say that more of its APAC plans will be shared at its Q2 2013 earnings conference call on May 9.

Japanese companies seem to be doing well in terms of social marketing, with drink-maker Ichitan coming out on top in Thailand, and bike-maker Yamaha revs up the most social media fans in Indonesia. But in Malaysia and the Philippines, two homegrown brands (Air Asia and Smart, respectively) are at the top of this ranking.

This combined count can be a bit unfair in some ways, as it punishes brands who opt to, say, avoid Instagram but have good numbers on other networks. An example is BlackBerry Indonesia, which is not in the ranking despite being one of the nation’s top Facebook brand pages with 26.7 million followers.

With all that in mind, here’s the full infographic, which also has some fun snippets about user behavior on brand pages on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and Instagram:

(Source: ZocialInc blog)

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

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

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

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

Pitching with a tweet

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

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

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

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

Image source credit: berita.upi.edu

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

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

Here come the jokers

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

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

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

Outright imposters

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

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

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

Magazine and e-book reader app Scoop has raised S$3 million ($2.4 million) from PT Gramedia Digital, a subsidiary of Indonesian media giant Kompas Gramedia. Prior to this Series B funding round, Scoop previously announced its exclusive content partnership with Kompas Gramedia.

Developed by Apps Foundry, Scoop now has 650,000 downloads, 90 percent of them from Indonesia. It has 210,000 monthly active users and delivers over 1.8 million pieces of digital content annually, including 50 daily newspapers and 90 percent of magazine publishers in Indonesia. Scoop also revealed in the press release that 80 percent of its revenue comes from iOS devices.

With the new war chest, founder and CEO Willson Cuaca (1) says that his company will be focusing on talent retention, talent acquisition, new products, and also regional expansion, specifically in Singapore, Malaysia, the Philippines, and India. When asked on for his thoughts about the investment, he told us:

It is quite encouraging that this is the first time Kompas puts investment in a startup. They normally build themselves or acquire. Kompas is taking a non-controlling stake which is quite rare for their organization.

Edi Taslim, Kompas Gramedia Digital Group’s Director said in the statement that “Kompas Gramedia has to invest in companies that demonstrate multinational competitiveness and/or expansion in the future.” If I’m not interpreting it wrongly, Kompas Gramedia may be in the mood to explore even more investment and acquisition opportunities to realize its regional ambition. Taslim shared more in the statement:

While building on our own traditional strengths, we want to minimize risk by staying on top of current trends. We can also take advantage of our parent company’s extensive network of offices and affiliates to support companies such as Apps Foundry with cross-border expansion in the desired countries or markets in the region.

Prior to Kompas Gramedia’s investment, Apps Foundry was invested by East Ventures, Gobi Singapore, and Mitsui Global.

(1) Disclaimer: Apps Foundry, the creator of SCOOP, is an East Ventures portfolio company. East Ventures also invested in TechInAsia and Willson is also a good friend/mentor of mine. See our ethics page for more information.

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

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

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

Entrepreneurship brewing up in Indonesia

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

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

Bukalapak’s progress

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

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

Foodpanda co-founder Kiren Tanna

Rocket Internet’s online food delivery website, Foodpanda, was launched last year in April and has since undergone rapid expansion. Today, Rocket Internet’s FoodPanda is in eight Asian countries supported by 150 staff. Foodpanda, combined with Hellofood which is a food delivery site targeted at non-Asian markets, is serving over 10,000 restaurants. Foodpanda alone has around 5,000 restaurants.

Foodpanda co-founder Kiren Tanna (pictured), claims that all nine markets are growing and growth has been especially great for Pakistan, India, and Indonesia. In India, Foodpanda is working with over 2,000 restaurants. Interestingly, Kiren shared that India has a lot of orders from iPads over the weekend. For Pakistan, around 60 to 70 percent of the orders come from mobile. Singapore is a big dinner market while Indonesia and Taiwan prefer to order during lunch time.

