“May was a historical month to mobile world. After more than two years, we’ve finally had a new biggest mobile internet-use country. Indonesia, who has been Rusia’s rival, is now on the top of the list,” Opera Software creator Jon von Tetzchner says in the State of the Mobile Web report for May 2010 that was just up on Opera’s official site.

The growth of Opera Mini users in Indonesia has sharply risen up to 317.1 percent compared to 2009. The number was far higher than Rusia, which only went up 43.3 percent.

A similar progress was also found in the growth of Indonesian Opera user page view that has been soaring to 570.6 percent since May last year, beating Rusia whose page view growth was only 71.1 percent.

However, the amount of data transferred by most Russian users is higher than the one in Indonesia. The average number of data transferred by each Russian is 9 MB while Indonesian users only transfer 6 MB.

Despite the short number in data transfer, Indonesia has acquired more page view per user than Rusia, which only obtained 477 page views, by getting 676 page views.

“Congrats to Indonesia, who’s now leading mobile web access through Opera Mini in the world”, von Tetzchner says, adding that the success was made possible by the support from Opera user community in Indonesia.

Since the beginning of the year, Indonesia has been competing with Rusia in terms of number of Opera Mini users. Opera Web Evangelist Cheah Zibin told VIVAnews a while ago that at the time, the number of Opera Mini users in Indonesia was slightly lower than in Rusia.

The website mostly accessed by Indonesian users is Facebook, which has brought the country to the third position in the list of biggest Facebook-using countries. Indonesia has even been predicted to knock England off the second spot in the list.

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They have also unintentionally become real life models of Indonesian Islamic fashion, she says.

Jetti R. Hadi, the editor in chief of NooR, a magazine specializing in Muslim fashion, said that during the haj a lot of people complemented Indonesians’ attire. “People would say, ‘Oh, you have such beautiful clothes’. The women always look attractive,” she said recently.

As the most-populous Muslim country, with a growing number of women opting to wear the jilbab or headscarves, Muslim fashion has emerged as a promising industry in Indonesia, with many designers focusing on clothes and accessories that adheres to Islamic principles of covering the skin and hair of women.

In the international fashion scene, Muslim wear and accessories in the coming years is projected to reach 20 percent of the total fashion industry, which was worth US$1.7 trillion in 2008, according to Jetti.

While none of the Muslim countries are capitalizing on this, those in the Indonesian fashion field are set to make Indonesia the “Mecca” of Muslim fashion, Jetti said.

The government, realizing the various designers of Muslim wear, who combine colorful Indonesian fabrics of batik and ikat with interesting cloth design — distinguishing itself from Middle Eastern countries style Muslim clothes of dark abayas, burqas, and niqabs — are currently joining forces with the industry to promote the country’s Islamic fashion.

The Culture and Tourism Ministry last week held Gala dinner events in Auckland, New Zealand, and Melbourne, Australia with a contemporary dance troupe, Batavia Dance Studio, and two Muslim fashion brands, Up2date and Bilqis, to promote the country as a Muslim fashion shopping destination.

The Jakarta Post joined the tour by invitation from the Culture and Tourism Ministry.

Having a limited budget for promotion — the Indonesian tourism promotional budget for 2010 is Rp 426 billion ($47 million), the tourism ministry is aiming for targeted marketing strategies, such as the Gala dinner and Muslim fashion show.

The ones in Auckland and Melbourne, the Culture and Tourism Ministry director general of marketing Sapta Nirwandar said, were organized to attract the Muslim community from the two cities. Indonesia aims to attract 7 million visitors for 2010.

In his speech at the Melbourne Gala dinner, Sapta said the ministry wanted to voice that Indonesia had a diverse culture. “We don’t want to discriminate other religions or make Islam special,” he said.

Sapta said the clothes showcased in Auckland and Melbourne hopefully could shed the “scary” image of Muslim wear.

“The clothes are peaceful, stylish; an image that is not scary. There’s no boundaries between the one who wears the clothes and other people,” he said after the Gala dinner in Melbourne.

