WAP site access from Indonesia??? are you kidding me??

Sometime ago, I got that kind of respond every time I plan a WAP site as one of medium to communicate with consumers. I was actually expected that attitude though, as there was no data on GPRS usage in Indonesia.

As I browse around and follow the big buzz of mobile marketing world, I found very useful data from admob.

The data stated, there are more than 1 billion requests for mobile ad from Indonesia. Indonesia is the second biggest after US.

mobile operator

source www.admob.com

source: www.admob.com

Assuming the average of ad is 2 per WAP page, the number of there are 500 million GPRS request originating from Indonesia’s mobile operators on January – September 2008 (around 56 million/month). The declining of GPRS price as part of Indonesia mobile tariff price war, unlimited GPRS access for Blackberry service and browsing via BlackBerry APN, and free GPRS promotion done by Natrindo, contribute the trafic spike on 2008 (1.1 Bio on 2008, 84 Million on 2007).

Nokia’s phones dominates the GPRS traffic by contributing 66.8% from over all GPRS trafic, followed by SonyEricsson (25.3%), Motorola (1.6%), and others (6.3%).

today’s theme…

I was stumbling around the web and found this quote;

“Work like you don’t need money,
Love like you’ve never been hurt,
And dance like no one’s watching.”

-crystal boyd-

very inspiring quotes during my busy day and remind me to keep my passion, and love it like I never fail

Firefox 3 Download day; internet community marketing

Unlike their regular updates or new releases of internet browsers, firefox on its Firefox 3 try to approach and create a buzz among internet users.

They create a virtual event called Firefox 3 Download Day 2008 that will be started on June 17th.

Firefox; an opensource based internet browser is the 2nd most popular internet browser after MS IE. They have users communities and developer communities that can be enabled as their product ambassadors and willing to do so.

Some of it users know why they choose firefox instead of their regular browsers but most of them didn’t know why they need to use Firefox instead of other browsers. Most of these users use Firefox because their friends told them to, regardless the fact that there are other better (technically) browsers.

Their strength in product quality + users and developers communities = Firefox 3 download day

let see, whether they can set a new record on their download day; but definitely from marketing point of view -that defined by a technology guy :p- what they’ve done so far can be categorized as what Seth Godin said a ‘purple cow’

~post written on firefox 3 rc 3

digital media; NOW and FOREVER media

Went to Asia Pacific Media Forum last week was a very meaningful experience for me as a new player in the industry. I believe not only me that got this kind of reactions; most of the people I talked to have the same impressions.

Changes are happening in media industry; from its medium to business model, from creative idea to executions. It all happened as a result of consumer evolution which change people from viewers to collaborators, from passive to interactive, from general to personal, and from primetime to my time. On 1965, it only take 3 TV commercial spots in order to reach 80% of woman aged 18-49 in US; today, the same effect will take 97 TV commercial spots with the same durations.

How can you talk your target that browse internet while watch TV, listening music using earphones, and checking their mobile phone every once in a while to text their friends?

Increasing TV placement budget will only make TV stations richer without any additional value to the brand.

Early age of Digital Media

Not a rocket science that alternative media is needed. Some of brands then look at digital media as one of their ‘complementary’ channel to support traditional media. When Internet users penetration boom in US, Europe, and Japan, some other countries -not necessarily has the same penetration rate – join the web portal band-wagon and create ad-hoc product websites that usually will disappear after a while.

There is no strategy, measurement, or even business model to capitalize digital media. Everybody build it for hygiene factor only, so they will have a temporary presence in digital world.

New Era of Digital Media

As the industry grow; strategy, measurement, and business model become more clear -although some redudancy on its measurement until now- media agencies not only talk about presence in Internet world, they also talk about how to take advantages on its technology superiority.

People start to talk about engagement time rather than just visitors per day, analyze traffic sources rather than only know how many hits they got per day, and in race to become the most search engine friendly websites.

Website that well known as ‘new media’ become now media. Brands are in the race of viral marketing on Internet business and create variants of websites and enhance it functionality from brochure sites into user generating contents websites.

Mobile Media

More than 30% of penetration and innovative mobile devices create another space of media to be explored. Unlike the beginning of internet media, on mobile media agencies did more proper research and create some of industry ecosystem proposals.

Unlike internet media, mobile media born in a more complex business model because it involving more parties in the picture that I don’t think are in the same page as innovative marketers and technology innovators.

