Gerakan Bawah Tanah - Mr. GBT

There are a lot of discussions on privacy these days. The internet and social media are getting most of the blame. Is this privacy issue for real? Yes, in the West, but no in Indonesia. I've been talking to some Indonesians about privacy. I give a lot of talks and in these talks usually I ask the audience what they think about privacy.  Many think that they have issues related to privacy, but from what they do it seems they don't have problems at all. For instance, Indonesians like to put their real identity - including birth date, schools they went, their child(ren), and more - on their social media! When I ask why they do that, the answers are simple; to get birthday greetings and to organize (alumni) reunions. That's why they have to put real birth dates and real schools. Same thing with photos. Indonesians like to share with families, friends, and even strangers. There was a survey - I lost the URL (if you know there URL, please let me know) - regarding privacy and ...

It has been a while, a couple of weeks I think, I cannot access Apple Store. What I mean by that is that I cannot update my applications on my iPhone, iPad, dan Macbook. It just stalled. I can access the main page, but updating applications doesn't work. Those applications that I tried to update are not accessible right now. Arrrggghhh... I have tried using different internet service providers, including my cell operators. All to no avail. Is this a specific case or a regional problem? I am in Indonesia.

One of the main reasons I subscribe to Indovision - satelite TV provider in Indonesia - is to watch English Barclays Premier League. I love soccer. But this season, for some reasons I don't know, this is not available in Indovision. I heard rumors about they could not get the license or something like that. In any case, this is bad for English soccer in general. People are now watching Spanish LA Liga soccer instead. I think somebody should take good care of this. Or, English soccer is losing fans in Indonesia.

Gone are the days of BlackBerry in Indonesia. It is replaced by ... Oppo ! When I go to stores or malls that sell cellphones, there used to be many counters with BlackBerry signs. Nowadays, the view is diffrent. It is Oppo sign. At first, I thought the trend is Samsung. But, it is Oppo. I didn't see it coming. Oppo phones are Android phones. They have great features similar to those of Samsung's (and some say are better) but are less expensive. Price is still the dominant factor in Indonesia. Although, lifestyle still dominates the buying factor. In this case, Oppo did the right thing; great lifestyle and less expensive. [I still miss my Samsung Galaxy S4 though. It was a loaner and had to go back to the owner. I really like it.]

Tried to open gplus. Few minutes passed by. Items were shown on the screen, but I couldn't type anything. Another minutes passed by. More items. Still couldn't type. Finally, I gave up. The above story is not an isolated event. I just happen to me almost all the time. Why would I post anything to gplus? I could do that on Facebook or Twitter. -- diary of a " fakirbandwidth "  (Indonesian: meaning, a person lack of bandwidth)

Culture is so fascinating. It is also important if you want to market a product (or service) to the people in that culture. To understand the culture, you have to be there - sort of speak. It baffles me that many IT-related companies are not in Indonesia to understand our culture :) This morning, I found this survey site that surveys the best football clubs according to their fans. (Here football means soccer in the North American term :)) The result is ... Persib is number one. Persib even beats Barca. ha ha ha. I guess most people - outside Indonesians - will find that strange. I don't. What/who is Persib? It's our city's (Bandung) football club. Indonesian football fans are maniacs. Just like UK's hooligans. The number of internet users in Indonesia is around 60 millions (according to Association of Indonesian ISPs). The number of cellphone users is easily doubles that. (The number of prepaid cell numbers already more than 200 millions.) You just add both of the...

A few days ago, I took my son's motorbike and rode up the hill. Took some pictures and felt sad. No, it's not the scenery. It was beautiful. Take a look at this photo I took. I feel sad because in the name of progress we turn this beautiful place it concrete houses and what not. But, what can I do? If I were a very rich man, I would buy this land and keep them as green as possible.

I used to use Rhythmbox for my music player on my Linux desktop (currently it's a Linuxmint flavor). Then, for some reasons, Rhythmbox quits randomly. At first, I tolerated it, but after a while I was annoyed. Time to switch. I switched to Banshee. And now Banshee is having the same problem, random quits. Time to switch, again! Aaarrrggghhh ... There are several music players for Linux, but one feature that I need in my music player is the ability to scrobble to Last.fm . That's all. Long time ago, I tried Songbird and liked it. Unfortunately, they stopped supporting Linux. Oh well. Fortunately, there is a fork. It's called Nightingale . And now, I am using it. It looks great (beautiful) and the most important thing ... I hope it does not crash randomly. Keep my fingers crossed. And start populating it with songs ... chirping ...

