Event Report

Quick post: some of the slides from the 12 Jan event is available. We have the slide from MobileMonday, vuclip and 3G Vision.

Please go here to download them: http://sites.google.com/site/idmomogroup/download-slides

… remember that last November (11-12 November) we had the Frost & Sullivan Telco Summit and Mobile Marketing Association event… the slides are available at our usual website: http://sites.google.com/site/mobilemondayid

I got the presentation from Rohit / MMA Global, Joseph / m-Stars, Ben Soebiakto / Octovate, and Amiranto / J-Spot.

Last week we had a joint event with Frost & Sullivan and Mobile Marketing Association (MMA, mmaglobal.com). It was also co-located with the Indonesia Telecoms Summit 2009.

Presenting were a number of who’s who in the mobile marketing in Indonesia… sharing their experience in running actual and successful mobile and digital campaign in Indonesia, plus also key statistics and insights about the future of this industry.

Rohit Dadwal from MMA explained the state of mobile marketing and how the association aim to drive and nourish this infant industry. He reminded us that Indonesia is BIG for mobile – more than 600 page views per user per month – well above global average of 250.

Next, P’ Sumantri from our own Indosat shared his experience in building Indosat’s i-klan mobile ad/marketing services. They have 1.5 million subscribers on i-kan now, and average response rate was ~20%. Indosat has quite comprehensive inventory: ranging from SMS, MMS, WAP, app store,  print ads on their vouchers and starter packs.

Andy Zain continued by sharing key stats from Indonesia mobile, telco, and advertising number, citing that currently only a paltry 0.02% from IDR 50T ad revenue went into digital/mobile ad.

Then we have Shinta “Bubu” sharing a very interesting success story about AXE integrated digital/traditional media campaign in Indonesia – the “Call Me” campaign. The statistics from the Axe Effect campaign run last year: 270k SMS, 760M calls from 32M unique numbers… The hotdog girl got 2 million calls a day! AXE sales up by 300%….

Oh, BTW, try to call 0855-889-0000 :p

Next Joseph “Joe” Lumban Gaol of m-stars also shared his precious experience running a mobile campaign for Green Sands. He mentioned something that I can’t forget: Go find the emotional benefit that you can offer to your users/subs, that is the stickiness factor for mob-ad – also the basics of marketing which applies here….

Benhard Soebiakto from Octovate was next on-stage, speaking from the point of view of a “traditional” media agency – the voice of a brand. Being cautious before jumping into the bandwagon, paying very close attention to the trends, eager to tap into this mobile media opportunities.

(Update: Thanks to Andy for the mention)

Ruben Eduardo from Pudding Media highlighted a very important point: SMS-based advertising, the old school. When 90% of all mobile subs used SMS, then you gotta consider this channel seriously. But he explained how to do it unobtrusively (not like these spammers…), for example ad insert in the bottom of reload SMS, etc. Talk to him, he’s got good ideas.

And finally Amiranto of j-spot talked about the potential of Augmented Reality (his latest pet project – Layar + Android), cool stuff. Some of their existing clienteles are looking into this technology, and how this can be applied into mobile marketing.

I guess all the presenters will eventually share their presentation slides (starting with Andy… soon…) for you to read and enjoy… so watch this space.

In addition to our live tweet at @idmomo, here’s the recap of the event.

It was a full house event, so packed, but also full of enthusiasm. We are featuring a bunch of developers and leading people in BlackBerry world in Indonesia. Also attending are a lot of movers and shakers in the mobile industry.

Agung Wijanarko (Indosat, @gungwi) opened the session by sharing his insights titled “BlackBerry Beyond Email Applications.” First he showed an amazing graphic that BB has hit the A phone in Indonesia in term of mobile web usage. Then he went on to introduce two types of BB applications (beyond email), first the horizontal applications (mass market) and then the vertical applications.

The horizontal applications is very important, because BlackBerry has grown out of its root as corporate solution into a consumer product. Sixty percent (60%) of the users are now consumer, and it’s growing faster. Dominating in the mass market apps are social networking and instant messaging apps.

