Groupon’s Business Model From A Different Angle

I recently read a piece by Redfin, the online real-estate company, about a story of Groupon and how it destroys small business. In this case, Groupon destroys a small coffee shop in Portland, Oregon and it got me thinking about how a startup’s business model should be flexible and how it relates to customer’s profit and your own company’s profit.

Of course, both are important. But this is the hard part of creating a business model for your startup, at least that’s your homework as startup founder.

Continue reading Groupon’s Business Model From A Different Angle

Engage, Scale & Virtualize

Guest post by Batista Harahap, an expert on scaling and virtualization, recently pointed as Chief Innovation Officer at Urbanesia. A big evangelist of Android phones, and the perfect guy to ask about anything Android. He talks about mobile programming, augmented reality, location based trends, scaling and virtualization and of course, Android apps. He blogs at Bango29 and tweets a lot.

A good friend of mine got chills everytime he heard the word Scale. WTF? In a sense, in just 1 word, it represents a very significant amount of time, thoughts, plans and most definitely efforts to enable any entity to expand and grow. That’s why that particular word is accompanied by 2 other words that I’m sure will help a lot easing my friend’s chills 🙂

The first word: Engage is the primary cause of the other 2 words. To scale and virtualize is the direct effect of it. Any website will want to engage their visitors and visitors to engage them right? Websites are more and more becoming a public service hosted and ran by private entities. Here in Indonesia with more than 15% of our population now online, it will take quite the effort to be able to engage that many visitors at any given time. The climate is favoring startups right now and it’s great to be part of one.

Continue reading Engage, Scale & Virtualize

Urbanesia Starts Pushing UrPoints, Strike A Deal With DealKeren

For long, Urbanesia have implemented UrPoints, a reward feature for user who add venues, leave comments, rate venues and other social activity on the location-based site. And for long, UrPoints is not an interesting feature to trigger activity on the recently funded website. Usually, UrPoints are exchanged for discounts for concert tickets supported by Urbanesia.

But after a while, Urbanesia finally introduce a feature where user can exchange their UrPoints with an actual deal/promo. A partnership deal with DealKeren is officially implemented on the website where users can now have a purpose for getting more UrPoints.

Continue reading Urbanesia Starts Pushing UrPoints, Strike A Deal With DealKeren

GeoKuliner Help Direct You To The Nearest Restaurant

Location-based is such a hybrid-friendly feature, from location-based social networking, location-based reviews, location-based e-commerce, location-based augmented reality and now location-based restaurant review. A very niche private beta project we found a couple of days ago and decided to review it.

GeoKuliner, is the name of the service which will help you determine a restaurant near you, complete with the review, contact number and of course the address of the restaurant. The UI is very simple, easy to use and relatively clean, giving the visitor a clear view of the website and it’s contents. Looks like GeoKuliner will be dependent on their users to submit content for them, User Generated Content.

Continue reading GeoKuliner Help Direct You To The Nearest Restaurant

Plasa’s New Look. Seriously.

The high-profile and government-funded e-commerce website Plasa.com recently announce their new look, as Shinta Witoyo (CEO) tweeted yesterday. Plasa rumored to receive another round of funding by their parent company, Telkom for further development of the marketplace site.

Plasa’s new design actually looks more cramped compared to the old version. More content seemed to got put on the frontpage, and I’m not a UI expert or anything, but i kinda feel less comfortable compared to the old design. But overall, Plasa added more content to the site including their partnership with GantiBaju (Indonesia’s Threadless) and other relevant content about shopping etc.

Continue reading Plasa’s New Look. Seriously.

The Moment You’ve Been Waiting For : 3 Groupon Clones Launched!

As you might all expected, yes Indonesia also has Groupon clones and most of them are still flying under the radar until they decided to launch publicly this week, all three of them.

They are Disdus, DealKeren and Fanesia. First, Fanesia claimed that they will launch a few days ago, based on the countdown timer they put on their homepage. Apparently, still no Fanesia. So let’s move on with it.

