When I heard the news about yet another social network site with Islamic content, honestly I accepted it skeptically. Even more so when I read that Salam World that is to be Facebook with an Islamic concept. As cited from some media, Salam World management is now visiting Indonesia, including Majelis Ulama Indonesia (Indonesian Ulema Council), the Ministry of Religion, Bank Muamalat to promote its product that will launch in April 2012.

Salam World is owned by some Russians and Turks who will invest $ 15 million to open its branches in 16 countries with large Muslim populations, including Indonesia. Beside that, in two years Salam World will spend $ 40 million on infrastructure and further expansion. It is a bombastic number for me. Next, Salam World is going to develop the internet payment concept using a kind of electronic gold or electronic dinar. Therefore Salam World is trying to collaborate with Bank Muamalat as a partner in Indonesia.

My skepticism is reasonable. If you visit the site SalamWorld.com, it does not look like a multi-million dollar project. It looks more like a  1990s design and not interesting for users…

Continue reading at Daily Social EN

Steve Jobs co-founded Apple with Steve Wozniak and Ronald Wayne in 1976 out of his garage in Cupertino, California. Following the turmoil that involved his ouster from the company from 1985 to 1996, he rebuilt Apple to become the world’s most prominent technology and design company.

His other company, Pixar Animation Studios, produced breakthrough and commercially successful animated feature films and joined Disney as its premiere animation studio.

Apple CEO Steve Jobs displays the iPhone, iPad and Macbook at the Moscone Center in San Francisco, Wednesday, Jan. 27, 2010. Pic: AP.

Apple released this statement earlier:

Statement by Apple’s Board of Directors

CUPERTINO, Calif. — We are deeply saddened to announce that Steve Jobs passed away today.

Steve’s brilliance, passion and energy were the source of countless innovations that enrich and improve all of our lives. The world is immeasurably better because of Steve.

His greatest love was for his wife, Laurene, and his family. Our hearts go out to them and to all who were touched by his extraordinary gifts.

Daily Social EN

Research company Ovum has predicted that in 2016 Asian mobile phone connections will reach 4.2 billion users. The report stated that 72% of these will be from China, India, and Indonesia.  As a comparison, according to Internet World Stats the total population of China, India, and Indonesia is around 2.8 billion people, of which 625 million are internet users.

The interesting thing is although it has important influence, the revenue from voice calls is decreasing. In 2016, data service is predicted to reach $145 billion, while the revenue from voice call in this period will only around $ 193 billion – decreasing almost $2 billion from what is predicted this year.

Ovum senior analyst, Emeka Obiodu, stated that although the growth of mobile phone users is significant, it will not stop the decreasing of voice revenue.

Continue reading at Daily Social EN

The niche e-commerce company Krazymarket has closed their Series A round led by Japanese company Recruit Global Incubation Partners, an investment arm of Recruit Group. Founder and Director Philippe Do told us that Recruit is perfect partner for Krazymarket because they have extensive knowledge in helping companies with niche content providers in Japan and all over the region.

Krazymarket plans to use the new funding to strengthen its branding as e-commerce for collectibles and hobby items amongst its Indonesian users through online and offline engagements such as events etc. Next step for Krazymarket is to educate the market as well as introducing the brand in order to increase the transactions on the website. Philippe also said that providing better services for customer is also an important agenda for Krazymarket, and the investment from Recruit could help make that happen.

Continue reading at Daily Social EN

Yahoo! Post Indonesia has officially launched. Post Indonesia is the third Yahoo! Post after in Hong Kong and Korea. In both countries, Yahoo! Post is known as KPost and has been established since 2010. Yahoo! Post tries to make collaboration of two popular areas on the internet those – social and search.

Yahoo! Post is actually simple and easy to use. You just need to write certain keyword and you can chat with other Yahoo! Post users in forum-like conversation. The difference is no need to float the thread just to make it up because every topic will be shown as a search result. iPad 2s and iPod Touchs was offered as prizes for Yahoo! Post users for the launch.

