When Yahoo decided to “give” Koprol back to its founders a few weeks ago, users were confused whether Koprol will remain dead or coming back to life. The founders only got the brand “Koprol” and the domain name, but the code and user database still belongs to Yahoo. They’re left with no other option than to built Koprol from scratch. And by god they will!
We talked to one of the co-founder Satya Witoelar, where he expresses his optimistic view that user will take Koprol back. When asked about what Koprol users should expect out of the new Koprol, Witoelar said that the new Koprol will have a slightly different value proposition but with the same strong community traits. “We hope our loyal Koprollers will like it although i think it will be interesting for consumers beyond the current userbase” said Witoelar.
The new Koprol will be developed by Barito Labs, which is basically the three founders and a couple of developers on board. Witoelar confirms that they haven’t ink any investment deals to support Barito Labs’ operations, the support only comes from the three founders’ own (deep?) pocket. “A few friends are ready to chip in, but we prefer to get the prototypes out first”, he added.
It’s definitely interesting to see Koprol come back to life, but location-based services are not as hot as they used to be. Monetization is one issue, but it appears that the users aren’t that interested anymore unless they have additional values out of the service. The new Koprol, whatever the new proposition is, has to offer much more than carrying the dead-weight location-based social networking service but rather to build data around it and expose those valuable data.
When asked about when we can start checking out the new Koprol, Witoelar said that the team is doing their best developing the new concept from ground-up, from scratch, so that’ll take a while. “we’ll start testing within 2 months” Witoelar said.
So, what is your idea for the new Koprol? We’d love to hear it from you.
