Kaskus Goes Top 10 Accessed from Opera Mini

Kaskus, Indonesia’s biggest online community with almost 2 million registered users finally able to sit in the top 10 accessed website in Indonesia from Opera Mini. Opera released its State of Mobile Web last June, indicating Detik and Kaskus to be the two local players succeeded to enter the top 10.

Andrew Darwis, CTO and founder of Kaskus said that they will soon release a survey for its 2 million users about what they want in order to improve their Kaskus mobile experience. After announcing their Kaskus for Blackberry application early this year, Kaskus also published their ODP application for Java-supported handheld such as Nokia and Sony Ericsson.

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BukaLapak, E-Commerce With Traditional Approach

Copywriting is indeed an important part of a service, the way you talk to specific target audience can help boost the experience you’re trying to give them, like Woot does. BukaLapak is one of that e-commerce sites that uses a more traditional approach of talking with their customer. One of that key value of traditional market in Indonesia is bargaining, the one thing you can’t do when shopping on a modern market.

It’s a small feature, but it really differentiate themselves from the other big e-commerce players. Too bad it’s not exactly a strong key point, their competitors can always add the Bargain feature and they’re left off with nothing. This factor has to be taken into account in the competition scene for Indonesian startups, most of them are not aware of this kind of situation.

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Is It Shopping Season Already? OgahRugi Giving Away Discounts

Discounts and daily deals website seems to be picking up in Indonesia as well as the rest of the world. A phenomenon started by Groupon and its social buying features. We’ve seen a growing number of e-commerce websites and discounts websites, but none of the tried to combine both concept in one website until now.

OgahRugi is that one site that tries to combine both daily deals / discounts and e-commerce with a twist of social features (which is practically mandatory). The bad thing about it, is they haven’t done anything innovative with both features, they just simply combine them together and there’s no bridge between two services. They seem to add e-commerce platform as a complimentary feature and maybe a source of income while they’re prepping a viable business model they can use as primary income.

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Guest Post : What do VCs look for?

This is a guest post by James Chan, Investment Manager at Neoteny Labs. James will be in Jakarta from August 13th – 16th 11th – 15th, and would like to meet people and get to know the startup community. Neoteny Labs is a hybrid incubator that combines early-stage venture capital with hands-on mentorship and incubation for its portfolio companies. James works closely with General Partner Joichi Ito on the fund and its portfolio companies, and is based in Singapore.

Since this is my first visit to Jakarta, I thought I’d introduce myself to the investor and entrepreneur community by way of a blog post. It is an adaptation of one of my previous blog posts. I hope you’ll enjoy it, and I looks forward to meeting each and every one of you in Jakarta soon.

What do VCs look for?

It is a question that has probably crossed the minds of many entrepreneurs who seek institutional funding. I’ve never built a startup before, much less raise angel or venture financing, and most likely lack the legitimacy to field my own answers to the question. I would like to think that my response is an aggregation of the collective wisdom of the coolest and smartest people that I’ve had the fortune to work with so far. I would also caveat that these points that are most applicable to early-stage deals.

The question begets two further questions; (1) What do VCs look for, for themselves? (2) What do VCs look for, from companies?

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Fanesia, Supposedly A Groupon Clone for Indonesia

Another startup ready to launch within 24 days since today, it’s a daily deal site called Fanesia. Founded by an ex-Tokobagus employee, Fanesia supposedly deliver daily deals for customers similar like Groupon.

On their Facebook page, they invited users to get discounts at their favorite restaurants, spa and fashion items which is one of the most popular items searched on the internet. This set them under the shades of with other big players like AdaDiskon and CariPromo without a niche strength of their own. In this area, you can survive when you focus / target specific people who’s willing to pay more online.

However, this kind of startup is a big bright star in the eyes of early stage investors remembering they have solid business plan and easier to scale then any other service-base startups. No news on whether Fanesia raised funding from investors, will definitely keep an eye following them around.

Kemana.com Secretly (and Finally) Launched!