More Indonesian women began to wear Islamic garb since the mid 1990s after the New Order regime eased religious repression in the pretext of national stability. Previously, civil servants, office workers and students were banned from wearing the jilbab. The toppling of Soeharto in 1998 that brought the reform era brought more freedom for people to express their religiosity. In recent years, religious symbols were seen as selling points for some political candidates, with posters of their jilbab clad wives displayed during election campaign time.

Along with the political changes, the fashion industry has started to supply stylish designs for Muslim fashion, giving more choices for women who are thinking of buying Muslim wear.

Not just a veil: Muslim fashion brand Up2date designer Lia Triana puts an ikat accessory on a model’s veiled head, at the Gala dinner and Muslim fashion show in Auckland on June 16.

The growing market and the many fashion shows that include Islamic fashion categories have influenced mainstream designers to produce Islamic fashion. Established names such as Ghea Panggabean, Sebastian Gunawan and Itang Yunasz design Muslim fashion aside from their mainstream designs.

Jetti said that now in Indonesia, Muslim fashion designs were incredibly rich. “It’s very colorful and you can see from the different types of head covers the wide range of choices. There are jilbabs that are very tight, there are also loose ones that cover the chest,” she said.

Indonesian women who opt to wear the jilbab have various choices of fashionable clothes, Jetti said. “This makes Indonesian Muslims not feel frumpish. They feel fashionable,” she said.

She said that people from Malaysia and Singapore, look at Indonesia for fashionable Muslim wear. She said that Muslim communities in Middle East, Europe and Australia could be tapped through rigorous promotion.

Last week’s Gala dinner was Melbourne’s second and a first for Auckland. Last year the tourism ministry brought Muslim fashion designer prodigy Dian Pelangi and veteran designer Iva Latifah to Melbourne.

This year Bandung-based Up2date represented the more youthful designs while Surakarta-based Bilqis presented its signature glamorous and elegant batik pieces.

With the theme “Tenun Inspiration”, Up2date presented layers of structured designs with touches of ikat from different parts of Indonesia.

Colorful ikat were constructed as vests layered on top of spandex blouses. One model wore a batik cape that can be worn in different styles.

Lia Triana, Up2date designer, said that the idea was to create different and versatile pieces to mix and match. The result was interesting vests, capes and boleros to add character.

Tuti Adib, Bilqis owner and designer said her pieces centered on the idea of elegance and glamor using woven cloth, batik and sequins.

Partnering with batik craftsmen in Surakarta, she said the woven clothes were made using a traditional weaving machine, and the batik was handmade.

“Muslim fashion is not a trend. It’s a need for some people who want to cover their bodies,” she said.

Australian market: Up2date co-owner Aju Isni Karim checks out a dress at Muslim fashion store House of Emaan, in Melbourne, Australia.

“I try to make clothes that not only serve the function of covering the body, but that has a sense of art in them,” she said.

The response to the clothes varied between Auckland and Melbourne. In Auckland, Bev Wallace who was present at the gala dinner said that she was impressed with the design and fabrics. Asked whether she would wear any of the designs, Wallace paused and said, “I honestly don’t know.”

In Melbourne, however, the audience rushed backstage to purchase the clothes presented at the show.
Laura Anderson, the chairman

of L’oreal Melbourne Fashion Week, wearing a Dian Pelangi design blue batik coat that she sourced from last year’s event, said that clothes designed for Islamic fashion had beautiful choices of jackets
and coats.

She said that Indonesia’s attempt to be the hub of Islamic Fashion was possible only if there were easy channels to market it. “That’s obviously through retail chains and special boutiques… There’s also the online channel. I think that’s the key to bring the clothes from textile manufacturers to end consumers,” she said.

The show in Melbourne did open up channels to the Melbourne market with Up2date and Bilqis meeting with Melbourne-based Muslim fashion store owners, one being Indonesian-owned House of Eeman.

Zurlia Ismail, owner of House of Eeman, said that she imported clothes from Jakarta, Surakarta, Malang and Surabaya.

“Our customers vary from people from North Africa to the Middle East as well as Southeast Asia,
such as Singapore and Malaysia,” she said.

Sapta, who has several times promoted Indonesian tourism through its fashion and food, said that it was part of cultural diplomacy. Last April, the tourism ministry held a one-month Indonesia exhibition at London’s most prestigious shopping center Harrods.