Its nature as a paid media and involving multi-billion investments, network operators are calculating very carefully mobile media business potentials and risks.

Where’s Indonesia in digital media evolution?

One thing that unfortunately not being discussed in depth is digital media in emerging market like Indonesia, where technology infrastructures can’t be as advance as developed countries. Some of things hard -or impossible- to be happened in emerging market countries.

So let me share my personal view on it;

• Contents; localization will become important task to be done. There maybe less than 10% people that can understand English in Indonesia
• Infrastructure; Indonesia internet penetration will be growing faster on wireless based technology
• Will Internet ever go faster than Mobile? From my personal view, I don’t think Internet penetration will be higher than mobile penetration, but mobile internet (mobile sites that accessed through mobile phones) penetration might be. Indonesia -if I may say- culture, will definitely drive people to buy mobile phone than a computer when they have to choose between those two sophisticated devices. Because mobile phone can be carried and somehow show status symbol.
• Which media has the highest index? Quantitatively, TV off course still the biggest coverage media , but according to media research, mobile and internet has the biggest qualitative points compared to TV
• Intelectual property; there are still no clear regulation on intellectual properties in Indonesia

If I want to promote my brand in Indonesia, which digital media should I choose?

Once again, in my personal view; still internet will the best digital media to penetrate Indonesia’s market with some tweaking on user-interface and development. Mobile on the other hand, can be used as an additional channel to create 360 degree presence on digital media and creating integrated digital media campaign.

By really considering some of points mentioned above, I think in Indonesia digital media is not only now media, it become now and forever media.

be the talk of town!

a short video from marketing guru himself in a TED conference that shows a receipt how you can sell your product more. How you should make your product have OTAKU (a japan word for people who obsessed fan of something), because OTAKU(s) will talk about your product, write about it, discuss it, and become your free-sales promotion people.

People don’t trust strangers (that’s what our mom always said anyway since we were a kid), but they will listen to their friends, they will listen to other people experience, they will listen to people that -they thought- independent.

I’ll take blackberry community in Indonesia called id-blackberry. Couple of years ago, one of the mobile carriers start blackberry service for public in Indonesia. They never heavily advertise it, but they successfully having more than thousands of people using the service. They create a community that consist of blackberry OTAKUs in Indonesia (well they also happened to be gadgets OTAKU – gadgets freaks). Blackberry never have any advertisement, mobile carrier who has the service also never advertise as heavy as their core product for this service. Blackberry OTAKUs do that job. They spread the news – and sometime very persistent – in order to influence people to use blackberry. From its superiority of compression and push technology, to their ease of use of messaging service such as blackberry messenger that can be a cheap way to exchange text based communication.

These blackberry OTAKUs willing to spend more money to enhance the look, performance, and have more than 1 BB devices. People start to know about it, these OTAKUs become their gurus in blackberry, their mailing list become one of the most active mailing list in Indonesia (i wonder why… :p).

Mobile carriers never spend their money to make a TV ads about this product, but BB subscribers increase in a speed that beyond their spending on ads.

These OTAKUs gathers, spreads the news, and persistently insist other to use BB without getting paid (beautiful isn’t it?). Now, mobile carriers start to do package deal for blackberry service; thanks to Indonesian BB OTAKUs!

Why they become BB OTAKUs?

1. some of them are already gadget freak, so they’re reason; they love its technology. Compression, push e-mail, and always connect – Great Product! (for these OTAKUs)
2. It’s (originally) design for corporate, but BlackBerry differentiate these product for retail to aim these technology OTAKUs. – Segmented
3. It keep enhancing its product from only a push mail service with great compression with GPS, camera, and create strategic partnership with software companies and internet service providers (facebook, google, yahoo, etc) – Strategic Partnership, expand OTAKUs from email OTAKUs to internet OTAKUs
4. The way it communicated -because it’s very segmented- made people talk about this product, create a buzz in OTAKUs world, and then spread widely in internet forums, mailing list, and word of mouth. – Be THE TOPIC

I think ( from a technologist that pretend to know a marketing world mind :p ) that’s what Seth mean. We need to make a product that not only aim for biggest chunk of customers, we need to make a product that segmented but have an impact to biggest chunk of customers by word of mouth.

Because these OTAKUs are willing to talk about your product, review it, and persistently insist people to understand its value if it worth.

who’s behind the gun?