Foodpanda works like this: customers go to the website and place orders online, then the restaurants will receive an order slip from Foodpanda’s GPRS box (or through SMS/email/fax), prepare the orders, and deliver them to the customers’ doorstep.

Foodpanda GPRS box

In places like Indonesia where food orders can be done by text or phone without the need of such a platform, I asked how Foodpanda differentiates itself. Kiren explained that the experience ordering food through the phone isn’t ideal. There’s a higher rate of errors when communicating information on the phone. Plus, expats who don’t speak the local language wouldn’t be able to place an order. With Foodpanda, it remembers customers’ delivery information when they next place an order, minimizes errors in communication since information is digitized, and ensures the most updated menus and prices available.

Although food orders are mostly done online, Foodpanda occasionally accepts phone orders to help new users get started. In such cases, the login details are sent to first time users together with discount perks to encourage them to order online in the future.

When asked about how Foodpanda selects restaurants to work with, Kiren told me:

We find the [restaurant] leads based on what we see [online], for example, HungryGoWhere. When we signed up a restaurant, we asked them questions like how many deliveries do you do? Are you ready for weekend peak capacity?

Foodpanda also orders from new restaurants to ensure that the food delivery experience is good and the food is in a good state when they are delivered. Orders from Foodpanda, though great, can be stressful for restaurants. Kiren shared that there are cases whereby a company flooded one store by ordering 200 sandwiches and another ordered 120 lunch boxes!

Moving forward, Foodpanda is looking to integrate with the big restaurants’ points-of-sale (POS) to make the process from ordering to billing smoother. Foodpanda is also investing heavily in mobile as it sees “very good traction” and growing number of orders from mobile devices. Kiren added:

We’re looking at city expansion […] and we want to be the number one in emerging markets for delivery services.

In Asia, Foodpanda competes with Dealguru’s Room Service Deliveries which operates in Singapore, Indonesia, and Malaysia. There’s no way to investigate who is bigger since both sides aren’t willing to share any data.

One of Perang Mistis’ cards – Rangda

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

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

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

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

Foreign players

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How does Lapor work?

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

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

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

Inaccurate reports?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

At the sidelines of the Startup Asia Singapore conference, I had the opportunity to meet Nobuaki Kitagawa (pictured above), CEO of CyberAgent Ventures China. He revealed that there are plans to increase the US$15 million fund targeted at the Southeast Asia (SEA) region to $20 million by the end of the year.

Nobuaki also said that CyberAgent Ventures has a keen eye on the Thailand market and started looking into it just three to four months ago. The current situation of the Thai market seemed favorable to them, and he is seeing more accelerators and seed investors popping up in the scene, in addition to the strong support that is provided by the ecosystem. He also noted that there are not many venture capital funds in Thailand. With CyberAgent Ventures focusing on series A and B funding, Nobuaki sees Thailand as a timely opportunity for them.

With presence already in countries such as Indonesia and Vietnam, Nobuaki is sure that they will be establishing an office in Thailand in order to be close to the market. Unfortunately there are no startups who have grabbed their attention yet, and they are still in the midst of meeting more in order to find the right fit. When asked about the kind of startups they are looking at, he tells us that they are looking at sectors involving B2C consumer internet and advertising, which pretty much follows the line of businesses that CyberAgent (TYO:4751) operates in Japan.

A new fund for South Korea this year?

Apart from Thailand, he also said that the CyberAgent company has entered South Korea, and has adopted a slightly different strategy as compared to China and SEA. The latter regions are developing markets and have much growth potential. Hence, most startups they look out for would be in consumer internet and online advertisement services.

On the other hand, as South Korea is a slightly more mature market, CyberAgent has a more specific approach, focusing on smartphone applications. With smartphone apps being a global platform, coupled with a large pool of talented Korean developers with a global vision, all factors seem favorable for them to establish a presence in the Asia Pacific region. In fact, CyberAgent Ventures made an investment in KakaoTalk back in 2011, and opened a Seoul office back in October 2012.

With this, they are very eager to set up an individual fund for the Korean market. Nobuaki explains that it is still in its preliminary stages, but could be established late this year.

