Category: Opinion

[Guest Post] Success in Indonesia: “Mobile” and “Social”

This guest post is written 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.

The importance of understanding the geography of Indonesia in relation to the development of internet infrastructure caught my attention in 2003 when I met Korean IT infrastructure developers. At that time, the majority of (South) Korea was already interconnected through broadband, while in Indonesia home internet access (dial-up) was still expensive yet unreliable, resulting in many users accessing internet from their workplaces or internet cafes.

They said, “The only way to make Indonesia interconnected is by using wireless connections, because it’s too expensive to build wired connections across this country with thousands of islands spread across large area.” Even though it was a dark age for wireless technology because of the difficulty imposed by government regulation, I always remembered those words.

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Will Air BnB Fever Hits Indonesia?

AirBnB is a new US’ phenomenal startup. Already it has interests many people in internet industry including investors. AirBnB was founded by Brian Chesky, Joe Gebbia, and Nathan Blecharczyk, established in August 2008, also a graduated from YCombinator, the legendary incubator. AirBnB already gets funded more than US$ 100 million from Digital Sky Technologies (DST), YCombinator, Sequoia Capital, Greylock Partners and othe Vencture Capital huge names.

AirBnB’s ambitious plan is to create a global scale company and open branches in other countries, two main reasons why they need hundreds of millions of USD of fund from investors. The planning is currently on going by acquiring Accoleo which basically German based AirBnb’s clone and has now officially becomes AirBnb’s rep office in Europe.

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Consumer’s Trust Level and Behaviour, a Challenge for Local E-Commerce

For the last a couple of years, e-commerce or online buy-sell service providers are growing in number. However this year might gets even more interesting and will become foundation for e-commerce’s growth next stage in Indonesia including in payment gateway development.

Aswin Utomo from AdaDiskon, during interview with DailySocial last month said that 2010-2011 is e-commerce year and 2011-2012 will be payment gateway’s turn. In some ways, I agree. At least payment gateway education by business doers will trigger e-commerce’s growth.

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Email – eCommerce Champion

The following article is written by Josep William Widjaja, one of Bina Nusantara International University’s lecturers. He likes reading any book or magazine that talks about IT world, and listening to jazz. His interests are IT implementation on business and marketing, web and mobile development, and infrastructure.

Email often predicted, sooner or later, to be forgotten by everyone, considering other means of modern communication technology keep emerging.

As a simple example, communicating through mobile platform nowadays are more into BBM (BlackBerry Messenger – a huge hit for Indonesian) or WhatsApp that bridges communication between smartphone users; not to mention web based communication means, we have Social Media like Facebook message, Twitter message and other networking websites. People tend to think that communicating through such means are more personal and direct, trendier, and less hassle. In other words, more effective and efficient than email.

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Survey and Focus Group Discussion for Tech Startup

I’m often asked about what people should do first when they are about to launch service or application from their tech startup or what additional facility they should add up? Questions like when to release their product? What kind of service or feature they should launch? What should they add? Up to what aif users don’t like their products.

My answer is: Research.

Research needs methods that are sometimes unorthodox, complicated, systematic, and thorough. But for me it can be done otherwise. What’s important is your way of thinking of things and method you’re going to use. No need to be completely thorough as long as you have clear guidance and referring to complete research method. Of course such a simple research cannot become the only complete scientific guidance and can probably be different than its basic meaning, but it can be source of additional information in making decisions.

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Dear Kaskus and Koprol, Please Fix Your Search Engine!

I was at Grand Indonesia this morning to meet a colleague at Starbucks Coffe. As one of Koprol’s devotee, I immediately turned on my laptop and tried to check in at Starbucks Grand Indonesia.

I then tried to find my location on Koprol, but unfortunately keywords “starbucks grand indonesia” gave me zero result. I tried other keywords, “starbucks thamrin” hoping the search engine would show me list of all Starbucks Coffees at Jl. MH Thamrin, and unlike what I was hoping for, the search engine showed me zero result. Again.

That, is confusing.

Still, I was curious. I tried other keywords like “starbucks plaza senayan“, “starbucks senayan city“, “j.co senayan city”, “coffee bean pacific place” and all keywords gave me nothing. I thought those keywords are common ones and most people will likely use them to find their location.