On the vertical app, Agung explained that mobile CRM is a very potential market that needs to be addressed. This is one of the main reason that people are still carrying their laptop when they are mobile.

His conclusion…

Indonesia is promising market and the new red hot spot for RIM and BlackBerry!

Next on stage was Deddy Avianto (ID Berry [BB only website], @idberry). He shared a business potential that many people often overlooked… BlackBerry themes. And not just simple themes, but showing that we – Indonesian – can do a lot of innovation in these themes. His theme creation are often featured in BlackBerry review websites.

One nice example is a theme that he did with BMW Indonesia to promote their new car. (Talking about mobile marketing).

dadBerry is also organizing several BB developer gathering. So watch his website/tweet. SPECIAL: he is offering for limited time free theme for us, id-momo-ers… so get it now. Details on his presentation.

Fahmi Gustiawan (Pravina) and Setiadji (Pemda DKI) actually impressed me with what they are sharing… M-gov application on BlackBerry… and not only Powerpoint-ware but already implemented in our very own Jakarta government.

So for example, the government can check Katulampa water gate level, for early flood mitigation/warning system. Then there is this (potentially) open and realtime communication channel to government officials wrt feedback (read: complaint) of public services — traffic jam, condition of public facility, … The Governor is monitoring and actively using these services!

This is very real, and hopefully can improve the quality of public services.

BTW, Fahmi was presenting using his BB, no laptop… whoa…

Next, on the lineup, were 4 Indonesian developers (one is half Indonesian, actually… ).

• Willson Cuaca (xsago, @foyage)… maker of Foyage BlackBerry LBS application. Foyage offered editorial and user-generated review for point of interests around Indonesia and Singapore, which utilize your LBS/location information. It also does traffic as well…
• Ronald Ishak (domikado, @ronishak)… domikado is a lifestyle application for BB that got so many download within days of their launch (20k downloads – their 1st year target, in 3 days… Ed. Ron, your investors will probably triple or quadruple your next year target, good luck…). He simply said that, “… this will change your lifestyle” from how you read news and how you trade stocks.
• Mark Hanusz (equinox apps)… expanded from iPhone to BB… simply because it’s something inevitable. Their jakartaglobe application is ported to BB. It’s offering a platform for mobile news, which includes monetization via advertising as well.
• Sukimin Irawan (caripromo)… his application is the one you should install if you’re a deal/promo chasers… it aggregates all the current promo from all over the place, food, shopping, electronics, movies, etc. (Ed. I wish all the marketers use this instead of spamming us with irrelevant SMS).
• We actually missed 7langit… guys, next time you should present ya…

The good thing with applications is that just this week BlackBerry launched their AppWorld (anyone who hasn’t download it please do so…. goto mobile.blackberry.com from your handset – you Nokians should download Ovi Store as well!). Although, like Agung mentioned, discovery of application is also a challenge in app stores. Probably we need in the near future guides to “app store marketing tactics”… But it’s a nice problem to have.

Last but not least, Michael Smith from Yahoo! developer network made a short announcement about the upcoming OpenHack day on the 21-22 November. It’s a fun day for you developers. Fun facts: Yahoo! has 63 million users in South East Asia, so it’s a huge market. Details can be found on this website.

So to wrap up… “Happy thumbing!”

PS. Slides can be found at the usual place.

After about 18 months, this is Tomi’s second visit to MobileMonday… still energetic and insightful, Tomi delivered his presentation titled “New Business Opportunities out of Mobile Social Networking”

So, here’s some key pointers:

Recession = it’s time to copy… copy proven and successful concept from other companies/countries/operators… launch it!

Great community services are built upon 4 principles: Connectivity, Culture, Commerce, Community. The ability to combine these attributes is the key to exciting services. Example: Sony Pictures Sofia’s Diary combines Connectivity (mobile voting via SMS) and Culture (teen’s interest in social/romantic dilemma) to create interactive mobisodic soap opera.

