Italo Gani, CCO at M-Stars, Shares His Entrepreneur Story

We’re always keen to hear the lasest news about the mobile scene in Indonesia. And with that in mind, we were delighted to get a chance to talk with Italo Gani, the Chief Commercial Officer (CCO) of M-Stars.

M-Stars is a group of mobile- and service-related companies, ranging from music content distribution to mobile payment and advertising. Some of you might remember Adstars, an Indonesia-based mobile ad network which we covered last month, with over 500 million monthly impressions.

Italo started his career as an entrepreneur in 1998. After the dot-com bubble, he started his own VoIP Service provider startup in Singapore and subsequently moved on to mobile-related businesses in 2006. That’s when he joined M-Stars as CCO.

We were eager to learn more about Italo’s story and experience. We think you will enjoy it too.

1. Could you briefly introduce yourself?

I started my first company in 1998 (around the first bubble era) — Indoitalia.com. The company unfortunately crashed along with the entire dot.com bubble burst in 1998.

And then I join Nawala Networks as a COO, which started as an webhosting company, ISP and developed into VoIP service provider company. Within three years it became one of the leading VoIP telecommunication service providers in Indonesia and Southeast Asia.

In 2003, I setup up my own VoIP Service provider in Singapore, Digitalbridge Communication Pte LT, which has been supporting Asia’s biggest names in the telecommunication industry such as Maxis, Celcom, Telecom Italia, PT Telkom Indonesia, etc.

Voice business started to saturate in 2006, and then I decided to move to the mobile value added service (VAS) business. In 2006, the founder and CEO of M-stars, Joseph Lumbangaol, convinced me to join M-Stars as Chief Commercial Officer (Joseph started M-Stars in 2000). In 2006 M-Stars was in process of expanding more on mobile VAS services, such as advertising, music label, social media and mobile payment.

Since then we started to launch a new business unit, on mobile advertising in 2008, a digital music label in 2008, music social media in 2009, and revamped mobile payment in 2009. Currently some of the business units are already being spin off to become a sister company of mstars group, such as Adstars for mobile advertising, drM for Digital Music Label, Popmaya for Music Social media, and Poploud for voice-based social media.

2. What is your family and educational background?