East Venture’s Latest Investment: Penn-Olson.com

Penn-Olson officially announced that they are now funded by East Ventures.

The news didn’t come as a surprise for me, because I can say I’ve seen it coming since Jakarta Ventures Night on March 21, 2011.

Along with time, I’ve discussed it with Rama and Aulia, and even though we had no solid evidence at that moment but everyone agreed that East Venture’s (EV) process in funding Penn-Olson.com can be seen from days away.

Finally the news of Penn-Olson being funded by EV appeared few days ago, but still not official. Willis Wee, founder and CEO of Penn-Olson wrote a little disclosure in their article on Tokopedia, and today official release was sent through email to Daily Social, confirming that east Ventures has invested in Penn-Olson.com, and the amount of funding is not disclosed.

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Mig33 Partners With Gree, Opens Floodgate for Social Game Developers

One of the first and largest mobile community service, Mig33, today announce that they’re partnering with Japanese social network platform, Gree where Mig33 will adopt Gree’s smartphone platform and also opening Mig33 community for social games developers in Japan and several other countries.

Mig33 now has over 47 million users and is opening the doors for developers to access their userbase, not to mention that all games on Gree now can easily adapted to run on mig33’s platform. This cross-port apps partnership could significantly increase the interest for developers to build apps on mig33’s platform, adding more and more content for mig33 users to tinker with.

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BREAKING: Groupon Acquires Indonesian Clone Disdus.com

Groupon today announced the acquisition of Disdus, one of Indonesia’s leading group-buying sites, as it expands its presence in Southeast Asia. The newly renamed Groupon Indonesia will join 46 other markets in Groupon’s network including Groupon’s recent acquisitions in Singapore, Malaysia, Hong Kong and Taiwan.

“In just a few months after its launch, Disdus has become the market leader and a first class example of collective buying site. Groupon Indonesia will harness strength of the Groupon network to sharpen the way local businesses reach customers throughout Southeast Asia,” said Rob Solomon, former Groupon President and COO, who announced his resignation from the Chicago company on March 22.

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East Ventures closes the year with Disdus investment

East Ventures is not going to end this year without some serious announcement for their Indonesian portfolio, as we receive a press release from Jason Lamuda, CEO and co-founder of Disdus. Disdus launched in August 2010 –together with 2 other similar sites– is one of the biggest Groupon clone in Indonesia together with DealKeren as incumbent players in the collective commerce scene. Their partnership with Kaskus in October boost up their visibility and gained new users from the mammoth forum, and apparently their partnership with the people behind Kaskus is only getting better.

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Plasa.com CEO resigned, Ariadi Anaya steps in as interim CEO

This morning, a big announcement comes from a company who claims to be Indonesia’s biggest e-commerce website,Plasa.com. Plasa’s CEO Shinta Dhanuwardoyo is officially confirming the rumor about her resignation from the government-funded company as per Dec 1st 2010. Shinta has been responsible for growing Plasa.com from scratch into a e-commerce platform with 400.000 users on November 2010, together with Andi S Boediman who acts as Chief Innovation at Mojopia -the legal company behind Plasa.com

Before her official statement, rumor has been spreading about her departure and the dispute that happened almost exactly a year ago between Plasa.com management with their Board advisors. Although it seems unlikely for the board to oust Shinta only, that move should be applied to the whole executive team and not only her.

Continue reading Plasa.com CEO resigned, Ariadi Anaya steps in as interim CEO

Two Indonesian daily deals sites on the loose

Yesterday, two daily deals site (you know, groupon clones) launched and ready to serve their customers and to compete with other bunch of clones existing in Indonesia. The newly launched services are Lapar.com and Valadoo.com. Lapar in Indonesian language means “hungry” so it’s a really cool domain name, while Valadoo is short for “Value Added Discounts Online Organizer” and i have no idea what that means.

Valadoo is a general discounts site, where they offer daily discounts for spa, restaurants, entertainment, etc; putting them on a head-to-head competition with the incumbent DealKeren and Disdus. As a differentiation factor, Valadoo has 3 types of deals : individual deals, just a simple deal without any group buying necessity involved; group buying, where you have to fulfill the quota in order for the deal to be activated; and friends deals where you have 1 voucher and invite several people in order for the deal to be activated.

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Rakuten Indonesia is alive (sort of) and start recruiting merchants

When Rakuten announced their partnership with MNC last May, everyone in the internet and ecommerce industry was stunned by Rakuten’s bold move to invade an undeveloped land. When i say undeveloped, i mean no one has done a success by relying on online transactions of any kind, it’s a big investment and risk. Rakuten is currently internationally growing like crazy by opening office all over Europe and several countries in Asia, and although Indonesia is one of them; it’s a totally different ball game.

In Japan, Rakuten is the biggest e-commerce service followed by Amazon with only half of Rakuten’s revenue. It’s not really a competition for Rakuten, so they decided to go all around the world and embrace new competitions. Rakuten Japan’s advantage -compare to Amazon- is they sell digital goods, which generates revenue (and lots of them) to the company.

Continue reading Rakuten Indonesia is alive (sort of) and start recruiting merchants

Rockto catching up for holidays, adds new badges

This holiday season, Rockto – a social recommendation startup – is catching up with their users by releasing new features and also new badges on their service. What Rockto does is to simply enable you to share internet content at any form on their platform, most people would say they looked like Tumblr but with a public timeline instead of personal timeline. It’s like a combination of Tumblr and Digg, plus the badge rewarding system like Foursquare.

Rockto releases a few new badges for their users this holiday that includes Fanboy, Worker, Rocker Chips and Goosebumps. And if the badge is not enough to intrigue their users, they also have a point-reward system on their service, called Rockpoints, which you can earn for every activity on the site. With 7500 rockpoints and a fanboy bagde, you can win a 4th gen iPod Touch and with 3500 rockpoints + fanboy badge you can get yourself a nice nifty 4th gen iPod Shuffle for their Rockto Store.

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Once the most popular microblogging service around, Kronologger shutting down

Another day, another startup dies. After the sad day for ArusMedia, now the grim reaper pays a visit to an old-school microblogging service, Kronologger. Founded by a serial entrepreneur Kukuh TW, who also went on and founded KumpulBlogger and IDBlogNetwork and made a decent amount of money from these two services with it’s solid business model.

Founded in 2007, it was originally named Kronologis.com and it was meant to be a weekend-hack project for Kukuh TW, he’s a hacker type who always keep on doing something new. So when Kukuh met Budi Putra (was the CEO of Asia Blogging Network), the two decided to rebrand the service and give it a new name, Kronologger, as a more serious project under the flagship of Asia Blogging Network. Budi Putra went on leaving Asia Blogging Network for Country Editor position at Yahoo! Indonesia, which basically leaves Kronologger out there all alone in the cold. Continue reading Once the most popular microblogging service around, Kronologger shutting down

Krazymarket snaps Red Herring 100 Awards

It’s a great achievement for Krazymarket, one of the niche e-commerce player in Indonesia focusing on collectibles and hard-to-get items. CEO Philippe Do today announced via Twitter that the company he’s leading is one of the Red Herring 100 Asia winners in Shanghai. Krazymarket went to the final 200 stage together with Circumflex Technologies to represent Indonesia, and Krazymarket went all the way to the winner’s hot seat.

Krazymarket compete with hundreds of other internet companies from all over Asia, such as Singapore, India, Kazakhstan, Vietnam and more countries. Although Indonesia only have 2 companies got through the top 200, It’s still a good achievement for Krazymarket who also the winner of dailysocial’s own SparxUp Awards 2010 for the Best eCommerce category.