Google Maps Indonesia boosted by local startups

Here’s a report on another Google event in Jakarta. We previously told you that Google Southeast Asia have lined up a week of events in the Indonesian capital, and flying in dozens of executives from the Singapore head office.

On Wednesday Google launched Google Maps Indonesia at Blitz Megaplex at Grand Indonesia in Jakarta. While the service has been around since Feb 2009, it was only this week that Google made an official public announcement.

Google Southeast Asia’s Andrew McGlinchey, who heads product management, and Derek Callow, who runs marketing, were on hand to explain the service and how they are now working with local partners to enhance Maps.

Maps has so far been limited to the standard map and overlay views with directions for those who walk or travel by car. Unlike in some other countries, Maps in Indonesia has no ability to monitor traffic or to find out public transport routes, let alone run Street View.

McGlinchey explained that the reason they haven’t said anything publicly earlier is that they wanted Maps to be mature enough first. With the launch, Maps is now available in Indonesian with its own domain at maps.google.co.id.

While there were no significant additions announced as far as feature parity is concerned, Google did announce partnerships with two local startups to provide more comprehensive information for Maps users.

One of the startups that Google has brought on board is Urbanesia which has been quietly revamping its website and working out third-party deals in the last several months.

To assist in searching venues and locations, Urbanesia’s more than 220,000 listed venues will be available for Google Maps users. With this assistance, information on Google Maps for Indonesia should be much more accurate and more relevant.

Selina Limman, Urbanesia’s chief executive, highlighted the cooperation between the search giant and her city directory. She’s counting on search results from Google Maps to attract visitors to her service as it provides much more comprehensive information than what’s listed on Maps. At the moment Urbanesia visitors average about half a million per month.

The other startup is Lewatmana, a traffic information service with video snapshots of road situations wherever traffic cameras are available. According to founder Hendry Soelistyo, his traffic cams would provide video feeds for Maps users if they choose to use the webcam feature. Though the videos are not live, they provide recent enough images to remain relevant.

At the event, Google also took the chance to announce Google Tanya Jawab for Indonesia in Bahasa Indonesia. Tanya Jawab is an Answers type service where anyone can ask questions and the answers will be provided by fellow visitors to the site.

Google is partnering with Chip magazine to provide some of the answers in the computer and technology fields. There are already hundreds of questions posted since May but the service hasn’t been openly announced until now.

Next on Google’s public agenda in Jakarta is the DevFest which will be held at Binus University on Friday.

Pictured L-R: Selinna Limman, Urbanesia CEO; Derek Callow, Google SEA marketing head; Andrew McGlinchey, Google SEA product management head; Hendry Soelistyo, Lewatmana founder
Photo credit: Aulia Masna.

Nulisbuku brings on-demand publishing to Indonesia

The other day we ran an interview with Aria Rajasa, founder and CEO of Gantibaju.com who declared that there’s absolutely nothing wrong with your startup being labeled a clone. In fact, he said that it helps people to relate to what you’re trying to achieve. It also helps if the company or service you’re modeling after doesn’t serve your region, your interest, or it doesn’t suit your intended market.

This week we will see the launch of Nulisbuku.com, an on-demand book printing service. Nulisbuku, which, literally translated, means ‘bookwriting’, was born thanks to the growing requests and wishes of writers who want to have their books published but for whatever reason couldn’t sign book deals with the traditional publishers or have difficulties contacting them. If this sounds familiar, it may be because you have heard of  Lulu, the US company that does on-demand printing, among other things.

The service is run by four young Indonesian entrepreneurs, Angeline Anthony, Aulia Halimatussadiah (better known online as Ollie or @salsabeela), Brilliant Yotenega, and Oka Pratama. The latest Indonesian startup will launch on 8 Oct at the Indonesia Book Fair in Senayan, Jakarta.

