Erik Meijer Should Take Indosat’s Mobile Payment Solution “Dompetku” to The Next Level

Erik Meijer is finally appointed as Indosat’s new Chief Commercial Officer, replacing Lazslo Imre Barta. His previous experience with Telkomsel and Bakrie Telecom should be a valuable asset in facing tough competition in the industry, especially to maintain Indosat’s position as the second largest cellular company in Indonesia, in term of number of subscribers.

Indosat is battling against more aggressive XL Axiata, in which headed by former Indosat chief. Aside from ensuring his marketing campaigns work as planned. I have one favor to be executed by Mr Meijer. He should bring Indosat’s mobile payment solution, Dompetku, to the next level. Broader usage and higher incoming revenue for the company.

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[Music Monday] So You’ve Got A Band. Now What? Make A Website?

Despite all the doom and gloom you might hear in the music industry lately about how it’s more difficult to sell albums, it’s actually a great time to be a band or musician. Whatever the type of your music, you could probably record most or all of your music on your computer, with adequate quality also. And if you don’t have your own computer, most small-to-medium sized music studios already use a computer to do most of the heavy work, and cost less to rent.

From the software point of view, there are many software suites you can use to record, mix, and make a CD master, even free ones, and the Internet offers various paid and free audio libraries to enhance the recording, whether it be a sound effect or a drum loop. Just make sure you can use it for your own music (just make sure it’s totally free or ask permission from the owner). You can even write and share the musical notation of your songs online.

Then what are you going to do once you’re happy with the recording result, and have finalized writing all the lyrics? Then it’s time for the world to hear it. These days, you don’t really need to wait for enough songs to be finished to create an album ready to share (or sell), because if you’ve recorded the music digitally, then it’s only one upload away to be up there on the Internet.

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[Dailyssimo] Does A Blog Need SEO?

These last few days, I was involved in a discussion in a Facebook group that I found quite interesting and quite eye-opening about the point of view of digital strategists in this country.

One of the topics discussed was the application of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) on a blog and this elementary topic spurred reactions that I can consider representative of most people’s perspective.

Do you think a blog needs SEO? The easy, fast and without further thinking answer is: Yes! But does a blog really need SEO?

The essence of a search engine is collecting and collating (indexing) the popular, and much sought after words on the list. The more popular a word, the more likely it will be on the top of the list. So if the word we’re looking for is the full name of a blog complete with the link then what we need to be on the top list of the search result is indeed, popularity.

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[Music Monday] Why Music Download Stores Won’t Work In Indonesia

The more I think of it, the more I think that many music services – at least in Indonesia – are going about it the wrong way. Since 2008, Indonesia has had a number of online music download stores. Various business models were tried – an ISP tried ISP billing, telcos tried charging via SMS, and some others even had a choice of payment systems; either through SMS or electronic voucher.

Investments in (quite expensive) hosting and delivery systems were made, in an attempt to replicate what seemed to work overseas – the music download. Essentially, users will pay for a song that they want, and only the song that they want, and download it to their choice device. Most services were required to implement digital rights management (DRM) as a way to circumvent unauthorized copying, and the files themselves were usually confined to the device that downloaded the file.

Needless to say, it didn’t work. It has never delivered the results that the music industry wants, that’s for sure.

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[Simply Business] Pass the Gold, Shovel Your Way To Riches

The first millionaire in California became one during the legendary 1850 Gold Rush, his name was Sam Brannan. Despite the gold rush, he did not become rich by discovering and selling gold, he was actually selling shovels. The second person that got rich in the same gold rush is a Jewish guy. He experimented with a material called denim and made comfortable but strong and durable pants to wear when digging for gold. His name was Levi Strauss, the inventor of Jeans.

Gold rush is always happening, even right now in our own digital era. Ten years ago everybody was rushing to have a website and now everybody was rushing to make mobile apps. Many people are finding opportunities in making mobile apps, but how many people actually make money from mobile apps?

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[Music Monday] Wait, You Can Make Money For Music From The Internet?

The [recorded] music industry has been in very dark days lately, especially in Indonesia – I’ve frequently written about the current situation so I won’t revisit it. But the breakdown is this: there is currently no real way the [recorded] music industry can make money from their work. CD sales are diminishing, music through mobile is going through a crisis, and there’s not really an online music store worth mentioning for the local market. But this does not mean that the Internet cannot make money for you, the musician or music label.

I’ll admittedly be broad about this – I won’t say there are a million ways to make money for music directly from the Internet, but there are definitely a lot of ways to make sure the Internet works for you and gets you that much-needed money. Music may be virtually free for most music listeners, but it doesn’t mean making the music you want does not cost money. Even downloading Audacity or Gamelan will take some money off your Internet bill.

Trying to pitch to a music magazine to cover your band may not cost money but bringing along coffee for the journalists goes a long way. And so on. Even if you’re a self-proclaimed indie artist that does not want to spend money, eventually you’d need money for food, right?

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[Simply Business] Working Too Hard Is Bad For You

I have been seeing a disturbing trend in the startup world. A behavior that plagues the corporate world and also the main reason why I left the corporate world is also infecting our beautiful little universe. That trend is: Working too hard.

Yes, I’ve seen it happen. People working late are viewed as heroes and working on weekends is already considered a norm. Not doing so would make you the mockery of your society. It doesn’t have to be this way. It doesn’t matter how many hours you spent working, it’s the results that matter.

Need an example? Check out the way Ryan Carson runs his business, by working only 4 days a week yet still makes a profitable ($3 million per year revenue) business.

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Why Educating the Market Might No Longer Be Relevant

As the e-commerce industry grow, we often see a lot of e-commerce companies trying to bring the e-commerce behavior to a new audience in the country. An emerging country like Indonesia, with all its growing economy and immature internet population is often seen as a target to market conversion.

We’ve seen the signs where big e-commerce players in the country pouring their best efforts to “educate” the market about the benefit of e-commerce, to browse for products, how to pay for stuff online, etc. Millions and millions of dollars are thrown via TV commercials, live TV shows, offline campaigns, etc. again to “educate” the market for the past 3 years but the results are yet to be seen.

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The Importance of BlackBerry World for RIM’s Future

Blackberry World, an annual conference attended by the entire supporting ecosystem of Blackberry, is being held on May 1 – 3, 2012 in Orlando, Florida, United States. This year, BlackBerry World will also be host to BlackBerry 10 Jam, a special event for developers where Research in Motion (RIM), will introduce BlackBerry 10, its new operating system for BlackBerry devices that will be released in the second half of this year.

Tyler Lessard, former RIM vice president, said to PC World that the BlackBerry 10 operating system will be different from the existing BlackBerry operating system. Applications on Blackberry App World designed for current operating system will not be compatible with BlackBerry 10.

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