He also added that the flow of money is currently all over the place, with both Chinese and South Korean startups looking to enter SEA and Japan, and Japan looking to China and SEA. In his opinion, the Southeast Asian internet community seems immature, but CyberAgent Ventures will be able to lead good exit plans if CyberAgent effectively expands into the region. It also hopes to help enhance the startup ecosystem with its networks.

When asked about its investments in Indonesia, Nobuaki also reveals that it will be soon making an investment in two startups within the gaming and e-commerce sectors pretty soon. Each investment will be under US$1 million. We’ll keep our eyes peeled for those.

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

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

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

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

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

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

New rivals: BeautyTreats and VanityTrove

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

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

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

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

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

Image source credit: berita.upi.edu

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

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

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

Not following porn stars

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

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

SBY vs Obama

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

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

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

But the truth is, it seems users don’t even care about filters, more than half of Instagram users don’t even use filters. I think most of the draw of Instagram has been the social network that’s built and ease of use. Some of the apps below do a good job of that, others not.

The nice thing about these photo apps, is it gives you a good idea of how each of these countries is innovating.

China

Most of these Chinese apps are feature-packed filter machines. I think the only one that currently interests me is Photo Wonder since it’s so thorough. Some have social networks attached, while some are standalone funky filter apps.

Camera360 (iOS, Android) – One of the most popular apps with over 80 million users. It’s chalk full of features on top of the obvious Instagram-like features (it’s got way more than Instagram). Users can decorate photos with stickers, edit photos, upload photos into the cloud and even create puzzle patterns with the photos.

Lemeleme (iOS) – A super simple app that doesn’t innovate much on what Instagram already does. It basically allows users to take pictures and post them to emails or social networks. It doesn’t have its own social network so I’m not sure how it’ll fair in the near future.

PaPa (iOS, Android) – An interesting concept that we’ve written about before, basically users can add sound to their photos. Japan’s Voicepic also does the same thing. It’s a cool concept but it might get steamrolled by the new wave of video apps coming to the fore.

Photo Wonder (iOS, Android) – Acquired by China’s mega search giant, Baidu, it actually allows users to see the filter before taking the picture, which is lightyears ahead of Instagram’s post-filter feature. But that’s not all, Photo Wonder also has an edit, collage, and allows users to download extra features like stickers and frames.

PIP Camera (iOS, Android) – This photo app departs from the traditional filter-oriented apps and has none of the usual filters you’d see in apps. PIP Camera focuses on framing your photos in different things like glasses, umbrellas, and computer screens. Fun, but a bit overwhelming.

Vida (iOS, Android) – In addition to adding pollution data to images, Vida is a fully packed app that allows filters, and sound. It’s even got its own social network. Unfortunately, you have to have an account with a Chinese social network to use it.

Japan

Japan’s been pretty innovative with photo apps, especially with apps that mangafy pictures. Fun for friends hanging out.

Camely (Android) – A cutesy app that, according to Rick, is “almost like Instagram if it were force-fed estrogen supplements”. Most of the filters are pretty female-oriented and pink, which makes for a particularly cutesy set of pictures. Download it for your girlfriend.

Cameran (iOS) – Cameran’s got an interesting take on decorations. It’s all about allowing users to randomize their decorations. Click on a flower decoration filter multiple times and you get to see different flower arrangements. It also comes from a rather famous Japanese photographer.

DecoAlbum (iOS, Android) – Another photo app centered on females, DecoAlbum allows users to create photos with text, backgrounds, glittery virtual stickers, and more and even allows you to assemble your photo collections into albums. It’s one of the few apps that actually prioritizes making albums.

Decopic (iOS, Android) – This app takes decorations to a whole new level. From adding customizable resizable decorations to hearts and stars painted across the pictures to artsy frames around your picture, Decopic a nice app, if you’ve got time on your hands.

