TechCrunch - Why Startups Need to Blog

Going though my tweets of the day, I noticed this aptly titled article in TechCruch by Mark Suster


Wow, finally, what I've been looking for. A how-to (and what-for) guide about blogging for a highly competitive industy, where "loose lips sink ships", along with all the must-have toolkits to put up in your blog. (I guess its upgrade time for this old blog. We'll see over the next few weeks).

Cool gadget aside, though, the issue about what to talk about is what's been worrying me about blogging. Yes, I'd like to share ideas with my fellow industry enthusiasts, but not to jeopardize my own companies.

Mark suggested to blog about the industry. Hmm.. somewhat save. There are lots of miscommunication and wrong informations about technology, especially internet, in Indonesia. I guess sharing my research on these (and get corrections) isn't too dangerous.

Social Commerce Platform 8thBridge Raises $10 Million

Social Commerce Platform? Wow, but of course, people are selling through Facebook. Why not. Gotta keep track of this one.

Can do quick checkout from News feed - Check
Sell from Fan Page - Check

Indomog's own facebook store must be lame in comparison :( Well, I slap dash that one in two weeks, so what do you expect. Oh, well, next month, maybe...

Eduardo and Jumio

An article really pique my interest today: Eduardo Saverin (lead a team to) invests $6.5m in Jumio, A MOBILE AND INTERNET PAYMENT GATEWAY... What! Where? How?

What is this Jumio? Where does it operates? How is it different than Paypal, or more importantly, than my Indomog?

I searched (oops, I meant googled), I dug, nothing. Except a Forbes article saying, that yes, there are nothing to find yet. I guess we just have to wait and see.

I found somehing interesting in Jumio's blog, though. A listing of all the different flavors of online payments.

This is what I need to work my head around for the moment. What's the space, what's its margins, who are willing to pay for what, and how will I make money.

Indomog (www.indomog.com) handles payment for digital goods (online games). We make money from the margin between what discount the publisher gave us and the fee I have to pay for my 2000+ resellers (and advertising costs, operationg costs, etc etc). And for that I need good margins.

The ecommerce players wants to use our service. and why not, we may have indonesia's widest cash in distribution network outside of a bank (that is not affiliated with a telco). But they balked at anything above 3-4%. After all, the credit cards only charge them 2.5%. And we are smaller, right, so we should be cheaper? (what kind of reasoning is that)

But it costs a lot of money to get the cash into the system. and a lot to get it out. On the other hand, it costs (almost) nothing to move the cash around IN the system. hmm....

Would someone use the system for just P2P? to transfer credit between each other? I guess if eventually one of the "P" is a very desirable merchant, that will work. We have 79 games including Zynga now, so that can be one, Mobile Phone pulsa is another, Facebook credit next month, Then Google's (and SITTI's),

Will that be enough? ... I wonder...