In the middle of Jakarta’s traffic jam (daily dose, really), I suddenly heard a radio ad for a new online service, a dot com company. Needless to say, there’s not that many startups have sufficient funding to go promoting their services via radio ad. Must be well-funded. And apparently, Freco is one of those lucky players.
Basically a business directory service, Freco adds social features to its platform. And by “social features” of course I mean it’s connected to Facebook where it enables users to see business reviews from their Facebook friends.
And besides its annoyingly horrible interface, I actually find this service useful. It actually helped me find information like nearest local doctors, plumbers, electricians, something that I find difficult to look for on the internet. Of course there’s services like Yelp in the US and Urbanesia in Jakarta although Urbanesia is more lifestyle-oriented business reviews.
Two things that I think Freco needs to fix is the User Interface (no doubt) and the search engine’s relevance because you’d have to think carefully about the keyword before you can actually get a good result. So far Freco has invested a lot to promote their services to mine more reviews and content from visitors and users, hopefully this’ll help them build a better and relevant search engine.
