Credit: emergingmarketsblog.files.wordpress.com

Indonesia has been in the top five countries in terms of Facebook (NASDAQ:FB) users for quite a while, and we’ve been hearing rumors that the California-based company is gearing up to open an office in Indonesia later this year. In that regard we spoke with Charlene Chian, Facebook’s head of communications for Asia-Pacific, to see if the rumor is true.

Before we get to the answer, Charlene reveals to us that Facebook now has 64 million monthly active users in Indonesia. We also heard from Dan Neary, Facebook VP for Asia-Pacific, at the recent IDByte conference that the company has identified Indonesia as one of the key countries to help Facebook reach the next billion in its user-base. Charlene helps explain how they plan to reach out to more users in Indonesia:

Given that Indonesia is one of our top five countries with most users (as of October 2012), we are definitely looking at how we can help Indonesians be able to benefit more from our platform. For a start, we are looking at working closer with digital media agencies through creative workshops to help them gain better skills and knowledge to better help their clients.

In the end, after understanding that Indonesia is a key component to Facebook’s plans, we asked if they plan to set up an office here. Sadly, she says, “No, we currently have no plans to set up an office in Indonesia.” That answer leaves Indonesia as the only country in the top five Facebook user-base not to have an office.

We received an update regarding what is arguably Indonesia’s biggest social photo sharing app Picmix today. The app now hit the 11 million user mark and has over 150 million photos uploaded so far, which is a whopping 42 million more photos since we talked about them four months ago.

Founder Calvin Kizana tells us the app’s top six country users: Indonesia (35 percent), South Africa (13 percent), Venezuela (13 percent), Nigeria (six percent), USA and Canada (five percent). Interestingly, although the biggest userbase comes from Indonesia, most of the app’s revenue – via in-app purchases – is from Venezuela and South Africa.

Picmix will soon launch an open API platform enabling developers to build apps and even games to reach out to the growing Picmix userbase. Picmix is integrated with carrier billing in more than 75 countries, as well as Blackberry payment, PayPal, MOL, and IndoMOG. The photo sharing app will also start selling its physical gift cards by the end of August in convenient stores like 7-11, AlfaMart, IndoMaret, and internet cafes. All of those payment methods can surely entice quite a few developers to jump onboard as it eases the monetizing part of the app.

These Picmix-related apps will then be showcased under the app’s “Fun Center” section aka Picmix’s app store. The recently launched app FaceMix – available for Blackberry legacy OS, Blackberry 10, and soon on Android – is a good example of how an app can be integrated with Picmix.

Credits: Chip.co.id

CyberAgent Ventures (CAV) Indonesia has seen their share of startups in the country and believes that encouraging more people to discuss entrepreneurial issues and strategies is always a good thing. In this regard, the Japanese VC firm plans to hold regular sharing sessions in Indonesia to talk about various business case studies in specific sectors. It’ll be called the CAV Salon.

In these sessions, which will be held in Jakarta, participants will also get to discuss and share about their business ideas with the other participants and the CAV Indonesia team.

Here are the seven topics that will be discussed in the upcoming events. The CAV team chose them for their market potential in Indonesia:

• Restaurant search
• Recruitment
• Social networking services
• Dating
• Vertical e-commerce
• Mobile apps
• Female-oriented media

The sessions are open to anyone who have an interest or some ideas in one of the above fields – that includes people who do not have their own startups or business plans yet. CAV will limit up to five individuals involved in each category to join the session.

If you’re game, you can shoot an email to the CAV team via vanada[at]cyberagentventures[dot]com and liauw_oswin[at]cyberagentventures[dot]com. You need to put in your basic information, background, which category you’re interested in, and what you think are the key success factors for the selected category. You can choose more than one category. The monthly event will start as early as next month.

Today, Indonesian price comparison site Telunjuk announced that it has received seed funding from Japan-based Venture Republic. The Telunjuk team says that Venture Republic’s experience in the shopping search engine business would help the team a lot in their effort to secure the top spot among product comparison search engines in Indonesia.

It is revealed that Telunjuk co-founders Redya Febriyanto and Hanindia Narendrata Rahiesa (Drata) still have the majority stake of the company. Together with Project Eden, Venture Republic will sit on Telunjuk’s executive board and help advise the startup.

Venture Republic notes that this is the VC’s first ever investment made in an Indonesian company. President and CEO Kei Shibata says that they jumped on-board after looking through the co-founders’ profiles as well as their company’s performance with a lean budget. Venture Republic itself has a few shopping search engine businesses in its Japanese portfolio such as Coneco, Travel.co.jp, and Hotel.jp.

Telunjuk now records half a million monthly unique visitors every month. Drata says that they will use the funds to expand marketing, develop more features, and hire more people while still keeping the team small. The team is squaring off against PriceArea which is backed by Japan-based GREE Ventures and Rocket Internet’s PricePanda.

One of the keys to a strong e-commerce infrastructure in any country is its online payment system. One of Indonesia’s biggest players in that industry is Doku, and today the company gave us some updates about milestones since its inception in 2007.

Doku can help process online payments through credit cards, a few major local banks like Mandiri and BCA, plus PayPal as well. The company notes that the company has increased its 300 corporate merchant number count up to 400 in this year alone. How much in transactions has Doku processed so far in the last six years? IDR 11 trillion ($1.1 billion). Plus there has been year-on-year growth close to 100 percent. The majority of those transactions come from the online travel industry such as to pay for airline tickets, hotels, and tour operators.

A couple of months ago, Doku released its e-wallet product called DokuWallet which offers more payment alternatives to consumers. The company recently announced that two big Indonesian companies, Merpati Nusantara Airlines and theme park Dufan, jumped onboard to use Doku as their online payment gateway.

One of Doku’s biggest rivals in this e-payment space is Veritrans, which managed to sway online shop Rakuten Belanja Online to use its services instead of Doku’s. While Doku’s other rival, iPayMu, which offers e-wallet service, records 11,000 merchants in the month of June.

Before we hear from organizer Andrew Tan about last year’s event and the kind of issues he wants to see startups tackling, these are the multi-country dates set for SI Camp Asia so far this summer:

• Bangkok, August 16 to 18 – with ChangeFusion and The Sync as partners
• Singapore, August 23 to2 5 – with Syinc and SWB
• Jakarta, August 30 to September 1 – with GEPI
• Manila, September 13 to 15 – with WebGeek
• Hong Kong, September 27 to 29 – with StartupHK and Bonza Pie
• Seoul, October 4 to 6 – with How2company
• Cebu and Kuala Lumpur are not yet set

As my Philippine-based colleague noted earlier today, SI Camp Asia is now taking submissions for civic startup ideas at its various city events.

Last year’s event saw six great ideas emerge from all across Asia. The eventual winner was Thatapp, which aims to help answer teens’ questions about sex. Sadly that app has not launched in the eight months since the event, something that raises the issue of civic startups who fail to tackle the issue at hand, perhaps due to a lack of funds or because it’s a side-project for those involved.

Seeking ideas across Asia

Last year the global SI Camp held only one event in Asia – and that was in Kuala Lumpur. So this year marks a big expansion for the program to eight cities in seven countries. Andrew Tan explains:

Last year was actually to set the foundation for this year. This year we wanted it to be held in different cities across Asia so that it is more accessible to people. We are still going to have a regional camp (SI Camp Asia) where we will bring the top teams from each of these local camps to Singapore.

Andrew encourages the do-good startups to think of issues seen in their particular country and to tackle those head-on:

I have always liked the saying “Think globally, act locally”. So startups should be focus on tackling issues that they either have experienced before, are affected by, or at the very least see everyday in their local environment. This is important because only by having first-hand experience of a problem can a startup have the insight to take the right first step, the drive and passion to go through the ups and down that any startup faces, and the sustaining energy to advocate for the issue that they are helping solve.

Also since a lot of the countries in Southeast Asia face similar issues mainly due to the fact that the infrastructure for things such as education, healthcare, and so on, are still under-developed. So the local solutions startups come up with will usually be adaptable to other countries.

The battle inside Indonesia’s local mobile phone brands is heating up now, offering users phones with better specifications at ever more affordable prices. The newest of the bunch to make a move is Mito. Though a lot of people consider the Mito brand as appealing more to the low end phone segment in Indonesia, it recently stepped up its effort to produce smartphones as well. Yesterday the vendor released a quad-core Android phone called the Mito A355.

The Mito A355 comes with 1.2 GHz quad-core processor and an 8 MP back camera. Specifications wise, I think the 5.3-inch phone still loses out to the recently launched Smartfren Andromax-U Limited and Andromax V, as the Mito A355 only offers 512MB of RAM. The new handset is sold at IDR 2 million ($200), which is more expensive than the Smartfren Andromax-U Limited and a bit cheaper than Andromax V.

But in the end, Mito seems like it’s still going to sell quite a lot more smartphones anyway. Why? Because Mito is very popular with buyers of cheap phones in Indonesia thanks to its star-studded ads with singer Afgan and magician Dedy Corbuzier.

Mito targets selling three million smartphones by the end of this year, with the vendor aiming at 15 to 20 million sales for its feature phones.

(Source: AntaraNews via Detik)

Tokobagus founders Arnold Sebastian Egg (left) and Remco Lupker (right) at our last year’s Startup Asia Jakarta conference.

Leaving Tokobagus, Indonesia’s largest online classified site, didn’t come easy for co-founder Remco Lupker. It was a tough decision for him. He adores the company like his own baby. He told Tech in Asia that he had a lot of fun ramping up Tokobagus from zero to the hero it is today. When MIH’s investment came in, he believed it was the perfect time for him to hand over Tokobagus to someone with much more experience operating a big company. That person is Michal Klar, who continues to run Tokobagus well.

