On Monday night, Hore Network, the community behind a number of Indonesian mobile and web developer initiatives, formally announced its name change to HoRepublik and introduced a number of new apps which will be launched within the next month or two. Led by developer evangelist Deddy Avianto, the group held a public gathering to socialize the apps that it has built so far.
Taking advantage of the semi regular gathering held at Obsat at Rumah Langsat in South Jakarta, Avianto and his band of engineers and designers spoke about the apps and services that they have developed over the past several months which varies from t-shirt printing to behavioral tracking service.
Avianto had informed us that HoRepublik is an informal collaborative community, one that leverages the skills and networks of its members to enhance and sharpen ideas in building technology based products and services. Membership in the group is strictly informal but they all work for the common benefit to raise each other’s profile through quality technology-based products.
The first app to be profiled was Pintails, the app which won the inaugural AngelHack Jakarta event earlier this month. Team leader Vincent Putera as well as developer Asep Bagja Pradana spoke about the creation of the app during AngelHack and what they want to foster from bringing the app to the market.
Second in line was Sabloon, a custom online t-shirt printing service similar to Tees but partnering with local t-shirt companies spread across the country to minimize logistics. According to founder Ibnu Maksum, he initially explored a collaboration with Tees to localize its printing services but negotiations stalled so he decided to go ahead with his own version. The service has yet to go live but it should be ready within a few weeks starting with Jakarta and Maksum’s hometown of Serang in Banten.
Third one to present was Inmoto.in. Co-founder Daus Gonia built this hashtag-powered photo printing service with three other team members so people can have keepsakes or mementos when they attend certain events or spent time at certain public places and want to have something physical to remember it by. While it was initially built for brands or companies to be deployed at their events, the service is gaining popularity at wedding ceremonies.
Next up was Sneakit, a social media monitoring tool which was developed out of Bermain.net. While Bermain.net was built out of curiosity, the team behind Sneakit took it further to create a suite of services which allows individuals, companies, and organizations to track particular social media campaigns. It lets campaign administrators to track keywords, sentiments, and popularity of the event through a set of graphs, charts, and figures.
Traco is another monitoring tool that was announced on Monday night except this one tracks website traffic and interaction to assist developers and site managers improve their offerings to better respond to how consumer behavior. Event tracking in this context is about finding out how site visitors or app users interact with the website or app. The team claims the results are comparable to Google Analytics but says it’s actually a complementary service rather than a competing one. Traco will see a soft launch at CommunicAsia in Singapore this week.
The last app of the night was Social Play. The music sharing app which we covered a little while ago received an update last week and is now closer to the complete 1.0 version imagined by Avianto. Between our coverage and last night, the team added personal profiles of Social Play users which reveals a musical preference and activity of its users bringing it closer to last.fm. The team is also working on building Social Play as an event promotion platform.
Strong Portfolio
All in, this collection of applications and services seems to be a strong starting portfolio for the group, perhaps even stronger than the many of the ones that have gone through the local startup incubators or accelerator programs in terms of product maturity and viability. What has yet to be tested though is market acceptance.
All of the products already have existing competitors, whether direct or otherwise, which means good news as the business cases actually exist for them and they do work, at least for the existing services, but it also means convincing the market to switch to these new ones instead based on their own merits and advantages. This would be the biggest challenge for the group from this point on.
Most of the products on show at Obsat on Monday night showed solid designs, immediate monetization paths, clear problem definitions and solutions, and a seeming lack of need for early stage investors due to direct revenues or cross subsidies from other projects. The teams tend to have a complete set of designers, business people, and programmers, and the ones that don’t, already have the advantage of being able to rely on others in the group to jump in and provide assistance.
We should be able to see by the end of the year how far these products have come and whether they are as solidly developed and marketed as they seem to be today. The success of these products could raise the profiles of Indonesian developers and improve market confidence of the ability of Indonesians in creating viable digital products.