When I attended the event, it looked at how the activity built for Yahoo! Post in several topics makes Yahoo! Post looks dynamic. The example is the thread on Facebook game The Sims Social that now is very popular. Any users can share or ask about the topic. When this article was written there are 163 topics. You can also browse to the topics. It main market is young people around 15-25 years old.

Continue reading at Daily Social EN

eBay just announced that it has appointed Edelman as its Asia Pacific PR agency to deal with cross border trade in the region as it represents 20 percent if the company’s sales in Q4 2010. The appointment follows the relationship between the two companies in the US. The PR agency is expected to “raise awareness of the opportunities to traders and entrepreneurs in Asia.”

Edelman will also provide counsel and guidance regarding strategic communications and approach to the online shopping site as it aims to learn more about the region and improve its adoption in Asia Pacific.

While regional operations will be centered in Hong Kong, Edelman’s offices across the region will be actively engaging and studying the market on behalf of eBay. It was only back in May that eBay selected Edelman Australia as its agency for the country.

eBay hasn’t had too much of a success in Indonesia as Tokobagus and Kaskus take the majority mindshare as well as value of online trading in the country. Its insistence on using PayPal is also a hindrance among many would-be buyers since most Indonesians are not entrenched in the banking system and PayPal’s customer service is infamously difficult to deal with.

According to DailySocial’s own research into Indonesian ecommerce, the most preferred method of payment is still bank transfer and eBay places fourth among ecommerce sites in the country behind Kaskus, Tokobagus, and Facebook. Amazon is fifth. There is also a set of challenges that online traders face when dealing with ecommerce in Indonesia.

Continue reading at Daily Social EN

Several days ago, I received press release from Sanny Gaddafi – Sixreps.com explained that they have just soft launched their service in the US at the Olympia Weekend 2011 event in Las Vegas, Nevada.

This soft launching might be the sign of their strategy, as written on DailySocial, to work on foreign markets. Because of this news, I contacted Denny Santoso, the founder and CEO of SixReps.com.

Denny explained that now in the US, they just did the super-soft-launch to get market insight. As reported, Sixreps is on the negotiation process with the US investor to get market target for their service. This improvement can be the preparation for it. As added by Denny from his explanation on his email, now Sixreps is waiting for the investment process to be completed.

Unfortunately, Denny could not attend the event because of a visa problem. However, if there is no obstacle, the scale-up of the US market will be done around the new year which means in the beginning of 2012.

If we read the official press release, it seems that this is the introduction for the foreign users (US), because there are also the explanations about some features on the SixReps service as social network for fitness and sport enthusiasts in which Indonesian users has understood. As the built-in database from exercise program, fitness modules and some social network facilities are provided. There is also SixReps passport which will be available internationally.

Denny also explained that the development of SixReps.com is now concentrated on the internal factors including infrastructure and server maintenance, which are important since now they are going to work on international market. “Recently, server can accommodate up to 5000 user connections in the same time.”

Continue reading at Daily Social EN

On Tuesday night at Bengkel Nightpark, Jakarta, Google officially launched their first campaign in Indonesia to promote Google Chrome. From the release received by DailySocial, the campaign which takes ‘Jadikan Internet Seluas Kreasimu’ (Make Internet as Wide as Your Creation) is first the integrated online and offline campaign since Google was established.

DailySocial readers may have read and watch one of the TV advertisement showing this campaign. You may also check it out here. This campaign is an appreciation to web heroes—social evangelist who runs their social activities. Google explained that the video series show the possibilities happen if the internet is blended with human creativity and passion.

Henky Prihatna, Indonesia County Consultant for Google explained “Formerly, internet was used only to find or read information. Nowadays, people keep digging what else can they do on the internet. Internet has been a creative medium where we can do good things for ourselves and other people”.

