Can BCA KlikPay and Mandiri ClickPay Boost The Spirit of E-Commerce?

Several days ago, BCA launched e-commerce payment solution KlikPay, almost simultaneously with the launch of Bank Mandiri’s ClickPay. Is the similar name only a mere coincidence? It could be. However a few weeks before that, these two banks finally decided to open a transaction path based on customers’ need.

BCA KlikPay and Mandiri ClickPay basically have the same concept, a platform that connects your debit account to an online service payment system. BCA KlikPay already supports several online services such as: Bhinneka.com, Blibli.com, CBN, Gudang Vouchers and Living Social. Self service while ClickPay have a little more: Garuda Indonesia, Plasa.com, Indomog, Rakuten, Blibli.com, Bhinneka.com, and Enjoyspin.com.

Both services claim their product will increase the volume of online transactions (e-commerce) in Indonesia. As the two largest banks in Indonesia, they certainly have the power to do so. With such enormous customer base, the partnership between these two banks is indeed necessary in order to support the growth of e-commerce service and banking which aren’t connected to each other beforehand.

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Originality is Overrated

Aria Rajasa is the CEO of gantibaju.com, a clothing startup not dissimilar to Threadless but with a touch of Indonesia and a very strong design community. His passion in entrepreneurship has gotten him to start a number of companies since leaving university and is now rumored to be starting another one. DailySocial will be featuring his posts every now and then as he has returned from a long hiatus from blogging.

Originality is overrated, there I said it. Yesterday I wrote about the clone king coming to town. Not so long ago Zynga the game company giant shamelessly rip-off Tiny Tower and also a desktop game Super Crate Box “heavily inspired” the iPhone game Muffin Knight. These 3 stories are just small examples showing one simple fact: EVERYBODY COPIES!

Everybody as in big companies copy other big company, small companies copy big companies, big companies copy small companies and of course small companies copy small companies. That is pretty much everybody. Let’s discuss this case by case.

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Mobile First Companies Tend to Neglect the Web

Angel investor and long time entrepreneur Mark Suster talks about how companies who have been focusing on the mobile-first strategy, as described by Fred Wilson over a year ago, are forgetting the second part of Wilson’s advice which is web second.

Mobile is without question an important part of the future of consumer technology. Everything seems to be going mobile in the last few years with companies like Instagram and Square, and that is evidenced by the skyrocketing number of smartphones sold in the past few years. The web however, is capable of offering more simply by being larger, more flexible, more comprehensive. Companies focusing on mobile first unfortunately tend to forget about the web’s capabilities.

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Are Tech Conferences Worth Attending?

Indonesia’s technology startup community did not waste time in kicking 2012 off into high gear by holding the two-day Boost Asia conference which was held at the Intercontinental Hotel in Jakarta on 17-18 January. The conference boasted a host of speakers and panelists from Japan, USA, Vietnam, and Indonesia and was attended by nearly 300 entrepreneurs, investors, other business people, the media, and even students.

I’m not going to go into much about the conference, that I’ll leave to Rama who will be able to talk about it much deeper. What I want to discuss however, is the effectiveness and appeal of conferences, especially tech industry conferences such as Boost or DailySocial’s very own SparxUp and whether it’s worth paying to attend them.

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JuraganGadget: E-Commerce Service For Gadgets Only Officially Launches

During the time, e-commerce services especially for gadgets is dominated by Bhinneka, the old player that has been up and down in the world of Indonesia dotcom. However, they finally get the new competitor namely JuraganGadget that is just launched in Jakarta several days ago.

As part of their promotion, JuraganGadget doesn’t charge shipping fee for Jakarta and its surrounding area. In addition, one of my favourite is the support of Paypal so I can use my credit card to shop without worrying about the security issue. Unfortunately when I tried to pay using Paypal, error is still appearing and finally I decided not to continue on purchasing.

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From the “Father of the Internet”, Mr Vint Cerf: Internet Is Not Human Right

Vinton G. Cerf, a leading computer scientist and is also known as the “Father of the Internet”, in the New York Times op-ed has revealed different opinion contrary to current perspective. While a number of countries began to introduce the concept of the Internet as a human right, Cerf firmly stated that the Internet isn’t human right. According to him, the Internet as the technology is the enabler of human rights, but not the right themselves. Human rights are including freedom of speech and the Internet allows anyone to easily express their opinions, except if you live in repressive country like North Korea.

Cerf also compared this situation to a time where someone who doesn’t have a horse and they would have difficulty earning a living. The right here is to make a living, not the ownership of horses. If the current horse owning rights granted to all people, of course it isn’t beneficial for everyone, even it will cause inconvenience.

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Local Apps, Market Opportunities and Marketing Activities

I’m doing blog walking rituals and found an article on TechCrunch that makes me think about the local made application. I won’t discuss about the points discussed in the article, but the article reminded me that there are many applications out there and they all fought to get users, both locally and internationally.

When we are talking about local applications in particular (especially those targeting local user in Indonesia) the article also indirectly reminded that local application also has a fierce fighting journey, not only in international markets but especially in the local – Indonesia market a well. I also feel that the usage applications ecosystem in Indonesia is still immature and still on the early stage.

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