Indonesia Digest: TMG plans to expand to Jakarta, blocking 4shared, and more

Here you can find some interesting startup news from Indonesia, not only in its capital, Jakarta, but also other their tech startup hubs such as Yogyakarta, Medan, Surabaya, and many more. These listed news are taken from our partner, DailySocial, a leading blog on Indonesia’s tech startup scene.

(1) Singapore-based gaming company The Mobile Gamer (TMG) closes a series-A financing round of S$1 Million from India’s One97 Communications. With this financing round, TMG also plans to open up their Jakarta office and start hiring engineers to develop their games. This move shows their faith in the Indonesian gaming market, and for a good reason. “We are the biggest developer on mig33, which have over 27M users in Indonesia. We forecast that 70% of our total users/growth comes from Indonesia,” Alvin said to us via email.

(2) Minister of Communication and Informatics, Tifatul Sembiring states that the ministry haven’t blocked any sites after the official initiative announcement a few weeks ago, although they’re focused on blocking big sites like 4shared.

(3) A service manager and financial planning company called NgaturDuit working with Detik to provide financial facilities check-up.

(4) Not wanting to be beaten by the innovation of Sony Ericsson and Universitas Bunda Mulia (UBM)’s M-Campus, Telkomsel and Research in Motion (RIM) Indonesia as principal of BlackBerry announced Mobile Campus for Universitas Pelita Harapan (UPH). The app is developed by Better-B and only took three months to be completed.

(5) Now there’s a local daily deals site from Surabaya called MurahRek.com. The name already carries the charm of its city of origin. MurahRek.com isn’t that different from other deals sites and the offerings are even similar (food, spa, restaurants, car wash, travel, etc.) and the discounts are quite attractive, ranging from 50% to 90%.

(6) Former Yahoo! Indonesia Country Editor Budi Putra and Jimmy Kembaren (also ex-Yahoo) announced their new project, and sure enough it’s a blog. Sort of.

(7) Jogjakarta based gaming company SoybeanSoft announced their strategic partnership with East Ventures. SoybeanSoft is a multiplatform game developer focusing on the local market such as ‘Hunter Story’, an action-RPG for the web, iOS and Android.

This has been brought to you by SGE and DailySocial. DailySocial is a blog that covers the Indonesian tech startup scene. They publish in both Indonesian and English.

Thank you to nordicfactory for the flag image.