Remco, for his part, moved on to other ventures. “Tokobagus can hardly be considered a startup anymore,” Remco said. “As [it] developed, it slowly required other management skills which were not so much in my field of interest.”

He added:

Tokobagus brought me everything I could have hoped for and so much more, I had a great ride with a great team, which I will cherish forever. Also, the Tokobagus experience taught me so much and allowed me to meet a lot of interesting people and do interesting stuff. I mean, how often do you get the opportunity to do multiple big nationwide TV campaigns?

The first thing Remco did after he exited was to go back home to Holland with his Indonesian wife to see his friends and family. The entire holiday lasted eight months. Afterwards, Remco started a new venture in Indonesia. This time, he is running a video ad network company, Ambient Digital Indonesia.

Ambient Indonesia is a joint-venture between Ambient Digital Group (headquartered in Vietnam) and Remco, himself. It’s established as a local entity. Unlike other ad networks that mainly offer banner ads fighting for limited inventory spaces, Ambient helps publishers create a new video ad inventory slot at the bottom corner of their web pages.

During his time in Vietnam, Remco came to understand more about Ambient Digital Group and its fast growth in the country. The company also did well in the Philippines. So he was convinced that Ambient’s advertising approach could work well in Indonesia. “Ambient did a superb job in Vietnam and the Philippines so imagine what we can do in a market with the size and growth potential of Indonesia,” he remarked.

Remco believes the product is unique and is already a proven business model. Plus, in a market like Indonesia, where TV advertising still commands a huge budget, Remco believes Ambient could bring TV advertisers to the internet, thus capturing a slice of that budget.

In the short term, Remco’s personal target is to make Ambient Indonesia the local market leader within six to twelve months. Despite being first in Indonesia, he expects copycats to emerge very soon. For the long term, Ambient will look more into product development, banking on the fact that there could be more room for innovation in Indonesia’s digital advertising space.

Besides running Ambient Digital Indonesia, Remco also made an investment in a local fashion brand that designs, manufactures, and sells shoes. Unfortunately, he wasn’t able to disclose the name of the brand yet. He also said that he might make one or two more investments in other startups but will leave it to fate to see what good opportunities cross his path. For his take on the Indonesian startup scene, he said that Indonesia needs sustainable companies who aren’t looking for a quick exit: “A sustainable market needs sustainable companies.”

Thailand’s social media monitoring tool Zocial Inc today just announced its plan to expand to Indonesia through a joint venture partnership with media conglomerate MNC. The cooperation will see the Zocial team learning the Indonesian market through the guidance of MNC, as well as opening sales and service channels in the country.

Zocial Inc chose Indonesia as the first country to expand to. Naturally, because the country has excellent social media activities. Starting next month, the team will roll out its two social media monitoring tools ZocialEye and ZocialRank to Indonesian users. Furthermore, MNC plans to hold social media awards for individuals called the Zocial Award in the future.

The team explains their first priority would be to improve their own system like how they track customer behavior on social media sites. And afterwards, to localize their language system to the Indonesian language so that they can identify positive and negative sentiments more accurately.

It is interesting to note that the Indonesia expansion is just the company’s first step toward preparation for the upcoming ASEAN Economic Community (AEC). Zocial plans to expand to other countries within the ASEAN region in the coming years. MNC, on the other hand, looks to be very welcoming to foreign startups with other joint ventures with China-based WeChat and the partnership with Japan-based e-commerce site Rakuten Belanja Online.

The ones who will be welcoming Zocial’s arrival in Indonesia are startups venturing in the same space here like NoLimit, MediaWave, and Brand24, to name a few. It’ll be interesting to see who will come out on top when it comes to understanding the Indonesian language. A few would argue that locals should know better, but the MNC partnership can definitely tilt the advantage to the Thai startup.

In April this year, Zocial was also part of our Startup Arena pitching battle at Startup Asia Singapore 2013.

With this investment size, I can take a break from fundraising. If you noticed, Tokopedia got funding consistently once every year. 2010 (East Ventures), 2011 (CyberAgent Ventures), 2012 (Netprice), and 2013 (Softbank).”

The fresh funds from Softbank will provide Tokopedia with the ammunition to focus on building the product, expanding the team, and also doing marketing. Some of you might also know that Softbank was one of the early investors at e-commerce giant Alibaba. So it can surely provide some e-commerce know-how to the team at Tokopedia. Daniel Kang COO at Softbank Ventures Korea elaborated in a statement:

As a close witness to enormous success of e-commerce in Korea, Japan and China, we believe Indonesia has a strong potential for online marketplace. After reviewing Tokopedia for two years, our team has strong conviction that Tokopedia could be Indonesia’s Taobao. Softbank Ventures Korea will support Tokopedia not only by providing growth capital but also by handing over experiences in this advanced market.

In our last interview with William, he revealed that Tokopedia has 770,000 active listings. Its gross merchandise value (GMV) in 2012 grew by 686 percent compared to the year before, with at least 53 percent repeat buyers each month. When asked about where the buyers come from, William said that about 40 percent of the merchants are from Jakarta. But for buyers, only 17 percent are from Jakarta. He also sent me the following charts to illustrate Tokopedia’s buyers and merchants city breakdown.

William — a keen admirer of Alibaba and its founder Jack Ma — said in the statement that he hopes to repeat Alibaba’s success story in Indonesia. He hopes his venture will bring a huge positive impact to society, creating one million jobs in Indonesia over five years.

(1) Disclosure: East Ventures is an investor at Tech in Asia. See our ethics page for more information.

From the left: Andy Zain (director of Jakarta Founders Institute) and Alexander Rusli (CEO of Indosat)

There is good potential of growth for mobile apps in Indonesia, and the future looks bright as both Indonesian telco Indosat and Jakarta Founders Institute (JKTFI) are looking to jumpstart your ideas and prototype mobile apps with the Indosat Wireless Innovation Contest (IWIC).

In its seventh year, Indosat and JKFTI will hold three big activities: a roadshow seminar to 18 universities in Indonesia, a boot camp for 40 selected teams, and two incubation programs. After undergoing the incubation process, there will be a separate negotiation process held with Indosat to talk further about how the telco can help market the apps as well as a few other details.

If your mobile apps idea falls into IWIC’s seven categories of game, sport, social media, music, video, m-commerce, or info, you might want to give this a try. The IWIC events will be held through November. You can check out more information about it on IWIC’s website.

Indonesian telco and handset manufacturer Smartfren has had a roller coaster year so far. On one end, their new set of smartphones are a breath of fresh air, especially for those on a tight budget but long for nice phones. On the other, the company had an internet connection meltdown so big that even the country’s ICT minister had to step in in the middle of the debacle.

One thing everybody seems to agree on is this: Smartfren is one of the most aggressive local handset manufacturers in the country. Gfk estimates that 62 percent Indonesians are using smartphones today ¹ (over 50 percent of all phones in Indonesia are under $50), and with the release of five new affordable smartphone devices by the company today, the future looks brighter for those who don’t have deep pockets but want to transition to a smarter device. Down the line, the handset competition will help drive both the phone’s price and performance to customers’ advantage.

New Andromax-i and Andromax-U

Two of five Smartfren handsets unveiled come with quad-core processors. The first is the refresh of Andromax-U which is simply called the new Andromax-U or Andromax-U Limited. The 4.5-inch handset receives a big upgrade of an even faster processor (from dual-core 1.5GHz to quad-core 1.2GHz) and more RAM (from 768MB to 1GB). It is priced IDR 100,000 ($10) more expensive than its older version, but still clocks at below the IDR 2 million ($200) price line.

The most popular Smartfren handset, the Andromax-i also got a refresh. So far, Smartfren sold close to 300,000 Andromax-i handsets.

Andromax V

The second quad-core Android handset unveiled by Smartfren is its latest flagship phone, which is the Andromax V. The phone has four distinct differences with the new Andromax-U: the bigger five-inch screen, Jelly Bean 4.2 OS, newer quad-core Cortex-A7 ² processors, and a better GPU. And while the Andromax-U OS can’t be upgraded in the future, Andromax V’s can.

The Andromax V comes with a more premium price of IDR 2.3 million ($230), but it is still quite affordable.

Affordable Ice Cream Sandwich Android handset

Smartfren also released the Andromax C, which is an entry-level smartphone. So why mention it? Because at only IDR 649,000 ($65), the phone offers a 4-inch screen with a dual-core 1GHz processor. Running Ice Cream Sandwich OS, this could perhaps be the best cheapest Android phone with those specifications in Indonesia so far, at least on paper.

The cost to own an Android phone with bearable specifications in Indonesia is getting lower and lower. And this phone can also help the the low-end Android user transition from the outdated Gingerbread OS to Ice Cream Sandwich.

Not forgetting cheaper Windows Phone handset too

The last phone the company launched is a Windows Phone 8 CDMA-GSM handset, which is claimed to perform faster than its competitors Nokia Lumia 620, 720, and HTC 8S. The handset is branded as Huawei Ascend W1. It is equipped with Smartfren’s EVDO Rev. B internet connection, which is more than four times faster than Smartfren’s other handsets.

Sticking true to the theme of affordable handsets, the Huawei Ascend W1 is priced at IDR 2 million ($200), which is cheaper than the three aforementioned Windows Phone 8 devices.

You can find more information about all the phones above on the Smartfren website. Except for the new Andromax-U, all of the new phones will be ready for pre-order starting tomorrow.

Besides Smartfren, other local handset manufacturer S Nexian will also be looking to release its quad-core Android phones soon.

