5 Interesting Startups That Pitched at IDByte Jakarta Roadshow

The startup pitching session of Indonesia Digital Byte (IDByte) 2013 kicked off with startup hunts in four cities in Indonesia. We dropped by to the Jakarta pitching session where each startup was vying for the winning spot along with prizes. Included in the prizes was a trip to South America or Middle East under the Geeks on a Plane program and a chance to receive US$50,000 investment from Dave McLure, the founder of venture firm 500 Startups.

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.

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