Incubation and Mentorship Programs Flock to Indonesia

For the past few months, we’ve been seing the number of incubation and mentorship programs starting to educate tech startup founders in Indonesia. We have local ones such as Merah Putih Inc (DailySocial is involved here), East Ventures Alpha, Jakarta Founder Institute, Project Eden, Telkomsel Bootcamp and numerous other similar programs.

These programs have existed since the beginning of the year and for the past few months it seems obvious that lots of entities want to tap this growing industry. Tech companies, telco/carriers and giant holding groups were amongst the most excited to start these programs and of course in-line with their business model.

2010 was the year for investors flocking to Indonesia and I happened to have met several of them as they went looking around the market, meeting people, looking opportunities to invest in Indonesia. Conclusion: the market is ready, the startups are not. These investors never came back, they were dissappointed. I told them that currently Indonesian tech startup scene needs mentorship, we’ve got some brave talented entrepreneurs but they’re still young and need guidance from mature entrepreneurs. And by “guidance” I don’t mean taking over their company.

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Advertising A Website On TV & Radio: Sense or Non-Sense?

Editor’s note: This guest post is written by Remco Lupker, co-founder and director of TokoBagus, a popular e-commerce site in Indonesia. He wrote about his opinion on advertising, especially a website on traditional media in Indonesia from his TokoBagus TVC experience. Remco originally wrote this article on his blog on November 5, 2011, we have permission to repost this article.

Recently Tokobagus launched its second TV campaign and being responsible for all marketing in Tokobagus I get a lot of reactions and questions on this topic. Basically the reactions vary from “you’re just burning money” to “awesome” and the questions mostly focus on the results and how we measure the results. Time to give some insights in our reasoning, experiences and how results are measured and analyzed. Does offline advertising of an online product or service make sense?

First off, I would like to say “don’t try this at home” meaning be really careful before starting any kind of big offline campaign on TV or radio. To let it make any sense in terms of impact you’re risking a load of money which in a lot of cases is much better spend in online marketing. Almost without any exception I feel extremely strong about promoting online products and services online. Any online marketing has the advantage of momentum, meaning a click on your ad can immediately lead to a conversion. The success of any online “hard-sales” campaign can also be measured instantly with a high accuracy.

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Indonesia is Just Getting Started on the Internet

Nielsen’s Southeast Asian Digital Consumer whitepaper we reported on yesterday claims that Indonesia’s Internet penetration rate is at 21%, growing at 20% annually. Rama compared this to Singapore’s 67% which makes Indonesia’s adoption rate look very low, but consider the number of population between the two countries, not to mention geographical differences.

Indonesia had 237.6 million people in 2010 with an annual growth rate of 1%. By 2015 this would put the population at more or less 249 million individuals. Keep in mind that since 1970, Indonesia’s population growth rate had been on a steady decline from 2.5% to 1%. Since 2005, the rate of growth slowed by 0.2%. That 21% adoption rate in 2011 means there are more than 50 million Internet connected individuals in Indonesia. Of course, this number depends on whose population data you derive your numbers from. I’m using Google’s public data for this analysis.

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Rakuten Acquires Digital Book Company Kobo

Rakuten Ichiba recently announce the acquisition of Kobo, a Canada-based ebook vendor, with a full cash 100% acquisition. This is the first time a Japanese-based marketplace company buy a content company. It’s been a while since Rakuten enables merchant to sell stuff using their platform, this time around Rakuten decided to sell their own things on their own platform. Kobo itself sells ebooks online and they also have an Android-based e-reader product called Kobo Vox which (somewhat) competing with Amazon Kindle.

Rakuten also has presence in Indonesia and I sincerely hope that Rakuten can bring Kobo to Indonesian market. Why am I so excited about this? So far it seems easy to buy Kobo’s digital products compared to other competitors especially for Indonesian market. Kobo also supports Paypal which makes it easier for Indonesian early adopter market to buys their products. Another thing that makes Kobo suitable for Indonesian market is their multiplatform support – Blackberry, iOS and Android – pushing their chances even further to expand in Indonesia.

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How PriceArea Saved My Day From Horrible Ecommerce Experience

This post is going to sound like a big-fat promotion but I’ll say it up front that – as usual – I’m not getting paid for any editorial publications I post on DailySocial. However I feel strongly about publishing this piece to make sure people know about the problem with many e-commerce sites (and startups in general).

So, here it goes.

Earlier today I suddenly feel the need to buy a wireless mouse to support and boost my productivity (yeah right) and I decided that I want a magic mouse. So I started to roam around local e-commerce sites to find one with decent price and convenient delivery.