Then he shared the update and a lot of examples about Mobile as the 7th Mass Media (someone care to improve the Wiki page?) and the seven benefits of mobile, reminding us that mobile is different than other medias:

1. Mobile is the first personal mass media
2. Mobile is permanently carried
3. Mobile is always-on
4. Mobile has a built-in payment mechanism
5. Mobile is available at the point of creative inspiration
6. Mobile has the most accurate audience measurement
7. Mobile captures the social context of media consumption

Benefits number 1 through 6 is somewhat easier to grasp. Understanding the 7th is the most interesting – how recommendation, referral, viral, and WoM work and being enhanced using mobile. Obama’s m-campaign is taken as another example… it’s viral enough (SMS invitations sent to supporters, and can be forwarded to others as viral campaign), it’s social enough (twitter and iPhone apps that show poll result contextually – got to see it…)

Then, finally the business model for Mobile Social Networking. It’s a 100-million-plus-user service globally, and there’s a positive ARPU impact (according to Informa). There are six revenue models at this moment:

1. Subscriptions
2. Advertising
3. Personalization
4. Pay-per-view (with revenue share)
5. Gifting
6. Ego-services

The newest one is ego services… feeding on people needs to look good (virtually). Introduced by flirtomatic, if you don’t like your rating (5 stars etc), can now eliminate worst rating but pay for it. Or find out who gave you that rating (and pay for it too…).

Tomi convinced us that there are real business potential of new and creative mobile social network services. Adding value to the operators and to the consumers, creators as well. SeeMeeTV for example gives an average UKP 13 payout for content creator…

And lastly, don’t forget to make mobile fun! Gen-C will dominate the world in the future (and the mobile world now), so they all love having fun… (as much as we do).

Few links worth mentioning:

• Many of his examples are taken from Tomi Ahonen Pearls Vol 2: Mobile Social Networking, which just came out last month and has 50 case studies of successful mobile services. The eBook is not sold on Amazon or any other place, except directly from the website (which has free sample pages!!) so head on to: http://www.tomiahonen.com/ebook/PearlsV2.html
• Please join Forum Oxford, the free expert community of over 2,000 with over 40 of mobile authors and 16 of the 20 best-read bloggers in mobile. Check the details about this on his preso slide.

Slides? Oh yes, it’s available on our site: http://sites.google.com/site/mobilemondayid/

And… SPECIAL THANKS for Ericsson Indonesia – for sponsoring Tomi and for Telkom Indonesia/indigo for sponsoring the whole event (food, drinks, venue). Thanks a bunch guys!

Tonight’s event was titled “The New Revenue Models of Mobile Social Networking” featuring our special guest, Tomi Ahonen. And of course, joining him are two speakers who are also well known: Shinta “Bubu” and Widi Nugroho of Telkom/indigo.

Shinta started the exciting event with her dynamic presentation about Digital Marketing initiatives in Indonesia – “The Rise of Digital Era.” She shared her observation that the Internet must change the way we approach marketing, considering that media consumption has shifted to online (and mobile) media.

She mentioned that marketing must understand the social media as the means to deliver high-impact and accountable marketing. Shinta gave two successful examples of recent social campaigns that show the power of social network: Whopper Sacrifice and iPod Nick Haley TVC. Whopper Sacrifice is a Facebook campaign that is soooo viral (it’s also trackable, they can track who install and buy-in the concept). While the iPod TVC is created by an 18-year Apple enthusiast (or should I say fanatic) student for free, posted in YouTube, and gained popularity overnight (kindof…), creating  what-you-never-dreamed-of awareness and interest for Apple.

Shinta then explained about BuBu Awards V06 – celebrate the best practice of Indonesian online in order to improve the high impact of new trends marketing! They have some interesting activities lined up, from digital marketing competition, blog writing competition on Komodo Island (yay!), and Digital Conference with great spekers.

Let’s go to bubuawards.com, and see if your company/yourself can participate (you should!)

Then Pak Widi of indigo-Telkom, our sponsor for this event, explained their initiatives the “Indigo Fellowship” – for brighter Indonesian digitalpreneur.

