Indonesia Digest – 29 Jul

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) Tasterous, the location-based app that lets you find and share local dishes, has launched an iPhone version. The company officially launched their Blackberry app in April 2011 and their Android app in June 2011 before finally launch their iPhone app.

(2) Google chairman and former CEO Eric Schmidt announced that the company will open their office in Indonesia before 2012. The announcement was made during his meeting with Indonesia’s vice-president Boediono in Jakarta. The vice-president’s spokesman Yopie Hidayat, as quoted by Kompas, explained that Google would like to develop their business by leveraging SMEs from Indonesia with foreign buyers like what Google did in China.

(3) MediaWave, a social media analysis platform, will continue to make improvements in their platforms, especially on the functions and user interface.

(4) StatCounter, an independent agency that tracks Internet access stats, have a web app called GlobalStats. If we look at the data captured by StatCounter in Indonesia, there was a monumental shift in June 2011. For the first time, accessing the Internet via BlackBerry beat Symbian-based phones.

(5) Internet reach in Indonesia has surpassed traditional media and ranks second only to TV according to a recent survey done by Yahoo! and TNS. The survey was conducted in several major and smaller cities across the country.

(6) A very recent report from Akamai, The State of The Internet report, shows that Indonesia holds 7th position as the slowest country in terms of narrowband connectivity.

More about Indonesia tech startup scenes (below excerpts are translated by SGE team, while the full article is in Indonesian)

(7) Freco.com is a site that provide search results on various topics based on other users recommendations. At this site, users can type some keywords to get other users’ recommendations. Users can add their own recommendations on some topics, which could be stuff that Freco.com does not have yet.

(8) Joining the e-commerce industry in Indonesia is Bibli.com, which was officially launched in Jakarta by CEO Kusuma Martanto. Bibli positions themself as an online mall with an easy, fun and free concept.

(9) HackerSpace is now present in Yogyakarta and will be managed by Bancakan 2.0, a community of developers.

(10) Indonesia Communication and Information Ministry will start to block internet access to the websites that provide pirated mp3 download services.