Following the conclusion of Echelon Indonesia on Saturday, Mohan Belani, co-founder and CEO of e27, reiterated that e27 will be expanding its reach across Southeast Asia thanks in large part to the investment it received from Japan’s B-Dash Ventures. As part of that expansion, we would like to officially announce that DailySocial will be joining the e27 family.
DailySocial and e27 have had a very close relationship over the past several years and our visions and goals largely parallel each other, not to mention that our company colors are both green and black, which is why this merger is inevitable. DailySocial co-founder Rama Mamuaya couldn’t be happier in announcing the news from Surabaya over the weekend. “This is something that we have been working on for a while now and finally, in 2013, we managed to make it happen. Mohan and I have been friends for such a long time and I can’t wait to finally be working with him in creating Asia’s best technology media company.”
“This is such an exciting time for tech blogging in Asia and we can’t find a better partner than DailySocial to push things forward”, said Mohan Belani in Jakarta. “We share the same goals, the same ambitions, and the same ideals, it’s absolutely the right decision to make as the startup and technology landscape in the region kicks into high gear”.
DailySocial’s operations in Indonesia will remain largely unchanged and editorial directions will stay separate for the time being with selected DailySocial’s posts being mirrored on e27. Eventually the sites will merge to deliver a united effort in bringing Asian tech news to the world. For 2013, the annual SparxUp Conference and Awards will remain on track but down the line, Echelon and SparxUp will be merged and the main event will alternate between Singapore and Jakarta from 2014 onwards.
Trenologi, DailySocial’s consumer technology blog will remain a separate operation within the e27 family. The site, which has reached a million page views since its launch in August 2012, will continue to bring news and stories on consumer hardware, apps, and services to the Indonesian audience, led by Wiku Baskoro as its chief editor.
On a personal level, this marks a return for myself to the e27 fold, having been an editor for e27 back in 2010-2011 before joining DailySocial. It’s nothing short of exciting to be taking on the regional tech media scene again since in such a short time it has grown so much with major International sites such as TheNextWeb and TechCrunch increasing their focus on Asia. With DailySocial’s strong editorial direction and e27’s news gathering resources, the combined entity will deliver more quality reporting with an expanded pool of experienced writers and columnists.
[Update – April 2, 2013]
Happy April Fools Day guys, thanks for reading š
[Update – June 4, 2013]
The best April fools always have an element of truth.