Affordable phones come with sensible expectations

I just want to lay it down for prospective buyers of Smartfren’s phones listed above. I’ve used the Andromax-U for a few months now, and I can testify the phone’s performance is quite sensible to its pricing. At least for me, these sensible expectations include not being a super-powered handset that can handle heavy multitasking smoothly and a very mediocre camera, despite its 8MP specification.

While a lot of startups pay attention to more general problems to be solved with mobile apps or vertical e-commerce sites, this particular Indonesian startup tries to solve a more niche set of problems that few delve into: typography, or font types. Everybody uses fonts, and the right font can make a real difference on your site or comic. FontPro wants to help people find and download beautiful fonts more easily. Founder Yudhis Adi Nugroho tells us about how they plan to do that.

For starters, the site claims over 20,000 free fonts are available for people to browse and download. I found the site’s clean look easy on the eyes. Browsing and downloading the available fonts is also quite easy in many formats like HTML and CSS.

What’s nice is how FontPro lets users preview the selected fonts in many layouts, like in different sizes or in a paragraph. Users can also compare how the fonts look side by side using the typeface testing tool (pictured below).

Solving two problems

FontPro is founded by Surabaya-based developer Yudhis. He says they do not produce any of the fonts, but collect them from available sources. The idea is to help people find and download them easily. A few demo fonts on the site don’t have complete character sets yet. They require the user to donate money to the designer for the complete set.

What specific problem is he looking to solve? Yudhis says there are two. The first is about making font searches easier. The classic way for people to search for fonts is done in four steps: browsing, downloading, installing, and trying the font mockup on their computer. If the font isn’t suitable, users repeat that process all over again, which is quite tiring. FontPro helps eliminate a step, allowing people to see and compare the mockup before the download.

The second problem he solves is how even the biggest font source, DaFont.com, doesn’t offer its fonts in web formats. With FontPro, you can get all the font formats in just one click, claims Yudhis. All of this can definitely save web designers a lot of time in their work.

Monetizing from typography

So how do you earn money from this business? Yudhis explains two business models to us. First is premium membership. Premium members will be able to use more advanced features on the typeface testing tool in the future. Second is through a fonts marketplace. The way the team plans to do this is by building an extension tool for Adobe CS and plugin for Office programs. With those tools, users can download and purchase fonts directly from the programs. It can help people focus on their work without the need to open the FontPro site again, says Yudhis.

Are there a lot of people who want to sell fonts professionally? Yes, it seems like it. And they are quite expensive as well. Some fonts can cost you between $29 to $2,000. Although this is quite a niche market, professional designers are among those who Yudhis hopes will purchase these premium fonts.

I have to say that this line of business is definitely not a common one for Indonesian tech startups. The execution looks to be good so far, and the benefits it offers are quite nice too. But what do you think? Does FontPro have what it takes to succeed in this industry? Tell us what you think about it in the comment section below.

Bang With Friends, a social network for people to hook up with their Facebook friends, has gained both notoriety and popularity this year. It’s inevitable that format will be reworked – and in this case, Indonesian developer Yudhi Mandey has come up with TristUp.

TristUp is a social network for people to “level up” their friendship. Just like Bang With Friends, after logging in using your Facebook account, you will get to choose which friends you’d secretly like to hook up with. To get a match, both parties need to choose “date or shag” (yes, those are the actual options). If not, they will be notified that there’s a “misfire” and there are no possible connections.

The friend selection screen is similar to Bang With Friends’ Pinterest-like layout. Too bad the TristUp friend selection is simply arranged alphabetically as I think randomized is better. You can filter the selection based on some preferences like religion and interests. But it didn’t work when I tried. Maybe that’s because none of my buddies have signed up for TristUp.

Going viral in Indonesia and Australia

Does TristUp have what it takes to go viral just like its inspiration site? It seems like it so far. Launched just last month, Yudhi says it has 500 registered users (pretty much among friends and friends of friends) in its first three days of operation. But after one and a half weeks, the site reached almost 3,000 users with zero marketing. While the team’s primary targets are Indonesian, almost 70 percent of TristUp’s registered users come from Australia – more specifically from three colleges in Queensland and some from Brisbane.

Yudhi is still confident that TristUp is suitable for more conservative Indonesians. He did a bit of research that found most Indonesian singles aged 16 to 28 are too shy to reveal their intention to get out of the so-called friendzone. He believes that TristUp can help them fill that need anonymously, and will start pushing Indonesian targeted ads within the month. He also added that anything that smells of sex and controversy can sell in Indonesia.

More dating features

To set the startup apart from Bang With Friends, Yudhi will add a video chat speed dating feature to TristUp in the next three months. The new TristUp feature will choose 10 women and guys based on things like location, interests, and age. Users will then have a limited time to introduce themselves and chat with their potential mates.

During that timeline, TristUp will also add a chat-like platform and smartphone apps, which have app-specific features like looking for a date nearby. At the end of the year, TristUp will also hold an offline meetup in Bali. Ambitiously, Yudhi hopes to have one million users by the end of this year.

Monetizing on the dancefloor

I don’t think Bang With Friends is monetizing its product yet. How would the Indonesian version be different? By using a freemium model. First will be a premium user category on TristUp. Free users will get limited feature usage, like a maximum number of video chat speed dating instances per month. Yudhi plans to charge users $2 a month. The app’s “find the nearest user” feature will also be premium. Users need to buy TristUp’s tokens to access the location-based flirting.

Interestingly, the team is also in talks with nightclubs in Jakarta, Bandung, and Bali for possible cooperation. The idea is to use TristUp’s apps as free entry to the club for premium subscribers. Using TristUp, users can detect other users who are inside that same club and maybe use the app to get a dancefloor partner. So far, two clubs have jumped onboard.

Yudhi is also in talks with local VCs to get the startup energized further in its attempt to get one million users by the end of this year. Before TristUp, Yudhi previously built babycare information site BibTalk and medical info startup TipsDokter.

So what do you think, folks? Do you think TristUp is one to look out for in the coming years?

This picture was taken on William (left) and Leon’s (right) first year building Tokopedia.com

Tokopedia has grown over the years to become one of the favorite C2C marketplace destinations for Indonesians to buy and sell.

Founded in 2009 by William Tanuwijaya and Leontinus Alpha Edison, the company is one of the top 50 most visited sites in Indonesia according to Alexa and claims to be the number one online marketplace site in Indonesia. It has over 770,000 active listings and its gross merchandise value (GMV) in 2012 grew by 686 percent compared to the year before. Tokopedia also claims to have at least 53 percent repeat buyers each month.

Some might see Tokopedia as the eBay of Indonesia but co-founder William would like to think that Tokopedia is more like China’s Taobao. William looks up to Taobao’s creator, Alibaba founder Jack Ma, as a role model, often researching into Taobao history and Ma’s speeches for inspiration. In many ways, Tokopedia and William do resemble Taobao and Ma. For example, Tokopedia insists in not charging merchants for utilizing its marketplace which is what Taobao did in its early days – that’s one key way that Taobao beat eBay in China. William told me more:

We learned from Jack Ma that small is beautiful and we also believe in the power of individuals and small medium enterprises (SMEs) in Indonesia. We learned that Taobao really focuses on solving problems – which are trust and efficiency in the Chinese market.

When we started our company, the e-commerce ecosystem was non-existent [in Indonesia], and we thought if no one starts to build a proper e-commerce ecosystem, then it will never improve.

Jack Ma isn’t William’s only idol. “When we started our company, we admire the Google founders so much,” he said. William insists that Tokopedia isn’t only an e-commerce company but it is more of an internet company which wants to make an impact and change people’s lives. Both Google and Alibaba, he says, have such vision. It turns out to be Tokopedia’s vision too but on a more local level. “Our company vision is to better shape Indonesia through the internet,” he told me.

Facing the big boys

Tokopedia’s journey hasn’t been easy as it faces multiple giants along its way. In its first year, Tokopedia faced Telkom-eBay’s Plasa.com which looks to be hanging on by a thread. In the second year, it faced Rakuten Belanja Online, a joint venture online marketplace between Rakuten and MNC which looks to be doing well. In Tokopedia’s third year, Multiply came onto the scene, transforming itself from a social/blogging platform into an online marketplace which we now know is sadly in the deadpool.

“With very limited resources, we have no choice other than work harder than everyone else to survive the competition,” said William. Of course, there are other giant competitors like Facebook with the ‘f-commerce’ phenomenon, discussion forum site Kaskus where a lot of C2C selling happens, and online classifieds site Tokobagus where consumers can also buy goods online. But William argues that forums and classifieds sites works perfectly if people only plan to sell just one item like renting out an apartment, or selling one old motorbike or some used mobile phones – but that’s not the right kind of platform for small businesses.

On Tokopedia, William explains that merchants that come on board usually have many different models and units. He highlights several pain points as to why social networks, forums, and classifieds sites aren’t suitable for serious online merchants to do business. For example, most forums and classified sites do not have a shopping cart, inventory management system, and payment processing services. For logistics, Tokopedia helps buyers to track the products by partnering with several shipping partners. William shared more:

In many ways, the Taobao model works very well in Indonesia. Taobao has the escrow function. If you don’t receive the product, Taobao will not release the payment. Tokopedia works the same.

Tokopedia has proven to work well for some of its merchants. In the process of building Tokopedia, William has witnessed several of its merchants, some of whom are housewives, generating over billions of rupiah (more than $100,000) in sales each month. “The beauty of an entrepreneur is that we can help people. As an internet company we want to build a platform to help others do e-commerce,” he said.