There are 3 video in series will be on TV: Lia Tersayang (dear Lia), a video about a father who uses internet to save and share the memory since her daughter was born and then grows up. Blood For Life video talks about Valencia Randa who saves people’s life by connecting donor to patients who needs blood. This two video will be on TV 10th September 2011 – 8th October 2011. While Indonesia Berkebun, about by using internet, Ridwan Kamil and friends start a movement called Indonesia Berkebun, a movement to claim back green area in cities. This video will be on TV on 22nd September 2011 – 8th October 2011 (the video link is not available yet).

As mentioned before, this campaign is an online-offline integration. Two of the movement are working offline but using internet to optimize their activities. You will understand this when watching the Google TV advertisement.

From the video I watched, I will boldly say that I like it. In my opinion, Google is smart by using this kind of campaign. By supporting social movements that are not only popular on the internet, it also gives influence, advantages, and inspiration to other people. This approach is more interesting compared to Firefox approach to grass root.

Continue reading at Daily Social EN

A tweet from Kaskus founder Andrew Darwis earlier today indicates that Google is starting its TV commercial campaign in Indonesia. “Google is here… check out their TVC ad tomorrow morning 8.30″ said Darwis on his tweet, creating a wave of expectations amongst influential people in the industry.

Google is also preparing to launch Google Chrome in Indonesia, and a source told us that the TVC campaign will be about Google Chrome. Google has been pushing their browser globally, and even pushing their “The Web is What You Make of it” campaign to promote Google Chrome, it is very likely that the TVC campaign in question will be under the same campaign.

So far, Mozilla Firefox owns more than 60% market share of browsers used in Indonesia and if Mozilla still want to keep it that way they would have to do something serious about their campaigns.

Continue reading at Daily Social EN

If you had been following my tweets yesterday or read the news online elsewhere you would have known that the Indonesian government is planning to exact revenge on Research In Motion (RIM) for setting up manufacturing operations in Malaysia by imposing additional tax on imported BlackBerry devices.

Indonesia and its government has long held strong animosity towards Malaysia despite or perhaps due to the shared heritage and culture. Claims of theft over cultural aspects and the arts have long been a sore point between the two countries and this latest decision by RIM only adds to that long list of reasons.

Indonesia is a massive market for RIM. Its one of the few countries in the world (if not the only one) in which BlackBerry devices outsell both iPhone and Android phones combined. The BlackBerry in this country is not seen as a business device but instead it is primarily a social device.

Whether you like it or not, the BlackBerry Messenger remains the primary tool for the middle and upper classes to communicate with each other. It has taken over SMS for those who have the device. Many of those who don’t have a BlackBerry settle for something that look similar enough so they can look like and pretend as if they’re using RIM’s devices.

Recently the Canadian company decided to set up a manufacturing plant in neighboring country Malaysia despite the devices being much more popular in Indonesia. As Malaysians prefer to go with non BlackBerry phones, it becomes a curious point to some as to the reasons behind the decision.

Gita Wirjawan, chief of Indonesia’s Investment Coordinating Board posed that very question as he reacted in dismay over RIM’s choice. He asked, “why did they choose to build in Malaysia?” He cited Malaysian sales figure of BlackBerry devices which comes in at around 10 percent of sales in Indonesia.

RIM was forced by the Indonesian government last year to set up an office in the country and provided service centers following an explosion of sales in the last few years. It also demanded RIM to handle service and repair requests for its devices which had been imported even without RIM’s authorization. In other words, BlackBerry service centers are expected to deal with authorized as well as unauthorized imports.

RIM was also required to comply with the government’s censorship scheme to restrict pornographic content over Indonesia’s data connections and to open its otherwise protected network to authorities  for any lawful interception request over criminal investigations. The government additionally demanded the company to build a data center in the country which would comply with local laws and regulations to facilitate the aforementioned requests.

