Could Android’s NFC Become Indonesia’s e-Payment Solution?

Google’s Android handsets have been growing in popularity in Indonesia, just like in other countries where they can get a smartphone with relatively lower price compared to the iPhone. And to make things interesting, last year Eric Schmidt announced Android Gingerbread’s support for NFC (Near Field Communication) and of course payment is most likely to be the main usage.

In Indonesia, e-payment has been always an issue with almost no e-payment solution working properly. The reason? The users simply have no interest of using e-payment solution and quite happy with manual bank transfer which might be caused by the lack of service that’s easy enough for common user to use, e-payment requires to much hassle compared to e-banking or m-banking.

But of course, this can be easily disrupted.

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Kaskus: Business and Community Loyalty

Many of you must’ve heard what happened to Kaskus recently, that 5 of their moderators submitted their resignation at the same time, all of the sudden. It happened shortly after the news that Kaskus and GDP Ventures announced their partnership in order to bring Kaskus to the new and higher level.

These two events happening the previous after the latter brings out rumor that the resignation was due to Kaskus’ management refusing to “pay” the voluntary moderators after receiving fund. Andrew Darwis, CTO and founder of Kaskus immediately clarified the news by saying that the resignation of the moderators has nothing to do with the rumor.

Shortly afterward the said moderators release their official statement basically confirming what Andrew stated, that they do not ask for anything financially from Kaskus. The problem was solved quickly but it seems some people used this rumor to ruin Kaskus’ reputation.

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Tech VC Activities On The Rise As Indonesia’s GDP Increase 6.5%

For the past few months VCs from the technology industries from all around the globe is visiting Jakarta to see the landscape, see if they can do something here in Indonesia. Indonesia has been standing under the spotlight ever since the Koprol-Yahoo and Disdus-Groupon acquisition, and also a huge contribution from the country’s amazing economic growth for the past few years, enabling investment security for all sectors including tech. As reported by MalaysiaInsider (quoting from Reuters), Indonesia’s GDP grow 6.5% in Q1 this year. Driven by strong consumption and investment, making Indonesia the biggest economy in South East Asia.

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Demo Conference Comes To Singapore

If you are not familiar with what Demo is, it is a conference where startup launch their service. Demo Conference is legendary event that has been around since 1991 and they have been witnessing the birth of the best and most innovative startups. Demo was a platform to launch application such Adobe Reader, Sun Java, Salesforce.com, VMWare, Shazam, TiVO and many more of them, outstanding technologies.

And now, Demo is available in Singapore and will be held in Sands Expo and Convention Center on November 29-30, 2011 organize by IDG Enterprise, VentureBeat and also Sphere Exhibits.

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Get ready for Startup Weekend Jakarta

Jakarta is going to have its first Startup Weekend event this month. The 54-hour marathon ideas, brainstorming, and networking event will be held at IDS at Epicentrum Walk in Kuningan, South Jakarta from May 20 – 22.

Supported by the Kauffman Foundation, which is the largest foundation in the world devoted to entrepreneurship, Startup Weekend aims to discover and connect developers, designers, marketers, and business people to build products and launch startups over one weekend. According to the website, half of the participants have technical backgrounds while the other half tend to be business people.

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Be Ready for Final Event of CHIP – Nokia Mobile Game Developer War

The series of events CHIP – Nokia Game Developer Camp and Developer War is entering final stage. Seminar, workshop, developer camp and developer war held in various cities like Jogja, Surabaya, Bandung and Jakarta will enter its final and closing event, on June 4, 2011.

DailySocial also followed the series of events among others in Bandung and Jogjakarta. You can check out the coverage here and here.

Now it’s time for the final stage, 6 winners from Jogjakarta and Bandung will compete with 3 winners representing Jakarta and Indonesia to “go on a war” and present their game applications and a live coding with higher level of challenges and difficulties. The finalists will be competing for a grand total of Rp 60.000.000 prize. The final will be held at fX Lifestyle X’nter – Jakarta on June 4, 2011.

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DealKeren Launched Mobile Web Version

One of popular daily deals sites in Indonesia, DealKeren launched mobile web version to accommodate cellphone users. According to Nia Anchali, Business Development Head DealKeren, the update was displayed since two weeks ago. Unfortunately DealKeren do not have a blog post that explains “story” behind this mobile web version. You can check mobile look of DealKeren here.

I think it’ll be better if the system can detect automatically visitors that come from cellphone browser and direct them immediately to mobile web without having to have special folder (mobile) for this.

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Internet TV, Hot or Not?

For the past decade, human have been obsessed to make communication tools more portable, and of course smaller. Invention of laptops, cell-phones, tablet PC all within the last 15-20 years has been a great achievement for human communication. People start using their phones to connect to the internet, and the trend shows how modern people no longer watch TV and prefer smartphone and tablet PC as their primary source of information.

But lately, a new trend emerge that many people say as the “Evolution of Television” where TV sets are now connected to the internet as a new platform for people to consume information. How this work is actually the same as all other platform, if you already have a huge user-base it is much easier to let people do what they want inside rather than figuring out what to give to them. Now user can download widgets made by third party information provider to install on their TV set, be it news, weather, videos, music, social networking sites, etc.

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Event: Mozilla Firefox 4 Launch Party – Bandung

Launching event of the Firefox 4 browser in Bandung have been accomplished, having previously held in two cities of Jogjakarta and Jakarta, this time the people’s browser party stopped by in Bandung, located at Potluck Kitchen, the event was held on Sunday, May 1, 2011, from 16:00 to 20:00 pm.

For this event in Bandung, besides the welcoming events there were two presentation sessions, the first session was from Gen Kanai – Director of Asian Business Development – Mozilla, Christian Legnitto – Mozilla Firefox Release Manager and Luke Wagner – JaegerMonkey / JS Engine Engineer. While the second session filled by Petshopbox Studio – The Making of Kumi, Faisal Asad – Kumi Papertoy and Yohan – a presentation on the Future of Web App with Firefox and Showcase – Fowab. Before the 3 speakers, Fauzan Alfi also presented and introduced some things, especially about the Mozilla community to the visitors, including about Kumi, Indonesia Firefox mascot created by ‘urang Bandung’ (means ‘Bandung citizen’).

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