Despite speaking highly of Jack Ma and Taobao, William does not plan to give face if the Chinese e-commerce giant decides to enter Indonesia. If that happens, William says confidently that Alibaba will be the shark in the ocean while Tokopedia will be the crocodile in the river.

The Indonesian startup scene is definitely one to follow in the coming years. Besides taking a look into the various startups popping up here and there, we should also be looking into the ones who have made it to the top. To that end, I talked with one Adi Kusma (pictured above) about his story of building his company Biznet Networks. He also has plenty of advice startups should heed.

Biznet offers a huge range of services which include being an internet service provider (ISP), data center, and TV cable networks. It all started with just one product, which was its ISP service back in 2000. Realizing that there’s huge market potential in the then burgeoning ISP business in Indonesia, Adi gathered $5 million of family money as capital to build Biznet.

Startup advice

This is where he shares his first bit of advice to startups: “The value proposition of your product must be clear, whether it is better pricing or it is more convenient for people to use your product.” After seven months of development, Biznet was launched in October 2000. By that time, the company already had a few clients. Back then, Biznet was able to offer both more convenience and keener pricing to customers. Users could get the same service as from competitors but for half the price at Biznet, Adi says, as well as a faster installation process which would only take about three days. The other players at that time needed three months for first-time installation.

It is like selling fried rice, if you open your stall today, there will definitely be customers buying your food right away. If you have the right product, and the demand is there, then you will have buyers.

Credit: Observer.com

The second advice I got from Adi is this: you must be the chef of your product. Rewinding back to the days when Adi was working as a programmer in the US, he was taking extra courses from Microsoft as well as consulting with American ISP players to learn about industry know-how. Besides working as a full-time programmer, Adi was also tinkering with his own “ISP lab” in his house. Only after he was sure that he could emulate the technology back in Indonesia did he come back here and do another seven months of rigorous learning and development here. The same way a chef would work and rework his or her next new dish.

He recalls the days where he stayed up late to learn about DNS server. Again using an example and metaphor from cookery, he explained that his friend’s restaurant business went haywire because the chef quit. The business owners weren’t able to replicate the kind of dishes that the chef cooked. Yes you can hire other chefs, but it’s going to be very expensive, something that a startup can’t afford. Successful restaurant chains like Bakmi GM or KFC have chefs as owners.

Adi’s third slice of advice is about timing. You should not be too late or too early to grab the opportunity. He gave the example of the tablet-like Apple Newton in 1993. The product wasn’t ready because the internet infrastructure wasn’t there yet. As a mobile device, it couldn’t do too much at the time ¹. Being too late to arrive to the market is also not good, how do you compete with the other players if they already have millions of users already? It’s going to be hard. Adi noted that there were only 13 buildings that used Biznet’s service in 2006. But after that time, the business was able to grow very fast. Now there are 560 buildings that are connected to Biznet’s service. The team also grew from less than 10 personnels in 2000 to 800 employees now.

When launching your startup, you definitely need to understand yourself and your competitors. Whether you have the capacity to compete with them, and how you plan to do that. Three things that a startup should have are integration of money, brain, and guts. Adi also mentioned that startups should have an understanding of finance management. He didn’t use up all of the $5 million capital he prepared, but he spent it across a few years time.

Biznet’s current startup project: AniMarsh

During the chat, Adi shared that their current project Animarsh can be defined as a startup. Animarsh is a seven-minute kids show which has been in the development stage for the past two years. Adi argues that while Japan has Doraemon and other countries have their own famous intellectual property and characters, Indonesia doesn’t yet have this kind of world-famous IP character. He wants to change that with Animarsh.

Sticking true to his words, Adi explained that the first year of Animarsh development was a failure. But that time was needed for them to learn the know-how behind 3D animation development, they were being their own chef in creating the product. He also admitted that they had to undergo that process because he wasn’t able to find a good Indonesian company to outsource the project to.

Animarsh will be launched later this year, and it will first be played on Biznet’s cable TV kids channel Max3 Kids. Adi hopes to sell the TV show to other countries, and make the characters famous. At the end of the show’s credits, Adi was proud to note that he put the phrase “proudly made in Indonesia” there.

You can check out Animarsh’s trailer below:

There are more funds than ever available for startups in Southeast Asia – and Indonesia in particular – right now, like the ones from Rebright Partners and 500 Startups. But there is one step that they all must go through to have access to those funds – pitches. I attended a pitch training camp held by UK-based Seed Forum in Jakarta a couple of days ago and found some gems that are worth sharing with those looking to make their pitches to potential investors.

The materials and commentary were delivered by Seed Forum president Steinar Hoel Korsmo who has overseen an ample amount of successful startup pitches to investors during his career. His first advice is to make sure you’re preparing a financial pitch to investors, as opposed to the more traditional product pitch. What investors want to hear is how you can generate cash for them as quickly as possible. What about your company’s noble mission and vision? Perhaps the ones who will be paying attention to that are specialist angel VCs like the Women Angel Fund program that GEPI recently started, not bigger VCs who specialize in series A or B rounds.

After that, Steinar shared 10 questions that you must be addressed during your seven-minute financial pitch:

• What is your business? You should be able to explain this with not more than 15 words.
• Who is your team? Present the main people in your team with a focus on stand-out personalities if there are any, or relevant competence like previous exit experience and financial competence.
• What is the market? This is where you explain who exactly your customers are, how large it is, and if you have a specific distribution strategy.
• What are your competitive advantages? Which problem are you solving for your customer? And what is the market need? You should also make a comparison between you and your competitors in a matrix.
• What is unique? If you have an intellectual property, patent, trademark protection, and perhaps IP strategy, you should also mention that.
• What is your business model? Simply, it’s about how you generate cash.
• What are the key budget figures? What is your financial status? Can you show historic numbers for turnover and profit in the previous three years? Show how they will play out for the next three years.
• What is the capital need and use of invested funds? What are the main purposes of use of your funds. Be careful not to ask for too small of a funding amount. It is better to x1.5 the estimation.
• Are there risk factors? If you include risk factors, you should explain how each of them will be eliminated. Do not include general but only specific risk factors for your business.
• What is the exit strategy? This is the gold. Are you gunning for an IPO (very unlikely for early-stage startups!) or a trade sale? If it’s the latter, you should give an idea about possible trade sale opportunities.

All of the questions above should be answered in 10 or 12 presentation slides, with the ‘666’ rule: no more than six words per bullet, no more than six bullets per slide, and no more than six word-based slides in a row.

One of the most common questions asked by investors during the pitch is about how much stake that they will get in return for the investment. If you are presenting your pitch to a large group of VCs like Seed Forum’s Investor Matchmaking Forum, you should tell them that you can discuss about that personally later. “Negotiation is a crucial part of the process too,” says Steinar. If you give away your number during the presentation, the follow up questions would most likely be on how you came up with that number in the first place, and you would be stuck answering that question rather than explaining about other important aspects of your company.

What’s in a elevator pitch?

Steinar also gave his tips for a good 30-second elevator pitch. You should only spend 10 seconds to explain your product in not more than 15 words with the rest of the time allocated to what he likes to call “value drivers.” Value drivers are the answers to why investors should invest in you, some examples of these are previous entrepreneurial experience in the team, great net profit, multiple revenue streams, proof of business concept, first-mover advantage, and disturbing exit strategy.

Seed Forum eyeing Southeast Asia

The event marks Seed Forum’s first ever pitch training event in Indonesia. Steinar told me that they plan to hold its Investor Matchmaking Forum in Indonesia next January and that they are gunning to invite a lot of local VCs to join the event. The idea is to circle the money owned by high net worth people into local businesses, and turn that money around. That can help the country develop faster.

Seed Forum will filter out candidates to join the forum through its pitch trainings. They hope to hold three to four pitch trainings in Indonesia regularly in the coming years, with about one to two matchmaking forums being held there. The organization now records 26,000 investors in its database and is present in over 40 countries worldwide.

Besides Indonesia, Seed Forum is eyeing other countries in Southeast Asia too. Among them are the Philippines, Singapore, and Thailand – they’re all on Seed Forum’s agenda this year.

Indonesian online real estate marketplace UrbanIndo has concluded a series A financing round led by Japan-based GREE Ventures. IMJ Fenox, a new fund focusing on Southeast Asia markets has also participated. The sum of the financing round wasn’t disclosed. Prior to this financing round, UrbanIndo has also previously raised a round from East Ventures (1) and other undisclosed angel investors.

Arip Tirta, Co-founder and CEO of UrbanIndo said in today’s announcement:

UrbanIndo has experienced rapid growth. The online real estate marketplace in Indonesia is shifting as users rely more and more on market data and tools to make the right decision in buying, renting, or selling properties.

This fresh funding will be used to hire more talent to join the team which currently has 11 people. Founded in November 2011, UrbanIndo claims to be “the most innovative real estate search in Indonesia.” It simplifies the search process by allowing its users to query directly on a map, complete with features like neighborhood reports, similar properties, and price distribution analysis of a neighborhood within a specific listing. Other competitors in Indonesia include Rumah123 and PropertyGuru’s Rumah.com.

When questioned, Arip told us that UrbanIndo currently has over 17,000 registered users with the majority of them being real estate professionals. The site has sold or rented close to 9,000 properties. There are also 75,000 active property listings. He also revealed that visits and pageviews have increased by 20 percent per month but did not share absolute figures. Moving forward, UrbanIndo plans to monetize based on the lead generation platform for professionals property agents.

The last time we saw GREE Ventures take a big interest in an Indonesian startup, it was Berrybenka, the women’s fashion e-commerce store, that got series A funding of its own.