With the support of the country’s Industry Minister M.S Hidayat, Wirjawan is now proposing additional tax over products that are imported instead of manufactured locally. Hidayat said that the government should penalize companies whose imported products hold large market shares.

The Jakarta Globe quoted Hidayat saying, “I suggest we impose an additional value-added tax or luxury tax for such goods so that people would choose to invest here instead.”

The Globe noted that the Tax Law has a provision to allow the imposition of such a penalty over products used by the affluents whose numbers are very limited in comparison to the rest of the demographics. This proposal is still in the very early stage and won’t be implemented for a while yet.

Continue reading at Daily Social EN

AllThingsD reports that Yahoo!’s board has fired Carol Bartz as its CEO, marking the end of a rocky 30 month period under the former Autodesk leader. At the time of the appointment Bartz came across as a no-nonsense leader who’s out to make sweeping changes into how the company is run. A year into her role, it didn’t seem like anything was changing More than two years after her appointment, the board has had enough.

While Yahoo! began as a web directory, it has been unclear in recent years as to what the company wants to become. Aside from Flickr, startups that it had acquired had mostly vanished or been fully absorbed with little significance among other more popular web properties. Even Flickr has been overshadowed by Facebook and Instagram. Yahoo’s own ventures to other web services have mostly been complete failures.

The strongest of Yahoo!’s stable is actually made up of its news properties but the company doesn’t seem to recognize that enough to act on affirming that position or using that as a spearhead for the company’s direction. While during Bartz’s leadership, it had acquired Associated Content, a citizen journalism site of some sorts, it was considered as scraping the bottom of the barrel.

Bartz herself confirmed her firing from Yahoo through an email to the company.

Continue reading at Daily Social EN

We just received an anonymous email letting us know that Foursquare has requested assistance from RIM to feature the latest version of the Foursquare app in the BlackBerry AppWorld. The reason for this request is apparently support for additional languages.

According to the email, the next Foursquare app update will have localization support for Thai, Indonesian, Russian, Portuguese and Korean languages. The app will be made available from September 1. No word as to the localizations for Foursquare’s apps on other platforms such as iOS and Android at this moment.

Continue reading at Daily Social EN

After its rousing 8th meetup, which also celebrated as its first anniversary in last February, this month Bancakan 2.0 will hold its 9th meetup. Bancakan 2.0 is a startups and developers community in Yogyakarta. The event takes the Ramadhan moment this year. This meet up will present three speakers from Yogyakarta.

The event will be on Friday, August 19th 2011, starting from 3.30 pm, at AngkirngQ Café, Jln. Pandega Satya No. 10, Jakal KM 5.8, Sleman, DI Yogyakarta.

Continue reading at Daily Social EN

Today the iOS mobile reader Scoop announced 300k magazine circulation downloads from their iPad app and announce the latest version of Scoop that supports iPhone and iPod devices.

Scoop is growing fast, way faster than we can imagine by adding more and more publishers to their mobile reader platform. In total they have more than 160 publishers and over 800 magazine editions inside their app in only nine months since they first launched November last year. Scoop is gathering not only print media but also online media and blogs to provide them with content.

And today Apps Foundry officially launches Scoop for iPhone and iPod devices to support the growth from their previously popular iPad app.

Continue reading at Daily Social EN

Dear Koprol and Yahoo,

You guys have been working together for over a year and Koprol has been around for over 2.5 years but we haven’t seen major adoption of your service by third party apps and services thanks to your lack of open API. What is going on? Why can’t you guys get your shit together so you can finalize and release your damn API?

Many of your feature releases are ahead of Foursquare. Those guys are actually catching up with a lot of the stuff that your team put together in the past two years, these include image hosting, threaded comments, nearby venues, business profiles, and venue reviews.

So why aren’t you throwing your weight around?

You’re like that guy who everybody knows is faster than the guys racing on the track but you can’t be bothered to get your ass down there and show that you actually are.

