We finally get confirmation that location based service Bouncity has been sold to game publisher Qeon for undisclosed amount. The previous owner, PhaseDev, is now focusing on the other two services under its management, Wayang Force and Tiket, while buzzing around with new stealth stuffs. According to source close to this matter, the Bouncity’s deal is closed on June before two of its key players, Kevin Osmond and Richard Fang, departing. Osmond and Fang are now collaborating to create consulting gig named Weekend Inc.
Qeon itself is a new player in game publishing industry. Its current product is Shadow Company, a First Person Shooter (FPS) online game that was launched in April. While Bouncity has some gamification process in the service, we are still not quite sure about the future of Bouncity under Qeon management. Qeon is part of MidPlaza group and having tight relationship with Biznet.
Bouncity was a promising startup when launched on June last year. It represented Indonesia for Echelon 2011 and claimed several awards in Sparxup 2011. In less than 30 days after starting, around 300 thousand users were registering, but a year later Bouncity is unable to gain more traction and forced to quit the arena.
Indonesian market is proven to be not very kind to local location based services. Bouncity’s direct competitor, Yahoo! Koprol is going to be shut down by the owner on August 28. Other player, Yotomo, is hardly even heard. Global champion in location based service, Foursquare, is still getting decent traction in Indonesia, although may not as popular as one or two years ago.
Update: former Bouncity COO, Kevin Osmond has reached us and gave some clarification. He said that the owner of Bouncity and Tiket is not PhaseDev since PhaseDev only consists of three person among management. Also 300 thousand users is statistics of one year operation, right before Bouncity being acquired.