The next step from the tourism ministry to establish Indonesia as a shopping destination for Muslim fashion is a yearly Islamic fashion fair in Jakarta that will debut next year.

The ministry is currently preparing a yearly Indonesia Islamic Fashion Fair, collaborating with the Indonesian Fashion Designers Association, NooR and fashion boutique, Shafira House, aiming to make Indonesia the center of the world’s Muslim fashion by 2020.

“People used to go to Singapore to shop. Now we want people come to Jakarta for that,” she said.

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“Users are growing very, very fast. Indonesia is about to explode,” Google Asia Business Development director Emmanuel Sauquet said of Southeast Asia’s biggest economy.

“It has very diverse and very active online communities. It’s the right place for us to come now,” he said. “Compared to other emerging countries, Indonesia is the fastest growing country.”

Google is collaborating with a local wireless broadband Internet company Bakrie Connectivity, whose new modem will come with Google Chrome web browser as a standard feature.

Indonesia’s population of more than 230 million people and low market penetration have made the Indonesia attractive for Internet companies.

The country has about 40 million Internet users, while it is also ranked third with the most registered Facebook users, after the US and Britain, with more than 22 million users.

A study by Yahoo! in Southeast Asia found that Indonesia is the largest and fastest growing online market in Southeast Asia. It marked a growth of 48 percent in 2010 of online usage compared to 22 percent last year.

Yahoo! recently bought local social networking website Koprol.

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The report, “Indonesia: Rising Competition to Spur Telecom Revenue Growth,” reveals that there’s a marked under-penetration of most telecom services in this vast, fragmented country of more than 240 million people.

But rapid service uptake, driven by increased competition and rising disposable income, is expected, with the Pyramid team predicting that, while China and India are still set for significant expansion, Indonesia will become the fastest-growing telecom market in Asia/Pacific during the 2009-2014 period, with overall revenues from communications services growing by a staggering 80 percent.

In the mobile sector, subscription penetration stood at 63.7 percent in 2009 — below the global average of 68 percent — and actual user penetration at 38.6 percent. There has already been some growth -– in 2006 subscription penetration was just 28 percent –- but the report’s authors believe there will be much more in the coming years, with penetration set to exceed 93 percent by the end of 2014. In revenue terms, the report predicts that this will translate to a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 11.4 percent for the mobile sector to 2014.

Broadband of any kind has yet to reach 1 percent of the population, but mobile broadband is on the march, claiming 2.4 million connections in 2009, compared with only 1.6 million on fixed broadband. This is partly explained by the archipelago nature of the country: The population is spread across more than 6,000 of Indonesia’s 17,000 islands, which makes wireless technology more suitable for broadband rollout. And in a country where only 5 percent of the population owns a PC, mobile phones look set to be the standard platform for Internet access.

PT Telekomunikasi Selular (Telkomsel) , the mobile arm of fixed incumbent PT Telekomunikasi Indonesia Tbk. (Telkom) , will probably be the main beneficiary of this growth, and will likely still dominate the market with a market share of more than 50 percent in 2014. (See Telkomsel Plans Capex Hike.)

But it’s not just a mobile story. The report predicts that fixed-line revenue growth will outstrip that of the mobile sector during the coming five years. Indeed, Pyramid projects that total fixed-line revenue will increase at a CAGR of 13.6 percent to the end of 2014. The main driver of this will be the continued popularity of limited mobility services — or fixed-wireless access (FWA) — throughout the archipelago. FWA already accounts for three quarters of all fixed connections in the country. (See Indonesian Operator Soars With FWA.)

The popularity of FWA, says the report, will mean that the fixed space will predominantly serve the need for voice services, while broadband data needs are met by 3G platforms. This, it adds, is “in stark contrast to other markets.” Perhaps surprisingly, WiMax looks set to remain a niche technology in Indonesia.

The simple fact is that while Indonesia is the fourth most populous country in the world, it ranks only seventh in Asia/Pacific in terms of telecom revenue. And in terms of telecom revenue as a percentage of GDP, Indonesia stands at 1.7 percent, compared with Vietnam on 5.3 percent and Thailand at 3.3 percent.

