About the Synergy Between Bakrie Telecom and Sampoerna Telekomunikasi

Several days ago, Bakrie Telecom (BTEL) and Sampoerna Telekomunikasi Indonesia (STI) announced a collaboration in which STI would acquire 10% of BTEL shares (worth $90 million) and in return, BTEL receives 35% of STI shares which is currently owned by Sampoerna Strategic and Polaris with an option to be the largest shareholder of STI in the next 3 years. Business entity will be synergized under BTEL.

Michael Sampoerna as President Director of Sampoerna Strategic, owner of STI, cited by Kompas, stating that the reason for collaborating with BTEL is to increase its competitiveness in order to expand in the data communications infrastructure, which will become a trend in the future. In other words, rather than making a costly investment in this area (and Sampoerna is not sure that they would gain profit), it is better to go with other entity that is “more secure”.

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[Simply Business] Digital Newspaper Distribution is Looking Grim

DailySocial readers are mostly early-adopters, using the latest technology and keeping up with the current trends. We don’t really watch TV, haven’t subscribed any newspaper in ages and read books in our Kindle Fire [or iPad -Ed].

So it’s pretty common for us to think differently because the way we consume media is different from most people. We often forget that our target market may not share the same behavior, at least in Indonesia.

Jawa Pos, one of the biggest newspapers in Indonesia is still going strong by circulating about 400,000 copies daily. It posted a study of media preferences by age groups in 2009 on its website claiming that about 47.7% of people in Jakarta and 75.6% in Surabaya still read newspapers. TV is still number one of course with 88.7% in Jakarta and 86.5% in Surabaya. Continue reading [Simply Business] Digital Newspaper Distribution is Looking Grim

[Music Monday] How Going Digital Can Help Music Licensing

Today we’re happy to announce Music Monday, a new column by Ario Tamat about the digital music scene. Ario Tamat had been in the music industry throughout the 2000s, being involved in the now defunct SoundBuzz and later Universal Music, dealing with digital licensing, distribution, as well as ringback tones. Music Monday will appear every week.

Recently, many people have been talking about the so-called “future of music’, on how the music industry and/or the musicians can make money from music. A lot of focus has gone into mobile music offerings, music download services, and the music streaming services much heralded to be the “next big thing”. They’re all basically consumer-facing businesses, where the services – and the music companies partnered with them – attempt to monetize their music library direct to the music-loving consumer.

The music licensing aspect, however, is not talked about much, and even less understood. A music composition (created by a composer) or a music sound recording (recorded and produced by a record label or the artists themselves) can be licensed out to various parties who have corporate uses for the music; the most recognizable being music for television or radio commercials.

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[Dailyssimo] Time and Work Space Revolution

For those of you who work in a city as crowded as Jakarta certainly need no further explanation as to why the city can’t be considered comfortable as a place to work, but what I would like to highlight here is how technology makes the revolution of time and work space possible for the whole industry.

Internet will be the backbone of the industrial world even though at present there are companies that have not been using it optimally, yet. And the issue of “working in Jakarta” could be resolved one step at a time with the Internet. How exactly the internet is the solution? I will try to describe it below.

There are two main problems working in Jakarta, first is optimizing working hours. This will not be achieved if we spend 2-3 hours commuting to work (not to mention the meetings outside of the office); this is reinforced by the fact that the workers/professionals have been moving to the suburbs. Second is the fatigue (tiredness) that emerged as the impact of the first problem. This fatigue element is causing discomfort when working which eventually negatively affects work performance.

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A lesson from Net Impact : Indonesia need more clones!

After attending the Net Impact Conference event a few days ago, I have come to a revelation that based on what’s happening in emerging markets like Vietnam, Thailand etc : Indonesia need more clones. The guys from Rocket Internet would be laughing at me by now, but allow me to further elaborate.

I saw presentations from gaming companies in Vietnam, social networking sites from China, an ad agency / portal from Japan that also shared their experience on doing business in their local market. I have to say that I’m a bit envious looking at these companies that makes millions of dollars each month as the result of a solid business model and a monetizable market. That is something that Indonesia is still lacking on.

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[Simply Business] Working Towards a Common Goal

I believe that business, contrary to popular believe is not a zero-sum game. There’s always a way for everybody to win. If you can’t find it, it doesn’t mean that it’s not there. It only means that you just can’t find a viable win-win solution.

When I started gantibaju.com, I got a lot of help from the t-shirt business community. They share abundance amount of information including their ‘secret’ methods of printing, their local distribution channels and their contacts. It was beyond me at first on why they would help me, but all of them commented in pretty much the same way: to help grow the industry, to ensure regeneration and enrich the healthy community of sharing. They believe that they couldn’t have done it themselves so building the industry in a collective measure is the way to go.

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[Simply Business] Foxconn Factory: A reality check on Indonesia wages

There’s a lot of fuss concerning how Apple treats its manufacturing partner Foxconn in China, news of Foxconn employees being paid in such low wages of $1.78 per hour making expensive iPhones and iPads.

Then it hit me, is $1.78 per hour cheap? The workers work 12 hours a day, let’s assume that they work 5 days a week. That would make about $1.78 x 12 hours x 20 days equals $427.2. That’s bigger than my first salary at an IT company in 2004! Not to mention it’s still a starter salary for most small companies in 2011.

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Why Jakarta shouldn’t be the epicenter of tech startups in Indonesia

If you look at all the big tech events happening in Indonesia, you will notice a pattern. You don’t have to be Sherlock Holmes to see that most of the things happening in the tech industry in Indonesia actually takes place in Jakarta, our beloved capital city. It’s an amazing city, we have airports, malls, fast internet and so on but it turned out to be one of the worst place for the tech industry to grow.

Of course there’s several good reason on why Jakarta is good for the growing ecosystem. The availability of international airport, center for business and being the nation’s capital are a few examples. Most businesses have an establishment and HQs in Jakarta, I couldn’t disagree with that, but there are a few facts that makes other cities better options for tech companies and the industry in general.

I’m going to compare Jakarta with two other cities : Bandung and Yogyakarta. There’s a lot of things happening in these two cities, and I think there should be more.

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