Kemana.com has been building buzz since early this year and on the website they counting down to May 2010 as their launching date. By the end of May, they changed the frontpage and now they claiming April 2010 as their launching date. After June 2010, they’re still not launching anything so i lost interest, until today when i randomly visit their website and there they are, launched.

Kemana.com was founded by Chris Benz (pictured left), an entrepreneur from New York who also founded CraftNetwork.com back in 2005. The reason they operate Kemana.com in Indonesia? I have no idea, but whatever it is it’s not because there’s no competition here. We have plenty of competition in the e-commerce/marketplace area, actually we have too many of them, but then again there’s no such thing as having too many competition.

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Telkomsel Breaks The Device Boundary with Appzone

Telkomsel, one of the biggest telco provider in Indonesia today announced Appzone. As the name suggests, Appzone is an application marketplace where Telkomsel subscriber can download various apps regardless the devices they’re using. Appzone provides applications for Blackberries, iPhones and Java-based apps for Nokia and Sony-Ericsson users. So every Telkomsel users from any devices will have the privileges to enjoy these apps.

Applications showcased on Appzone now not only consist of free apps, some apps are also came with a price tag between IDR 8000 – 20.000, which is very affordable.

This is another alternative for Telkomsel subscriber other than the app offered by their manufacturer like iPhone App Store, Blackberry App World, or Android Marketplace. In terms of competition with other app-market, it is less likely to compete with other marketplace since it’s very exclusive and so far it didn’t gain enough traction from independent developers. It is most likely that Telkomsel have a deal with their software developer partners to develop mobile apps for AppZone.

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LintasBerita’s New (And Weird) Ad Unit

LintasBerita, a social bookmarking site with huge traffic secretly rolled out their new partnership with Krazymarket, a local niche e-commerce site. The partnership is actually just a common banner advertising with a unique treatment.

Based on the ui of lintasBerita, the Krazymarket ad looks like a new independent channel based on the tab-like ad shape. This is a bit deceiving for visitors like who clicked on the ad because i thought it was a channel for e-commerce or some sort. This is possibly the lamest ad unit i’ve seen so far.

It would be better for both party to do a more in-depth partnership to promote Krazymarket’s stuff on the website based on the similar visitor characteristics of both site. People visiting LintasBerita to find weird (or unique) news while Krazymarket sells unique stuff and also antiques.

LintasBerita is one of the biggest website in Indonesia in terms of traffic and engagement where every website that gets in the frontpage get a spike reference from LintasBerita, similar to The Digg Effect.

Scraplr Raise Seed Funding From East Ventures

Scraplr, a Bandung based startup focusing on Task Management with a pretty UI recently raised an undisclosed amount of money from Singaporean-VC company, East Ventures. Last June, Scraplr was the one and only Indonesian startup to launch at the Echelon 2010 Launchpad where they literally slaughtered by the panelists Dave McClure from Founders Fund, Bret Terrill and some other digital techies on stage.

After the event, Fares Farhan and Tata Tricipta (founders) told me that they were slaughtered because they didn’t communicate well using English, which made the panelists didn’t really get what they’re trying to say. But again, seems like the objective for scraplr is finally achieved as they successfully convinced East Ventures to put money on the Task Management startup.

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Where Have You Been, Google?

kompas-img — Photo (left-right) : Andrew McGlinchey(Google), Hugo Diba (Detik), Desmarita Murni (WWF), me and Derek Callow (Google). Photo courtesy of Kompas

Most of you were already aware about yesterday’s event. Yes, Google launched their browser, Chrome, in Jakarta yesterday. That was the first time for Google having a consumer event for one of their product. So, i sat down with Andrew McGlinchey Google SEA’s Lead Product Manager and talk about it.

The 20 minutes discussion came up with a pretty interesting conclusion, from my side. So i asked Andrew, why Google decided to do something in Indonesia? Google have been operating in Singapore for quite a while, and until now they practically ignore Indonesia. And my second question was, why Chrome? Why not Android, or Google Maps?

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