8villages is one of the growing startups in Indonesia and set its sights at a market that many startups don’t pay attention to. Farmers with feature phones may be a combination considered to be uncool by local startups which tend to refer to Silicon Valley where practically everyone there uses a smartphone. Indonesia is clearly a different market, similar to many growing Asian nations as feature phones are still dominant. Just because it’s a feature phone market doesn’t mean it can’t be monetized. mig33 with its business model shows that this is possible.

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Ask any smartphone-wielding Indonesian about their messaging apps and they would most likely say a combination of two, maybe three apps, aside from SMS, the usage of which had been in serious decline over the past year. WhatsApp, BlackBerry Messenger, and Line tend to be the top three messaging apps mentioned by Indonesians. Although people do actively use other messaging apps, they are not as prominent on people’s minds.

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Several years ago, when I was still in University, I owned a USB thumb drive. It was still relatively new then and not many people owned one, to the point that I had to carry around the installer CD everywhere. That thumb drive was capable of storing a whopping 64 MB, much larger than the box of floppy disks that I carried everywhere, and was most certainly less prone to fungi. Today, a thumb drive with such capacity is probably not for sale anymore; even 1GB drives are usually given away as bonuses.

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Last Saturday, April 20th, 2013, a few friends and I had the chance to create a small gathering to discuss about music, entrepreneurship and technology. This gathering started off from people who had joined a group with the same name on Google+, moderated by Robin Malau and Widi Asmoro. Looking at how active the discussions were in the group, and the variety of topics covered in a group what was literally weeks old, I offered to create the first gathering for this group at the offices of Think Web, which is also where Wooz.in is headquartered. Thanks to Ramya Prajna for providing the space and the audiovisual equipment.

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Social network that focus on travel Burufly announces its undisclosed investment from Walden International and Batavia Incubator. According to e27, the investment will help Burufly to expand to the region, with Thailand currently on the list. What’s in my mind, however, it’s not about the destination, it’s more about the audiences.

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One of the main pillars of industries based in intellectual property are royalties. In this definition, royalties is the amount of revenue shared and received by an owner of an intellectual property or work, from usage of said work by other parties; it often refers to musical works and compositions. The royalties paid can be 0% to 100%, depending on the agreement between the work owner and the party who wants to exploit it. Bottom line, every work that is used, whether it is duplicated, broadcast or used in sync with other products (in what is called synchronisation rights, usually for ads, movie soundtracks, and so on), the work owner will receive a portion of income as agreed.

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