Writers can submit their books to the site and anyone interested can order the books to have them printed on demand. The company will process orders for even just one book but because it’s a printing service, it won’t accept PDF distribution. That’s for the writers themselves to figure out if and how they will deal with digital releases. For each book sold, nulisbuku will take a percentage out of the revenue to cover the printing, handling and shipping costs.

At this stage, it only offers one book template. Despite this limitation, Ollie said that there are already many kinds of books including novels, cookbooks, self help books, instructional books, photo books, and many more ready to be ordered at launch day. As part of its launch campaign, nulisbuku has signed up 99 writers to publish their books with the service and will be buzzing the online media with the tag #99writers.

Ollie also confirmed that eventually the site will offer multiple templates to choose from and if a more customized approach is to be required, there is a premium service to have the book designed and laid out manually.

Being in Asia, there’s a lot of web-based services that we wish were applicable in the region but are not. One example is Koprol (which initially began as a Brightkite clone, not Foursquare as many would have you believe) which worked because Brightkite was too focused on the US region for quite some time and a number of Indonesians wanted something with a local flavor. The same can be said about Gantibaju.com, the multitude of Groupon clones and now nulisbuku.com. At the moment nulisbuku only serves the Indonesian market. Time will tell if they can expand to the rest of the region.

Taggo turns your Facebook fans into customers

Loyalty cards can be a pain in the behind. Literally. With so many men carrying overstuffed wallets shoved into their back pockets, the rise of Wallet Sciatica seems to be increasing with each loyalty card collected.

But who passes on an opportunity for a discount? So to save a couple of dollars, we shove all our loyalty cards into that leather pouch and lug it around. The same goes for women consumers who have stacks of various loyalty cards into their purses.

Well, Singapore’s Taggo claims to have good news for us with their new Taggo.me sevice that was launched recently. (COMA’s Jacob Joseph wrote about Taggo’s story in a guest post)

Taggo.me allows merchants to reward customers for their loyalty at the point-of-sales without the hassle of handing out respective loyalty cards. In Singapore, customers can opt to use their EZ-link cards (used mainly for public transport), by registering their unique 16 number PIN on Taggo.me’s Facebook tab, or by buying an RFID sticker from any participating merchant. Registering and activating your preferred card is a breeze. Next comes the hard part.

First, you have to figure out who the participating merchants are, as there isn’t a list of merchants and their offers available yet. Next, you have to visit each merchant’s Facebook Fan Page and “Like” each of them, because only then can you enjoy the benefits of being a “loyal” customer.

Aaron Koh, Taggo’s public relations person, said that they were working on posting a list of participating merchants on Taggo’s Facebook page and me website, with “Like” buttons for each offer to make the experience more user friendly. Right now, Taggo is focusing on expanding its merchant network beyond the existing six.

Taggo’s service will definitely change the way merchants run their customer loyalty programs if it catches on. By being able to identify loyal customers and rewarding them at the point-of-sales, Taggo enables merchants to accurately target loyal customers and keep them coming back for more with their real-time promotional updates on Facebook.

Before Taggo, merchants could only use Facebook fan pages to keep potential customers informed of their various offerings. Now, not only can they physically identify their loyal fans, but they can also measure the reach and influence of their fan page and promotions by watching the fan-to-customer conversion rate.

And for the customers? If Taggo is able to enough merchants on board, this could remove the pain in the butt of carrying a stack of discount cards in your wallet.

Google’s Jakarta blitz

Google has a busy week in Jakarta. With events on every day of the working week, the Mountain View company is looking to make inroads in Indonesia following Yahoo’s high-profile entrance to the country. We heard that 30 of Google’s 120 Singapore-based staffers flew to Jakarta to handle the ‘Google week’.

On Tuesday afternoon, Google and AdMob held an event called ThinkDigital at the West Ballroom at the Kempinski Hotel in Central Jakarta. It was essentially a seminar promoting the benefits on online advertising through AdWords and AdSense. At hand were company representatives, digital agencies, bloggers, the media, and several high-profile public figures.