Indigo Fellowship aims to foster enterpreneurship in the digital business. They provide facility from creation, ideation, seed capital ($$$), coaching, and digital playground (utilizing Telkom’s vast resources)… helping Indonesian creative people to succeed as digitalpreneur.

This program is launched now since May 2009, and will go into selection/recruiting phase until August 2009. Screening will be conducted in September 2009. Key judging criteria will be: People (yeah, joining MobileMonday will help you in this criteria), Profit, Planet (yeah, you should do good for others, man!)

So, what are you waiting for: plasaindigo.com

I’ll save the second part of the recap for tomorrow or the next day. Haven’t got the slides….

Update: Special thanks to our sponsor: Ericsson Indonesia and Telkom Indonesia. Thanks guys, without you we can’t get this event done.

Apology for my delay… nevertheless, here’s the recap for May event. Selular magazine also wrote a nice article about it as well – can’t find it on the web – will scan & post.

One of the main attraction for today’s Internet/mobile Internet is video. We know that it is big, but how big?

So Cisco launched “Visual Networking Index” initiatives to sample the traffic in Internet. Ichwan F. Agus, the SP Sales Director of Cisco explained about this VNI initiatives… Cisco is deploying probes on major ISP globally to measure what’s really happening there.

Key findings of VNI are: video as the key driver of IP growth with high-def and on-demand content as major use of today, but collaboration & mobility in future networks. Video now is dominated by Internet Video to PC, but future will be Internet Video to TV (hmm…) and Interactive Video.

Based on the VNI, in 2012 video is predicted to occupy up 90% of consumer Internet bandwidth. This reflects 65% growth annually… This is enough to create a challenge in the current operators’ network.

Mobile data traffic, he continued, will double every year… (yipee!!), so in 2012, mobile data traffic will be twenty times what it is today. Amount of mobile data traffic per month in APAC is about 230 Petabyte (PB). To put this into perspective, one Petabyte is 1000 Terabytes or 250k DVDs…

Then, Jeff Teh… represented by me explained about a key trends in the mobile industry acros Asia.

Here’s the executive summary:

• Moderate growth in premium content market of 37.4% over 2007.
• Operators seeking alternative revenue streams: Mobile Data services (YES!!). Mobile voice is now 74% of operators revenue, but by 2014 it will be only 62%, so representing 10% of revenue shifted to value added services (at the current market, it’s about 8 trillion Rp)
• Messaging remains key revenue contributor to mobile data services in APAC and even global. It’s no surprise that basic information services & news alerts are still strong. He referred to RedNano in Singapore as a new business model for info services.
• Mobile entertainment key to growth with Music and Video services leading the way. Music is driven by RBT. Popular new music services are: Mobile Karaoke and Music TV. Mobile video should be redefined, content needs to be adopted to what users want.
• 3G, Mobile Internet and handset trends key to growth of mobile data services and premium content. Frost & Sullivan believed by 2014, 47% of all devices are capable of Internet access.
• Mobile advertising, search, commerce are new areas of growth of premium content.

Highlighting on the mobile video, I quotes Jeff that what users want are not simply TV translated to mobile format but rather (try that please):

• bite-sized chunks of entertainment as fillers during free time
• no full movies (painful to watch on the mobile screen)
• viral video campaigns for mobile marketing alternatives
• mobile cartoons

Then you know exactly that we need to understand more about Mobile Advertising. And to make sure that it remains non-intrusive, targeted, personal, immediate. Ad-sponsored model can be the new revenue stream and expected to improve consumption of premium content.

Ad is related to the Social Networking trends. But they didn’t see yet the form of revenue in SocNet… (Tomi’s got answer for that).

Other than that… vertical search is interesting trend. The promise of vertical search (specialized search, focusing on a certain type of content, e.g. images, hotels, shopping, …) is to deliver content in fewer clicks… The less click the happier the user will be.

Lastly, try to look at Voice IVR/VAS. Voice portal that helps user to select and get content (instead of browsing through WAP pages). Usable for RBT selection, conference, voice chat. Really big in India, China, and Thailand. (I know that some operators & VAS ops are looking into this).

