MavenSay, a social recommendation app, just got a surge of unplanned downloads coming from Indonesia, and its founders are moving quickly to include Southeast Asia in its expansion plans as a result. The company’s Toronto-based co-founder, Jesse Dallal, said the two-month old app got 100,000 downloads over the past fortnight. It has a total of 130,000 downloads so far, and the sudden surge… → Read More
Hon Hai is planning to diversify its business away from producing Apple devices by signing an agreement with Indonesia to make and sell handsets in that country, reports Reuters. A Hon Hai spokesman said that the company, which derives about 60 to 70 percent of its revenue from manufacturing work for Apple, hopes to sign the agreement next month. Hon Hai, the parent company of Foxconn, is one of… → Read More
Apps Foundry just announced that it has raised $2.42 million (S$3 million) in a Series B round of funding. The Indonesian company is registered and headquartered in Singapore, and this round of funding has come from Indonesia’s largest media group, Kompas Gramedia. The company’s main product is a digital newsstand app called Scoop. This round of funding will go towards Apps… → Read More
As the War of the Asian Mobile Messaging Apps heats up, Indonesia is becoming one of the most important battlegrounds for players like WeChat and Line–and TV ads are a surprising but effective part of their artillery. Though the country currently has one of the lowest Internet penetration rates in Southeast Asia, a large and youthful population (27% of its 242.3 million people is 14 or younger)… → Read More
Indonesian game developer, TouchTen, has been signed up as Gimmie’s exclusive game distributor in its country. Gimmie is a start-up by former lead programmer at PopCap Games, Roy Liu, and David Ng, who led business development at ChinaCache. The company employs a model typically found in fun fairs, which offers real prizes as rewards for playing. After a recent pivot away from Silicon Valley… → Read More
Another day, another unfortunate piece of news out of Groupon’s international operations. Today it’s that SoSata, Groupon’s Indian site, got hacked. In a letter to users, Groupon encouraged them to change user names and passwords and assured them no financial information was compromised because none is stored on the site. Compared to the flood of angry headlines about Groupon of late, this… → Read More
JAKARTA– I’m mid-way through a trip to Indonesia at the request of the State Department, and I’m finding a hard time putting the experience into words. You’d think after two years of writing about other countries it’d be easy. I can’t remember if it was always this hard, or there’s just something different about this trip.
Maybe it’s the added surreal layer that this time, I’m flying around… → Read More
Another day, another example of RIM having to buckle to governmental pressure in order to stay in business. It has emerged that RIM has agreed to filter pornographic content on Indonesian BlackBerrys as a direct result of a government request. While this isn’t the first time that RIM has had to accommodate various government requests, it does represent the first time that RIM has greed to filter… → Read More
Someone needs to make me a “Where in the world is Eduardo Saverin?” logo. Following up on my story that he was holed up in a penthouse in Singapore investing in Facebook games, comes news that Saverin has hopped over to Indonesia to meet with some startups. Pictured to the left is Saverin with Aria Rajasa of GantiBaju– a company I wrote about here that won the SparkxUp awards in… → Read More
Andy Sjarif has an almost weird, man-crush on Google. No matter what crazy things Eric Schmidt may promise shareholders, Sjarif is in no doubt that the great and mighty Google can achieve them. Self-driving cars? Trips to the moon? Wind farms? All in a day’s work at the Googleplex. Google with its execution, its Ph.Ds and its algorithms is Sjarif’s mahaguru.
But – all that said – he still wants… → Read More
Silicon Valley and Wall Street both bash Yahoo a lot these days, but if there’s one place the company has excelled it’s in Asia. Its Alibaba investment alone is one of the best deals made in the Chinese Internet, and Yahoo Japan is propping up even more of Yahoo’s stock price. Yahoo also has local portal strongholds throughout Southeast Asia, including Indonesia where it has also been one of the… → Read More
Welcome to part two of Ask a VC in Southeast Asia. This week, it’s Wilson Cuaca and Chandra Tjan of East Ventures. I shot this video in Singapore, but they invest primarily in Indonesia where East is one of the only traditional early stage VC firms.
Over delicious crab, we discuss the Web opportunities in Southeast Asia, whether startups should focus locally or globally, and perhaps the most… → Read More
JAKARTA– You’ve probably heard about the swell of Internet users coming from Indonesia. It’s already the second largest market for Facebook, after the United States. It’s “only” the fifth largest market for Twitter, but it’s number one in terms of the ratio of people online to Twitter adoption. And Google trends ranks Indonesia as the top Foursquare country– two slots above the United… → Read More
JAKARTA–It was only a few days ago I was sitting in a wheelchair getting a blood transfusion.
It was Friday night in Singapore, and I was at Clarke Quay– a pseudo-outdoor mall of clubs. It’s like a smaller scale version of the Las Vegas strip frequented by Singaporean college kids, goofy Western expats and hot Asian girls, mind-bogglingly shimmied into too-tight dresses. → Read More
As promised, my guest on Ask a VC this week is James Chan of Neoteny Labs, an early stage investment firm with operations in Singapore. Chan isn’t some banker-fied expat, he’s a “son of Singapore’s soil” as he phrases it. He was educated in the system, served his two years in the army and got a scholarship to study in the US, part at Carnegie Mellon University and part at Stanford.
That… → Read More
It’s been nice sleeping in my own bed, reconnecting with the good, ol’ echo chamber and actually getting to see my husband for the last six weeks, but I’ve been in one place too long. I am hitting the road again, hunting for good startups and entrepreneurs.
If you’re an entrepreneur thinking of pitching me, you should know I tend to get excited about four things: Wacky almost futuristic science… → Read More
A few months ago I wrote about the nascent, juicy Web market in Indonesia. It’s Facebook’s second largest market, and a place that is causing surprising swells in traffic throughout the Web 2.0 world. Yet Indonesia has been virtually ignored by Western Web companies and venture capitalists. Until recently, that is. Since my trip I’ve had more than a dozen investors, startups and… → Read More
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