Continue reading at Daily Social EN

No, unfortunately I wasn’t the one visiting Silicon Valley but the privilege went to Shinta Dhanuwardoyo, the former CEO Plasa.com and currently the Managing Partner for Nusantara Ventures. She visited Silicon Valley to meet some of the most influential people in the tech industry, and she’s kind enough to share her story with us (so we don’t need to go to Silicon Valley ourselves).

warning : photos attached can cause severe envy-ness!

So Shinta, what’s the story you can share with us?

I was invited to the Facebook office, after Javier Olivan head of International Growth of FB attended and spoke at IDBYTE 2011. He told me he was impressed with Indonesia and he wanted me to go to Palo Alto’s office to talk to his team regarding Indonesia’s digital landscape especially on Mobile. Javier also told me that I will be meeting with Sheryl Sandberg during the visit. So on that occasion I decided to visit them in Palo Alto last July 28, at their Headquarter. I got the honor to meet with Sheryl Sandberg and spoke with her a bit on Indonesia and her initiative on the Women in tech.

She was excited for my visit and of course I was thrilled to meet her. She told me that she would want to visit Indonesia soon, especially that she acknowledged the leap growth of Indonesian FB users and the mobile aspect of it. The office is really cool, the concept is just open office even Sheryl and Mark are out on the floor with everyone else. I didn’t got a chance to speak to Mark Z, however, I got to see him inside the glass meeting room. I presented regarding Indonesia to Javier’s team which included in front of Ran Makavy the Snaptu’s founder (the Mobile app company that was bought by Facebook). They were impressed with Indonesia’s mobile landscape, since we know most of Facebook users in Indonesia are using mobile to connect. Then got to eat lunch with his team at the Facebook diner and did the tour around the office.

I notice that you went to meet Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook’s COO and Katie Stanton, Twitter VP of International Growth. What was that about and how did it went?

I visited Twitter office on the first day of my SF trip on the 27th of July. Unfortunately, I didnt get a chance to meet with Katie, since she was on vacation but she asked me to meet up with Jana Schmidht, Director of Mobile and Laura Gomez from Localization. From the mobile, Jana said she would like to support Indonesia from mobile side and from Laura, she talked about Twitter in bahasa Indonesia and the translation. Jana mentioned she would love to be more engaged with Indonesian mobile landscape.

How do you think Facebook and Twitter sees indonesia, strategically speaking? Any plans from them you can share?

Facebook is always concern from the users side, they want to grow users and so for Indonesia since it is mobile that drive the growth in this country. Snaptu is one acquisition that they made to make mobile experience for FB to the next level: “mobile for all ” on FB. Twitter on the other hand admitted had not focus so much on Indonesia yet in terms of mobile landscape, but they realized already the potentials and will be on their toes soon.

How is the startup and entrepreneurial scene in SF compared to Jakarta? Anything we can learn from SF? The notorious geek-party perhaps?

I was also invited by Sarah Lacy to the Techcrunch First Mobile Crunchup Conference and Techcrunch 6th Annual Summer Outing at Palo Alto. Thanks to you Rama, for hooking me up with Sarah….appreciate it. The conference was mobile specific, so they had speaker from Foursquare, Bump, Instagram etc. Seems that Foursquare is still one of US favorite LBS. Other than Foursquare, there were a number of mobile companies. Kevin Systrom, CEO of Instragram announced that the Android version will absolutely happen for Instagram. The event took place in AOL building, an amazing and vast space devoted for start ups. I had a great chat with Sarah Lacy as well, who is going to pregnant on her last trimester and yet she looked so energetic talking about her upcoming trips after she is giving birth. Thank you Sarah, for inviting me to such a cool event.

Afterward, I went to the Techcrunch 6th Annual Summer Party which was hosted by August Capital. This was the scene for the Valley’s tech meet up, and this was where I met a number of VCs and lots of startups and even people from Google, Facebook and other more established Tech companies. I met a number new companies that I have not heard of before like Wishpond, isocket, etc. It wasjust a networking session but I can feel the air was difference with a blanket of excitements from various startups able to mingle with the more established companies and a pool of eager VCs.

