On Friday we reported that MakeMac, Indonesia’s largest Mac blog had been acquired by Apps Foundry, a mobile applications company as per the report from Penn Olson. It stated that Apps Foundry will assume operational duties of the blog while content management will remain with the current writers.
It’s difficult to see this deal objectively. Clearly there’s a strong conflict of interest in having a mobile app company running a supposedly independent blog about the industry it’s in. It just so happened that on the next day, DailySocial held an iPhone developer conference in Bandung in which MakeMac was a partner, so we caught up with the blog’s founder, Kuswanto at the event.
We asked Kuswanto straight up what is going on with the deal and why he decided to let his blog be run by Apps Foundry. He insisted that the goals of both MakeMac and Apps Foundry were aligned. Both wanted to make sure that the blog is able to grow and scale accordingly especially as he had been running it on his own as far as the back office is concerned.
According to him, he’d been talking to a number of suitors who might have an interest in the blog but what almost all of them wanted were ways to distribute and market their products instead of communication channels and community outreach. With over 30 thousand followers on Twitter, he said that they wanted to use the blog’s Twitter account as a sales channel, so he turned to the only one that seemed to share his vision of the blog.
As for the acquisition, Kuswanto said that the initial report had it wrong. He said that it’s not an acquisition but a collaboration in which Apps Foundry will handle all the back office operations so he and the writers can focus on delivering content. He maintains that the blog will remain an independent output of Apple-related news, tips, and guides despite the deal with the software company.
He admitted that the way the news came out on Friday wasn’t handled properly especially with a deal as delicate as this, especially with Apps Foundry being the so called partner instead of East Ventures itself. He realized that the outcome and the perception of the deal could be taken differently than intended but he felt that it needed to be done to ensure that the blog can meet its growing needs.
Having had this discussion and his insistence on the situation, it’s still unclear whether the deal was an acquisition or not but it is an unfortunate one no matter how you see it. Just the idea that a software company can be in control of the operations of one of its own industry’s blog is a cause for concern in many respects. The conflict of interest is simply enormous.