I started to visit three of the big e-commerce sites that first came to my mind, I don’t need to say which ones. After 30 mins of browsing and trying to find a magic mouse, I got frustrated. Not because it’s expensive or unavailable, but because it’s ridiculously hard to find them. Why? Because most of the search engine on these e-commerce sites are really bad. For the lack of a better word : sucks.

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This Is Probably Why US Companies Won’t Open Their Office in Indonesia

So Google, RIM, Facebook and just recently Paypal decided to open their office in Malaysia instead of Indonesia. This causes controversy amongst industrialists and economists that believe those companies should’ve set up their offices in Indonesia instead of Malaysia. Market-base is one of the biggest reason, companies like Facebook and RIM (Blackberry) have a huge user base in Indonesia but instead they’re investing in Malaysia.

We keep trying to figure out why but just recently I was guided to a Wikipedia page of something called the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. Could this be the reason?

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Users Do and Have to Complain

The series of User Experience (UX) posts is brought to you by Qonita Shahab, a researcher in UX who used to work in IT. Her interest in music and photography helps her in designing interactive system prototypes. Since she started research in the field of persuasive technology, Qonita studied more about social psychology and the communal use of technology. Follow her on Twitter @uxqonita.

Have you heard of “Stop complaining about Facebook’s changes, it’s free for God sake!”? Have you been labeled as whiner just by talking about it? I’m among those who talked about it, but I didn’t buy the whiner label. After all, what I did was giving them valuable inputs.

Besides, I also don’t agree that Facebook is free. Of course financially we don’t pay anything to Facebook, but this approach has been in practice for too long: giving free access to a product (of parts of it) lowers the barrier to adopt the product. We may wonder, until when will Facebook keep being free? Will in the future Facebook suddenly charge us something?

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Nokia Indonesia’s Strategy for NFC Adoption

Several days ago, I wrote an article about Near Field Communication (NFC) application and its correlation to the adoption of its application. The article was written for a couple of reasons. The first reason is the introduction of new Nokia handsets called Nokia 600 and Nokia 700, and both of them support NFC. The second reason is the emergence of two local applications that rely on NFC; Menoo! Tap Tap and Smash Mania.

Last Monday, I was invited by Nokia Indonesia to attend a media briefing for the introduction of Nokia’s new handsets. I’m not going to discuss about the gadgets here, I am more interested in the application development and Nokia’s strategy to make NFC technology popular among mobile phone users in Indonesia.

NFC on mobile phone is not only available on Nokia, but Nokia provides the biggest support for local apps. Nokia has been touting NFC on its devices for a long enough time, at least since 2006, however, the market has just woken up to the technology recently. Irwan Hermawan—Nokia Indonesia Product Manager and Narenda Wicaksono—Nokia Indonesia Developer Manager went through a number of points regarding NFC and its adoption.

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Freco Attempts Offline Promotions To Boost Content

In the middle of Jakarta’s traffic jam (daily dose, really), I suddenly heard a radio ad for a new online service, a dot com company. Needless to say, there’s not that many startups have sufficient funding to go promoting their services via radio ad. Must be well-funded. And apparently, Freco is one of those lucky players.

Basically a business directory service, Freco adds social features to its platform. And by “social features” of course I mean it’s connected to Facebook where it enables users to see business reviews from their Facebook friends.

And besides its annoyingly horrible interface, I actually find this service useful. It actually helped me find information like nearest local doctors, plumbers, electricians, something that I find difficult to look for on the internet. Of course there’s services like Yelp in the US and Urbanesia in Jakarta although Urbanesia is more lifestyle-oriented business reviews.

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Which Side are You on in the Text Messaging War?

Jon Russell over at The Next Web brought up a possibility of what the Skype-Telkomsel deal means for messaging. When people think of Skype, the first thing that comes to mind is free phone and video calls between Skype users and reduced call rates to regular landline as well as mobile numbers. While free text messaging is certainly a part of Skype, the brand is not immediately identifiable with it. If Skype is going to make a challenge into this field, it has a mountain of competitors to conquer.

Competing with Skype in mobile instant messaging are big time players such as BlackBerry Messenger, Yahoo! Messenger, mig33, Facebook Message, and WhatsApp. There are many more but these are the prominent ones. Apple’s iMessage and Google’s Messenger in Google+ Android and iPhone apps are worth mentioning but they are still in early infancy with limited feature, reach, and reliability and thus not in a position to appeal greatly to the masses just yet.
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