mobile internet? bener ada penggunanya?

admob data bilang, akses mobile internet (semua site yang berbasis mobile – m.blabla.com, ataupun wap.blabla.com, ataupun www.blabla.com/m) Indonesia nomor 2 setelah peringkat Amerika Serikat.

Baru-baru ini, Opera – perusahaan yang  fokus untuk melakukan pengembangan mobile browser- meluncurkan data mengenai seberapa besar pengguna browser mereka yang berasal dari Indonesia. Cukup konsisten, mereka bilang Indonesia juga nomor 2 untuk traffic browsing menggunakan Opera-mini. Data yang di-release oleh opera-mini saat ini hanyalah data pengguna mobile internet dari Indonesia yang menggunakan Opera-Mini sebagai browser mereka. Bisa dibayangkan, seberapa besar akses GPRS yang sesungguhnya jika digabung dengan data orang-orang yang melakukan akses mobile internet dari default browser handsets mereka.

Masih menurut Opera, rata-rata pengguna mobile internet di Indonesia memakai sekitar 4MB / bulan. Mungkin hal ini karena tarif pemakaian GPRS yang masih cukup tinggi di Indonesia. Karena jika kita bandingkan dengan data yang dikeluarkan oleh pihak lainnya, penggunaan rata-rata mobile internet di Indonesia adalah 20MB / bulan.

Apa artinya? Tergantung dari sudut pandang mana anda berasal.

1. Media : belum khatam kita belajar mengenai digital media di Indonesia melalui media internet, mobile internet bisa dijadikan pilihan karena mempunyai angka penetrasi (dan jumlah absolute) yang jauh lebih tinggi dari Internet di Indonesia. Sebut saja situs-situs mobile internet seperti m.friendster.com, m.yahoo.com, telah mulai memasarkan banner di mobile-site mereka.
2. Brand Owner : salah satu peran dari mobile marketing (yang selama ini cuma dikenal dengan SMS broadcast saja) adalah banner di mobile internet. Kelebihannya, selain bisa mengarahkan pengunjung ke mobile-site dari brand, banner di mobile internet site bisa di program untuk:click-to-call:banner di klik kemudian langsung menyambungkan HP ke nomor yang telah ditentukan, click-to-SMS: banner di klik kemudian langsung membuatkan SMS dengan format yang telah ditentukan sebelumnya ke nomor yang telah ditentukan juga.
3. Mobile Operator: melakukan proposisi yang berbeda selain perang tarif telepon dan SMS
4. Publishers : mulai membuat versi mobile website mereka, untuk memaksimalkan revenue iklan dengan sesuatu yang lebih terukur.
5. Consumers : Bisa menikmati internet dalam skala kecil melalui HP yang sudah support GPRS

Dengan perkembangan industri telekomunikasi saat ini (10 operator telepon nirkabel, HP yang telah support GPRS dengan harga yang murah) hampir dapat dipastikan beberapa tahun ke-depan, banyak orang-orang Indonesia yang mendapatkan pengalaman pertama mereka menyentuh dunia maya melalui layar kecil HP.

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%).

WAP sites, how are they?

Couple of months ago, my friend from mobile ad-server network (Mkhoj – mobile search) came to Jakarta.

They showed a very optimistic view on mobile internet (again, mobile internet I refer to is accessing internet via mobile phone, not using mobile phone as a modem) and stated Indonesia is having the 3rd biggest mobile internet traffic in the world. At first, I didn’t buy their story knowing that GPRS penetration can’t be said successful in Indonesia. Even, one of the operators said that they still have lots of idle bandwidth for mobile internet.

They invited me again on their second visit (yes, my 1st meeting with them is actually also their 1st visit to Indonesia) with a better preparation and present me with the same story on how they really optimist on mobile internet in Indonesia and how it will bring benefit to advertisers.

Finally, I challenged them with one of .juicer’s lab product; a news aggregator mobile portal rangkum . They gave me some impressions to play and giving me a chance to know how this ad-server work.