Many Indonesian companies, even large conglomerates and local offices of international companies, are wary of the online world, mostly seeing the internet as a place where their employees run away from their duties at work, especially now with the proliferation of Facebook and to a lesser extent, Twitter. The local colloquial expression of going online is, “to play on the internet,” which labels the internet as mostly a time-waster. While that’s arguably true, it means Indonesian companies are dismissive of the idea that the internet can be a serious business.

To many Indonesian companies, the idea of spending a portion of the budget, even a small one, to run an online campaign is still foreign and, at best, fraught with reluctance or apprehension as companies have yet to see the equivalent of a formal collection of results the way Nielsen collects data from print, TV, and radio.

Ilya Alexander of Narrada Communications lamented this reluctance by a number of his clients as his studies so far show that online campaigns can offer a better cost-to-benefit ratio than traditional campaigns. Several companies, however, have been testing the waters of online marketing through Facebook Pages and engaging high-profile individuals with popular Twitter accounts to promote their products or campaigns.

It remains to be seen what kind of fruit Google’s approach to Indonesia will bear as Yahoo ran a similar event almost exactly two years ago called the Yahoo! Purple Hour, though of course, the Indonesian online world has dramatically changed since. Yahoo’s Indonesia country lead, Pontus Sonnerstedt, back in 2008, was mulling about holding repeat events depending on the result of the first one but no such follow up occurred, at least not publicly.

Gothere on product philosophy, expansion plans and taking investments

Gothere is a navigational application that helps you find your way through Singapore. It is a good if not better alternative to Google Maps in Singapore.

Gothere launched its web service in mid-2008 and became an instant hit with its users. They receive over 3 million page views and over 500,000 unique visitors a month. The founders of Gothere started off this service by driving through each and every road in the city to provide the shortest and best route from any given location.

They have hit several milestones in the past two years. Gothere opened up its Maps API, started running advertisements on their site and recently released an iPhone app. They are also one of the most talked about apps in Singapore, according to this report from JamiQ. Their iPhone app has been rated four stars and has received raving reviews from majority of their users.

Clearly, Gothere is a popular product, has good traction and a loyal fan base – yet it is not looking for funding nor looking into expanding to other countries. Why not? We asked Dominic Ee, a GoThere co-founder, about the team’s plans and more. 

Business Model

Are you looking for investments now?

Not at the moment, we currently have sufficient funds to sustain development.

Why are you against taking external funding?

We happen to be in a market with many uneconomical players, who have the ability to out-muscle us in terms of staying power as well as technology. Location + maps are an integral part of the current mobile revolution; as a result, all the giant technology companies have huge teams working on their own maps offerings. Taking in external funding doesn’t change this, and only delays the inevitable for a company without a proven business model.

However, what we’ve observed these few months is that gothere.sg still brings a lot of utility to the ordinary consumers despite the presence of many larger and more powerful competitors. Our challenge now is to figure out how to provide a unique solution to the problem of travel/navigation and price it competitively. With the platform that we’ve built so far, we don’t need many additional resources to execute this, and if the market validates this model then perhaps we can consider taking in external funding to expand further.

Why focus on being just a Singapore-centric app. What’s stopping you from expanding to other countries?

Much of the value and utility that we create with gothere.sg is only possible because of the local knowledge that we have. Expanding to other countries is certainly possible, but not without significant costs. Without a good model to monetize a service like www.gothere.sg, it wouldn’t make sense for us to expand to other countries, especially when we are competing on an uneven playing ground against uneconomical players with deep pockets.

That’s not to say that the Singapore market isn’t big enough for a small outfit like us, especially when it comes to the mobile platform. It’s a well-known fact that Singapore has one of the world’s highest mobile phone penetration rate. In a recent publication by AdMob, Singapore ranks 11th in the world with about 400,000 iPhones, and has the highest iPhone penetration rate of about 9.6%. In terms of absolute numbers, we are even ahead of larger countries such as Taiwan, Netherlands and Spain!