I was adding songs into my music player. This time I am using Banshee on my Linux desktop computer. One thing that brings to my attention is that I've got songs unordered. Looking carefully, it is the annoying "the". Some of the songs in my collection has the word "The" as part of the artist (band) name. Some don't. An example would be "The Beatles". They ended up in different list; "The Beatles" and just "Beatles". Aaarrrggghhh. So annoying. One of the problems with English, I suppose. (On a side note. What is the correct name of the band, "The Beatles" I suppose?) Oh, by the way, iTunes recognizes this and ignores the "The" when sorting the artists. Good job! (And I have just realized that Nightingale also knows the The. yayyy)

G+ has just changed the look and feel (again). And, again, I don't like it. Correction, I actually like the look and feel but it is slow to show. That's because our internet connection is not as fast as in the US. People in Google seem to forget that there are places in this world with limitted bandwidth. In fact, many countries with huge number of internet users have slow internet connection. Indonesia is one of them. In another post I mentioned that Twitter is gaining popularity ove Facebook in Indonesia. One of the reasons is that Twitter is lighter than Facebook. Most of users in Indonesia access social network through mobile phones (smartphones). The quality of 3G or CDMA connections varies between places. Even in big city, like Bandung where I live right now, there are places with bad signal quality. My home is one of them. I opened my G+ page and it keeps on giving "loading" message. It's just too bloated. Trying to be fancy but ended up in the gutter...

Gmail has just enabled/changed its user interface. There is one thing that bugs me and I think this should be corrected. If you reply to an email, the body of the replied email is quoted at the bottom of the email. This makes the reply by default a " top posting " reply. It's a no no in netiquette. This is just plain wrong. Don't the designers know this (top posting)? They should not make this the default setting. This could be an optoin that the user has to enable it if one wishes. Or, is top posting unrelevant now? I feel like a dinosaur, now.

Recently, I've been asked questions about Indonesian Internet users. To be frankly, I am also looking for data to analyze. (I am running my own internet crawlers, but they are kind of slow - my students are slacking :))  Most people are using SocialBakers as the source of Facebook and Twitter stats. Here's an example of their Facebook stats . The thing about Internet in Indonesia is that it grows rapidly. If you search the internet, most of the statistics are kind of old. Have a look at twitter users stats in 2009, for example. (Link to the report is missing. Will put it here.) Indonesia is nowhere to be found. And yet, I believe, today Indonesia is probably in the top 4 of twitter users. ( Report from Mediabistro shows that in 2012 Indonesia is in the top 5 twitter users.) New data / stats are needed.

I noticed that Path is gaining popularity in Indonesia at the expense of Facebook. The funny thing is, Path is not well known in the US. This just to show you that you'll never know why things happen in other parts of the world (in other culture). Time and time again, I tried to encourage IT companies to put their foot in Indonesia. To smell the coffee here, as the saying goes. But these companies are locating elsewhere. The closest is Singapore. Heck. What are you doing? You won't get the cultural thing if you are not here. You don't have to trust me. But don't go crying if your market share is declining in Indonesia.

There is a new trend in Indonesia and it is an application called "WhatsApp". It is an application that allows us to send messages to a person or - more frequently - a group of people. It is a replacement of BlackBerry's BBM. The BlackBerry's era is over. The reason is that Android is becoming more popular, as in other parts of the world. WhatsApp is cross platform and operator neutral. What more could you ask? I don't use BlackBerry, so I don't use BBM. I just recently bought an Android phone - it's an LG. WhatsApp is the application I installed and quickly I am part of many WhatsApp groups. I could see that many people are like me, embracing WhatsApp.

I have just read a job opening for RIM. The target market is Indonesia, but the job is in Singapore. I just don't understand this. Why don't the open the job in Indonesia ? I have mentioned this over and over again. You have to be in the place to smell the coffee. You can't be form far afar. (Why there's no Starbucks in Italy, eh?) For example, go to BEC (in Bandung) or Roxy (in Jakarta) to see what's going on. If you don't know those two names, then you know diddly. My point exactly.

Earlier I wrote that Indonesians are switching from Facebook to Twitter. Many - mostly folks from Facebook - don't believe me. Well, what can I say. (I was right in predicting things since late 80s or early 90s.) Here's a newer statistics about twitter. The number one place of active twitter users in the world is ... Jakarta, our capital city. My city, Bandung, is "just" number 6 (six) on the list. Can you imagine this? Oh, you cannot since you're not here. Ha. Like I said, you guys (Facebook, Twitter, and all those internet tech companies) should have an office here. Just to smell the coffee and find out the trend for yourselves. Oh, coffee here is also good! :)