Continue reading at Daily Social EN

With the revelation that Google is planning to open an office in Indonesia, a lot of the talk has been about how it would be beneficial for them to do so, but many of the arguments I see on a number of blogs, news articles and on Twitter show a misunderstanding of the benefits.

Most highlighted the argument that Google as a corporation would be more accessible to Indonesians, that it would be able to do more direct interaction with Indonesia and understand the market a lot better. After all, Indonesia’s 230 million people is the fifth largest in the world and with only 40-odd million internet users it’s a market that can’t be ignored.

Common Argument
An oft-mentioned fact is how prolific Indonesians are in social networking sites as if it’s a major factor in establishing a local presence.

Many of those citing the number of Facebook users, Twitter activities, and blogging frequencies seem to forget that establishing a local office or striking an investment deal rely on much more than just a simple population count.

Additionally, most of the arguments put forward reflect more towards Indonesia’s advantage in having Google (or any other major internet company) establishing a presence here rather than seeing it from Google’s point of view.

A different angle
Of course, having an office here would allow any company to get to know the market more intimately.

Additionally, despite having tens of millions of people connected to the Internet, the majority of Indonesians are still not fully aware of what it is. Most see the Internet as an alternative marketplace and a cheap way to connect with other people. Even the local term to “go online” is to “play on the internet”…

Continue reading at Daily Social EN

According to Google’s internal data, search queries coming from mobile devices in Indonesia are increasing fast and growing over 112% each year. This puts mobile search queries responsible for approximately 50% of the entire Google search queries coming from the country.

Google’s internal data states that Indonesia’s internet user base is growing at a modest 15% annual rate. It’s unsurprising for those who have been looking at Indonesia’s internet market that home broadband penetration is growing slowly while smartphone adoption is increasing as price for devices gets cheaper.

Continue reading at Daily Social EN

At last night’s MobileMonday in Jakarta, Nickhil Jakatdar, co-founder and CEO of Vuclip flew down from the United States and presented some insights into mobile video consumption. Vuclip is a company that delivers mobile videos to any video-enabled device.

While it’s dwarfed by YouTube, Vuclip still delivers more than 350 million videos per month to more than 25 million viewers in 200 countries around the world. It’s primary markets include India, Saudi Arabia, United States, United Kingdom, Indonesia, and Mexico.

Jakatdar’s visit coincides with the release of Vuclip’s latest Global Video Insights report which the company makes available on a monthly basis. The report reveals that aside from a dip in February, the number of mobile video consumers have been on the rise this year.

Vuclip had delivered just over 200 million videos to mobile devices in January and in June that number had crossed 350 million, a 175 percent increase in six months. The number of viewers went from 18 million in January to over 25 million in June. That means the average number of video views per person had gone from around 11 per month to 14. In a single month, Vuclip delivers 750 terabytes of video.

Jakatdar remarked that by 2014, smartphones and other mobile devices will pass traditional computers as the primary devices in which consumers watch videos. Currently, the iPhone is the top device for watching video in Vuclip’s environment.

This corresponds to a report released in May 2011 by FreeWheel which discovers that 80% of mobile video consumption in the US happens on an iOS device with 30 percent each on iPhone and iPod touch and 20 percent on the iPad.

Continue reading at Daily Social EN

DailySocial readers must know the local location based social services such as Yahoo! Koprol, Urbanesia, and Personaflag, for Yogya, beside Personaflag there is another location based social service called t4nya.com.

This one social media is quite interesting, has a slight difference from the others and a little bit unique. The first approach is mark a favorite location and then user can add photos, give score and comment to the place they’ve visited before, able to find places, location and new relations.

