E-commerce industry in Indonesia is definitely on the rise. We’ve been seeing a lot of payment gateway supporting the growth and also big name marketplace with big cash. But alas, the majority of people are still selling their products on Facebook. Yes, Facebook!

Facebook was never meant to be a place where people can sell their items but the Indonesian did it anyway. This also happens to Multiply, Friendster and even Blackberry Messenger Groups. Where there’s people gathering, there’s people trying to sell you something.

Let’s take a look at Multiply. The company pivoted from a social networking site to a marketplace because they’re seeing major growth of sellers using Multiply in many Asian countries like Phillipine, Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam.

After the pivot, Multiply is now considered as the largest online social shopping destination in Philippines with over 120,000 sellers targeting about 5 million users. Seeing the huge market in Asia, they actually moved their headquarters to Indonesia and will be concentrating their e-commerce expansion in South East Asia.

Multiply is a big company that works in a big way, but let’s take a look at a smaller business unit: the actual people who sell stuff on social media. Most of the people I know that are selling stuff on social media are young moms. From the information I’ve gathered, they’re claiming to earn $1000-$3000 per month, which is about 10-30 times more than Indonesian minimum wages of $120.

The most popular social media to sell from is Facebook. It’s easy to upload photos and spread the product by tagging everyone you know. Raise your hand if you ever been tagged on a product your friend sells. I had that experience numerous times and it’s pretty annoying. But to my surprise, based on the comments I read, people actually buy them.

The second most popular is Blackberry Messenger Group (BBM Group). Simply because it’s so easy to broadcast message across hundreds of contacts and the ability to save an image to a group is quite a convenient. Blackberry users are BBM-addicts and the fact that more than 5 million Blackberry is already at the hand of Indonesian is another convenient factor to include.

Personally I found that selling on Facebook or Blackberry Messenger Group to be cumbersome. But it’s a lot easier for a lot of people if you factor that they’re already accustomed to the system. E-commerce system like tokopedia may provide a simpler and more direct approach at e-commerce but IMHO it still cannot beat the number of sporadic sellers in Facebook or BBM Group, nor can it defeat the amount of people (millions of potential buyers!) already using the platform.

The use of Blackberry Messenger as a sales tool is not exclusive for the personal sellers, some brands use it as well. We are seeing more and more malls using BBM as a platform to broadcast discounts. How about Brodo Footwear that uses BBM as a customer service channel. Brodo have 2 dedicated blackberry device with over 1500 contacts in total. They claim that more than 50% of sales happened in BBM! That’s quite funny considering they actually have an online store with a decent shopping cart system. Maybe people are just too lazy or prefer a direct communication to an actual person on the other end even if it’s just in a form of text chat.

Social media seller is an interesting phenomenon and like it or not, it is still a popular way to sell stuffs. It may be annoying as hell but until we actually have a platform easy enough to use and wildly adapted enough then people will keep tagging you with their products and broadcast you constantly on BBMs.

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Aria Rajasa is the CEO of gantibaju.com, a clothing startup backed by a very strong designer community. His passion in entrepreneurship has gotten him to establish a number of companies in technology and design industries since leaving university.

Leading semiconductor company Advanced Micro Devices (AMD), pointed its new boss for Indonesia. Commencing as of May 1, Hermawan Susanto will be the Country Head for AMD Indonesia. Previously, Hermawan Susanto has long been involved in Indonesia IT world with Microsoft, leaving the company as Director of Central Marketing for Microsoft Indonesia. As the Country Head, Hermawan is responsible for expanding AMD’s brand equity and grow a business enterprise including cloud computing and virtualization.

Confidence in this appointment is mentioned by Nick Lazaridis, Corporate Vice President of AMD, in a press release, “Hermawan proves to AMD to build a strong foundation of assets and resources available to reignite innovation and drive growth. I believe that the knowledge and expertise about the local marker owned by Hermawan can help strengthen AMD’s business in Indonesia and we continue to deliver innovative and different solutions in business.”

Susanto has an educational background of MBA from SBM ITB and a degree of Electrical Engineering from STTS Surabaya. This new position is a great PR for Hermawan to lift AMD’s branding in competing in consumer and cloud market in Indonesia.

These last few days, I was involved in a discussion in a Facebook group that I found quite interesting and quite eye-opening about the point of view of digital strategists in this country.