What this means for us now, is that the combination of local knowledge and presence, will allow us to reach out and experiment with new ideas very quickly and efficiently in Singapore.

Other than sponsorships on sites, and the iPhone price, is there any other revenue model that gothere is pursuing?

Moving forward, we see the mobile platform as the key revenue model to pursue, so we’re focused on trying to innovate in this area and provide real value to our customers. That said, we’re always on the lookout for new ideas – one of the advantages to being a small and nimble company.

Product Updates

How has the reaction to Gothere’s iPhone app been so far?

The response has been pretty good, we climbed quickly to the Top Paid App spot and stayed there for a week. To date, we’ve had more than 10,000 downloads, and gothere.sg app has been consistently ranking among the Top 10 Paid apps in the Singapore store ever since.

At first, we were sceptical about whether people would pay for an app that is essentially a substitute to the free maps.app, preinstalled in every iPhone. We’re now heartened to know that Singaporeans are willing to pay for good design and usability.

What are some of the upcoming features?

Version 1.3 (which we’ve just released), is mostly about surfacing previously hard-to-find information such as car park rates and bus stop services and arrivals, making them more easily accessible and searchable from the main interface. Just for kicks, we also included Google Street View with compass and motion panning support.

We’re currently working on the next release of the app, with a super duper feature that we think will make some of our users squeal in delight. However, we want to save the surprise for later on, so forgive us for not sharing more at this time. :)

Other than the iPhone app, are you working on any other project?

The iPhone app is our main focus at the moment. As mentioned earlier, we’re working on a big feature for the app to be released in the next few months. If it proves to be a hit in the local market, then the possibility of developing on other mobile platforms opens up, and you should expect gothere.sg to be synonymous to travel and navigation in Singapore. ;)

Any plans on expanding to other platforms such as Android soon?

As you probably know by now, Google has just announced the expansion of the Android Market to more countries, including Singapore. This is great news for many developers, and we’re pretty excited too. We’re keenly watching developments in this space and eventually hope to bring our application to the Android platform as well.

Lastly, what’s your favourite iPhone app (besides Gothere) of all time?

Reeder – a Google Reader client. We like that the app developer made it a priority to make reading pleasurable, which is the main reason why we subscribe to feeds in the first place. All the other frills are neatly tucked away, and don’t interfere with the main goal of reading. This is something that we try to practice when designing our applications as well. :)

Singapore puts up $38M for foreign tech execs

Singapore’s National Research Foundation has earmarked US$38 million (SGD50 million) to invest in foreign tech firms so that these executives and entrepreneurs can guide Singapore-based startups, the foundation’s chief executive, Dr Francis Yeoh, told us.

“We have known for a long time that the critical part of the ability to succeed in higher-risk startup companies is the guidance of more experienced entrepreneurs,” he said at an investment conference in Singapore. “The idea is to bring such entrepreneurs to Singapore.”

We interviewed Yeoh at the NRF-sponsored Techventure conference at Marina Bay Sands, where the foundation’s chairman, Dr Tony Tan, had earlier announced plans for the fund. It is called the Global Entrepreneurs Executives scheme. Singapore’s Straits Times quoted Tan saying: ‘To create Singapore’s own Google, we need the Eric Schmidts who have the broad executive managerial experience to complement the technologically-brilliant founders like Larry Page and Sergey Brin.”

Yeoh told us that the NRF had not settled on the selection criteria for the target entrepreneurs yet, although it wanted individuals with a proven track record of success in multiple companies, and who had received investment from top-tier venture firms. He said the NRF would take a stake in these companies with the earmarked funds.

“They should come with their companies and get into the ecosystem here,” he said.

The foundation is active in Singapore’s startup scene. It runs a matching fund, called the Tech Incubation Scheme, which has attracted international firms like Neoteny Labs, among others.

Gobi helps Singapore startups enter China

Gobi Partners wants Singapore-based startups to apply for its China market-entry programme called Gobi China Launchpad.

