Sometime late last year I attended the launch of Mojopia, a business unit of Telkom Indonesia which was run by a newly created Telkom company called Metranet. While the name Mojopia may sound rather alien, it was actually derived from Majapahit, a major South East Asian empire during the 13th to16th century located in what is now Indonesia. Quite a role model to look up to if you ask me.

Mojopia's first major task was to relaunch plasa.com, Telkom's community site which dated back to around the year 2000 and has since gone into relative obscurity, apparently it still has about 80 thousand users. Most of the people I know when I mentioned the name would ask back if it actually still exists. Indonesians who were already online five to ten years ago would immediately recognize the name but most of those only today probably would not have heard of the name.

Ecommerce Platform
This presents an opportunity for Telkom to relaunch and repurpose the site. They've decided that plasa.com will be more of an ecommerce platform for small to medium enterprises and use the existing community platform as a way for businesses to interact with their customers.

At the moment, Kaskus is the largest or second largest community site in Indonesia next to Twitter with about a million or so active users. It is also arguably the largest ecommerce platform in the country despite the fact that it began as a message board. The tightly knit community at Kaskus made people comfortable in dealing with online trading as more and more people began selling all sorts of items on the site. Before long, Forum Jual Beli (Trading Forum) became the most popular destination at Kaskus and when a few years ago they removed the adult-oriented forum from the site, the traffic took off in the ways the site's operators never expected.

There's quite a lot of small entrepreneurial individuals, mom and pop shops, and the like, who have been building their businesses online through blog sites such as Blogger or Multiply over the years and Mojopia's efforts should push this even further as they have the support of Telkom and its wide range of assets and capabilities.

A major stumbling block in growing ecommerce in the country is the lack of trust people have with online payments. Credit card ownership is uncommon as most people still prefer the traditional cash or direct transfers upon receiving the goods. Clearly this presents a huge problem and raises the issue of trust, or rather, lack of it. Having a major company backing the site, dispute resolutions hopefully will become something that is much more easily managed.

Like a Mall
In a way, plasa.com operates like a mall where tenants pay rent for the privilege of a space on the site. Supposedly they also have signed the services of a couple of major banks to support their payment system which include credit cards, direct transfers and Telkom's own T- cash. PayPal is, to the best of my knowledge, not yet on board as it's not currently that widely used outside the web developer or freelancer communities.

Those who visit plasa.com would be presented with a range of tenants offering various kinds of products. Mojopia has been hard at work in courting various businesses around the country to adopt plasa.com as their online presence to widen their opportunities in finding new customers. Currently however, the site is still in transition and still shows the old design.

iPad Giveaway
Plasa.com officially relaunches next Saturday night, March 27, and they are planning to give away 24 iPads to those who have registered at the site prior to the launch. The drawing will be done every hour in the 24 hours after the launch event which will be telecast on GlobalTV. Unfortunately, it seems that it will coincide with Earth Hour. Someone hasn't been paying attention apparently.

Anyway, about the iPads, this is an interesting move. Apple obviously has yet to make iPads available outside the US (currently even Americans can only pre-order it sight unseen) and their plans for the initial international roll out in April does not include South East Asia let alone Indonesia.

So how are the winners going to get their hands on those iPads? Apparently what Mojopia plan to do is announce the winners as they come and present the iPads once they are made available locally. It's pretty much the only thing they or any other company can do if they're planning to giveaway iPads in a competition for the time being.

There is still a question whether iPad warranties apply internationally or not which is a major reason why it would not be wise for a major operation such as this to source the iPads from overseas.

Regardless, this move by Telkom to push for an ecommerce platform should be lauded as Indonesians move to a more internet-aware society. The rapid adoption of social networking sites combined by a surge of mobile broadband subscriptions in the last two years have opened the eyes of many Indonesians who were previously less aware of what the internet is and what its potentials are.

We'll see if plasa.com manages to improve trust in and viability of ecommerce in the country.

Sent from my iPhone