It’s quiet interesting from UI and UX side and also user friendly. The users have been given the privilege to add important places or their own favorite location on the map. It’s easy to add places and the funny icons display in each category made me comfortable in using t4nya.com. Even though it’s still in beta version, t4nya.com is such an addictive social service.

For users the registration process is very simple, you don’t need to fill in a registration form, simply login with your Facebook account. It’s also easy to add favorite places or important places with photos include in it, captions and comments on the site is very easy in t4nya.com. After the above process, users can also share their activities to Facebook and Twitter.

Continue reading at Daily Social EN

Last Saturday, Project Eden held a pitching for the 20 participants who signed up to get funding and incubation, the event is in conjunction with a series of Bizconnect PPKI events.

From the 20 participants, eventually Project Eden committee chose the big five for closed pitch interviews session. Before this stage, Kevin Mintaraga explained that 52 participants were selected through online registration. They choose the 20 best business proposals to pitch their idea for five minutes to the Project Eden committee.

As written by Kompas.com, the five participants who passed are Bumble Games Indonesia, Telunjuk, PointBump, Arsanesia, and LocalBrand.

Kevin Mintaraga and Natali Ardianto explained via email to DailySocial, the five elected will conduct a closed pitch interview as a continuation of the initial selection, Natali said, “It could be in the first closed pitch interview we did not directly accept the startup, but we give a kind of mentorship to sharpen their business plan, we might even offer to do a pivot so the business plan become more focused, and they did another pitch interview with a business plan that has been sharpened.”

When asked about the reasons why Project Eden choose the best 5 as mentioned above, Kevin said that they had the initial idea, founder who have a vision and integrity and the opportunity to developed product that will be accepted by market, while Natali explains that in addition to good products, this five ‘winners’ has a founder passion, sharp and focused. This kind of character is sought by the committee of Project Eden.

The toughness in a founder became one of the important things, Natali exemplifies PointBump, originally PointBump was an underdog, but after a pitch session yesterday, Project Eden decided to pick them, one reason was that Project Eden saw firsthand the founder passion and believes in his product.

Continue reading at Daily Social EN

It’s time for Dailylicious‘ weekly recap, but before we write a variety of information received by DailySocial editorial, we would like to apologize to our readers at DailySocial because since last week DailySocial suffered from a server down and cannot be accessed, hopefully this time we managed to get rid of the gremlins who dwell in our servers and DailySocial can always be accessed smoothly.

The first news that appears on Dailylicious is about a short list of businesses that use ‘nesia as their last name, it’s quite interesting because if we previously knew about Urbanesia, there are some startup or other businesses that use the last name nesia, such as Golfnesia, Fanesia (we have discussed it in DailySocial), Exportnesia, Kuponesia and others, along with a brief list of links can be viewed from this link.

Before getting into other information from Dailylicious, there is an update from the news about Kapanlagi acquisition, the news is still a rumor though and we will update it if there’s any further information. In addition there is information relating to RIM, API for BBM has been opened for public since a week ago, we also write about BBM social platform explanation, BBM social platform that doesn’t mean BBM for IOS or Android. We also have article about Dealkeren post Livingsocial acquisition.

Next in Dailylicious there is an interesting statements from Jeremiah Owyang or @jowyang, an Industry Analyst at the Altimeter Group, he Tweet a statement that if you feel you have no competitors, the answer is there are only three, you were in the wrong market, self-denial, or both, so competition is not always bad in fact good for business development.

Still about Google+, this time @niwat0ri passes his opinion with ‘the chicken comics’ – ChickenStrip, this time the chicken expressed his opinion about Google+ circle, want to know what he thinks, check it out via this link.

Back to DailySocial, there are several services that change their look, and launched the latest version of each service, Rockto and Tonehighway are two of them. Koprol also officially held a press conference to introduce the new look of their sites for both desktop and mobile as well as commemorate Koprol 1^st anniversary under Yahoo, for complete information can be read at this link and this.