One of the topics discussed was the application of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) on a blog and this elementary topic spurred reactions that I can consider representative of most people’s perspective.

Do you think a blog needs SEO? The easy, fast and without further thinking answer is: Yes! But does a blog really need SEO?

The essence of a search engine is collecting and collating (indexing) the popular, and much sought after words on the list. The more popular a word, the more likely it will be on the top of the list. So if the word we’re looking for is the full name of a blog complete with the link then what we need to be on the top list of the search result is indeed, popularity.

In other words, a blog has to be pretty popular, searched by quite a lot of people to be able to be on the top list of search result. That’s how we play the game… fair and square.

Then why do many people want to apply SEO to their blogs? I used to have an answer that’s reasonable enough for me. Thousands of blogs contain interesting articles, spread across the internet universe, so quality content cannot necessarily guarantee that the blog will be easy to find. Therefore in order to quickly stand out and be seen by search engines, they started applying SEO in the hope that the blog can capture more clicks and open up instant opportunity to quickly become popular.

The successful implementation of SEO and the ease of creating a blog not only open up opportunities for bloggers to produce better content but also inviting the opportunist to “trick” the search engine in order to raise the order of the list of certain blogs by using pay-per-click ads. So you can imagine the effect on the opportunist income by combining SEO and pay-per-click. Of course, they do not care about the result, it’s more important for search engine users to be tricked into clicking on one of their pay-per-click ads.

With the inaccuracies of search result due to the application of SEO on blogs containing pay-per-click ads, search result often filled with “junk”. So Google, as the world’s biggest search engine provider, launched a modified algorithm in February 2012 which it calls Google Panda to suppress the ranking of blogs or junk sites (low quality sites) and clean up the search results on its search engine. Ironically, the biggest player in the pay-per-click ad industry is Google with its AdSense.

Back to the headline above: does a blog need SEO? Surely now you can answer with more options.

Abang Edwin is a practitioner of online community management since 1998 long before the term social media/social networks become popular. He began his journey by experimenting with several online communities which eventually successful at that, to this day he still gives consultations about knowing character and foster online communities for brands / agencies and individuals.

He was at Yahoo! for over 4 years as a community manager. Currently he is Country Manager – Indonesia for Thoughtbuzz.net, a social media monitoring company.

[Image: Findyoursearch via Flickr - CC]

While shared working spaces have been popular around the world for quite some time, it’s only becoming popular in Indonesia in the last couple of years since the FOWAB folks in Bandung set up their fist hackerspace, which has since moved to a bigger and better location. Jogjakarta followed up by setting its own hackerspace not too long after. Since then there has been other shared spaces set up across the country and plans for more are being talked about with increasing frequency.

This increased take up of such a space is being spurred on by the rise in freelance and entrepreneurial individuals looking for places in which they can go about their businesses without having to incur expensive set up fees and deal with all sorts of leasing commitments. Coffee shops are popular spots for freelance workers and startup founders to work at but these places have various limitations which could be overcome by having shared working spaces instead.

More recently a community working space is being set up in Ubud, Bali. Cleverly named Hubud, short for Hub in Ubud, is the brainchild of three foreigners looking to set up a space of their own. Video editor Peter Wall, designer John Alderson, and United Nations consultant Steve Munroe who got together one day and decided to move forward with the idea of a shared space in Ubud.

At the moment Hubud does not have a permanent space yet but hopefully it will change soon. Hubud currently relies on Facebook to engage with the community as it does not yet have its own website, and the web address hubud.org redirects to the Facebook page.

DailySocial had an email conversation with Peter Wall a short while ago about the space and this is what he had to say:

How did the idea for a co-working space come about? I mean there are plenty of others around the world but what prompted you to set one up in Ubud? Never having been there I’m curious as to the scene and likelihood of people taking advantage of the place, so perhaps you can give me a background on that as well.

Peter W: The idea came about totally organically. I had been thinking about it for a while, as I’d been living in Toronto before Ubud and had been inspired by the work of the Centre for Social Innovation (CSI) there (which just this week announced they’re opening a third building!).

CSI  must be one of the largest co-working spaces in the world by now, so just an incredible place. And John, my partner here, had also been thinking about a co-working space for Ubud – longer than I had actually. And a friend at a ‘guy’s night out’ here in Ubud connected us.

