Following the recent news of Bouncity acquisition by Qeon Interactive, former Bouncity CTO and co-founder, Jeffry Anthony approaches us about Bouncity and its future. Anthony is the only co-founder (there are initially four of them) who still remains with the company and joining Qeon as the CTO. He’s in now charge with the development of Qeon social gaming platform.
First, he told us about the acquisition process. Bouncity was acquired on June 2012 by PT Qeon Interactive, an Internet Value Added Service provider which runs and operates Qeon Social Networking Service (SNS) and also an online game publishing company which managed to launch Shadow Company first in Indonesia before any other countries.Qeon Interactive is also a part of Midplaza Group, which owns Biznet, Midplaza building, Intercontinental Hotel, and Ayana Resort.
Qeon Interactive acquired Bouncity for an undisclosed amount of cash in a transaction in which PT Qeon Interactive receive the rights to operate Bouncity platform, including its mobile applications and databases, and to retain all members of the development teams.
Second, Bouncity (and also Tiket) was not owned by PhaseDev, but both of them was developed and initiated by PhaseDev, which consists of Anthony, Wenas Agusetiawan, and Dimas Surya. Although the three of them own the majority shares in both companies, they can’t just simply address PhaseDev as the owner of them since there are also other shareholders such as Kevin Osmond and some others who opted to be anonymous.
Third, Bouncity service would not be killed, but instead, it will be integrated into Qeon’s social gaming platform. There will be some major changes on our mobile applications which may involve some re-branding as well. He assures that Bouncity won’t be the second Koprol that fired all of its members.
Talking about the reason of acquisition, Anthony said that the co-founders feel that Bouncity, being too ahead of time here, is slowing down in gaining traction and was having some difficulties in getting new customers and making sales without any real marketing effort. Before it was acquired, Bouncity was relying solely on its merchants to do the marketing because, as a start-up, Bouncity was run and operated in a full bootstrapping mode which means it didn’t have any financial backings to do any marketing campaign to help gaining the traction that it needed to leverage the business.
That’s why when Qeon Interactive came over and made a really good offer, the Bouncity owners could not resist. The situation is simply because all of them believe with this take over Bouncity will be able to bounce back and acquire more users faster by utilizing the channel of Midplaza group and also the gaming contents from Qeon in order to take the service to the next level.
According to Anthony, as he’s now both Bouncity co-founders and Qeon CTO, this acquisition is not only good for Bouncity, but also good for Qeon Interactive since now they have a really good development team and enough technical talents to further develop its SNS service. The team will integrate Bouncity into their social gaming platform and to utilize Bouncity mobile apps for their content delivery.