(1) Disclosure: East Ventures is also an investor in TechinAsia. See our ethics page for more information.

From the left: Fung Fuk Lestario (GEPI), Shinta Widjaja Kamdani (GEPI), and Nadya Saib (Wangsa Jelita)

Women entrepreneurs in Indonesia might want to pay attention to this news announced by Global Entrepreneurship Program Indonesia (GEPI) today. The organization has set up its angel network fund in Indonesia called Angel Investor Network Indonesia (ANGIN). And ANGIN’s first program, called Women Angel Funding, will target Indonesian startups from any sector which have a female as a founder or co-founder.

The Women Angel Fund program actually comprises of 10 women entrepreneurs with high net worth. They, together with GEPI, will bring not only early stage funding, but also mentorship, network, business consultation, and a boost of credibility to the startup’s business. If you’re a tech startup looking for early stage funding between $10,000 and $50,000 and a good reach of offline networks in many sectors, you might want to give this a try. Tech-wise, Fung Fuk Lestario, the former Lazada Indonesia managing director and co-founder from GEPI, can help mentor you as well.

To get things started with the Women Angel Fund, you can register via email to women[dot]angel[at]gepindonesia[dot]org. If you make it through the screening process, you would be invited to present a three to five minute pitch to the angel investors. You can also direct your questions to the given email.

This morning at e27’s Echelon conference, CEO and co-founder Mohan Belani announced that the company has made a strategic investment in Indonesian tech media site DailySocial, which is founded by Rama Mamuaya. In addition to that news, e27 is also establishing a joint-venture with Hubba in Thailand to form e27 Thailand.

There’s no press release as of yet. Only this from DailySocial which noted that what was written on April’s fool day is more or less what people can expect out of the investment/merger.

We have reached out to e27, DailySocial, and Hubba for comments and will update if we hear back.

(Image Credit: @dondyb)

Recently, the election for Jakarta’s governor used social media in quite a few interesting ways. So some might say this is a good time for Indonesian national politics to embrace the web even more. One Indonesian startup is taking on this space by launching a social-engaged political news site for the upcoming 2014 general election RI1.tv. Can the startup prove to be a media industry changer in Indonesia?

Launched last week, RI1 aims to connect Indonesian citizens with the country’s president and the general election process. That sentence alone speaks volumes about the startup’s ambition. Riding on the upcoming presidential election, the site offers users the ability to ‘vote’ for the candidate ¹ they hope can be chosen as president, and lets people issue challenges to those same candidates about dire problems that need to be tackled by the next president. Furthermore, RI1 users can also read about the presidential candidates and find related news about them. While the domain is ‘.tv,’ RI1 doesn’t offer live streaming just yet, but there are self-produced videos for people to watch.

After browsing through the site and speaking with COO Agung Setiawan about the media startup’s plans, I found both good and not-so-good things about the way RI1 is being executed and about the direction it’s heading in. Let’s first start with the good ones.

3 good things about RI1

First, I think RI1 is playing very smart in launching its service in anticipation of the upcoming presidential elections taking place next year. This will help encourage all parties, including the presidential candidates, netizens, and media to be more willing to engage with RI1.

Second, RI1 has got off to a good start. The startup has received support from celebrities and influential people like Pandji Pragiwaksono (368,000 Twitter followers) and Aidil Akbar (106,000 Twitter followers). Some of them will go on to become RI1’s local influencers by sounding out the user-generated challenges to the presidential candidates every week.

Third, there aren’t that many political startups as of yet in Indonesia. So RI1 has little competition in this space. The potential user reach is quite big as well. Agung says that there are around 87 million youths – people aged between 17 years old to 35 years old – that can participate in next year’s election, and they’re likely to be engaged with the political process mainly via social media like Twitter and Facebook.

Sensitive business model

The first not so good thing about RI1 is how the startup balances its independence with its business model. RI1 earns its money from interested political parties, either by putting banner ads on the site, or by hiring RI1’s service to advise them should they want to hold offline talkshow events. Politics, of course, is a sensitive matter. The first time a user sees a banner ad from one political group on RI1, it might already make the site look biased.

So how can RI1 stay objective if their source of income is, potentially, from one particular presidential candidate? Agung assures me that the only thing the candidates can buy from RI1 is banner ad spots, and that’s it. The candidates cannot influence RI1’s news content nor it’s online voting results. It remains to be seen if users care at all if there are banner ads from political parties on the site.

Will there be political groups wanting to post ads on the site? Apparently so. Agung told me that he has quite a few connections to those parties and he has confirmed that these parties now have digital media divisions to help win campaigns.

Agung believes that an ad from a political group won’t ruin RI1’s independent character. Moreover, the funds will help support RI1’s mission to encourage youth participation in the upcoming election. RI1’s content and offline activities in reaching out to young people can help build the startup’s image, and that is where the startup’s focus lies.

The second thing that RI1 needs to watch out for is its revenue sharing scheme. Do you remember about the startup’s feature that lets users post challenges for the president candidates to solve? If a candidate wants to put banner ads on a user’s challenge post, he or she will earn a 30 percent commission from them.

While that sounds very nice, as I said before, politics is a sensitive thing. What’s going to happen when the user’s banner ad comes from a candidate that they do not support or even hate? Agung needs to pay more attention to this problem, especially as it also affects the local influencers and celebrities that will be taking part in the challenges. Those people would not want to be exclusively associated with a certain political party as it can potentially ruin their personal/celebrity brand image.

Regarding this potential problem, Agung told me that if people don’t like the political ads, the team can also approach non-political entities like companies to advertise on the site. The big idea for the site is to become a political mediator for young people – and that can help build the nation.

RI1 content isn’t that deep

One thing that I highlighted during my conversation with Agung is the site’s not-so-deep content. RI1 has candidate profiles on the site, but the profiles are very general, containing only the candidate’s general info and brief political experience. It doesn’t explain much about the candidate’s achievements, voting records, or even allegations leveled against them. All of which I think play a crucial role in helping users determine which candidate they will choose.

Agung told me that the news content will also be light, meaning that RI1 will not attack any political parties if there’s any controversial issue about them. He’s going to leave more serious media sites like Kompas to handle that avenue. The reason for this, Agung said, is because RI1’s main goal is to inspire youths to participate in the election, and the site doesn’t want to burden these people with heavy news.

Additional, more in-depth information regarding a particular candidate can be written by its users on the challenge feature. Agung stresses that they will never interfere with user-generated content.

Future plans and present concerns

A lot of political groups care only about the campaign period. So what will happen after the presidential election finishes next year? RI1 will continue to monitor the new president’s activities like how he or she keeps the promises made during the campaign. RI1 will still aim to be the main socially-engaged media platform and resource for young voters in the nation. Agung hopes that eventually the list of challenges put forward by the users can be used as input for the next president’s 100 first working days plan.

For now, RI1 is dealing with a chicken and egg problem. I think in due course, it’ll be easier for the media startup to entice more users to create more activities during the early pre-election hype. For now, they will need to focus on securing candidates’ cooperation so that the challenges are meaningful and have some chance of being addressed. The site is still a bit quiet now.

Agung says that political parties will start to reveal their candidates’ names after the Lebaran holiday in August. We should expect a flurry of activity on RI1 after that.

Politics is a whole new avenue yet to be ventured by a lot of startups in Indonesia. But that is definitely one of the spaces people should look out for, especially during the campaign period as billions of rupiahs will be spent by each party to get people to vote for them. There is money, there is space, but is the market ready for a media startup in this niche?

Other Indonesian startups to have briefly ventured into the political scene include NoLimit and Rolling Glory, who launched the hugely popular SocialMeter during last year’s Jakarta elections. Both capital governor candidates also released their own versions of online mini games during the heated campaign.

Change Ventur.es is a one-month program that will commence this September 9 and will end on October 9. It will first kick off with a weekend of business model generation and lean startup principles, and in the following weeks, talks and workshops will be tailored to the applicants’ backgrounds and knowledge. Co-founder Grace Clapham says some of the workshops the team is looking at includes idea development, design thinking workshop, finance fundamentals, opportunity analysis, scaling enterprises, setting up businesses, building confidence and an entrepreneurial mindset, cultural awareness, and marketing and branding with a limited budget.

Morning yoga

There is a good mix of work and play, but the main focus is on collaboration and moving the idea, social, or business venture forward. To be honest, I think a good balance of exercise and work allows one to let ideas flow better. Grace tells us:

Most days will start with a surf or yoga session, and then venturers are free to work on their project throughout the day. Venturers will have enough time to focus on making their idea a reality whilst being challenged at the same time through mentors and coaches from a variety of backgrounds and expertise. Workshops, sessions, and talks will be held but most are optional for them to attend – all sessions will help them with fundamental skills, creative thinking and making their ideas happen.

And no, it’s not all play for you. All participants, or venturers as Grace calls them, must partake in activities that are catered for them, and not just attend as and when they wish. Prior to the program, interviews will be conducted to ensure they have the right mindset and goals. “We are working very hard at making sure we have the right group of venturers,” says Grace, which is essential to “create an environment that has a strong community and a great team spirit”.

After the month-long program, venturers will be expected to continue their journey and launch their own projects as the Change Ventur.es team will continually provide the necessary support and help. The mentors and coaches are also willing to extend a helping hand to make projects a success, and also in a hope that program graduates will return to mentor future program participants.

Why the surfer paradise?

