KASKUS expands to Improve Services

Year 2011 will be a new chapter in the history KASKUS for 11 years. Where, as The Largest Indonesian Community, KASKUS will expand both in terms of infrastructure, human resources and business networking sites in an effort to become number 1 in Indonesia and become a global player in the internet industry world. KASKUS will focus to go with perfecting Social Community Forum & Commerce Forum, which became its strength today, and also integrate it as a network-based citizen journalism and online trading.

Plan for KASKUS arranged in Outlook 2011 is what was announced in a press conference held in Ballroom A Grand Indonesia Kempinski today (Wednesday, March 9, 2011).

On the same occasion, KASKUS also announced a new partner in its business expansion efforts that have been running since January 2011 with the company's GDP (Global Digital Prima). "The decision not to expand the management to others is to enlarge the network KASKUS and to be able to move more aggressively than the year - previous years so that it can bring KASKUS to a higher level again." Reveal Lawadinata Ken Dean - CEO KASKUS Networks. The presence of these new partners does not change the order of policy and management structure, in addition to enlarge the team. "The vision, priority to the comfort and add users KASKUS, as well as long-term strategy in view the opportunity to be a primary consideration KASKUS acceptable to the GDP. This is what distinguishes the GDP of the other partner," said Ken.

With this expansion, KASKUS known through the Community Forum and Commerce Forum was, not only will improve both their products are, but also optimize its online payment system, known as Kaspay, advertising facilities, KasAds, as well as access on mobile KASKUS more broadly and aggressively.

Social Commerce - Community, Marketplace, and Trust

Amid the rise of online businesses that tend to focus to increase the number of users without concentrating on the benefits to the user, whether Commerce Forum or Community Forum admiration of users by providing benefits to them. Not limited to facilitate them to interact, but also as a source of livelihood, as evidenced by more than 2.6 million members KASKUS to date, with total access of up to 53 million and the number of pages accessed per month, nearly 900 million.

KASKUS will improve the quality of content contained on the forums KASKUS by presenting expert contributors, as well as increase the number of forums in accordance with the trends and user needs. Similarly, Commerce Forum service will be added and customized, not only to enhance user convenience in transaction, but also to answer the needs of more sellers and buyers with different characteristics.

Communities that have been solid with the confidence that has been formed will be able to support e-commerce activity in Commerce Forum that still hindered the issue of trust. Starting this year, Commerce Forum will be a place of sale and purchase activity is more comfortable and trusted with Social Commerce format that allows the user to minimize the risk of online transactions through reviews, recommendations and testimonials, plus new features like bidding system, bargain, and preferred payment method in accordance with the characteristics of the Indonesian market. To support the optimization of these two features, KASKUS also will integrate Kaspay as one means of payment used in Commerce Forum, and KasAds that can reach all potential advertisers, especially SMEs who do not have a big budget. KasAds is also targeting mid-tail market, where KASKUS will work with local sites to help them more developed. KASKUS open opportunities for local sites to cooperate with KASKUS.

Improve Infrastructure. Add Server Up 250.

To increase the network strength KASKUS in providing convenience to users and attract more users, the infrastructure this year KASKUS accretion target of doubling the server to 250 servers. It is also balanced by the addition of labor to approximately 80 personnel to reinforce the existing division in KASKUS i.e., programmers, sales, marketing, customer relations and creative team. KASKUS even have started to recruit professionals from top IT companies in Indonesia.

Overview of the GDP (Global Digital Prima)

PT Global Digital Prima (GDP) is a local company engaged in the digital industry with main focus to develop the digital industry as well as local content Indonesia. GDP also has established cooperation with several leading local sites such as lintasberita.com, infokost.net, krazymarket.com, bolalob.com, dailysocial.net and also in the group marketing and advertising company Red Cipta Media (MCM) and the recently launched enterprise incubation, The first website in Indonesia, Red and White Inc. (MPI).

ABOUT KASKUS

KASKUS is a web-based forum that the members get together and do the discussion and sharing around their hobby.

KASKUS founded by Andrew Founder KASKUS Dervish as well as CTO (Chief Technical Officer) from KASKUS, in November 1999, in Seattle.

KASKUS entered Indonesia in 2008, and officially became an entity under the auspices of PT. Darta Media Indonesia.

Currently Andrew Dervish run with 2 people KASKUS colleagues of Ken Dean Lawadinata (Chief Executive Officer) and Danny Oei Wirianto (Chief Marketing Officer).

Currently KASKUS has 2,676,826 members (updated as of March 8, 2011, at 22:15 pm) and called for KASKUS member is Kaskuser. Currently KASKUS has approximately 400 communities in it.