Line Camera (iOS, Android) – Since it’s released by NHN, you just know this camera app is going to be feature packed. It’s 600 stamps, over 100 frames, 14 different filters, 156 brushes, and more. It’s Line’s flagship photo app, and nicely integrated into the chat app. Since it piggybacks on the Line platform, there’s lots of users.

Manga Camera (iOS) – With One Piece and Naruto being the world’s most widely read comic series’, of course Japan would come up with Manga Camera, an app that would literally turn you into a cartoon. You can even add in decorations like Japanese “wow” text.

Million Moments (iOS, Android) – Produced by Sony and primarily focused on photo viewing, Million Moments is a nice though possibly useless departure from the other apps in this list. It allows you to assemble small slideshows so that you can view with your friends. I’d rather view photos on my computer or TV though.

Snapdish (iOS, Android) – Another interesting niche take on photos is Snapdish. It’s all about photos and food, the ideal app for food-lovers, and they’re big population, half of my friends take photos before they eat. Snapdish puts this all in one place and connects food-lovers with each other, thus socializing food.

Voicepic (iOS) – Possibly the progenitor of PaPa from China, this app also allows you to add sound to a picture. It also allows you to add various filters on top of your sound-enabled pictures. I’m not sure how this is catching on though, especially with services like Vine gaining popularity.

South Korea

Pudding Camera (iOS, Android) – Despite the odd chocolate-like name, don’t be deceived, this app’s got the usual Instagram-like features plus a cool panorama feature. A panorama feature is not something most apps in this list have.The app annoyingly posts to Twitter, but can be circumvented.

Cymera (iOS, Android) – This photo editor app is a bit complicated and not so much fun, but it’s got lots of options for editing your photos. It takes quite a few clicks and touches to get to what you want to edit, but the result it really nice since you can do so much.

Southeast Asia

Since Southeast Asia is particularly fresh to the game, there’s not too many apps from each country, but certainly some worth noting, strong unique contenders to their East Asian counterparts.

Singapore

Babygram (iOS) – Have you ever been sick of all the baby photos you get barraged with on Facebook from your friends? Well, never fear, Babygram is here. The app is very specifically about sending baby photos into a timeline for yourself and your close family. Very cute and cuddly.

Fotobook (iOS) – Forget taking photos and posting them to a separate social network, this entire app is dedicated to browsing Facebook photos from your friends. It makes it really easy to look through all your friends’ photos. Other than that, not much to it.

PixaRoll (iOS, Android) – A concept rather similar to KeepShot from Vietnam, you take pictures and you can have them sent to people in other countries. Great for travelers who are on the go and don’t want to have to carry an extra pen and camera. Why buy a postcard when you can just get your photos sent straight to people?

Malaysia

Nostalgio (iOS) – One of the simplest framing collage apps out there, which basically has a set of 20 basic collage frames and 6 borders to choose from. Nostalgio also has filters to give your collages a little more effect. It costs $0.99, though.

Vietnam

Fuzel (iOS) – An Apple Editor’s Choice photo app for 2012’s best photos apps, this swanky app from Not A Basement Studio makes stitching photo collages together really fancy. You can select from a host of readymade collage patterns as well as customize your own, and then directly post to your social networks.

KeepShot (iPad only) – Not A Basement Studio newest iPad app allows users to create, edit, and assemble photo albums together. Then it lets users print the beautiful physical photo albums and delivers them straight to users’ doorsteps. It’s like Pixa Roll for albums, unfortunately, currently the service only ships in the USA.

Indonesia

PicMix (Android, Blackberry) - Indonesia’s feature-packed PicMix is awesome. You can edit photos with captions, filters, frames, and text, and following Instagram it’s also got a nice snazzy social network to post to. In February this year, PicMix has hit the eight million milestone with more than 108 million photos posted so far.

If we missed any apps, please let us know in the comments, and we will add them to this list.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Satu Layanan launches officially too

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

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

(Source: DailySocial)

Credit: Kompas.com

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Credit: Kompas.com

Credit: Kompas.com

(Source: Kompas)

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

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

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

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

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

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

(Update: Changed Malaysian to Malay since we’re talking about the language, not the nationality!)