The China-based venture fund announced a new US$74 million fund for China and Singapore-based startups in August. The Gobi Singapore-China Media Ventures Fund targets “digital media” startups seeking early or growth stage funding.

“Our main goal is to help Singapore-based companies enter the Chinese market. Upon successfully completing the Launchpad programme, Gobi would like to have first right to invest in the companies should they be looking for financing,” said Ku Kay-Mok, the partner at Gobi Partners Singapore who is running the programme.

Mok is running the programme with James Tong of Dextrys, an outsourcing firm in China, who is based in Suzhou. The programme will work with three companies for three months to launch a product or service in China. It will also pay up to 50% of travel, accommodation and other costs. Only “digital media” companies need apply, though. Ku clarified the term:

“Digital media is used very broadly and may include but not limited to, consumer services, e-Commerce, online, media advertising and applications, games and education.”

With submissions closing on 11 Oct, Ku said the response has been good.

“We have received a number of enquiries so far, so we are looking forward to a healthy participation level at the close of the call,” he said.

The programme is managed by Gobi and does not involve Singapore government agencies. Ku has been involved in television production at Xinya Media, a Gobi portfolio company, and at Singapore’s Mediacorp. He has also co-founded an application service provider called Private Express in the US and was part of Singapore’s Media Development Authority’s new-media fund.

Why startups should feel good about being called a clone

Aria Rajasa is a co-founder of Indonesian startup Gantibaju, which crowdsources T-shirt designs. Of course, that’s also what Threadless does. In this guest post, Aria explains how he deals with Gantibaju being given the uncomplimentary label of ‘clone’.

“Isn’t Gantibaju.com just an Indonesian copy of Threadless?”

Yes, we heard people say those words a lot of times. So many times that people started asking me whether I felt offended being compared like that. Well the simple answer – and what I usually tell people – is no.

Why not?

It’s very common for people to compare two services that are similar to one another, especially if one of them is more famous. Take location-based service Koprol, for example. It’s considered Indonesia’s Foursquare. Then there’s Sendokgarpu.com which is supposedly Indonesia’s Yelp. The list goes on.

So I don’t see why it would be a problem to be compared. In fact I can go so far as to say that it’s quite beneficial for us to be compared to another brand. Here’s at least three reasons why:

1. It’s easier for people to relate

Usually, we don’t have that much time to explain our business to consumers, and sometimes people just don’t get what we do — especially when communicating on Twitter with only 140 characters.

So it’s easier for me to start by giving an example of a similar brand. Saves us time and the idea is delivered. Here’s pretty much what I would say:

“Yeah we’re like Threadless, but all of our designs must be about Indonesia”

Simple, easy to understand and to pass around.

2. It keeps us on our toes

Being constantly compared means that we have to always improve. Many of our designers are also regulars at Threadless and they often ask for features on Threadless that aren’t available on Gantibaju.com.

When we do something or have a feature that is subpar compared to Threadless, people complain about it, and all that feedback is priceless! We need that kind of regular feedback to keep us motivated and being compared to a service like Threadless helps people give that kind of focused feedback to us.

3. It provides a great benchmark

Sometimes it’s a bit hard for us to see where our company is going or are we growing fast enough on a given time. Having a conparison can provide a good benchmark on how we’re currently doing. If it takes them one year to have 10,000 users then we’re doing pretty awesome ourselves if we reach the same number in less than a year.

So there you have it, three reasons that changes a negative comment into a motivational one and to use it as a tool for your own good.

Feel free to comment as this is very debatable. I would love to hear your opinion if you think that being called a copycat would damage a brand

This is part of a series of guest posts featuring first-hand insights, experiences and advice from personalities in Asia’s startup scene.

Evernote’s Phil Libin mentors Founder Institute Singapore

Founder Institute, a startup mentorship-driven program will be closing their application for the second semester tomorrow (Oct 5). The applicants will be notified of their acceptance into the program by Oct 8.