For Indonesia, the only way, it seems, is up.

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More than 20 million Bahasa Indonesian speakers are now Facebook members, the survey by research company Inside Network found.

English is the most common language, with over half of Facebook’s 400 million-plus users — followed by Spanish, French and Turkish.

But Indonesians are way ahead of the Asian pack, despite patchy communications infrastructure and little computer access for many of the country’s 234 million people.

And it could lead to money-making opportunities, according to the California-based research company’s Inside Facebook site, which tracks the social networking giant’s rapid spread across the planet.

“As Facebook continues to grow around the world, and add the bulk of its new users in countries outside of the United States, users? language may become an increasingly important factor for marketers and developers,” the report said.

It underlined the importance of tailoring the site to different cultures and localities.

Last month, online tracking firm comScore said Facebook delivered 176.3 billion display ads to US users alone in the first three months of the year.

But as Facebook expands, so has criticism of the company’s privacy settings and allegations of blasphemy.

The site was blocked in Pakistan for almost two weeks until Monday following a storm of controversy over a contest organised by an anonymous Facebook user calling on people to draw the Prophet Mohammed.

And Facebook is no stranger to religious controversy in Indonesia, the world’s most populous Muslim nation.

Last May hundreds of clerics from Java and Bali islands urged top religious authorities to issue a fatwa, or edict, banning Facebook for Muslims.

The clerics argued the site enables unregulated chatting between the sexes, opening the door for “obscenity,” pornography, premarital sex and adultery.

Discussion groups ranging in topics from politics to Japanese animation and homosexuality in the national language dot the website.

“Facebook is like a magnet that attracts people to join,” the cleric who headed the meeting, Abdul Muid Sohib, told AFP.

“We all know that some Facebook users use it to offer themselves for prostitution.”

Tens of thousands of Indonesians signed up to Facebook groups condemning the clerics’ call.

Source: France24.com

Having matured from its early 2000s Internet obsession with Friendster, it seems Indonesia has become something of a Web force, embracing everything from Facebook to Foursquare catching people off guard with some uncommon swarms. We wrote about an obscure Indonesian awards show taking over Twitter back in March, and on May 6, Indonesians flocking to see Iron Man 2 won their first Super Swarm badge on FourSquare—something US Web addicts usually only earn at large events like SXSW.

I’d like to say I hunted down some impressive Internet entrepreneurs during my current trip to Indonesia to ask them exactly what was going on here, but really they found me. (Just another sign of their Web savvy.) I had dinner with some of them in Jakarta last week, they include Leontinus Alpha Edison of Tokopedia, an ecommerce platform; Eduardus Christmas of still-in-progress Evolitera; Rama Mamuaya, creator of the local blog DailySocial; Selina Limman of Urbanesia.com, a local review site; Satya Witoelar of Koprol.com, a location-based social network just acquired by Yahoo and Andrew Darwis of Kaskus, a forum and classifieds portal.

I grilled them on some basic questions to bring you a Web-in-Indonesia primer. But before we get to those, here’s what impressed me the most about this small-but-tightly-knit community: It’s incredibly collegial. Plenty of research has shown that the biggest reason Silicon Valley beat Boston as a venture capital and startup hot spot was because culturally it was open, trading employees, funding, mentorship and ideas among competitors. It’s not uncommon to see Web competitors in the Valley having dinner together and generally discussing business challenges, before they go back to the office for some late night coding to bury one another in the market.

This is something many emerging markets struggle with as they put up walls, try to enforce NDAs and are generally cagey about their ideas. But the Indonesian crew is so small that they’ve found each other—mostly via Twitter—and banded together, openly discussing challenges posed by uncertain waters of raising money and offers to get acquired.

Since Indonesia has had little hype, the community seems to have grown organically—like the early days of the Valley and very unlike Web communities in Israel, India and China. Friday night I had dinner with two leading companies Kaskus and Tokopedia—both essentially community sites that have elements of eBay and Craigslist. Edison of Tokopedia was talking about how many ideas they get from reading the forums on Kaskus. “Wait, do you guys consider yourselves direct competitors?” I asked. Both laughed and said yes, sort of, but Darwis explained, “The market is so small, we’re better off helping each other.”