Continue reading at Daily Social EN

Brand new location-based social game Bouncity is about to enter its first month of operation following its limited launch on June 8 with a BlackBerry application. Why BlackBerry? It’s the most prominent smartphone in Indonesia and its owners are among the most active users of social media.

In less than 30 days, Bouncity has apparently gained 16 thousand users with more than 500,000 activities completed according to founder and CEO Wenas Agusetiawan. That’s just over 31 activities per registered user. When averaged over the past month, it’s slightly more than one activity per person per day. It also has amassed 75 thousand venues in its database

If projected, that growth would put Bouncity at 96 thousand users by the end of the year. However, the company is working on making Bouncity available on iPhone and Android by the end of July, though word has it that the iPhone app will be released sooner. With availability in additional platforms, it’s reasonable to expect bigger growth compared to the current adoption rate.

Continue reading at Daily Social EN

Today, the local location-based social network Koprol rolls out their new revamped version of the site but it’s currently not available as your default look. In order to see the #newkoprol, you’d have to go to new.koprol.com and use it there. The Yahoo company also start using promoted hashtags as a way to make money where advertisers can promote their content inside the service.

The Yahoo-company also rolls out new design for its mobile site synchronizing the look and feel with its new web UI and features. The new look is quite nice, sleek and minimal with full focus on the content and the sidebar although ironically they doesn’t seem to be giving enough exposure to the popular hashtags section (one of their source of income).

Continue reading at Daily Social EN

Editorial: Today’s topic is gaming, an industry that knows no age and continue to exist in various forms ranging from gaming consoles to social mobile gaming. The most important question for gaming startup is, how’s the monetization? In here Didiet of OneBit Media will try to share insights about the gaming business model in Indonesia.

There is an interesting phenomenon in social media lately in Indonesia. Some of the platform began to declare themselves as an online game platform. Friendster, as written in DailySocial, a social media platform ever rising and is very popular in Indonesia, to re-launch itself as an online gaming platform. In addition to Friendster, mig33 which has tens of millions of users in Southeast Asia began planning to sell virtual goods in the Asian market and moved their office to Singapore. Even Nokia held a Game Developer War which I see quite successful capture and publicize the potential seeds of local game developers Indonesia.

First step into the game industry, I was quite logical considering a website as well as a platform now cannot rely solely on the number of hits alone. Other parameters such as hang time also determines how attractive a website and a platform in the eyes of users, and gaming is the most surefire way to keep the user using the website/platform. One key to the success of Facebook is the existence of those games that made by ​​Zynga on that platform that managed to attract new users to be a Facebooker and also adding value to existing users by providing engangement media through online games.

Basically an online game is not a new thing in Indonesia. Game publishers like Lyto who managed to take billions of dollars in revenue from Ragnarok Online, Rising Force Online, and many more. There is also Megaxus with Audition Online which brand with the name AyoDance in Indonesia, and most recently that the author knows of is Point Blank, published by Gemscool. Maybe their names are less popular in the startup world in Indonesia, given that most Indonesian startup is web-base, but their monetization model is one of the most successful in Indonesia. The issues such as the lack of online payment system and the low adoption of credit cards are not holding them back from monetizing their users, and beside the fact they do have a community that has thousands of members.

Their way of monetizing player is using the most familiar way in Indonesia, namely the sale of virtual goods. They also issued a voucher in some nominal whether physical vouchers or through gateways like GudangVoucher (GV), IndoMOG and similar services. Vouchers can be exchanged for cash or coins to be exchanged later with the virtual goods that exist in their game. The method is virtual goods more attractive to the users in Indonesia rather than subscription. With selling virtual goods they can promise their game free for lifetime but requires certain items to make it easier to conquer the game, or just to beautify avatars like what happened in Audition/Ayodance. Yes, a variety of beautiful and blink-blink accessories and will raise the prestige of the holder of the characters.

Continue reading at Daily Social EN