Long story short, I created a mobile internet ad that linked to http://m.rangkum.com and ask my colleague to perform a daily checking on its performance.

In 3 days, I see a traffic jump from mobile internet sites (hey…. they do exist and have traffic!!). Total visits to rangkum mobile sites increase by 60% with more than extra 1000 page views per day. Not to mention,these traffic came from Indonesia as I set my ad can only be seen by WAP traffic from mobile operators in Indonesia. Although most of WAP sites that gave me traffic were adult mobile sites, I believe with all giants dotcom companies (friendster, facebook, yahoo) also extend their access by creating a mobile site version, we can see more and more traffic come from these sites and generate even more interesting mobile marketing industry in Indonesia.

With this small yet productive case study, we try to sell this concept to some of advertisers.

digital media dan pemilu 2009

Mid 2007 – 2008 digital media di Indonesia hampir bisa diumpamakan layaknya sebuah keranda. Ketika dibicarakan dan dibuat beramai-ramai; namun tidak ada satupun orang yang mau masuk duluan.

Sepertinya semua akan berbeda di tahun 2009. Pemilu dengan 33 partai akan bergulir; bisa dibayangkan berapa besar keuntungan media konvensional dengan adanya even ini. Saya bukan seorang ahli media, tapi berdasarkan logika harga media placement akan meningkat tajam berdasarkan suppy-demand ratio.

Apa dampaknya terhadap strategi komunikasi produk-produk komersial dengan peningkatan harga ini?

Satu hal yang pasti, mereka tidak akan berhenti melakukan komunikasi; hanya cara dan pemilihan media yang harus lebih di teliti mengingat harga yang meningkat tajam.

Media Digital (internet maupun hp -atau biasa disebut mobile marketing); akan menjadi pilihan yang cukup bijaksana; mengapa?

berikut logika saya;

1. partai akan mencari suara terbanyak; apapun usaha komunikasinya, tujuannya hanya 1: DUKUNGAN
2. Massa terbanyak ada di ‘bottom of pyramid’ dimana media yang dapat dengan mudah mereka jangkau adalah konvensional media
3. berperang dengan ramai-nya pesan-pesan politik yang akan bergulir, akan bias dan tidak efektif
4. digital media, akan sangat sedikit dilirik oleh partai karena kurang memberikan nilai lebih kecuali image dari partai tersebut. Sementara seperti yang saya ungkapkan di point pertama;yang mereka butuhkan adalah orang memilih dan mencoblos gambar partai mereka diantara 32 partai lainnya

Dengan logika sederhana diatas; cukup bijaksana produk komersil memulai langkah mereka ke dunia digital. Karena akan menjadi sangat masuk akal baik dari sisi matematis maupun budget, untuk mengalihkan lebih banyak budget media ke media digital di tahun 2009, khususnya untuk product untuk SES AB&C+

Saatnya mereka bisa berkonsentrasi untuk melakukan ‘keterlibatan’ (engagement) customer terhadap produk-produk mereka, melalui media digital. Entah itu adalah untuk melakukan viral, memulai melakukan persuasive technology melalui media internet dan mobile, sampai memulai cita-cita mereka untuk membuat digital campaign yang terintegrasi baik dari sisi channel (mobile dan internet) maupun eksekusi.

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

innovate or re-invent?

Sometime it is hard for me to differentiate between innovate or re-invent or copycat especially when it come to creative idea in global space like internet or mobile internet.

For example, we create a ‘google/yahoo-news-like’ portal that specified for local news contents http://rangkum.com

The idea was discussed during lunch time with my ‘love-to-parse’ working buddy; Azis. We were discussing why google/yahoo seem not too bother with content localization especially to Bahasa Indonesia. Our discussion then become more specifically to news product and how we need to open more than one tab / windows just to cover all local news in Bahasa.

I believe many commuters don’t really have time to read newspaper or read internet news in their office. From our point of view, news will have meaning to the readers if only they really interesting after read its headline.

Then, with respect to Google and Yahoo!; we create rangkum.com . A news portal that gather local news sites in Bahasa Indonesia.

