Echelon 2010: Day 1 - Some Thoughts

Some will say it’s enlightening, some also says it’s nothing new from a technical point of view but all of us agree that now is the time for Indonesia as an emerging market to grow and finally create an ecosystem supported by Its startups.

Before I say anything else more, I have to say that I was late coming there :( Woke up too late and I got there just in time for @andisboediman and @andyzain presentation. No regrets though, their presentation rocked the house! It made people realize how big a market is in Indonesia and monetizing it is not impossible.

Their presentation was right on and precise to say the least! I tweeted some points that I think we all should know and grasp it to our own startups:

In Indonesia adoption is tricky. Don’t sleep with just anyone (everyone), pick a wife/husband. The context for this is telco operators. Pick a side from all of them.
Telco operators in Indonesia doesn’t care about your ideas, your platform, your apps and or your technology. There’s only one thing on their mind which is users quantity. The more the merrier.

I was also sitting beside a guy from AdMob Indonesia (never knew AdMob has an Indonesian rep). He told me stuffs about AdMob’s Android analytics in Indonesia. It’s quite impressive by the way. The past month, Indonesia racked up 2 million impressions. For a mobile platform with a slow start in Indonesia, I purely believe it’s a good sign of what’s to come. It’s just too bad that AdMob is not supporting Location Based ads. At least let our application gets the location fixing and we’ll send the API the location.

I went back home to clean up and get a shower before going to @rampok’s place in Bussora Street. I remembered him telling me about Hackerspace near his place. So I went looking for it there. It was a place where a geek can call it home :) I met with @m0t0chan there, a VC I met with @rampok before. After the Koprol Yahoo acquisition, Indonesia is getting a lot of attention. Anyways, going back to Hackerspace, the place is crowded with geeky aromas.

[caption id=“attachment_388” align=“aligncenter” width=“252” caption=“Control The Robot”][/caption]

You can control the robot above you know. Go to http://tinyurl.com/hsghal and see for yourself. It’s a change of geeky gimmicks for me. Liking it seeing electro and the web getting mixed as one.

After that, it’s off to Koprol Yahoo afterparty at Verve, Lock Road. Free beers, I’d be stupid not to come hahaha. I met Collin, a friend from Yahoo OHD 2009. He was suprised to see me there and asked what the heck am I doing there? lol. We shared a few stories about our own businesses and it was fun meeting him. Gonna meet up in Jakarta next week with him. Anyways, Yahoo folks are fun to be with I suppose, see the picture below and judge for yourself.

[caption id=“attachment_390” align=“aligncenter” width=“225” caption=“Who is it for?”][/caption]

Thanks for the wristband Yahoo, you guys are something else ;)