Steve Munroe, our third partner (and also at the party) had developed a similar idea when he was living in Phnom Penh a few years back, and so we came together and just ran with it. It’s been great working together and feeding off each other and are so excited about the project moving forward!

As for Ubud, I think the community is in a really interesting place right now. There is a very powerful convergence of many different communities here and in many ways they aren’t connecting as well as they could/should be.

Of course there is the Balinese community, which is obviously very rooted here and connected to their incredibly creative traditional artistic endeavors that really put this place on the map as an artistic haven/mecca. And then there’s the Indonesian community, with people from across the archipelago who have either moved here or who come here to retreat or be inspired creatively.

And there’s the long term ex-pat community – many of whom who have been here 10, 20, or 30 years, and who have contributed a good deal to creating a unique vibe in Ubud, and finally there’s the new ex-pats, those of us (like me) who have been here only a few years, or months, or days, and who come here and find an incredible energy and vibrancy to the place.

Now these communities are all here, but in many ways aren’t connecting as much as they could or should be. So the idea behind Hubud is to have a place, a creative place, for people to come together and collaborate and work together. There are basically no large corporations here (other than a few chain hotels), so almost everyone is either a small business person or an independent freelancer. We want to create a space for these types of people to come and connect and work together, while still being independent.

What’s the place like, have you got photos to share? Is the place up and ready or have you still got some setting up to do?

We are building the community first, and the space will come second. We’re starting May 21st with a pop-up – a two week trial run at a cafe we are taking over in central Ubud. The pop-up will be the week before and the week after TEDx here in Ubud, so a lot of ideas and people will be bouncing around.

We have already connected with many Ubudians, and are hoping to connect with lots more – and want people’s input as to what type of space/community they want. We’ll then move to the next phase – finding a semi-permanent space we can rent for a few years… and then eventually we hope to build/buy our own space.

What kind of infrastructure have you got in place?

The pop-up space will have a large “mother table” to work at, and then various nooks and crannies to work at. There will be coffee, tea, etc., and a shared printer. The space will be a collection of ‘zones’ that support different activity, like a library/tech center, a conferencing pod and so forth.

What kind of scene do you expect from Hubud? Hackerspaces in Bandung and Yogyakarta are clearly technology/web oriented while Ubud is synonymous with creative writing, but something tells me it won’t be all writers. Clever name by the way

It’s a good question. I think we’ll see a large mix. We’re hoping for a mix. There are so many creative types here, writers, photographers, artists, designers, architects, filmmakers, but we think everyone is creative. Entrepreneurs are creative. Small business people are creative. So the idea is to get whoever wants to come into the space and, as someone smarter than me has said – allow accelerated serendipity to happen. One theme we anticipate in Ubud is invention/reinvention – very broadly speaking this is the totally creative space that many people are in here.

What can visitors expect from Hubud or from joining Hubud, and lastly, is there some form of membership? What’s the cost structure for visitors?

The idea is to have a membership, based on hours per month, or months per year. A drop in for 1/2 day/full day is also likely. We haven’t set up the cost structure yet. The pop-up is free, and we’ll get input from the community on what type of costs we might have. So stay tuned!

[image from Hubud Facebook page]

The more I think of it, the more I think that many music services – at least in Indonesia – are going about it the wrong way. Since 2008, Indonesia has had a number of online music download stores. Various business models were tried – an ISP tried ISP billing, telcos tried charging via SMS, and some others even had a choice of payment systems; either through SMS or electronic voucher.

Investments in (quite expensive) hosting and delivery systems were made, in an attempt to replicate what seemed to work overseas – the music download. Essentially, users will pay for a song that they want, and only the song that they want, and download it to their choice device. Most services were required to implement digital rights management (DRM) as a way to circumvent unauthorized copying, and the files themselves were usually confined to the device that downloaded the file.

Needless to say, it didn’t work. It has never delivered the results that the music industry wants, that’s for sure.

Since the obvious absence of iTunes in the market, many players tried to step up to the plate and offer music downloads. Many of these music download stores tried to emulate iTunes in one way or another – most duplicated the user interface design, some even tried to create the hardware + software ecosystem that iTunes is best at. None of these stores were hardware manufacturers, so they had to try to make the experience as seamless as possible for the user, and try to get the already large mobile user population to get used to music downloads.