Several days ago, youtube, multiply, rapidshare, and some other websites were banned in Indonesia. Internet users in Indonesia got a notification from their ISP that those URLs can’t be accessed until further notice according to government’s direction.

I will not discussed about the root cause, which I believe already became a hot topic in other blogs and Indonesia’s news portals. It was very interesting (and surprising) decision made by government. I’m questioning whether they aware that they can’t restrict people to go to where ever they want in www world; even if their destination URLs were banned. People can always use Internet proxy (as it shared in several mailing lists when this restriction happened), search from other sources, ask other people to download the contents and send to an Internet disk for Indonesia’s Internet users to download, and many other things that Internet geeks can think of. Internet has the most sophisticated contents distribution channels. If they really think of internet censorship, they really need to think of investing great amount of money and build a system like ‘great firewall of china’.

It’s really sad (for me and other internet users in Indonesia), to know a respectful IT institution in Indonesia had taken such step in order to do internet censorship. I wonder whether they understand how a content can be distributed in www world.

Looking at this situation, highlighted an old issue on how bad Indonesia need the right man behind the gun. Indonesia need a group of professionals that willing to ‘donate’ part of their busy time to at least be a pressure group in order to make things right in our beloved country.

are you one of them? do you care about your country? or you only want to state your comments but not give any solution?

mobile internet potential in Indonesia

(note: I refer mobile internet as accessing internet in your mobile and not using your mobile as a modem )

When mobile internet service was firstly introduced by IM3 (as their differentiator when they launch their network), GPRS only become a very hot topic; so many people talk about it, but only one of two use it. Although it was free for a year, network footprint, handset readiness, and handset setup become barriers. Soon after IM3 launch the service, existing mobile carriers that have bigger footprint also launch GPRS product.

But GPRS take up was disaster. All operators were in the race launching GPRS service and get media coverage but forget how to activate people. Unlike other countries, mobile carriers don’t control handsets distribution in Indonesia. Handsets in the market are open for any mobile carriers without any network preset and there was no GPRS OTA setting provided by mobile carriers (10 years after the product was launched (2007), Hutchison 3 become the first operator in Indonesia that give GPRS setting OTA push message automatically when subscriber insert their SIM card in to the phone).

All mobile carriers seemed treat GPRS as a ‘we_also_have_it’ product without any development or exploration on how to increase GPRS traffic. Although I believe they realize this will be a very big potential due to low penetration of fixed line internet.

Content providers and handset manufacturers were become a ‘hero’ on educating GPRS products. CP starts by build a WAP sites and provide various services that require GPRS (poly-ringtones, color pictures, true-tones, java-games) while handset manufacturers inject setting wizard application for GPRS and MMS settings.

At 30% of mobile connectivity penetration (~15% mobile penetration -not_confirmed-) with combination of ‘change_handsets_every_3_months’ habit and affordable GPRS supported handsets product aggressive penetration, a research from one of handset manufacturer said that 90% subscribers in Indonesia are using GPRS supported handset.

Potential? YES, a few months ago in Indonesia Mobile Monday launch event, T. Fuad from Yahoo! Asia HQ in Singapore announce their foot print in Indonesia by having their one-search and Yahoo!Go mobile apps. in all GSM mobile carriers. Unfortunately, usage growth result is not as expected. I don’t think setting was the problem, it because lack of activation activity from operators that happened to be got the ‘exclusive’ deal with Yahoo! as the pioneer for Y!Go app. launch. Beside lack of activation activities, pricing also become the biggest barrier -people perceived there will be more bytes to be downloaded if they’re using the application because it has a lot of graphics, thus they perceived it will be very expensive to them.

So is it mobile carriers fault? not 100% correct though I don’t think Yahoo! had done their homework by research on ‘the most popular service that accessed in their line of services portfolio in Indonesia’, because they took off Y!Messenger in new Y!Go that launched in Indonesia, or maybe it was their global strategy to push mobile internet ad in all of their foot prints. (fyi, youngsters in Indonesia willing to pay US$ 1 / month(exclude GPRS charge) to one of mobile carrier for 3rd party mobile IM application that can connect to Y!M).

