4 Things that Indonesian People Need from Their Government

In light of the increasing activities in Indonesia’s technology industry, I think Indonesian government has to start supporting it in a more serious manner. Indonesian government needs to be ready on tackling problems which might emerge later on. In this past few weeks, I learned so much from the technology industry leaders overseas. I learned about the government’s role in order to grow innovation, nurture the industry, and to protect the companies as well as the consumer.

I come up with some crucial things waiting to be executed in order to support and protect Indonesian technology industry which is still in its infancy, fragile and in desperate need for support. Dear Mr. Tifatul Sembiring, our beloved Minister of Communication and Information, you might want to read this.

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Waiting for the Adoption of Local NFC Application

Several days ago, Kompas wrote that Nokia is ready to launch two new mobile phones (Nokia 600 and 700) with NFC technology embedded and ready to use by Indonesian market.

Well, surely I’m not going to discuss about the gadget. I am more interested in discussing the NFC technology and its correlation to local applications in oder to maximize their technology.

According to Kompas, there are at least two applications from local developer such as Menoo! Tap Tap from Elasitas, and Smash Mania, a game from Agate that uses NFC technology. Those applications were introduced at INAICTA. Unfortunately, I couldn’t attend the event so that I couldn’t try those applications myself. Therefore, I tried to contact Narenda, developer relation from Nokia to get further information about it.

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Asian Can also be the Pioneer for Innovation

The title above is the statement underlined by Serkan Toto, a Japan-based Techcrunch contributors, on his keynote presentation at SparxUp Awards Conference 2011. We all know that most of Asian startups tend to clone US startups. However, cloning is not bad since there are some successful clone acquired or funded for millions of dollars. Moreover, cloning is not monopolized by Asian startups only. European startups, or even the US startups also do the same thing.

In fact, Asian startups can also be innovative, especially in the technology industry. Serkan has identified seven things that made Asia a pioneer for innovation. Here is the list:

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MindTalk releases new promo video

Between the end of May and the early June, Twitter timeline was enlivened by a new social media named MindTalk. Then in September, Danny Oey Wirianto that was the Chief Marketing Officer of Kaskus officially resigned. He is said to be focus on his new company named MindTalk as the co-founder and CEO.

In these last few days on Facebook and Twitter, Danny starts to introduce MindTalk by sharing a video (advertisement) with a concept that, in my opinion, is impressing. Danny also promoted this video for several time on official GEPI (Global Entrepreneurship Program Indonesia) Facebook Group.

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Startups, Clones and Bloggers

This guest post is written by Remco Lupker. Remco founded Trustcon Network Solutions in 2001 which was specialized in connectivity & security and active for the leading telco’s in the Netherlands. After having sold the company he founded Soltria Europe and shifted his focus on e-commerce solution. The same time he joined forces with his current business partner Arno Egg to launch Tokobagus.com where he is still shareholder and director. Living as an immigrants in Indonesia he regularly share his thoughts and opinion on the developments in this emerging market. Follow him @remco_l.

It doesn’t seem like such a long time ago when Techcrunch writer Sarah Lacy for a moment put the Indonesian startup scene in the spotlight. Sarah’s article “What the hell is going on in Indonesia” was a wake-up call for the VC’s that still didn’t recognize the fully potential of the Indonesian web and mobile market.

Just a few days later I flew from Bali to Jakarta to attend the second meetup of #Startuplokal. Despite the place being overcrowded and the event being somewhat chaotic one thing became clear, things were happening. There was this feeling of sharing and ambition to change the world.

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DS Dramas

It’s been an interesting week. Most interestingly, Aulia wanted me to take the post down. The Twitter Drama post was deemed irrelevant and confusing. I mustered some effort to explain why I posted it there – primarily because it was Part II to a series of (mostly planned) posts on how to make sense of the Indonesian internet scene. I ended up promising him to write more often. Maybe I will.

I chose Twitter as a general illustration of a new medium – widely popular and recognizable to most – even if they don’t monetize yet. Or Detik.com – Maximum Reach with Tabloid Quality – except this one monetize.

The case studies confuse a whole lot of people and they saw many, many, many internet shops in Indonesia faltered and died because the ad money never comes.

Well, you can’t sit around and expect people come to give you money. Not in any business model, or any market. You have to work to make money and you have to work hard, but I will not write another post to state the obvious.

I would simply offer you another perspective: online advertising is peanuts.

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Twitter Dramas

Twitter is so full of dramas. I have not been paying much attention to the details but I was aware of it. I have been once or twice stuck in a conversation with someone entirely about what happened on ‘the timeline’ last night. Not that I am being patronizing or anything but I had other things to do last night and missed it.

Why don’t we talk about the last Republican Presidential Debate on CNN instead – there was a question to the candidates if America should build an electrified fence along the south border with Mexico. Surely, they would’ve learned from thousands of history that the walls would eventually be taken down. But that’s for another day. Game of Thrones anyone? I pay for HBO exactly because so that I don’t have to do much and just flick the remote.

My media consumption pattern change. I used to have twitter on my Blackberry but soon it drained the battery so fast and clogged everything else down, so I removed Twitter and use my Blackberry as it was designed for: a chat device. Twittering was done on the iPad for a while and mostly from the traffic. These days, I’m back to carrying a laptop around (a Macbook Air, my very first Apple computer since the Apple IIc. Yes, iPad is a computer but it doesn’t have a keyboard).

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Are You Ready to “Lose” Your Partner in Building a Startup?

A few days ago, a friend asked about a service or startup that had not been heard for a long time. The same question also was asked by myself and a number of other friends.

I still try to find out and collect information about the development of some startups. However, let’s discuss about something that I think interesting for us, especially for startups that are built by more than one founder.

Developing or building a technology startup is basically a business. It might be in the form of web service, mobile, game, or any other services dealing with technology. There are many things should be considered when building a business. One of them is the founder and the partners (for businesses that are built by more than one founder).

A co-founder or partner (see below) in a number of cases becomes a major factor in creating a startup as a company could thrive thanks to having a perfect match of talents, although it may fail due to a fall out among the founding partners.

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Making Sense of Indonesian Internet Scene

I was reading SangatPedas the other day and ended up reading up most of the threads on Indonesian internet scene. Some of them are very interesting and this being Sunday and all, I couldn’t resist.

Let’s start with Remco’s beef on Online Advertising this being the least understood part of the Indonesian market/internet ecosystem.

My understanding of his language is that he thinks the Online Ad market is already oversaturated and only allows for opportunities to those with scale (aka. current news status quo, Detik/Viva/etc.):

Well, once you have a critical mass and you’re in the top of the hierarchy the advertising game changes

In fact, I agree to almost everything his said up to and including that sentence. Beyond that, I think he got it completely wrong.

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