Various marketing and promotion efforts were launched, as were cooperations with the music labels to offer a large selection of songs. Business negotiations took months as both parties wanted to find a balance between an attractive consumer proposition and a lucrative deal for the music labels (who represent the musicians and artistes) to make sure they get money that can be reinvested into making more music. The systems themselves took a major effort to build, not to mention the effort in promoting these services. There was no other way but to try, and see if people were receptive to music downloads.

Well, of course it didn’t work – one of the top five things that Indonesians do on the internet is search for music. And do they go to these music download stores? No, they went to 4shared, Mediafire and all sorts of other file sharing sites. Why? Because it’s just easier. And this ‘habit’ has been going on since the days of Napster, way before the technology to construct an online music download store was established.

The digital world is a somewhat double-edged sword for the music industry – one one side, the nature of digital can enable virtually unlimited scalability in terms of content sales; on the other, the same content is easily copied – and copy-protection schemes are circumvented – and distributed for free with no way for the content owner to control. Not to mention the fact that many people are ignorant about copyright laws and anti-piracy laws – they just want their music. Thus the single assumption that people want to pay for a crummy low-fidelity MP3 file – or even a high-fidelity MP3 file – should have been looked at more closely. The writing was on the wall for all to see, but of course, being part of the industry at that time, we had to give it a shot. In hindsight, it probably wasn’t worth the investment. But the strange thing is, some music download stores continue selling to this day.

There is even one store that goes out of its way to use ‘download legal quality songs’ on its billboard ads (also a bad move). Here’s what’s wrong with that sentence: the average music consumer does not care if it is legal or not, and most don’t even worry too much about quality. And if you’re selling something online, why advertise it on a billboard? Why not, you know, online?

I don’t pretend to know what the “next big thing” for the Indonesian music industry will be – something that the industry hopes can replace the ill-fated ringback tone, and the CD before it – but it’s definitely not music downloads in its current form. It could be just one service out of many offerings. Bundled music and subscription services have started to some success, but as I have said many times, the key may be with many “small things” instead of just one “big thing”. And the creativity of the ‘startup generation’ is just waiting to be tapped.

So yes, people want to listen to music. Definitely, without a doubt. Before the Internet, we had a limited number of choices on where we get our music – TV, radio, or buy the album. Now, there is almost limitless choice on the Internet. Why not create limitless choice of accessing music as well? There must be some way to rethink even on how to sell CDs or music files. And there may be many more ways to monetize music that is not dependent on copy control or fighting piracy.

Ario worked in the digital music industry in Indonesia from 2003 to 2010, and recently worked in the movie and TV industry in Vietnam. Keep up with him on Twitter at @barijoe or his blog on http://barijoe.wordpress.com

CloudIndonesiA, an independent cloud computing community established two weeks ago. In contrast to Indonesia Forum of Cloud Computing Association – Asosiasi Forum Komputasi Awan Indonesia (AFKAI) declared by Indonesian Cloud Forum. CloudIndonesiA’s member is more to people who want variety and learn together about cloud computing.

CloudIndonesiA community begins with Cloud-Indonesia mailing list set up by Alex Budiyanto on April 23, 2012. Alex then took the initiative to create a community portal and invite people to contribute. Currently about 30 people are helping to raise the community.

Alex Budiyanto, contacted via email, said that the community was formed as a medium for sharing knowledge about cloud computing and trying to positively contribute to the nation in this field. Cloud computing knowledge sharing media in Indonesia, according to Alex, is still so few so he feels the need for a special place to accommodate a wide range of resources about cloud computing.

Since its establishment two weeks ago, this community has had a mailing list with around 340 members, Facebook Group with 800 members and Twitter with around 130 followers. Member of the mailing list consists of a wide range of backgrounds from both professionals and students.

Alex added that this community is open to the public, which used a variety of platforms, both proprietary and open source. In addition to these activities in cyberspace, Alex hopes for offline activity t be able to be held at the end of this month. Furthermore, this community also plans to make cloud computing communities outside Jakarta to popularize cloud computing. At least five regions (Aceh, Makassar, Bandung, Pontianak dan Yogyakarta) are ready to make the local community.