Will Yahoo! bring their mobile IM product to Indonesia? I surely hope so, because the application is very straight forward and easy to use. Mobile users only need minimum education to use the product. Look at blackberry users in Indonesia, they all use mobile Y!M. Imagine it can be extended to normal java-supported phones. Then we just need mobile carrier to give a special bundling data package for it (I heard one of the mobile carrier willing to do so… )

Along with IM application, other form of mobile marketing through mobile IM application, rich mobile content promotion (truetone, polyringtone, color-wallpaper, mobile avatars), and content recommendation can be easily pushed. Even, mobile carriers can also promote other GPRS required product (their WAP site, mobile carriers social network initiatives, even to 3G contents like fulltrack music download). So they will give cheap GPRS charge for mobile IM, will lead mobile carrier to be able to get more revenue.

Activate mobile subscribers to more advanced products by introduce PC internet application to mobile will really lead to over all mobile internet success story in Indonesia, IMHO.

Will adsense/adwords work for your company/product?

One of Google remarkable innovation in media and advertising industry is adsense/adwords. The question is; will it worth for your company to use this service?

Not to worry! Google provide the tool to examine whether adsense/adwords will work for your company. It’s in google labs site, but everybody can try it.

Google trends will see how frequent a keyword searched in Google by internet users. The beauty of it is not the rank it self or you can compare more than 1 keyword at once; but it also presented based on region and time (cool!! – IMHO) . I tried the service by comparing “motor yamaha” and “motor honda”. The result is as follow (see the detail of originating area the search was made);

So, does your company website / product is worth to be registered as a adword/adsense? try it out in Google trends

re-inventing the wheel

I browse around universities websites and find all universities have e-learning features in their web. Most of them are created by in-house University’s IT team.

Hopefully, those universities share the same vision and standards on how to deliver best computer mediated learning system to their students; or even extends it to anybody who join the programs. Because I remember my programming concept lecturer said “don’t reinventing the wheel”.

If e-learning developed by every universities built by their own standards, there will be a good chance to have same functionality in many standards, many algorithms in many programming languages. It will be such a waste of ‘intelectual’ time .

Why don’t universities gather and create a forum (doesn’t need to be a physical forum, can be virtual forum – try google project ) to share, create, and develop a standard to deliver the best computer mediated learning system in Indonesia. Or building an the best e-learning system is ‘unofficial’ way to show my university is more andvanced than yours?

Let’s imagine that all Universities are working together to build a standard for e-learning system focus on high-school graduates, it will be such an efficient way because no one research, build, and solve the same issues; and Universities can do their individual effort by customize e-learning system for people in rural areas around Universities’ city. There will be more challenges for universities and good impact for communities development.

Look at Google, their commitment on solving problem and their openness become their unique value that lead them to be the most respected .com company. They engage more talents to achieve one goal: create the best search engine that works for everybody.

Having a working e-learning system for IT literate people especially Universities students for me (IMHO) is useless. Because there are facility like Google, Wikis, Specific interest groups, scientific articles, and other technologies can be easily accessed and used by Universities’ students.

But creating an e-learning applications for non IT or English or Bahasa literate community will be a challenge that need to be conquer. They are actually communities that really need technology to accelerate their learning processes. They really need a technology that work for them, not the other way around.

‘nrimo’ – javanese concept of life

nrimo, is suppose to be a great concept of life that teach us to accept everything we deserve as a compensation of what we’ve done.

An elementary school teacher in Indonesia will not be able to afford a Harley Davidson just count on their salary every month; but they will get other non-material appreciation because of their service to produce Indonesia’s next generations. If someone choose to be an elementary school teacher, they should realize this and commit to this path without compromise.

Unfortunately this concept of life become a weapon to irresponsible people to continue their economic colonialism to people in rural areas. People in rural areas are brainwashed so they will receive their destiny to be poor. Somehow, ‘nrimo’ is perceived as blindly rely your life to the destiny. If God wants you to be poor, then what ever you do, you will always be poor.People in rural villages are made to believe that being poor was their destiny by neo-colonialist people, so they can take maximum benefit out of it. These low educated people are brainwashed so they don’t have any desire to develop themselves and easily satisfied by minimum material appreciation.

It’s been happening so long that they believe that there is no other way to life their live but being poor. During Soeharto’s era, this situation was strengthened by subsidizing on every life-critical needs so these poor people didn’t see negative impact of this misdefined ‘nrimo‘.

In contrast in most cities, invasion of consumerism that lead to corruptive behavior is caused by the absent of ‘nrimo’. Many people want more than what they can afford, try to find a shortcut to get what they want, and do anything to achieve what they want.