Daniel Bergqvist discusses creating a developer community in Indonesia, an emerging market with a large population of young people and growing internet access. He outlines plans to build on existing initiatives by identifying influential developers to evangelize a new platform and help form a local team. The goal is to launch a developer website and community in a way that feels local rather than corporate to attract developers and build an installed user base that can eventually become profitable.
We are a Finnish startup developing a cloud-powered mobile platform\nBased in Helsinki\nFounded 2010\nApproximately 20 people, a majority engineers and designers\nBacked by the founding engineers of Skype among others\n\n\n
By utilizing the cloud we are bringing smartphone capabilities to affordable phones. We are giving end-users an experience that shouldn’t be possible on low-end devices. So in a sense we are to mobile apps what the Wolf is to dead body disposal in Pulp Fiction. \n
Tiny (250k) JS engine residing on the handset. The engine itself could be a Java midlet or written in a native language depending on platform and requirements. In the cloud we are utilizing Google’s V8 engine. Node.js is taking care of communication and the communication format is JSON. We’ve also implemented some compression algorithms in order to keep bandwidth consumption as low as possible. \n
It’s free. It includes a phone emulator. But it also allows you to emulate different radio network conditions. Although much is included it doesn’t force you to use a specific editor. \n
Blaast uses distribution partnerships with mobile network operators to create a unique subscription based app store offering, which offers developers recurring revenues. So instead of charging per download, end-users pay a subscription fee and gets access to all the apps on the platform. Much like spotify is doing with music. So instead of splitting revenues two ways as other well known industry players do. We split rev. 3 ways, operator, Blaast and developer. The developer cut is 70%. Reason for splitting 3 ways is that we want to get the operator into the equation. We we want them to include free data in the subscription fee and we want to piggyback on their billing relation w/ the end-user. Giving them a piece of the pie is a way to incentivize that. \n
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Population\n
People under the age of 29\n
Mobile phone penetration\n\n
Fixed broadband penetration\n
Percentage of Indonesians with a credit card. \n
Number of Indonesians on Facebook. Making it the second biggest market for Facebook after the US\n
Number of Opera Mini users. Making it the biggest Opera Mini market in the world. \n
So our starting point was that we had a launch market and an awesome platform. We also had a hunch that a concept with local developer evangelists probably would work well. But we had no or very few apps. Which is a problem since success in the app world seems to be measured in number of apps. \n
First we started to look at what cities we could be interested in. We quickly decided to focus on Jakarta, Jogjakarta and Bandung. \n
Find the influentials\n
It also helps if they are JavaScript ninjas, but that’s not an \n
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hard goals\n- Weekly meetups\n- App competition\n\nSoft goals\n- The local and friendly revolutionary \n- Open\n- Creative, not only for programmers\n- Everything we do should reflect the the way we want to be perceived. \n\n
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In 3 months: 15 meetups. 1 app competiton. 3 bootcamps with the evangelists. More than 600 registered developers. More than 100 developers who’s actively using the SDK. \n