If you are interested to participate in this community, you can go directly to the community’s portal on http://www.cloudindonesia.org/ (make no mistake with Indonesia Cloud Forum’s site that has similar address http://www.indonesiacloud.org/). This community provides free email address with up to 25Gb of storage facilities. For more information, inquiry or partnership, you can send email to info@cloudindonesia.org.

We obtained information that Susie Sugden, Managing Director of Lazada Indonesia, has resigned. This is the second resignation of the top personnel in the Rocket Internet regional group in the last month after Nadiem Makarim decided to resign as Zalora Indonesia’s CEO in April. Lazada and Zalora are the cutting edge of Rocket Internet e-commerce business in Southeast Asia. Lazada is present in mid-May of this year and focusing in the area of electronic and household items.

Of course, the resignation of these two key personnel is intriguing among the instigators of the internet businessmen. Moreover, a few days ago, a large e-commerce company in Indonesia has formed an association to improve the quality of e-commerce ecosystem of Indonesia which is in the stage of growing – with a fast growth, according to the culture shift. Unfortunately, for the time being, we are still groping in the dark, what on earth is going on inside Rocket Internet.

Susie Sugden, prior to serve as Lazada Indonesia’s leader, was working for leading consulting firm, the Boston Consulting Group. Sugden has a social science background from University of Melbourne.

In order to make it easier for users to access its services, last week Rumah.com launched BlackBerry application. The launch of this application was announced through its blog. Rumah.com hopes that the application can ease people of Indonesia in looking for houses, apartments or other property as needed.

The application will detect user’s location so it can give advice on property on sale or lease in the area. In addition, this application also features a mortgage loan calculator, property search agent and also features news about the world of property.

Chris Antonius, Country General Manager of Rumah.com, via Rumah.com’s official blog said that Rumah.com application is released for BlackBerry only. But similar application for Android and iPhoen users is under development and Chris hopes that it can be announced in the near future.

Rumah.com has been acquired by AllProperty Media that own PropertyGuru Group that has a business network covering countries in Southeast Asia such as Singapore, Malaysia and Thailand. Rumah.com’s BlackBerry application can be downloaded for free by visiting this page http://apps.rumah.com/bb from BlackBerry browser.

LintasArta strengthens cloud computing service in collaboration with its subsidiary, PT. Lintas Media Danawa (LMD). LintasArta which previously offered Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) solution, is now offering Software as a Service (SaaS) solution that is marketed by LMD. The service is more complete with network service which is LintasArta’s business.

IaaS is an infrastructure “rental” service such as data center, storage, hardware, and server for businesses. While SaaS is a software or system “rental” service such as enterprise resource planning (ERP), customer relationship management (CRM), human resource information system (HRIS), points of sales (POS) and so on.

VAS Commerce General Manager of LintasArta, Teddy Sis Herdianto, as cited by IndoTelko, explains that the cloud market in Indonesia in 2012 will increase in line with the business increase and growing national economic. The companies will be more daring to expand the products and locations throughout the entire archipelago. This will create increase of the need for ICT companies. The companies are optimistic to offer cloud computing technology to various industrial sectors.

2012 is likely to be a milestone for cloud penetration in Indonesia. Last month, XL announced its cloud service while last week, Indonesia Forum of Cloud Computing Association is declared. In recent years, we may be looking at cloud computing technology to replace IT technology used by many industries and companies nowadays.

[Image Source]

Kleepon, one of daily deals sites, holds a competition with iPad 3 as the prize. The competition is organized to continue the loyalty program which launched some time ago.

Iin Eka Putri, General Manager of PT. Kleepon Indonesia, in a news released received by DailySocial, said that the competition aims to make customers become more familiar with Kleepon’s loyalty program. In this competition, customers are required to collect loyalty points as much as possible.

There are several ways to get iPad points. To be sure, customers must be registered and have a lot of points for a chance to get iPad because only 20 participants with the most points will be drawn to get the iPad3. More about this competition is in this page.

Kleepon’s loyalty program which launched last April seems interesting enough for some merchants to join. If at the time of the launch, there were only two merchants optimized to follow this program, there are currently more than 15 merchants recorded following the loyalty program.

The effectiveness of the loyalty program is not yet visible. Two of merchant kleeps that I saw joining in the loyalty program haven’t made many sales. But only those two kleep that still have enough time until the promo ends. Maybe it needs this kind of competition for customers to compete in getting loyalty points.