Evernote’s chief executive, Phil Libin will be speaking at the first session of the Founder Institute program.

Founder Institute started its first semester in Singapore in March 2010. Adeo Ressi, founder of TheFunded and Founder Institute who was in Singapore last March to kick-start the first semester, will be back this semester to mentor a new batch of companies.

Founder Institute has a four month curriculum to train entrepreneurs in various aspects of building businesses. They are trained by overseas as well as local mentors. They hold a session every week in the evening, after work hours. Each session is led by three mentors who share their insights and opinion on different topics listed in their curriculum.

Founders also work closely with their peers and teams to complete assignments provided by the mentors.

iSyndica’s co-founders on what went wrong

We reported last week that Singapore-based startup iSyndica would be ending its services on Oct 10.

Our post attracted comments from iSyndica’s co-founders on what went wrong. Some of the comments were rather long, so we have parsed them for you.

Of course, the oft-quoted statistic is that nine out of 10 startups fail, but the failures don’t get as much attention as the successes. So we appreciate the iSyndica folks for their candidness.

Here’s the updated story:

iSyndica is a cloud-based tool where one could upload a multimedia creation and sell it via their distribution platform. Their offering to customers was, “turn their passion into profit.” To sign up for this service, users had to pay a certain amount.

iSyndica was founded by four partners, Gwyn Jones, Hugo Angelmar, Thomas Gorissen and Sebastien Coursol.

Jones resigned iSyndica early this year, citing personal reasons. According to Jones, Coursol resigned recently. Angelmar told us that he left the company in early July.

According to this comment on our original post from Jones, “The investment terms included a clause that if both founders (myself and Seb) were to leave the company, then the company would be closed down, and any money left returned to the investors.”

Jones also said that money “wasn’t directly the issue” since iSyndica had raised US$1.1 million in funding.

Coursol, who was the firm’s CTO, had similar sentiments to Jones, as he wrote in a long post on 29 Sept on a forum for microstock photographers, one of the groups of people who used iSyndica’s services.

“iSyndica had some reasonable backing, however the business results were disproportionately small in comparison to the original objectives,” Coursol wrote.

According to Coursol, iSyndica’s business model was broken. It couldn’t get enough users to pay and it couldn’t make a commission from distributing content because of stiff competition:

Because, from the start, based on our positioning as a tool for contributors, and not a microstock agency on steroids (with distribution), we were caught between a rock and a hard place: most potential users don’t really feel like paying and we can’t make a commission on content sales for fear our distribution network would collapse under anti-distribution warfare from agencies who would see us as direct competitors endangering their supply line.

Coursol used a Starbucks analogy to explain why iSyndica couldn’t charge its users enough:

Most of us, me included, have no problem spending $5 at Starbucks to get a coffee. Well, heck dude, you can get a coffee just about as good, if not better, for 50 cents if you make it yourself. I don’t see us counting our pennies then, right? You enjoy the coffee and forget you just pissed out $4.50.

When it comes to providing a service that revolves around you (or I) making money, suddenly prices become a much more sensitive story. You start comparing your income versus your cost. And the truth of the matter (some here pointed that too) is that the majority of contributors really don’t make that much. And because most people don’t value their time, the $5 spent on a coffee suddenly becomes a more attractive proposition than $1 spent on saving you a couple hours of work.

In the end, Coursol wrote, although the company had funding and decent technology, it couldn’t generate enough profits to justify continuing with it.

You do not get investors without having to measure yourself to some minimal expectations. And thus, while the platform was technically sound and could have gone further. But in terms of business, in terms of pure profitability, we shot ourselves in the foot (and the head) from the start and it was time to pull the plug, instead of pissing money in a black hole.

Jayesh Parekh, one of the firm’s early investors, told us in an email after our first post went up: “We started a service that showed good prospect a couple of years ago. We launched the service and it did not take off as expected. And now the majors are getting into the same space. So we decided to return the balance of the money back to the investors. Got to keep trying. Keep at it.”