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.

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.