Why You Shouldn’t Run Beta Software Unless You Know What You’re Doing

Apple announced iOS 7 last week at Worldwide Developer Conference in San Francisco along with OS X Mavericks and at the same time released the first developer beta versions of both operating systems. Neither OS will be available publicly until later this year but of course, there are people who just couldn’t wait. If you have no business testing unfinished software, you really shouldn’t install a beta software. Let me tell you why.

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[Manic Monday] The Digital World Has Its Roots In The Physical World

In our increasingly digital world, we still cannot separate ourselves from physical objects. We [still] have physical bodies, not in energy or electronic form, and still interact with physical things. The computer/tablet/handphone that you’re holding? That’s your window into the digital world, although this ‘window’ still differs from person to person, and that’s if they have access. Perhaps you haven’t bought a CD for years and choose to look for songs on the Internet (regardless of legality)? You’d still need a set of speakers or headphones to listen to them.

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What Investors Look For According to Touchten’s Anton Soeharyo and Ideosource’s Andi S. Boediman

TouchTen co-founder and CEO Anton Soeharyo was at Game Developers Conference last Saturday with Andi S. Boediman of Ideosource. The two kicked off the event talking about what investors are looking for in companies. Touchten itself had just announced its latest game, Zico, a football game for iOS and Android based on the career of the Brazilian football legend Arthur Antunes Coimbra, better known as Zico.
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[Manic Monday] Chat Apps As Entertainment Platforms

Lately, chat services like KakaoTalk, LINE, WeChat and others are in a battle for attention from customers, with the hopes that they will download and use their apps. Some companies have spent quite a bit of money to appoint celebrities as brand ambassadors and place TV ads during prime time. Various features have been developed and promotions executed – even features like stickers have been imitated by apps that formerly did not even have chat, like Path.
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Learning from Farming Information Service 8Villages

8villages is one of the growing startups in Indonesia and set its sights at a market that many startups don’t pay attention to. Farmers with feature phones may be a combination considered to be uncool by local startups which tend to refer to Silicon Valley where practically everyone there uses a smartphone. Indonesia is clearly a different market, similar to many growing Asian nations as feature phones are still dominant. Just because it’s a feature phone market doesn’t mean it can’t be monetized. mig33 with its business model shows that this is possible.

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The Messaging Conundrum

Ask any smartphone-wielding Indonesian about their messaging apps and they would most likely say a combination of two, maybe three apps, aside from SMS, the usage of which had been in serious decline over the past year. WhatsApp, BlackBerry Messenger, and Line tend to be the top three messaging apps mentioned by Indonesians. Although people do actively use other messaging apps, they are not as prominent on people’s minds.

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[Manic Monday] Empowering Music With Data

Several years ago, when I was still in University, I owned a USB thumb drive. It was still relatively new then and not many people owned one, to the point that I had to carry around the installer CD everywhere. That thumb drive was capable of storing a whopping 64 MB, much larger than the box of floppy disks that I carried everywhere, and was most certainly less prone to fungi. Today, a thumb drive with such capacity is probably not for sale anymore; even 1GB drives are usually given away as bonuses.

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[Manic Monday] Music, Entrepreneurship And Technology Gathering

Last Saturday, April 20th, 2013, a few friends and I had the chance to create a small gathering to discuss about music, entrepreneurship and technology. This gathering started off from people who had joined a group with the same name on Google+, moderated by Robin Malau and Widi Asmoro. Looking at how active the discussions were in the group, and the variety of topics covered in a group what was literally weeks old, I offered to create the first gathering for this group at the offices of Think Web, which is also where Wooz.in is headquartered. Thanks to Ramya Prajna for providing the space and the audiovisual equipment.

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[Manic Monday] Revisiting Royalties

One of the main pillars of industries based in intellectual property are royalties. In this definition, royalties is the amount of revenue shared and received by an owner of an intellectual property or work, from usage of said work by other parties; it often refers to musical works and compositions. The royalties paid can be 0% to 100%, depending on the agreement between the work owner and the party who wants to exploit it. Bottom line, every work that is used, whether it is duplicated, broadcast or used in sync with other products (in what is called synchronisation rights, usually for ads, movie soundtracks, and so on), the work owner will receive a portion of income as agreed.

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