KASKUS occupies the 6th position for Top Website in Indonesia (based on alexa.com as per March 8, 2011)

KASKUS Achievement: "The Greatest Brand of the Decade" (2000-2010), awarded by Mark Plus Inc, "The Best Innovation in Marketing" (2009), awarded by Marketing Magazine, "The Best Market Driving Company" (2009), awarded by Marketing Magazine, "Number 1 E-Commerce Indonesia" (2011), awarded by Forbes Magazine.

KASKUS STATISTICS (As of February 2011): Visits: 53,000,000, Pageviews / month: 900 million, Time on Site: 32.10.

Payment and Commerce - Mobile Perspective

Are you doing mobile banking? Have you bought something from online shops? If your answer is yes, then this subject is yours. We know that there’s transition from traditional payment to mobile payment, but only a few people who know about how to do e-commerce / social commerce, how secure the e-payment system and how big the growth of online payment in Indonesia. For the Blackberry developers, there must be some curiosity too on how to monetize in BlackBerry.

To speak those both fragile & big things in mobile world, Indonesia Mobile Monday had a chance to invite four masters on payment and e-commerce ecosystem to share their knowledge and data with us. They are Daniel Tumiwa (Indonesia Country Manager of Multiply Inc), Leontinus Alpha Edison (COO of TokoPedia), DokuPay, and Sarim Aziz from Research in Motion.

TOKOPEDIA

Indonesians do its online shopping at Kaskus, Detik Forum, Wordpress, Facebook, Blog and Classified Ads. Problems at Classified Ads are Fraud that there are no guarantee they will receive the items after buyer send the money to seller. The other ones are the difficulties to maintain, a lot of manual works, and lack of convenience at all.

TokoPedia is a simple, better & safer online shopping experience. With its 87,000 customer, 9,200 sellers and 3 billion cash turn over, TokoPedia is sure that it can offer better & safer online shopping experience with its services. Right now, TokoPedia is only a simple mobile website, especially for sellers’ perspective.

MULTIPLY

Multiply is shopping, selling & sharing. With its 2.3 Million Users, Multiply was confident to establish its Indonesian branch on December 2010.

For Multiply, Social Commerce means an end-to-end Seller and Buyer interaction with social interaction that gives credible source of information and recommendation on sellers, buyers and products.

In Indonesia, Multiply builds its own community with user generated content to build sense of ownership (design contests, product/service feedback, etc). The local business also helps to educate the market on how to succeed in e-commerce.

For Multiply, mobile payment will offer convenience and end to end e-commerce on the small screen and add more impulsive interaction and transaction opportunities as it is real time and always done altogether by the consumers, buyers and shop owners. Today Multiply has 36,000 shops. For Multiply, mobile offers impulsive interaction and transaction. It will also open the doors wide for e-commerce in Indonesia, although there is still lack of payment options.

DOKUPAY

It was just a short presentation from DokuPay :-))

But what we can learn from DokuPay is that DokuPay is a local integrated internet payment service. DokuPay works together with some banks and provide the online payment system and helps to make sure it's the secured one.

RESEARCH IN MOTION

The latest news from Blackberry World is that people may expect the Blackberry Bold 9900/9300, the thinnest BB yet and the first smartphone to run OS 7, late this summer! On Playbook, its Video Chat is the best tool to make, take and share video calls with friends and family over an internet connected Wi-Fi® network. And it’s already available via OTA software update now! The last one is about Blackberry Balance that can separate users' work and personal data on BlackBerry smartphone, prevent users from cut/copy/pasting work data into a personal application or email and prevent users from forwarding corporate email, calendar and PIM data through BlackBerry® Internet Service, etc.

On the e-commerce side for Blackberry, the ones that get the most benefit are the vendors that can submit their apps for free. The vendors may deploy the apps to BlackBerry App World to reach to over 35+ million active users and may easily leverage the BlackBerry Advertising Service with only a few lines of code. Other benefits from Blackberry for the vendors are that the vendors can manage digital goods via its portal and get 70% revenue share.

For the full slides and presentations from the speakers, please click this link: http://blog.mobilemonday.co.id/2011/05/slides-for-may-30-event/  

Social Media in Indonesia – What’s Trending?

Social Media is a hot issue in Indonesia. Most people, companies and brands have agreed that they have to use the Social Media to be existed and engaged with their friends, family, employees, customers and clients. But the question is: How do we use Social Media in the right way? What’s hype in the Social Media? How smart are we to use the Social Media and get benefit from it?

We are lucky to have four experts in Social Media joining our Indonesia Mobile Monday to share with us their knowledge on the world of Social Media. 