Do we violate intellectual property? off course no We honor them, that’s why we just take the headlines and some sentences of the news in order to update our readers to hot topics about Indonesia. If they interested to read more about the news, they can click a link then it will redirect them to the source of content owner sites.

Although we still on progress on do the web-semantic thing in our rangkum.com-beta portal and enhance it with more personalize functionality, we got positive feedback from our friends. I really hope our work can be useful to others too.

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.

everybody can create a website, now it’s easy….. and FREE!!

Trying to get a homepage up n running is not a very hard task this day. I still remember few years back, write a homepage will require you to open your text editor type tags, validate your HTML, then find a place to host it and pay them for the service. Back in those days, creating a websites will require a company spending hundreds to thousands of US$ just to built a static WEB page.

Then few years later DHTML come to solve the requirement to have a dynamic website. ASP, PHP, and JSP enable people to have a database driven website. Updating content not necessarily change the HTML source code, web-administrator only need to insert, update, n delete database. Some -good- web developers also build a user interface to update the contents so clients can easily change texts, images, even upload a video.

Developers that have business sense, then package codes n database into a product. Make web developers’ job easier by not have to create everything from scratch, shorten development time, and most of all create opportunity for more people to create a websites.

WEB 2.0 make things even more interesting. User generated contents reduce web-admin work. Internet users can modify their own page, using easy to modify UI (started by Friendster if I’m not mistaken, where user can modify their profile page..). Blogging sites, more advanced social networking, made internet even more fun.

Some internet start-ups as well as all giants are in race to create the most sophisticated but easy to use applications. I’ve shared my story about google-applications. Saturday morning I got an email regarding newly launched Google product in their google application portfolio.

Before writing this post, I try to play with it and create a sandbox (http://sandbox.dotjuicer.com – not much to see, but for a person that not focus on web-programming it’s very easy… ).

I imagine a if this kind of application can be introduced to SMEs or even home industry in Indonesia. It will surely help them a lot. They don’t need to spend a lot, even they can do it in nearest internet cafe and build their website as if it built by professional web programmers.

So many things can be done; as a start, maybe universities can encourage their IT students to help nearest SMEs or home industries by set-up a short training course to use this new feature from google. This will have a meaningful impact to the community development. It doesn’t need to be sophisticated, the most important is to be exist in www world then any potential buyers can search them through internet.

Google, please get your emerging market team to Indonesia ASAP

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.

free internet presence cost (a google apps testimonial)

When I start my company ; a creative digital media agency (mobile media and internet media), my first priority is to set-up a domain name, e-mail, and (still under-construction) website. 

At the same time, I was really into all Google innovations and been trying to keep track of what they’ve done by browsing their google labs and tried out some of their future features in there. My eyes was really into google-pages. I thought to my self, if only google also give a web hosting service with customized domain for free. It will be very useful for a low budget company in order to get exposure in unlimited potential of www.

We can train home industries or help them to use this google-pages as their online front-end with email to contact/contact number so it will eliminate unnecessary mediator that took incredibly high margin and still pressed these home industries to give the lowest price for them. 

For example; a handicraft home industry can show their product in WEB by build a simple homepage, using easy to use google-pages and upload their product images.  Then point their selected domain name to Google free web-hosting facilities. This will stimulate faster community development.

A month after google-pages tried out, I find an article in my google-reader that google launch their new product called google apps (google applications). 

 

It has google docs, google calendar, google pages, start page, etc. I tried out google apps standard edition (because it’s free :p). It turns out they provide mail service and customizable domain into what-ever domain you have. So I try my company domain, dotjuicer.com

Now, I have my domain web-page (although it still under-construction :p), my email service (using @dotjuicer.com) that also can be retrieved using POP3 or IMAP, and ‘dotjuicer’ calendar. 

Total cost: IDR 100,000,- (for a year domain name rent)

If we can leverage this and equipped home industries so they can have their front-end in internet with this low cost implementation, I believe they will get lots of benefit out of it.

It’s cool, it’s cheap, it’s applicable, and relevant for community development in emerging markets.