Archive for December, 2010
What’s with the Indonesians?
Back in May of this year, Yahoo! acquired an Indonesian geo-social startup called Koprol. Koprol was pretty much unheard of on the geo-social apps landscape.
Yahoo! made the acquisition through their franchisee, Yahoo! Southeast Asia, after Koprol won a Yahoo! Developer Day in Jakarta.
Since May, Koprol has really taken off in Indonesia, now reporting over 1 million users, which puts it in #2 place against FourSquare’s reported 3 5 million users.
Koprol is now also the #3 social network in Indonesia after Twitter and Facebook:
http://www.koprolblog.com/2010/11/3rd/
At Locle we had already noticed that there was something special about Indonesia in relation to geo-social. Without any advertising or promotion of Locle in the Indonesian market, and without any translation or localization, 15% of Locle’s users were from Indonesia.
We know that Indonesia is a big country. With 240 million people, it’s the fifth most populous.
So what is it about Indonesians? We think it’s to do with mobile vs PC usage. A significant proportion of the population only have mobile phone access to the internet. But we also think it has something to do with the way Indonesians socialise. As a predominantly Muslim, yet liberal country, geo-social networking seems to fit well with their way of life.
It’ll be interesting to see what other countries turn out to be surprise geo-socialisers!