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Will Google Wallet Succeed in Indonesia?

A few days ago, Google launched its Google Wallet which is a mobile app that enable cellphones to act just like a credit card to consumer. With an integrated NFC chip pre-installed (currently only in Google’s own Nexus S), consumer could just wave their phone in front of a reader in order to make payments. According to Stephanie Tilenius, VP of Commerce and Payments at Google, it envisions the cellphone to act as a personal financial hub for coupons, merchant loyalty points, payments and receipts.

There’s no doubt that this will change how consumer buy things online and offline, this will impact the world and Indonesia as one of the fastest growing economy in SEA is not an exception. Despite the low credit card penetration in the country, Google Wallet could still impact the credit card growth in Indonesia, if it plays nice.

But still, the question is : can Google Wallet help leverage Indonesia’s ecommerce scene?

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Mobile Development Day Event and A Little Story on Internet/Mobile Market in Medan – Indonesia

Last Saturday, not only in Yogyakarta, but in Medan was also enlivened by a various events related to technology world and Internet. At least there are 3 events that I know, Medan Mobile Game Development Day sponsored by Nokia, Android event and idbloglicious roadshow which was held by idBlognetwork.

Unfortunately for the event associated with Android I did not have the info and was not present at the event, while for two other events, I had the opportunity to stop by and talk with the organizers.

For Mobile Development Day event, the event was organized by the local committee of the WebMedia, a computer training service provider, website development and IT solutions. The event was attended by 400 participants from various backgrounds, ranging from students, vocational, practitioners and the general public. The event held at the Hotel Madani, Gelora Ballroom, Jl. Sisingamangaraja no. 1 – Medan was presenting five speakers include Narenda Wicaksono – Developer Manager of Nokia Development, Kresna Dewantara – Chief Technical Officer of Armanovus Indonesia, Yuandra I. and Paramitha H. – Winner of Mobile Game DevWar Bandung, Firstman M – President of NICE, Shieny Aprillia – COO Agate Studio dan Erick Kurniawan – Co-founder NICE.

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Startup Pitching – Lessons From a Rock Show

rock concertThis is a guest post by Robin Malau, an Indonesian music industry veteran who’s also a blogger, creative entrepreneurship mentor, and digital consultant. He can be seen at the offices of Cerahati New Media Communication, a multimedia production company in Jakarta, as its Digital Media Producer. You can follow him on Twitter @lowrobb.

One day while giving a lecture at an Entrepreneurship class, one of the students asked, “Mr. Robin, why are you no longer in a band, don’t you miss being a band member?”

My answer, “Of course I did. But I can still feel like a band member and this (teaching in class) is my own show.”

After retiring as an active musician nearly 10 years ago I began to understand that the most important lessons I received from being in a band for over a dozen years can be implemented beyond the field of music. In reality, every process of becoming a musician can be applied to in life.

One of the lessons was the process of doing a show. Steps from preparation until the end of the show can be implemented not only in music but also for internet startups. In this case, the equivalent of a show is the pitching process.

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[Guest Post]: Web Success in the LinkedIn Era

The following article was written by Josep William Widjaja, he is one of lecturers at Bina Nusantara International University. Beside his hobby reading any IT related magazines or books and listening to jazz music, Josep’s interests are in implementing IT in Business and Marketing, Web and Mobile Development, Networking/Infrastructure.

By now everyone has heard about LinkedIn’s spectacular IPO last week, quite possibly the most significant public offering by a Web business since Google. Other Internet companies such as Groupon and Facebook are almost certain to follow suit in even grander fashion, but what makes the love for LinkedIn so striking is what it reveals about the future of working on the Web.

Whether it’s a business owner, an entrepreneur in the making, a job seeker or a lifetime freelancer, all would do well to pay attention to how LinkedIn is changing the landscape for professionals on the Web. Google changed the way we treat information, Facebook is changing the way we treat each other and Groupon strives to change the way we treat commerce. LinkedIn, the social network for professionals, is changing the way we treat our businesses, our jobs and our livelihoods.

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