This seems obvious if you’re in the Valley, but I can’t tell you how uncommon it is in most places I’ve been in the last few years. Well done, Jakarta. Don’t lose that—as Boston learned the hard way, it’s a formidable advantage.

Now, some answers to that title question, mostly courtesy of the entrepreneurs photographed above.

How Many Web Users Are in Indonesia? Reports vary from 38 million users to 8% of the population, which would equal more like 20 million. If the previous reports are true, that’s close to Internet usage totals in Brazil and India, far more hyped and targeted markets. But that’s just for accessing Internet over computers. Web mobile is huge and Blackberries are the default device. Data services and cheap and you can buy Blackberry data service by the day on prepaid phones, upping the accessibility even more. Access to Facebook and Twitter are advertised on mobile billboards around the country, which is why the audience seems even larger for these services—most people are only interacting with them on their Blackberries.

Why Is the Indonesian Web Swarmy? Part of this is answered above—it’s a huge market that few players are explicitly targeting, even larger when you factor in the mobile Web. That means that as many people may be logging onto your site from Indonesia as from India or Brazil, but you have probably heard so much about Brazil and India being big emerging markets that the swell doesn’t catch you off guard. Few people know anything about Indonesia—let alone that it has 240 million people, almost as much as the US. So the swells can be surprising.

How Many Web Entrepreneurs Are in Indonesia? This crew estimated between 300 and 1,000 in Jakarta. Mamuaya has personally written about more than 300, and upwards of 1,000 have attended different founder events. Unlike the Valley, most of the “startup people” are founders—most of these companies are still pretty small. (More on entrepreneurs outside Jakarta in a future post.)

Does Anyone Make Money on the Indonesian Web? Most of them do not. There are two problems, they tell me. Indonesians do not want to pay for the Web, so founders are loathe to follow the Chinese model of amassing a large number of micro-payments to build a big company. “There is a big difference between one penny and free here,” Edison of Tokopedia says. So most are following the Valley playbook of build-and-monetize later. That may be a risky strategy: Encouraging the idea that the Web is free, rather than setting expectations from the beginning. But the reticence is also practical: Few people have credit cards and banks don’t have a universal payment system that ecommerce can exploit.

Advertising can actually be lucrative, even at this nascent stage. Part of that is because a lot of big brands are waking up to the Indonesia’s large, untapped market and there aren’t a lot of mass media platforms to advertise over. Kaskus makes $50,000 (US) a month in advertising, more than double what it takes to run the business every month.

Are There Traditional, Early-Stage VCs in Indonesia? As far as I can tell, there is exactly one and it’s not a traditional firm. East Ventures—a Singapore-based angel fund set up by Batara Eto, the founder of mixi.jp, the Japanese social networking site and others. They’re not based here, but have spent time in Jakarta scouting deals and have recently funded Tokopedia and Urbanesia. (Mamuaya reports here that a few more firms are coming or at least considering the move.)

Is Anyone in the West Trying to Buy These Companies? Again, as far as I can tell, there is exactly one suitor, although this one is more traditional: Yahoo. This insight was a lot newsier when I first drafted this post a few days ago. But Koprol aside, Yahoo has approached half-a-dozen small, up-and-coming Indonesian Web startups, this crew said. So far no other deals have been reached. But Yahoo clearly sees something here and likely isn’t done.

What is the Biggest Challenge Indonesian Web Entrepreneurs Face? Surprisingly, no one I asked said capital or exits. The relative lack of big, lucrative coding jobs from the multinationals like Google, Yahoo and Microsoft and the lack of venture capital have kept developer wages and costs of building a startup incredibly low. No one seems to feel a real pain for venture capital, because none of these companies are started with an expectation of it. This makes Indonesia absolutely unique among the 11 or so countries I’ve visited in the last two years. Instead, the pain point is finding developers. In Indonesia, developers are considered an entry level position, not a lucrative career path. Most companies have to invest six months or so in training the talent they need, making scaling up a challenge.

Source: Techcrunch