Yahoo’s Big Purple Bus Schools Indonesians in Using the Internet Safely

Last week, Yahoo launched a program named Yahoo Buka Dunia (which literally translates to ‘Open World’) in Indonesia. Using a bus covered with its corporate purple (pictured above), some Yahoo staffers will travel about 5,000km to 20 cities across the islands of Java and Sumatera, visiting 40 schools.

Yahoo will be showing some of the islands’ people how to use the Internet in a positive and safe way. The emphasis is on guiding youth and students, as well as teachers, who are novice Internet users.

The bus will travel for a month, starting in Jakarta, then moving on to Palembang, Jambi, Lampung, Bandung, Semarang, Yogyakarta, and finishing in Surabaya. The distinctive purple bus will not only visit big cities (such as the capital cities of each province), but also small towns and rural areas, spreading new knowledge about the Internet and its potential benefits.

According to a Yahoo Net Index Study last July, the rate of Internet consumption of Indonesian people is ranked second, below TV. The number of Internet users in Indonesia is fairly low, at almost 40 million. But those engaged users are massive social media fans, and are effectively number two in terms of Facebook users world-wide, and possess the ability to create often-meaningless Twitter trending topics. “That’s why it’s very important to look out for the [Internet-based] issues that can influence young minds,” Yahoo Indonesia’s country manager, Pontus Sonnerstedt, said in a statement.

By the way, regular readers might recall that this is not the first time a huge web company has used a bus to out-reach in this way. This past September, we wrote about the Google Internet Bus in India, a program quite similar to this one. Back in April, RIM introduced the Playbook in Indonesia on a bus. It seems that using huge, branded buses to go out to consumers is a new trend in some parts of Asia.

[Source: JagatReview – article in Indonesian]