Dropbox reckons that it has 161 percent more Chinese-speaking users now than it had last year. So that makes it a good time for the American cloud storage service to roll out language support for Chinese – as well as Malay and Indonesian.

As announced on the Dropbox blog today, the updated Asian languages (along with new support for Polish and Russian) can be found on the Mac, PC, Linux, Android, and web apps from today, and will reach iOS soon.

With Dropbox being blocked in mainland China [1], the support for both simplified and traditional Chinese text is clearly aimed at the Chinese diaspora worldwide, be they in San Francisco, Sydney, or Singapore.

In terms of Malaysia, the Dropbox team says it’s seeing 274 percent growth there, and an even more stellar 537 percent annual growth in users in Indonesia. Though it’s not clear precisely how many users that entails. But Malaysians are saving 7.5 million files per day, while users in Indonesia are committing five million files to the cloud each day.

Dropbox is having a busy day, and also just announced Dropbox for Business as an expansion of its enterprise-oriented Dropbox for Teams cloud service.

Last May, Dropbox ventured into the Korean market, and began its push into Japan way back in 2011.

Original image credit: berita.upi.edu

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(Source: The Jakarta Globe)

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

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

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

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

I met Joseph Edi Lumban Gaol, founder of M-Stars Group, in Jakarta, Indonesia. M-Stars is one of Indonesia’s pioneer mobile content providers; founded in 2000, it currently employs more than 150 staff and has five subsidiaries under its wing (AdStars, VOX, dr.m, PoPs, and m360). Joseph started his career in the mobile scene in 1997 at XL Axiata, one of the largest Indonesian telcos, and rose to become a senior product manager. He held that position for two years and eventually called it quits in 1999 to start out on his own.

His startup journey

Joseph started M-Stars as an application service provider to BCA bank, one of Indonesia’s largest banks. Its service enabled BCA customers to do banking transactions through their mobile devices. That was in 2000 and M-Stars was the first to provide this service. It was not an easy start, Joseph said, because it was extremely tough to get a bank to work with any company, least of all a startup. Nevertheless, he knew he had to get through this barrier of entry to achieve a breakthrough and he came up with a way to do it. He explained to me:

Before I got the bank to work with me, I had an MOU with XL to start this new service as a value added service. With this partnership in place, M-Stars and XL (a trusted telco) then jointly approached BCA to have this service as their new e-banking channel.

As for how he got the MOU with XL, Joseph said he pitched that the telco would become the first operator to launch secure mobile banking for its customers. Plus, working with BCA, who at that point of time had eight million customers, could improve XL’s brand image and set it apart from the competition.

The breakthrough

Despite the partnership with XL and the value proposition being offered, it took nine months before the bank finally agreed to commit. This seems long but it was definitely a worthwhile wait. The partnership set M-Stars into uncharted but lucrative territory that has a high barrier of entry.

However, the partnership did not last long. M-Stars was forced to exit in 2005 as the bank wanted to control the service itself. As it was a forced exit, the terms given were not great. Joseph felt he had to sell his stake in the partnership as M-Stars had little leverage to negotiate for a better deal. He sold the whole system to BCA and cashed out. Luckily for Joseph, prior to the forced exit, M-Stars had already ventured into becoming a mobile content provider to telco companies and had already developed a substantial revenue stream. Without that, the cancelled partnership might have killed M-Stars itself.

After that, M-Stars focused on providing mobile value-added services such as ring tones, music, news, lotteries, etc. At the same time, it partnered with another bank, BNI, to provide a service similar to what it had previously offered BCA. In 2008, Joseph went on to start up VOX, a mobile micro-banking system for phone users in Indonesia that now has 12,000 merchants and around two million people who hold a bank account with them.

Intrapreneurship

Joseph is not a lone wolf, and he also encourages intrapreneurship in his company. Employees are encouraged to think out of the box and given funds and equity if their ideas are good. Companies started up from M-Stars include:

• AdStars, a digital advertising network that focuses on premium publishers in Indonesia.
• m360, a company that provides digital media training services to its clients.
• Dr.M, a service that helps digital record labels and artists manage their digital community, offline fanclub, and promotional activities.
• PoPs, a platform that delivers digital entertainment content to mobile and internet audiences.