Grace excitedly jokes that the main reason for choosing Bali is that she is half Indonesian. But as a matter of fact we do know that there’s a lot happening in Indonesia, and that we all love strolling down the beaches along Seminyak, checking out those bikini babes, and enjoying that ice cold Bintang beer. Yes, the place offers a great lifestyle experience, which Grace believes, with both factors combined, will provide “the type of community experience we want – and Bali is also becoming an innovation hub in its own right”. It’s a short flight away from neighbouring cities such as Singapore, Jakarta, and Hong Kong too.

The price for participating in this month-long program starts from $1,995, depending on the type of accommodation which ranges across dormitory, twin, and queen bedrooms in a Joglo style villa (pictured right). Breakfasts will be provided every morning, and the 25 selected participants can take part in the yoga and surfing lessons should they be interested. There will also be dinner gatherings with invited guest speakers from across the region.

So for the participants, wake me up when September ends, because it sounds like a really fun and exciting program. If you would like to soak up the sun and drink some coconut juice while cracking your brains about a new product, visit the Change Ventur.es website here.

[Image credits: Yoga pose picture from Flickr and Change Ventur.es]

We’ve seen quite a few Indonesian-made games recently, and this mobile browser-based game made by Depok game developer Tanoshii Studio is still a refreshing one. The game is called Garata, and it is now made available on gaming platform Kotagames. Two things I instantly noticed when playing the game: first is that Garata combines Indonesian folklore with robot characters! And second, the game has very nice graphics in comparison with the usual games meant for feature phones.

In a nutshell, Garata looks like the Indonesian version of Gundam which is set in its own folklore universe. Garata itself is the name of the robot species. The team describes Garata as Wayang Robot Battle species who are living in the Bharatayudha galaxy. That theme is chosen in the hope of attracting both local and international gamers.

Garata’s story is inspired by the Indonesian shadow puppet story “The Battle of Bharatayudha.” You will also find legendary Indonesian characters inside the game like Garata Gatot Kaca and Garata Hanuman. But most of the famous characters are premium items available via in-app purchases.

After giving the game a try for a bit, I found Garata offers the usual social gaming experience found on Kotagames platform. You would be able to do quests, buy items, obtain new characters, and battle with the other players. One more thing that I have to give props to the game developers for is how they pay attention to details. Besides the very nice graphics and interesting Indonesian robot battles, I found the storyline to be quite intriguing and entertaining as well.

Tanoshii Studio co-founder Oscar Kurniawan explains about the game’s progress so far:

We put some love into the game. Hopefully, players will feel it and play it like crazy. On the first day of Garata launching, we already made sales of our in-app purchase items and there are hardcores gamers playing it. [As of this morning,] Garata players now are in around 1700, with conversion rate (paying user) of two to three percent.

Garata was one of Indonesia’s representatives at the Indie Prize Showcase at Casual Connect Asia 2013 held in Singapore last week. And the game was crowned as the winner of the professional category during the recent XL GameHack 2013.

Besides Garata, Tanoshii Studio has built several apps such as children’s game Room of Disaster for Nokia phones. The game has been downloaded over 80,000 times from the Nokia Store and has made its way to the Blackberry 10 platform too.

The team is currently working to bring Garata to Android and iOS platforms. In the meanwhile, you can try playing Garata on Kotagames here.

Credits: Chip.co.id

As one of the most well known venture capitalists in Asia, CyberAgent Ventures (CAV) has put its money into quite a few companies around Asia, and some of them have achieved successful exits. Hailing from Japan, the venture capital firm first set foot in Indonesia about two years now, but so far there are only two Indonesian portfolio companies invested by CAV – the marketplace Tokopedia and babycare online shop Bilna.

So on average, CyberAgent Ventures invests in only one indonesian company every year, which is pretty low. We spoke with CAV’s Indonesian investment managers Steven Vanada and Liauw Oswin Liandow to find out more about the team’s progress in Indonesia.

Let me first bring you up to speed on the context. If you have gone to at least two startup events in Jakarta, then you would most likely have seen either Steven or Oswin as they participate in those a lot. They have been quite active in getting to know Indonesian startups and making themselves available for people to approach them. Yet they have only invested in two companies so far. Why is that?

3 things that CyberAgent Ventures looks for

Steven told me that they look at three things before making an investment decision. First is the potential market size, to gauge how huge the startup can grow, and whether that particular market is ready or not. Oswin personally believes – for example – that while the Indonesian market for medical startups has potential, it is not yet ready. So what kind of markets both have potential and are ready, in their mind? He says that vertical e-commerce, dating, mobile-related industry, and social networking services among others are now in primetime. Steven adds:

We prefer a business that has a vast user-base and may not necessarily need to monetize in the short term. The key is in the long-term user value. So even if the platform/service is not profitable for the short term, if it can retain user activities for longer term, it would prove to be much more valuable than the short-term monetization

Not all business models can monetize quickly, some need more time than others. If your business model is one that needs long-term monetization, and might need to burn a lot of money first, this is where external funding like CAV comes in. “We are here to help you with the funding, so you can do what a bootstrap startup can’t usually achieve by themselves,” says Steven.

Second thing they look at in a startup is the team. Steven likes to say that their ideal team would be one who can commit for the long term and has passion in what they do, or at least believes in what they are doing. Tokopedia’s William Tanuwijaya and Bilna’s Ferry Tenka are among those who fit the profile.

The third thing is strategy. It is about how the company plans to be the market leader. What makes the company unique or different from the rest of of the pack. And whether they have a sustainable competitive advantage.

Helping the industry grow

What makes CAV stand out compared to the other VC firms in the region? Steven says that the company’s extended network – helped by parent company CyberAgent (TYO:4751)
– across the region is one to look out for. That network reach is beneficial for startups wanting to expand or when looking for the next funding round. Furthermore, besides coming from an internet business background, CAV has experience and exposure in many internet business models from various countries, which can lead the VC to offer different perspectives to founders and advise accordingly. The team likes to think that they are quite hands-on when it comes to helping their companies through weekly meetings to discuss strategies and progress.

Both Steven and Oswin are Indonesians, and it is nice that they wish to help grow the local tech industry here. The team will soon hold monthly events where they can share case studies with aspiring tech entrepreneurs, as well as help advise current startups about their business strategies. Having friends to discuss business strategies is always a good thing.

We’ve heard from CyberAgent Ventures China CEO Nobuaki Kitagawa last month that they’re going to make an investment in two Indonesian startups from the gaming and e-commerce sectors. He also mentioned that the team is planning to raise the investment fund for Southeast Asian region to $20 million by the end of this year.

On the last note, Steven stresses this point:

We want to position ourselves, not as a mere “investor”, not someone higher than entrepreneurs, not lower. But we want to position ourselves to be the same level of founders who would “sweat” together.

This article is part of our ‘VCs in Indonesia’ series.

While it’s a no-brainer that making good presentations and pitches is an essential skill to be mastered by any startups anywhere in the world, I’ve found my share of startup pitches which I thought need to be honed a lot. If you’re looking for first-hand experience and practice to improve your pitches, then Seed Forum’s Pitch Training event in Jakarta on June 4 can be a good platform for you.

The event is quite exclusive though as it is open only to 10 hand-picked companies. To participate, you would need to email your company’s profile first. And if accepted, the company can send in as many as two people to join the training, which is hosted at Microsoft Indonesia office in Jakarta. It’ll cost each person IDR 50,000 (US$5) for food. The Jakarta event will be led by Seed Forum president Steinar Korsmo.

Pitch Training participants will also be able to learn more about Seed Forum’s other events which can connect startups with investors. The event is open to any kind of startup.

The deadline for registration is Monday, June 3 at 12 noon Jakarta time. For more information about the event as well as registration, you can try contacting Seed Forum’s Indonesian partner STI Indonesia here.

Credit: nationmultimedia.com

“Do Indonesian startups have what it takes to face off against foreign companies?” I have stumbled on that question for some time now while conversing with a few startup players here. “Can Indonesian startups be the kings in their home turf? Even better, can they be the kings in other countries as well?” While there’s very few startups here thinking about expanding just yet, they might need to start doing so as the ASEAN Economic Community (AEC) draws even closer. What is AEC you ask? It’s basically an agreement which lets businesses in ASEAN countries expand much easier inside the region. That can mean an opportunity for your startup to expand, or threatened because other companies can come into your turf and fight you.

AEC will come into effect on December 31st 2015, to get a better grasp of what will happen when that time comes, I spoke with Chris Kanter, the vice chairman of Indonesian chamber of commerce and industry (KADIN Indonesia). Representing the local businesses, KADIN Indonesia helps the Indonesian government oversee and handle the AEC preparation as well as the discussion with the other country representatives. Chris told me that while the ASEAN Free Trade Agreement (AFTA) regulates goods within the region, AEC regulates people, which include services and manpower.

When asked about what kind of regulation that will be changed by AEC, Chris explains that AEC will basically let ASEAN members conduct businesses a lot easier inside the region. That will include easier requirements to receive business permits and extended duration of stay for ASEAN foreigners.

He admits that the Indonesian government must be able to help, facilitate, and even give incentives to local startups as to help them get ready for AEC. While it is being done as we speak, it is still far from enough, he said. Chris mentioned about how the government still needs to build a lot of infrastructure like free wifi and faster internet speed here.

Chris encourages tech startups to prepare as soon as possible for the upcoming AEC. “Technology enables businesses to operate everywhere, don’t just be defensive.” Indonesian startups shouldn’t only defend their turf, but also attack other areas too, said Chris.

As one of the biggest hindrances for people to expand is the huge amount of capital ¹ needed, you can expect the cost and the paperwork hassle to be reduced significantly for ASEAN members. With both AEC and AFTA enacted – meaning that it’ll be cheaper to export products and easier to receive payments – businesses like e-commerce should embrace this opportunity wholeheartedly.