The first speaker is Andy Sjarif, the CEO of SITTI, who talked about how he mapped the Indonesian Social Media through SITTI. SITTI captures the words from the internet and maps them to get the conclusion. From here, SITTI helps the internet users to use the words that are hype, most used and trending to be monetized. SITTI can also help the people to create force for a mission through the words in internet.

For example, from Luna Maya and Ariel Peterpan case, SITTI can show how Americans and Indonesians reacted on the case. Americans asked about the news, while Indonesians asked more about where to download the video. Other samples are the topics on Tifatul Sembiring, Melinda Dee, etc. Pretty interesting presentation!

Andy ended his presentation with: “Every word you wrote, every mood you have, any friends (or enemy) you have are captured in Social Media. Understanding this will – someday – shift the direction of this nation.”

The second speaker is Danny Wirianto, the CMO of Kaskus.  Danny said that Social Media is about shifting on lifestyles, behavior and how we use things. Social Media is also about the change from institutional control to social control. This is shown from a research that 7 from 10 journalists get their story ideas from the internet & rely on the news from the internet.

Social Media can also be described as Social, Share & Speed. Danny added that companies should be engaged and creates an experience, instead of selling products & services.

The third speaker is Johan Kremer, Head of Alliances for Research In Motion Southeast Asia. Johan showed the recent data that there is growth for smartphones in Asia that would attract more developers. One of the local Blackberry applications, Love Indonesia, was selected last year as the Asian regional Super App winner. Love Indonesia is an application location-based lifestyle-portal that guides us in finding anything we need with its different type of search feature.

Other great thing about the new Blackberry is the integration with Facebook, Bloomberg, etc.

Johan revealed that the biggest Blackberry applications downloaded in Indonesia is IM & Social Networking (33%), Themes (22%) and Shopping (11%), while the driving force of Blackberry is Blackberry Messenger and local applications.

The best points about Blackberry Messenger is that users are more connected with their family and friends as they send more messages everyday and BBM was rated with the highest level of satisfaction score by users across all markets and platforms.

He added some great news that there will be Blackberry Developer Day in Bandung on 24th of May and the Blackberry's Playbook will be launched officially next on June!

The last but not least, the fourth speaker is Enda Nasution from SalingSilang who discussed about the Social Media Landscape in Indonesia. Social Media is people having conversations online. People use Social Media to report news. And the “online reporters” could be news organizations, journalists and decision makers, and also “Alays”. From here, SalingSilang engine collects all the conversation and news sent to the Social Media like Twitter, blogs and Facebook.

It is found from SalingSilang that the peak hour and the peak day of Twitter in Indonesia are at night and on Thursday. And the busiest city for Twitter in Indonesia is Jakarta. On the tools, people mostly post their tweets from Ubersocial, Twitter for Blackberry and Snaptu.

SalingSilang found that there are 5 million people in Indonesia do the blogging on May 2011. Enda concluded the event by saying that the Social Media industry is growing & needed its foundation.

For the full slides and presentations from the speakers, please click this link: http://blog.mobilemonday.co.id/2011/05/slides-from-may-2-event/

Astrid Amalia di Fimela Luncheon: Perempuan, Ambisi, dan Persamaan Hak

Senang sekali bisa menghadiri Fimela Luncheon pada bulan April 2011. 

Tautan aslinya adalah: http://www.fimela.com/lifestyle-relationship/fimela-luncheon-perempuan-ambisi-dan-persamaan-hak-110421y.html 

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FIMELA Luncheon kali ini membahas hal yang sangat berkaitan dengan Hari Kartini. Yaitu soal perempuan, ambisi, dan persamaan hak. Penasaran? Baca terus.

Obrolan seru ini terjadi sambil menikmati makan siang suguhan Pesto Restauran, yang terletak di kawasan Thamrin. Hidangan khas Italia yang lezat, menemani luncheon saat itu.

Saat topik dilemparkan, keempat peserta langsung bergantian menyuarakan pendapat mereka. Di awali dengan Astrid Amalia, yang menganggap kalau perlakuan yang berbeda karena perbedaan gender memang masih sering terjadi, terutama di dunia kerja. Walaupun dia nggak mengalami secara langsung, tapi menurut Astrid, punya ambisi dalam bekerja sah saja. Perlakuan yang beda jangan dijadikan masalah besar atau hambatan. Posisi dan prestasi dalam bekerja itu salah satu pembuktian atau ajang menunjukkan jati diri. Selama bisa kompromi dengan pasangan dan nggak mengganggu keseimbangan keluarga, kenapa tidak?