Enjoy & happy selling

Some of the May & June Mobile Monday slides are available. Please go to our slide page @ http://sites.google.com/site/mobilemondayid/

Tomi’s slide is not yet there. Just a bit more patient please…

Last night we touch one of our favorite subject – update on the trends and happenings in Mobile Internet world in Indonesia. Joining us among about 120 audiences are Zibin Cheah from Opera Software (our event sponsor), Rahmadi (Dodi) from Ericsson, Pahala form Mobile-8, and Steven from mig33.

Pak Dodi opened up the session with the update on LTE – the next generation radio access technology for mobile, or I should say simply the 4G. LTE performance target is very interesting: better spectrum efficiency, achieving more than 100 Mb/s and a very short latency – this should be one key technology that can get mobile broadband on par with fixed broadband!

Regulatory-wise, LTE has not been decided by our Gov’t… so let’s watch this promising space.

For the additional details, check out his slides (link to be provided).

Then, Zibin from Opera Software explains what Opera has been doing to drive standard-based and better web browing experience including the Tjarakan (next-gen Javascript engine). Two important highlights in my views are:

• Indonesia continues to be in the top position for mobile Internet usage, second only to Russia. Data collected from Opera Mini statistics.
• Top 10 sites visited from mobile are: Friendster (got like 50% of the traffic), Google, Facebook, peperonity, gamejump, my.opera, getjar, gratisindo, digg… this already generated majority of the traffic.

Zibin’s presentation can be found in this link.

Steven of mig33 then reinforces that mobile (data) usage in Indonesia is big. About 5.4 million registered users. (So assuming the proportion is consistent, there are 1+ mio daily sessions from Indonesia). He also shared a couple of their business perspectives – caught my attentions are (quoted):

• Mobile internet opportunity is not the same as the desktop internet opportunity

• First wave of successful applications are or lead to, utility that is coadjacent to the phone’s first value proposition – Communications!

Point number 1 will be a complete opposite of what Opera Software believes… but hey, it’s ok to disagree. His slide can be found here.

Next, Pahala Sinaga from Mobile-8, discussing some observations from mobile broadband market… First, the growth of broadband subscribers and users are still very lucrative – in his slide, he shared a very valuable data collected from various sources about growth, ARPU of broadband services in Indonesia. Secondly, he also shared the characteristics of services — e.g. price, mobility, modem bundling, etc — that people expect from their Internet services.

(I personally would like welcome them to this broadband services space, expecting that they can add value and alternatives to the market).

Mobile Internet is something very interesting. For all of the players. For users, as it is promising a new services that you can enjoy on your mobile phone. For developers, as this is the next growth and monetization area. And for operators (and vendors), because Internet will change a lot of assumptions – technical and business.

Watch this space. Don’t get left behind.

Special thanks, once again for Opera Software for sponsoring the MobileMonday March 2009 event.

This year, Indonesia is honored to have BioLocate shortlisted as Top 20 Finalist and invited to present in MobileMonday Peer Awards 2009 in Barcelona. The team from BioLocate unable to make it to Barcelona due to the short notice, but they are managed to make a short video presentation and was playbacked in front  of the jury in Barcelona. Although BioLocate did not win, I am happy that we are the only representative from South East Asia to make it to the final.

BioLocate at Peer Awards 2009

The Mobile Peer Awards is a wonderful event, attended by estimated 1000 audience and was opened by keynote from Anssi Vanjoki, Executive Vice President & General Manager, Markets at Nokia and Member of the Nokia Group Executive Board. We have audience from all over the world, including developers, startups, venture capitals, media, and government officials. I met a big team from Malaysian MDEC, but unable to find anyone else from Indonesia (or Indonesia government … well, maybe next year we’ll send official invitation).

For those of you who would like to know how the finalists “wow” the jury during Peer Awards, I would like to share a video of Unkasoft, one of the audience favorite doing all the tricks (including “Tiger Jump”) to visualize their solution within the strict 3 minutes pitch. Enjoy!