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SparxUp show takeaways: Indonesia is not only Jakarta

SparxUp in Jakarta has concluded, and our Indonesia-based correspondent has a wrap-up of the afternoon sessions.

The afternoon session at SparxUp was keynoted by Zane Adam, Microsoft’s senior director for Cloud and Platform Strategy. He highlighted the importance of cloud computing for startups. By deploying through Platform as a Service (PaaS), businesses can save on technology and infrastructure costs, and can therefore concentrate more on their growth. Zane believes that platforms like Azure can help a lot of startups deploy any application in any platform they want. Emerging Market Expansion

The next panel discussed “Emerging Market Expansion,” and brought together Zane, Akshay Patil of Foursquare, Norita Kobayashi of GREE, Willix Halim, and Troy Malone of Evernote. The panel was moderated by Veritrans Indonesia CEO Ryu Kawano Suliawan, and focused on growth and how companies can go about with their expansion.

For GREE, localized language was somewhat important, but finding heavy and loyal users in the country where they have their presence in was far more important. “We are currently looking for developers in Bandung and Jakarta,” Norita says. He admits that they were still struggling to search for the best strategy to develop the local market. In the case of Foursquare, Akshay admitted that they fully supported the super-user community and thought that this strategy fits the audience. The location-based service is still small, having about 100 employees across New York, San Francisco and the United Kingdom. Foursquare still does not see the importance of having a local presence outside of its offices. If you wonder where their biggest user base is, it’s Turkey! The digital repository Evernote has been going strong internationally since 2009. Key strategies implemented for market development are through hackathons, conferences, user meet-ups and the recently-announced Evernote for Business. Growth is quite fast. For instance, the Indonesia user-base has reached 250,000, and Troy said the company might establish an office in the country. Future plans revealed include another hackathon in conjunction with the launch of new Android-powered devices priced between US$ 70 to 90. In Asia, China, Japan and India are Microsoft’s biggest markets. The company has had a presencein Indonesia for more than two decades. Localization is country-specific, and done with cooperation from local developers and strengthened relationships with homegrown partners. Microsoft is confident they can strengthen their foothold in this market through cloud-computing offerings.

Meanwhile, Freelancer has 150 employees spread across four offices in Buenos Aires, London, Manila and Sydney. The company realizes the importance of the Indonesian market and has decided to appoint a country manager for Indonesia as a key figure to manage whole operation, tactically and strategically. Expanding to Indonesia

“Expanding to Indonesia” marked the last keynote. Netprice CEO Teruhide Sato complimented Indonesia as more promising country than Japan due to its natural and human resources that will bolster the industry. He shared success stories of Japanese local players. E-commerce giant Rakuten developed other products (infoseek and mytrip), and started to enjoy skyrocketing growth in 2008. CyberAgent successfully survived from their 1998 crisis and became a very popular game developer and publishing company since then. What we can learn from DeNA, another Japanese giant player in mobile publishing that dominates the market with e-travel, e-commerce, and payment gateway services is this: “Do and lead local while keep thinking global then go outside the country and localize.”

His keywords are “Time Machine” and “Local.” He first discussed internet business history and pointed out lessons from the success stories. Rakuten, CyberAgent and DeNA started from one core business as the only driver, and were able to expand their businesses into other playing fields after approximately seven years. Based on his presentation, Indonesia will reach market maturity in 2018. Strong and popular products and services will always become the appetizers for local players to jump into the same space. It’s inevitable and is a turning point for the country, hence internet business owners should take advantage of this trend in order foster their growth. Exploring Indonesian Market

The panel on “Exploring Indonesian Market” was moderated by Merah Putih Inc.’s Anthony Liem ended the Friday session. Panelists were Fakhry Bafadal, founder of Jogjakarta Tech community Bancakan 2.0; Reza Prabowo, co-founder of Bandung tech community (FoWAB); Italo Gani, CEO of Inbound Marketing; and Dondy Bappedyanto, Infinys System general manager. Panelists shared their experiences dealing with major cities across Indonesia, like Medan and Malang, aside from the cities they are currently based in. From the supply side, we could easily find developers and other digital talents in Jogja and Bandung since these two cities are more conducive than the capital city, particularly when it comes to the traffic, atmosphere, and number of educational institutions, lower cost of living and friendliness, among others. But Dondy pointed out there is a gap in between the graduates’ skillset and what the industry needs. Fakhry and Reza admitted this, and agreed this is the purpose of their tech-oriented communities. “We need to solidify strategic partnership between education and tech industry. My company is doing it by now,” Dondy says.