Money troubles

A cohesion day at M-Stars

But it wasn’t all a smooth journey. Besides all the red tape he had to struggle with when dealing with banks and telcos, he told me that the finance part of starting up was especially tough. The company depended entirely on him and his co-founder’s savings to operate – which wasn’t a lot. He dreaded payday.

On some occasions I had to borrow money from family and friends when the cash flow was low, especially to pay employees. This was one of the toughest challenges psychologically, as I had to pledge my credibility to them and spend sleepless nights making sure cash flow was positive and that loans from friends and family weren’t defaulted. Remembering those days now still makes me smile.

The founders also leveraged their strong network in Indonesia’s mobile industry and did consulting projects to bring in cash. These projects generated quick cash and sustained the company till it clinched the lucrative partnerships with BCA and XL. His startup finally broke even in its seventeenth month of operation.

Through Joseph’s entrepreneurship journey, I see similarities to many Asia startups: taking up consulting and outsourcing projects to stay afloat while working extra hours to build a product of their own. I believe this approach to being sustainable and having a greater plan for your startup is very much needed for startups in this region as investment and angel funding is not widely available in many parts of Asia.

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

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

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

Searching for local partners

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

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

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

Why BigBang?

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

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

The future

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

For retailers, cash registers are an expensive, space-hogging, eye-gougingly ugly experience. Indonesian startup DealPOS instead wants to push point-of-sales systems onto the web – and the interface onto any tablet or iPad.

DealPOS’ Nelsen Lim, pitching to the judges right now at our Startup Arena event, reckons that his cloud-based system is much more scalable and affordable for small retailers – especially for stores with multiple locations whose inventory back-end can be unified in this service. He claims that only five out of 100 retailers in Jakarta are using any kind of software to manage their sales right now, and the time is right for that to change.

Before the pitching contest, Nelsen explained to me that DealPOS has 15 clients already using the service, powering the back-ends of 50 individual store locations. When it comes to customers using credit cards, the shopkeeper can manually enter the card on their tablet into the DealPOS system in order to process it, or use an add-on card reading device.

All DealPOS clients so far are in the Jakarta area, but Nelsen says that he’s ready with a Singapore server on Softlayer for overseas expansion. He’s also keen to work with resellers in numerous countries.

The judges are keen to know how unique this is in Singapore (Nelsen says it’s the only such POS online system in Indonesia). Nelsen also assures the judges that the service includes support and secure web backups for retailers.

This looks like a strong contender among our 20 Startup Arena challengers. Is this the winner? Check back between 6:30 and 7pm to see who wins.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This is his slide if you’re curious:

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

Indonesian social travel site Burufly has concluded a financing round from Walden International and Batavia Incubator. The sum of the investment wasn’t disclosed.

Unlike other meta search travel sites, Burufly slants more toward social and original travel-related content. Pete Goldsworthy founded the company in April 2012; he believes that good travel-related content helps Burufly acquire users more efficiently rather than relying on marketing. Burufly was previously invested in by Ardent Capital and now has more than 380,000 registered members who shared 3,000 images last week and generated more than three million engagements (likes, comments) so far.

The investment will be used to develop more content, both user-generated and editorial, and also improve on its social marketplace for travelers to build their networks and share their experiences.

This evening, we are pleased to have a panel of distinguished guests from Indonesia, Thailand and Vietnam to give us an insight on Singapore’s neighbouring markets. Held at Biopolis, tonight’s sharing and networking session is a prelude to tomorrow’s Startup Asia Singapore conference involving speakers:

• Reza, FOWAB in Bandung, representing Indonesia startup scene

• Mimee, Thumbsup, representing Thailand startup scene

• Mike Tran, Keewi, representing Vietnam startup scene

(The liveblog will auto-update below)

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

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

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

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

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