Disdus is one of the groupon daily deals sites launched this week, founded by the same group of people who founded (and currently still run) Citzel, a location based review site. Jason Lamuda, founder and CEO of both Citzel and Disdus told us that they are going to focus on offline events to support their online presence. This strategy is quite unique but not surprising in Indonesia, might as well leaving other competitors wondering whether they should follow or not.

Continue reading The Moment You’ve Been Waiting For : 3 Groupon Clones Launched!

Tokopedia’s First Birthday, Booked 5 Billion IDR Transactions

Launched on a historic day of August 17th (Indonesia’s independence day) last year, Tokopedia celebrate their first birthday by launching their new mobile version of the site. William, Founder and CEO told us that the mobile version has most major features just like in the standard web version. Seller can check orders, delivery statuses and withdrawal, while visitors can buy items, check their orders, confirm payments, etc.

As the first startup to be invested by the aggressive VC East Ventures, Tokopedia also gain quite a strong traction compared to other competitors like Krazymarket, Juale and Kemana. Their traffic keeps going up and experienced a few spikes every now and then, but most importantly they also claim 5 billion IDR transaction record. Too bad this doesn’t necessarily a good thing for Tokopedia since they’re not taking a cut out of the transactions made, instead they’re preparing to make money from advertisement. I personally find it weird, but hey.. every startup got its own way of thinking.

And now that they’re one year old, Tokopedia also decided to drop the beta label form their website, giving their user more of a trust level with their service. Happy birthday Tokopedia!

Urbanesia Goes Android, Available on Nexian Journey

Recently funded by East Ventures, Urbanesia goes crazy over their mobile apps especially after they got a new CIO who’s focused on mobile experience particularly on Android devices. They recently announce their partnership with handset manufacturer Nexian to bundle Urbanesia’s Android app on the low-end Android device, Nexian Journey. It’s a nifty app as well, you can actually use their location based Augmented Reality map to find out where exactly is the best venues around you.

In spite of the rumor surrounding their dispute with Koprol regarding the partnership with Nexian, Urbanesia intent to focus on bringing the venue review and social features on their Android app. Riding the wave of Nexian’s low-end targeted marketing effort, Urbanesia expect to gain more market share and new users from middle-low slice.

Continue reading Urbanesia Goes Android, Available on Nexian Journey

Calling All Indonesian Startups : SparxUp Is Officially Open

The most anticipated startup award of the year is finally and officially open for registration. SparxUp Awards 2010, held by DailySocial together with our partner Semut Api Colony is set to be the biggest startup awarding event in Indonesia. And SparxUp Awards 2010 is more than just an awarding event, it’s a celebration of Indonesian startup awakening from a giant hibernation.

Indonesian internet and mobile user is huge, but this time we will produce something good, we’ll contribute something significant to the world’s tech-culture. This is a small contribution from us, who’s been blogging about Indonesia’s tech-culture for more than a year and see the big potential, hidden and undiscovered.

Continue reading Calling All Indonesian Startups : SparxUp Is Officially Open

KlikBCA Embrace Mobile Web and Apps For Smartphones

Said to be one of the best eBanking system in Indonesia, KlikBCA now leave their competition behind even further by embracing the mobile culture of their urban Indonesian user. Today, KlikBCA announce that they’re officially opening their new mobile eBanking system, a mobile version of their web-based KlikBCA. BCA claims that this mobile version is as secure as the desktop version.

Not only releasing their mobile website, KlikBCA will also launch native apps for popular devices in Indonesia. KlikBCA will soon release its native app for Blackberry, iPhone, Nokia S60 and a Java-supported app for the rest of the smartphone. Excellent choices of handheld support that represents almost all eBanking users in Indonesia, although the iPhone app seems a bit too presumptuous. It’s not that i don’t like iPhone, i love them, but Android seemed to be picking up instead of the iPhone.

KlikBCA is also partner with several e-commerce websites such as Bhinneka, IndoMog (online gaming payment) and several other partners. In the future, KlikBCA will add more and more partner, probably making KlikBCA as Indonesia’s biggest closed-loop mobile e-commerce / integrated banking system. Seems like a big dream.