[Manic Monday]: Engage Through Digital, Sell Through Digital And Physical

The digital entertainment landscape in Indonesia has been shaping up pretty quickly the past year. E-commerce becoming more widespread, growth of smartphone penetration and app usage, and more ways to do transactions online. Social media has grown an industry on top of it, fuelled by brands and products who want to make sure they are talked about in the social networks where more and more people find information firsthand before looking at other media – also by a new generation of entrepreneurs, either by creating new products on top of the social networks, or by capitalising fame or notoriety of themselves or other people.

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The State of Crowdfunding in Indonesia [Part 2]

In the first part of this story, I analyzed the state of crowdfunding industry in Indonesia by examining three popular crowdfunding sites in this country. At the end of that post, I came to a conclusion that the size of crowdfunding industry is still relatively small compared to the whole startup scene in Indonesia. In this part, I wanted to try to find an answer to the question asked in part one, “what issues need to be resolved to have a better crowdfunding industry in Indonesia?”

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The State of Crowdfunding in Indonesia [Part 1]

Earlier this month, our sister blog, Trenologi, reported some stats regarding crowdfunding site Kickstarter. This post has brought me to finding that the year 2012 has been dubbed as the year for crowdfunding by no other than Forbes itself. Collectively, the crowdfunding industry in the USA has made US $1.5 billion in 2011 and was predicted to finish 2012 generating $2.8 billion according to report by research firm Massolution. This leads me to ask, how is the state of crowdfunding industry here in Indonesia?

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[Manic Monday] My Wishlist: Digital Entertainment in Indonesia, 2013

This is my first post in 2013 – so I thought it would be fitting to jot down a few things that I hope will happen in 2013 in the digital entertainment scene here. 2012 has certainly been an interesting year – International music services like iTunes and Deezer finally arrived, the much-adored (by industry players, at least) RBT is somewhat ‘resurrected‘, and of course, perhaps many other things that has not shown their importance yet. Naturally, this list is very subjective.
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Microsoft Indonesia Cripples Windows Phone By Blocking Twitter Apps and Other Popular Services

Microsoft is counting on Windows Phone to put it back in the race for mobile computing supremacy and it’s relying on partners like Nokia and HTC to deliver the best phones possible to get people to use Windows Phone. It has also pushed developers and companies to make their apps available on the platform. Unfortunately this desire hasn’t seemed to reach the minds of the people at Microsoft Indonesia because many significant apps are not available to download in the Indonesian Windows Phone Store.

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Government’s (Un)Important Role in Asia’s Tech Scene

Early this December I got a chance to speak at APEC SME Summit and Open Web Asia 2012 held in Hainan, China. Besides myself, almost every tech blogger from each country in Asia Pacific attended, Japan, Singapore, Vietnam, Malaysia, China, South Korea and also Hongkong. We had an interesting discussion about government’s role in the tech industry in each country. Continue reading Government’s (Un)Important Role in Asia’s Tech Scene

[Guest Post] A Snap Shot of Indonesia’s Startup Ecosystem

My job is to travel around the region spreading the word about our accelerator program. I really enjoy the opportunity to spend time with entrepreneurs and developers across the region and I thought it would be interesting to share a snapshot of what I saw in Indonesia. Continue reading [Guest Post] A Snap Shot of Indonesia’s Startup Ecosystem

[Manic Monday] What The Resurrection Of RBT And Arrival Of iTunes Store Indonesia Mean For You

December 5th, 2012 was a good day if you worked in the recording music industry in Indonesia – well, at least, considering the doom and gloom that hung over the industry players recently. After over a year since the so-called Black October happened, Indosat, XL Axiata and 12 of Indonesia’s largest music labels, launched a major initiative to support ringback tone sales. The program integrates the promotion of ringback tones of both telcos, formerly using separate dial-in numbers, to a single code applicable to both telcos, and also combines the promotion efforts – and marketing money – done by both telcos. The telcos are now investing heavily again in promoting ringback tones to their customers.

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[Manic Monday] Books Might Disappear, But The Words In It Won’t

When was the last time you read a book? How many times have you read a book for the past month, say compared to, the amount of articles you read on the internet, or from social media feeds? I probably read only one book a month, and usually science fiction. Everything else is gobbled up in small bites through articles on the Internet here and there. I don’t think I have enough bandwidth in my head to keep up reading more books, either by quantity or quality or genre. I still buy books and try to collect books by my favorite authors, but even my reading habit has started to move over to Kobo.

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[Manic Monday] Should Digital Distribution Channels Invest In Producing Content?

These might be interesting times for content creators the world over, as it is increasingly becoming cheaper to produce and distribute content – music, movies, games, literature – and there are also a multitude of ways to enjoy such creations, where one creation can lead to another (for instance, a book inspires a movie, a movie inspires a game, and so on), not to mention the ways it can all interact and integrate. Yet times are not as rosy for content producers, especially in the ‘traditional’ sense. Continue reading [Manic Monday] Should Digital Distribution Channels Invest In Producing Content?