Yulia Astuti mengungkapkan, fokus dan punya ambisi pada tujuan yang ingin kita capai atau dikejar adalah sesuatu yang positif. Asal nggak bertentangan dengan peran sebagai perempuan, alias harus tetap peduli dengan keluarga atau pasangan. Dan jangan sampai mengabaikan keluarga demi pekerjaan.

Perempuan boleh punya cita-cita setinggi mungkin, tapi jangan lupa dengan tanggungjawabnya sebagai ibu dan istri, begitu menurut Indah Julianti. Dan harus bisa menempatkan diri. Alias tetap tahu posisi sebagai perempuan.

Sambil menyantap main course masing-masing, para peserta mengatakan kalau sisi feminin perempuan justru bisa dijadikan poin lebih. Astrid memberikan contoh, banyak perempuan sukses nggak cuma mengandalkan kepintaran tapi juga penampilan yang menarik. Jadi perempuan harus bisa memanfaatkan apa yang dia punya untuk meraih sukses. Penampilan yang menarik jika dikombinasikan dengan kemampuan akan bisa meraih apapun yang dicita-citakan.

Diah Nurhaidah juga setuju kalau sisi feminin dan ambisi bisa dikombinasikan dan saling mendukung. Tapi yang harus diingat adalah, perempuan menurut kultur Timur memang punya posisi tertentu. Dan karena kita hidup di negara yang sangat menjunjung norma Ketimuran, sehingga nggak boleh lupa dengan kodrat yang ada, walaupun sudah meminta untuk punya hak dan kesempatan yang sama.

Astrid mengiyakan dan menambahkan, selama nggak melanggar norma dan hukum yang berlaku, serta nggak mengganggu orang lain, perempuan bisa mengerjakan apa saja dan jadi apa saja. Perbedaan gender itu hanya dalam pikiran orang. Hanya dalam mind set.

Menurut Indah, budaya timur memang membuat perempuan berada dalam posisi tertentu, karena didikan yang ada. Tapi kalau sekarang, cara mendidik pun udah beda, anak laki-laki dan anak perempuan dididik dengan perlakuan yang sama.

Yulia mengatakan, awalnya diminta adalah persamaan kesempatan. Tapi semakin kesini terjadi pergeseran. Jaman dulu memang perempuan posisinya di rumah, mengurus anak dan rumah. Secara fisik perempuan dan laki-laki saja beda. Jadi kalau mau disamakan, mau punya kesempatan yang sama, perempuan juga musti ingat kalau ada keterbatasan yang natural, keterbatasan secara fisik. Begitu juga buat laki-laki, ada hal yang nggak dipunyai. Dan perempuan harusi tetap ingat posisinya.

Sambil menikmati tiramisu atau pannacota, yang menjadi pilihan penutup siang itu, semua setuju kalau perempuan boleh saja menuntut kesempatan, boleh saja meminta persamaan hak, tapi harus menerima resiko dan konsekuensi yang ada dari kesempatan yang diberikan. Dan yang pasti nggak menyalahgunakan dan mengatasnamakan persamaan hak untuk hal-hal yang negatif.

Menarik, kan? Pastinya!

State of the Internet Southeast Asia 2010 (From comScore)

• Indonesia’s internet users is 8.6 million and online hours / visitors is 14.8 hour.
• Indonesia has the highest percentage growth in Southeast Asia (+32%) from 6.5 to 8.6 million online populations.
• The female share of internet population in Indonesia is 36%.
• At the Indonesia internet population, Facebook reach 87.4%, while Twitter reach 21% (4th globally).
• With 8.6 million Indonesia internet users and the number of Indonesia’s Facebook users are 35 million, it means that, in average, each Indonesian has 4 Facebook accounts.
• The most visited airlines sites in Indonesia are Lion Air, Air Asia, Garuda Indonesia.
• Top banking destinations in Indonesia are Bank Mandiri, BNI, Citibank.
• The world’s most video viewers are Malaysia, Hong Kong, Singapore.
• The growth of blogs in Indonesia is the highest in Southeast Asia (+8%) from 63% (2009) to 68% (2010).
• The world’s heavy searchers are the Philippines, Hong Kong, Singapore.

The Most Popular in Southeast Asia:

• The most popular in Malaysia: Social Network, Search, Photos, Multimedia, Blogs.
• The most popular in Indonesia: Social Network (90%), Search Navigation (85%), Photos, Blogs, News.
• The most popular in the Philippines: Social Network, Photos, Search, Multimedia, Email.
• The most popular in Hong Kong: Search, Social Network, Multimedia, News, Email.
• The most popular in Singapore: Search, Social Networking, Multimedia, Photos, Email.