Of course, everything that was spoken here is also applicable to startup players in the other nine ASEAN countries like Singapore, Malaysia, Vietnam, and the Philippines. What do you think, folks? Do you think tech startups in ASEAN will be busy expanding and attacking new markets, or would they still be too busy (or too poor) tapping into their own local markets?

Kompas.com new logo unveiled

Indonesians are familiar with Kompas Gramedia, a 48 year-old media brand that is trusted by many in the country thanks to the Kompas newspaper, which remains an important source of news.

Besides newspapers, Kompas Gramedia also runs other print media from magazines to tabloids. It owns Gramedia book stores as well as radio and TV channels. On top of that, the company is also venturing into hospitality and education sectors. Kompas Gramedia is touted as the leading media company in Indonesia through its variety of strong media channels.

Despite its huge media influence and success, Kompas hasn’t rested on its laurels. The company understands that it has to change with the times as more people are starting to consume news online. Its first attempt into the online space gave birth to the first online version of Kompas in 1997.

Edi Taslim, who is now the digital group director at Kompas Gramedia, said that while Kompas.com was set up as a separate company, it is nonetheless just a companion to the Kompas newspaper in 1997. Kompas.com will republish news that is found on its print version and doesn’t run any of its own stories. Prior to joining Kompas Gramedia’s digital division, Edi, who joined the group straight after he graduated from college, was an editor-in-Chief at CHIP Media (which is also under Kompas Gramedia) and helped Kompas Gramedia expand its business in Malaysia and Singapore.

Edi Taslim, digital group director at Kompas Gramedia

In 2007, he was asked to lead Kompas.com as general manager with about seven to ten people in his team. In 2008, Kompas.com restructured and relaunched with its own editorial team and the site finally began to run its own stories. It also has its own business team. While freedom from Kompas (the printed newspaper) is great, it also means that Kompas.com is managing its own profit and loss statements. It is on its own to prove that an online media could generate revenue and stay afloat. Edi told me:

In 2008, the board of directors decided that Kompas.com has to be a real online news site instead of just a companion of Kompas daily. We don’t wait for print anymore. In the last ten years, it was just a companion of daily and that didn’t work because people want to read news real-time.

In a print company, I think the challenges is always the online culture. It’s totally different in terms of how we work and report. That’s the biggest challenge since [Kompas.com] started. So we really have to do an extreme approach. Coming from a traditional media company it is difficult to change the mentality and culture of online journalism.

At Kompas.com, Edi first had to ensure that the team had an online-first culture and mentality. He explained that writing for newspapers, you cover what’s important regardless of whether or not it’s interesting. Online, people click on interesting news that may not necessarily be important. For example, celebrities fighting on Twitter isn’t important but it is interesting for a lot of online readers. The way reporters write their headlines and stories online has to be different than writing for a newspaper. Courses were introduced to help the reporters learn and adapt to the online world better. Edi explained:

In print, you go to an event and come back to write for the 6:00 PM deadline. In online, before you go for an event, you have to create a teaser for the event. Once you arrive you create another piece of news. During the event you have another article submitted online and after the event you have a post-event article.

Another stark difference is that reporters who work at Kompas.com have to be a multi-media capable. Meaning, on top of just writing, they will have to know how to shoot videos and take photos. Writing for internet readers also means that speed is key and reporters usually have to break news as soon as they are at the scene. It is more doable nowadays with the help of smartphones. “If there is breaking news, we have to report it within two to three minutes,” said Edi.

While speed is important, Kompas.com ensures that the articles published on its site are well written. Editors are stationed within the office to help edit and polish the articles. Each day Kompas.com publishes more than 400 articles. It enjoys 19 million unique visitors and 210 million pageviews each month. Kompas.com has been profitable since its first year with 90 percent of its revenue coming from advertising. While that’s great, Edi laments that Kompas could have done even better if it had entered the internet earlier.

Going online and investing

Kompas.com isn’t the only online property Kompas Gramedia has. Other online properties it owns include Gramedia.com (mainly an e-commerce bookstore), Urbanesia.com (an online city directory), and Kompasiana.com (citizen journalism). Just recently Kompas Gramedia’s digital arm invested $2.4 million in Scoop, a magazine and e-book newsstand and reader. Scoop founder Willson Cuaca says that is the first time that the Indonesian media giant made an investment in a startup.

Edi pointed out that Kompas Gramedia is taking an extra interest in e-commerce and online advertising companies. But noted that there isn’t any pattern to the company’s investment. He said:

We see startups and investments that can strengthen our position as a media company. Not just Kompas.com but Kompas Gramedia as a group. It doesn’t have to be related [to media], we also want to see other businesses that we think can create something different within the group. We want to diversify and of course we look for potential partners in doing this new business.

Rebranding

Edi Taslim explaining Kompas.com’s new design at this evening launch event.

Today, May 29, marks the five year anniversary of Kompas.com and the company has taken this opportunity to flesh out a newly designed and responsive site that fits onto any screen. All of Kompas.com mobile native apps will also have the same look and feel.

On top of the new web design, Kompas.com is now more social and shareable. Every reader can have their own page in which he or she can personalize their news to quench their different interests. It will also be accompanied by a loyalty program for readers who will get points for sharing and commenting on articles and these points can be exchanged for goodies each month. It is also allows readers to see what articles have their friends read, favorited, or commented on Kompas.com. Edi added:

Instead of news we are looking at bringing online videos, all the movies and TV program from Kompas TV to an online demand video. [There will be] full episodes [and] not just teasers.

Besides pulling video content from its TV arm, Kompas.com is also looking to create its own original video series for its web audience. Most importantly, this rebranding is to shape Kompas.com as a brand that is more like your friend and not to be associated with the seriousness and authoritative branding which readers usually have with the Kompas newspapers. Edi added:

We want to make the brand more appealing to the younger generation. We had lots of surveys to study the brand of Kompas.com. People still associate the brand with Kompas [and the] first thing that come to your mind, in terms of figure, is that Kompas is my father’s friend who wear a tie and is very respectable. We do not want that. We want Kompas.com to be a friend. This is our first step to make the brand more appealing and we will introduce new campaigns at the end of the year.

Ryota Inaba, President Director and CEO of PT Rakuten-MNC

Rakuten’s (JSD:4755) Indonesian e-commerce site, Rakuten Belanja Online (RBO), turns two-years old today. Coinciding with today’s anniversary, RBO also announces its cross border e-commerce platform that promises users a better user interface and more products coming from overseas. It’s scheduled to be launched on June 3 in Indonesia.

With the global cross-border platform for Rakuten users in Indonesia, merchants in the country are also able to do cross-border trades in different Rakuten marketplaces backed up by an enhanced language support via its translation and review process. So far the same global e-commerce platform has already been launched in Malaysia. We asked Rakuten about how it will tackle logistics and payments across border barriers and will update when we hear back.

RBO also sees an upgrade in its payment process by partnering with Veritrans, a payment gateway company headed by founder Ryu Kawano. RBO was previously using Doku for this, but Ryota Inaba explained that trust, chemistry, and Veritrans’ fraud detection system has won them over.

So much for the Rakuten and MNC split-up story. Ryota Inaba, president director and CEO of the Rakuten-MNC joint venture, started his presentation at the RBO office at MNC tower this afternoon by emphasizing that Rakuten is here to stay in Indonesia. Inaba says that Rakuten and MNC are still a team and insisted that the split up story is a rumor. He also highlighted Rakuten’s financial strength that it will be able to finance RBO to success in Indonesia. He said in the statement:

Rakuten is confident that Indonesia has the potential to become the biggest e-commerce market in Asia. The launch of our new Global E-Commerce Platform and payment gateway signifies Rakuten’s continued and deepened commitment to merchants and customers in Indonesia

In Indonesia, RBO says that it is experiencing fast growth. Its gross merchant sales grew by more than 115 percent year on year (YoY), paid orders grew by 257 percent YoY, and the number of online shops increased by 129 percent YoY. RBO also sees huge growth in mobile orders, seeing 438 percent of growth YoY. No absolute figure was revealed, unfortunately.

Evernote Business, the enterprise-oriented version of the note syncing and online collaboration app, has launched today across much of Southeast Asia. It’s now available for the usual price of $10 per user per month in Hong Kong, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Taiwan, Thailand, and Vietnam; it’s S$14 in Singapore. (Update: Corrected the Singapore price).

Evernote Business notebooks in the app.

US-based Evernote says it has 5,000 global subscribers to its Business platform already. It’s usable in small- and medium-sized companies, as well as for workgroups in larger corporations. It can be used to store and share notes, presentation files, and all kinds of images and charts.

The same service launched in mainland China earlier this month, where Evernote has a total of four million users, including its free service for regular folks.

Earlier this year, Evernote’s Tiang Lim Foo told us that the note syncing company has two million users throughout Southeast Asia. About 400,000 of them are in Thailand where Evernote is proving popular, and 350,000 of the users are in Indonesia. Globally, over 50 million have signed up to Evernote.

For our second Jakarta Meetup at the Microsoft Auditorium, we had Lichi Wu (pictured above) from mobile advertising company Millennial Media talking about how to monetize from your mobile apps.

Lichi starts things off (see the full video below) by telling people to make sure they start building their app with monetization plan in mind. Though this is obvious, quite a few people forget this crucial process. Afterwards he explained about the mobile market overview in the region, focusing on things like smartphone penetration rate in countries worldwide and a bit about the difference of Android and iOS users.

