[Simply Business] Stay Away From the Idea Guy

I think we have all seen the likes of ‘the idea guy’, the one with a million great idea and no skill, value or intention to back it up. I like to call ‘the idea guy’ for what he/she truly is: the bullshiter. You see, the idea guy always starts with something like this:

“Hey I got a brilliant idea, let’s make facebook for little people and we’ll be rich! You code and I will get 80% of the share because it’s my idea”

If the guy cannot provide any other value aside from the idea, STAY AWAY AS FAR AS YOU CAN. Idea is cheap, it provides no value without the execution to follow. Of course it is not the case if the person can actually provide you with added value like capital, connections or technical skills. Let’s look at these values in details.

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[Music Monday] What An Exciting Week For Digital Music!

Who says the music industry is dead? While Napster might have spelled doom at one point in history, the past 10 years have seen an ever-accelerating comeback in the digital music space. While iTunes might still hold a dominant spot over digital music sales, more innovations and startups are breaking into the scene and making their own noise (nudge at Spotify). I literally couldn’t decide what to write about for this week’s column, so I’ve decided to do a short summary of all the interesting news around digital music.

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[Simply Business] Digital Newspaper Distribution is Looking Grim

DailySocial readers are mostly early-adopters, using the latest technology and keeping up with the current trends. We don’t really watch TV, haven’t subscribed any newspaper in ages and read books in our Kindle Fire [or iPad -Ed].

So it’s pretty common for us to think differently because the way we consume media is different from most people. We often forget that our target market may not share the same behavior, at least in Indonesia.

Jawa Pos, one of the biggest newspapers in Indonesia is still going strong by circulating about 400,000 copies daily. It posted a study of media preferences by age groups in 2009 on its website claiming that about 47.7% of people in Jakarta and 75.6% in Surabaya still read newspapers. TV is still number one of course with 88.7% in Jakarta and 86.5% in Surabaya. Continue reading [Simply Business] Digital Newspaper Distribution is Looking Grim

[Music Monday] How Going Digital Can Help Music Licensing

Today we’re happy to announce Music Monday, a new column by Ario Tamat about the digital music scene. Ario Tamat had been in the music industry throughout the 2000s, being involved in the now defunct SoundBuzz and later Universal Music, dealing with digital licensing, distribution, as well as ringback tones. Music Monday will appear every week.

Recently, many people have been talking about the so-called “future of music’, on how the music industry and/or the musicians can make money from music. A lot of focus has gone into mobile music offerings, music download services, and the music streaming services much heralded to be the “next big thing”. They’re all basically consumer-facing businesses, where the services – and the music companies partnered with them – attempt to monetize their music library direct to the music-loving consumer.

The music licensing aspect, however, is not talked about much, and even less understood. A music composition (created by a composer) or a music sound recording (recorded and produced by a record label or the artists themselves) can be licensed out to various parties who have corporate uses for the music; the most recognizable being music for television or radio commercials.

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[Dailyssimo] Time and Work Space Revolution

For those of you who work in a city as crowded as Jakarta certainly need no further explanation as to why the city can’t be considered comfortable as a place to work, but what I would like to highlight here is how technology makes the revolution of time and work space possible for the whole industry.

Internet will be the backbone of the industrial world even though at present there are companies that have not been using it optimally, yet. And the issue of “working in Jakarta” could be resolved one step at a time with the Internet. How exactly the internet is the solution? I will try to describe it below.

There are two main problems working in Jakarta, first is optimizing working hours. This will not be achieved if we spend 2-3 hours commuting to work (not to mention the meetings outside of the office); this is reinforced by the fact that the workers/professionals have been moving to the suburbs. Second is the fatigue (tiredness) that emerged as the impact of the first problem. This fatigue element is causing discomfort when working which eventually negatively affects work performance.

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[Simply Business] Working Towards a Common Goal

I believe that business, contrary to popular believe is not a zero-sum game. There’s always a way for everybody to win. If you can’t find it, it doesn’t mean that it’s not there. It only means that you just can’t find a viable win-win solution.

When I started gantibaju.com, I got a lot of help from the t-shirt business community. They share abundance amount of information including their ‘secret’ methods of printing, their local distribution channels and their contacts. It was beyond me at first on why they would help me, but all of them commented in pretty much the same way: to help grow the industry, to ensure regeneration and enrich the healthy community of sharing. They believe that they couldn’t have done it themselves so building the industry in a collective measure is the way to go.

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[Simply Business] Foxconn Factory: A reality check on Indonesia wages

There’s a lot of fuss concerning how Apple treats its manufacturing partner Foxconn in China, news of Foxconn employees being paid in such low wages of $1.78 per hour making expensive iPhones and iPads.

Then it hit me, is $1.78 per hour cheap? The workers work 12 hours a day, let’s assume that they work 5 days a week. That would make about $1.78 x 12 hours x 20 days equals $427.2. That’s bigger than my first salary at an IT company in 2004! Not to mention it’s still a starter salary for most small companies in 2011.

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[Simply Business] Content Curation is Taking Over The Web

Aria Rajasa is the CEO of gantibaju.com, a clothing startup not dissimilar to Threadless but with a touch of Indonesia and a very strong design community. His passion in entrepreneurship has gotten him to start a number of companies since leaving university

Content is often the most overlooked element of a startup. This usually happens because most founders are techies and techies concentrate on what they know best: Technology. They can tinker days and months perfecting their code, playing with the test unit and scaling the servers like crazy. Yes, playing with technology is awesome but content is King.

Content is where I expect much of the real money will be made on the Internet, just as it was in broadcasting. ~ Bill Gates

But content itself is worthless if it adds no value. Without value, content is just noise and the Internet is full of them! Nobody needs more noise in an already complicated life. To create great content, curation is needed. Curation is what differentiates between noise and great content. It adds value and selects only the most relevant content to specific users.

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