Getting down to business, Lichi then pointed out the three different business models for earning mobile revenue: making it a paid app, or in-app purchases, or by implementing advertisements inside the app. He explained in more detail about the three mentioned strategies, including their pros and cons. One interesting thing about using the in-app purchase model, as explained by Lichi, is that you should still cater to your non-paying users, which can be up to 99 percent of them. If you have one happy paying customer and 99 unhappy free users, then most probably you will end up having a very bad review of your app. Will that one happy customer write something nice? Perhaps not. It is easier for someone to write a bad review than a good one. “Users tend to focus on negativity,” said Lichi.

He then moved on to talk more extensively on optimizing the ads-based business model in mobile apps. You can watch his full presentation in the video below.

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Today Japan-based Line held a press conference to talk about the company’s progress in Indonesia. While the company did not reveal its exact user numbers in Indonesia, the figure they gave today is the closest thing to estimate how hugely popular the app is here locally.

Line reveals that the company has passed the 23 million download mark for its whole suite of Line apps – which includes Line messenger, Line Games, Line Camera, and other Line apps – in Indonesia.

The messaging app has been very aggressive in marketing its product here with star-studded TV ads. One of its ad stars, Agnes Monica, who’s the number one celebrity Twitter user in Indonesia is at this afternoon’s event in Jakarta, and will have her own sticker pack in Line’s social messaging app soon.

Recently, Line also boasted of having 16 million users in Taiwan. The app has also launched in China and was last week in hot water amidst a controversial possible censorship plan for its Chinese version. Globally, Line messaging app itself has hit the 160 million user mark.

During the event, the company also shared that it has donated IDR 750 million (US$75,000) WWF Indonesia. That amount is generated based on the number of WWF Indonesia free stickers downloaded by Indonesian users in the span of one month. As the company pledges IDR 1,000 ($1) for each sticker pack download, it means that Line has at least 750,000 Indonesian users downloading the stickers.

Indonesian e-commerce marketplace Shopious is making its debut appearance today. Right from the bat, I personally think that this project is quite ballsy for two reasons. First, Shopious implements a C2C business model, which is used by popular sites like Tokopedia and the soon-to-close Multiply without generating much of a revenue stream. Second, Shopious CTO Aditya Herlambang told me that they’re going to start monetizing – charging merchants – in one year’s time. As a startup, how do they think that they will succeed with this business model here?

Let’s take a look at the founders first. Adit previously worked at Pulse and he was there during the transition after the reader app got acquired by LinkedIn. He also co-founded iOS app Pinstagram (now Pictacular). Adit, together with the other Shopious co-founder Billy Halim, studied abroad.

Now that he’s back here in Indonesia, Adit believes that there’s a place for Shopious. He believes that all great businesses come from a focused and niche mindset. An example is how eBay started with electronics and Amazon with books; from then on, their businesses expanded to other product categories. And he reasons that it’s easier for the Shopious team to pay attention to this niche C2C sector first.

Fashion focus

Why is Shopious choosing the fashion category for its shopping platform? Adit says it is because there’s still a huge market for this. Unlike with electronics, everyone can offer a different variety of fashion items from a huge catalog of brands worldwide. Furthermore, the profit margin derived from the fashion industry is quite large. “You can sell a shirt for IDR 300,000 (US$31) and get a three-fold the margin,” says Adit. With this healthy profit margin, merchants will be more willing to pay the upcoming fee to Shopious.

How much will the team charge its merchants? A 10 percent transaction fee says Adit, and it will be implemented next year. I told him that other marketplace sites were thinking similarly a few years back. But sites like Multiply have repeatedly backed away from charging e-store merchants. Adit told me that the team is resolved to stick with the plan.

A lot of people believe that you need to burn quite a lot of money when jumping into the C2C e-commerce industry. Adit believes that the key is customer service because a lot of people are still not used to shopping online, so the online help must be quite satisfactory. Adit will rely on using other creative methods to market the site – rather than burning money on ads such as the way the site offers users IDR 10,000 ($1) for every Facebook friend they invite who shops on Shopious. The end-game is similar – new user acquisition.

What makes Shopious site stand out from the crowd? Adit explains that there are a few nice social features inside the marketplace which include following a merchant store, Pinterest-like images, and a news feed that can give product suggestions to users based on what they follow on Shopious. The process to build stores inside Shopious is very easy too. Currently there are 20 merchants with e-stores on the platform, already offering about 500 fashion items.

Personally, I am curious to see what will happen when Shopious decides to charge its merchants next year. Will the market be ready by then? Will its merchants flee to other marketplace sites like Kaskus, TokoBagus, and Tokopedia to sell their wares? Or will they stay and pay? Whatever happens, it will definitely be an interesting case study for the other players in this industry.

(Thanks for all the entries, but now this contest is closed)

Chinese handset maker OPPO has set foot in the Indonesian market recently, bringing in its flagship Oppo Find 5. What’s so special with the phone? Specification wise, the phone is on par with high-end phones like the Sony Xperia Z, and a few will argue the OPPO Find 5 is a better phone than the Samsung Galaxy S4.

As a new player in the Indonesian market, OPPO will need to compete with the other popular brands like Samsung and Sony here. Hermanto, the digital manager of OPPO Phone Indonesia, told us that OPPO’s internationally recognized brand and high-end features would be able to attract quite a number of customers.

While on paper the specifications look really good, there are still concerns about the phone’s performance in comparison with other brands. Hermanto said that the company upgrades the phone’s firmware every two weeks to make sure the phone performs at its best.

In around July and August, OPPO will produce three new phone models and in October the Chinese company will launch another high-end device. These phones will make their way to Indonesia shortly after being available in the Chinese market.

OPPO Find 5 16GB is priced at IDR 5.5 million ($560) in Indonesia. But the best news of all is that in cooperation with online shop Lazada Indonesia, we are going to give away one OPPO Find 5 to one lucky reader in Indonesia!

All you need to do is follow these steps:

• Like Tech in Asia on Facebook .
• Give a wacky tweet on the comment section below about why you really want the free handset, while including your Twitter handle ¹.
• Tweet this post with the hashtag #OPPOFind5TIA.

We will announce who the lucky winner is at 10pm Jakarta time tonight. Be sure to follow @techinasia as we will send you a DM with your Lazada voucher code.

UPDATED at 11:00 Jakarta time: Congratulations to @dewe for getting his hands on a brand new OPPO Find 5! Now he can let his friends admire the phone all day long.

In celebration of Indonesia’s biggest telco Telkomsel’s 18th anniversary on May 26th, nine local e-commerce sites will hold a one-week promotional program with special treatment for Telkomsel users like extra discounts and cash-backs. The nine participating online shops are Lazada Indonesia, Zalora Indonesia, Berrybenka, PinkEmma, Bilna, Plasa, Reebonz, LivingSocial, and FoodPanda.

While announcing this new promo campaign, a few of the sites also shared their latest data. Ladies fashion e-store PinkEmma has so far gathered more than 400,000 members in the nine months since the startup’s inception. The site attracts 20,000 daily visitors.

Babycare e-commerce site Bilna, which launched in November last year, now handles 200 to 300 daily transactions. The site records two million page-views every month and more than 450 brands have jumped onboard.

Women’s fashion e-store Berrybenka is also recording great numbers. With over 400 brands inside the online shop, the startup now garners 10 million monthly page-views and handles around 300 to 400 transactions every day. At the beginning of this year, Berrybenka raised series A investment from GREE Ventures.

Daily deals site LivingSocial also has very nice numbers. The company recorded three million monthly page-views last month. Rocket Internet’s Lazada Indonesia, Zalora Indonesia, and FoodPanda look to be doing very well too. Zalora Indonesia CEO Hadi Wenas told us last month that they now have 200,000 daily visitors. Besides doing a few initiatives like celebrity-endorsed clothing collections, the whole Southeast Asia Zalora network must be in delighted with the fresh injection of $100 million announced yesterday.

All of the team generally expect to see a three-fold to five-fold rise in transactions during this promotional program. Hadi and PinkEmma CEO Iwan Tantra told me that besides the usual sales program, the press conference yesterday is also being held to send a message to the nation’s consumers that the Indonesian e-commerce scene is looking very healthy despite the downfall of notable e-commerce site Multiply recently.

You can check more information regarding the whole promotional program with Telkomsel here. The site should be accessible on May 26th.

Indonesian game studio Tinker Games releases its flagship game Inheritage: Boundary of Existence today for iOS. The one thing that excites me about the game – besides the fact that it has ample amount of Indonesian characteristics inside – is the game’s size, which is 400MB. I’ve seen my share of Indonesian mobile games so far, and there aren’t a lot of huge and complex games such as this coming from the country. Let’s see how the game’s features justify its size.

As the Tinker Games team describes it, Inheritage is a horizontal shoot’em up adventure game that combines Indonesian culture, anime-style artwork, and a visual novel. It’s aimed at a global gaming audience. The game includes Indonesian cities as the backgrounds for the stages, local urban stories, and traditional weapons. The team has put an Inheritage encyclopedia inside to help explain about the various Indonesian artefacts that appear inside the game.

Of course, for a game with that kind of size, Inheritage offers a few other gaming features and details inside. For example, the game is equipped with spoken dialogue in the Indonesian language (though the whole game is playable in English), and players will be able to unlock special attacks and animal partners called Rakyans. You’ll also want to check out the game’s artwork.

Tinker Games is cooperating with local developer Touchten in promoting a few of its games. Inheritage is available as a ‘lite’ version here, or you can buy the full version for $3.99 here. The game studio is offering a 50 percent discount for the game this week only.

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 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.

This article is part of our ‘VCs in Indonesia’ series.

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.