Last night, me and the guys from #FOWAB had the rare opportunity to meet and have conversations with a technology journalist and author from Silicon Valley, Sarah Lacy of TechCrunch. A big thanks to Wiku and Rama of DailySocial for inviting Sarah to Bandung and paying the bills :) you guys rock!
The dinner/meeting was held at Sierra restaurant, located at northern Bandung overlooking a beautiful panoramic view of the city. Some of the guys who were there was the usual suspects, the guys from FOWAB : Anggi and Agus from iCreativeLabs, Tata and Fares from Scraplr, Reza representing RaveWarrior and RServe (really sorry you can’t be there Yohan. We’ll send you the pics alright :D), also met some new friends from Oray Studios and Movreak.
The talking points where of course technology, industry, and stuff. But my personal favorite part in particular was Sarah’s stories about Silicon Valley’s famous billionaires. She met and talked to most of them, so it was fascinating. Here they are :
1. Elon Musk laughs like James Bond villain.
2. Mark Zuckerberg is actually a nicer person than Bill Gates.
3. Steve Jobs don’t give a shit about fanboys.
3. Larry Ellison, like always, is brilliant.
So there you have it, some of talking points we had with the author who’ve seen them all and talked to them all, directly from Silicon Valley. Let’s hope my next article is my direct report from the Valley itself.. :)
Cheers!
I have this sneaking suspicion that a fair number of people are under the impression that User Experience is the hot new “silver-bullet”. Sorry to burst any bubbles, but I am afraid that just isn’t the case. While there can be no doubt that UX plays an important role in shaping, defining and…
On Thursday, August 12th 2010, we were invited to Bandung Ventures Night (BVN), an event hosted by East Ventures (EV). East Ventures is of course the name every startups in this part of town have been talking about. They’re widely known for their involvement in Indonesian startups like Tokopedia and Urbanesia. A little birdy told me that they might also have something cookin with Scraplr, the one and only Indonesian startup pitching on Echelon 2010, an event for Asia’s startups in Singapore a few months ago.
So we were of course very excited when we received the invitation. It’s not everyday we came across this kind of event, especially in Bandung. Galenic was invited to talk about Gamelan and we were eager to share the Gamelan story at the event.
The event started around 6 PM. The venue was located at a beautiful spot, atop Padma Hotel’s 8th floor restaurant, overlooking a dense northern Bandung’s forest. After the dinner around 7 PM, Wilson of EV started the event with his presentation on East Ventures. Then this session was continued with Wiku’s presentation on Daily Social, William on Tokopedia, and Selina on Urbanesia.
The main course of the evening was surely the presentations by 12 startups invited to the event. And Gamelan, if I might add, was lucky to be the first presentation. Each startup only had 3 minutes to tell their story, so we used it as much as we could. A couple of slides on why we created Gamelan, followed by a series of screenshots, and we’re done :) I really wanted to show the audience our app Gamelan in action, but due to the 3 minutes restricition, this was not possible. Wilson even set a 3 minutes timer on his iPad in front of the presenters, with alarms and all :).
The QA session followed the presentation. One of the questions I got was from Danny Saito from MySQL Asia. Mainly he was asking about the music meta data used by Gamelan, because in Japan, Last.fm (Gamelan’s main data source) is not readily available.
After Gamelan, eleven more startups took the stage to tell their stories. We were chillin at the back smoking and sipping coffee, while watching the rest of the presentations. Like we said, it’s nice to go first :D. My favorite presentations from the other startups would probably be the ones from filmoo.com and ngubek.com. Simply because they had a lot of screenshots of their product and it looked pretty. I really get a sense of what their product is and caught the spirit behind their creations (well, sort of :D).
The event went on until 10 PM. After a brief photo sessions and biz cards exchange, everyone went home,- I’m pretty sure -, happy. All in all it was a great event, one I’m surely glad I was there. So, thank you to everyone at EV, looking forward to meeting you guys again soon. You guys rock! \m/
9gag:
We don’t make movies to make money, we make money to make more movies.
- Walt Disney
9gag:
Take the initiative to ask your customers what they think than to wait for your competitors to do it.
- John Wechsler
We are a company located in Bandung. We make Rich Internet Applications and enterprise-scaled information systems products. We are expanding the team and we would like to have you aboard. If you’re an experienced developer who wants to take the challenge of leading a team of programmers, this vacancy is for you!
We want a talented and experienced developer with several years of software development under his/her belt. Someone who can lead a team of programmers and designers to create stunning products. Not only you have to be proficient in software development, you also need to have the leadership and project management skills required to tackle big projects.
If you think you’ve got what it takes, send us your CV, portfolio, and salary expectations as soon as possible to us. Tell us a bit about online persona (like your LinkedIn/Twitter account) so we can get to know you more.
Send your credentials to : ari.setyo[at]galenic.web.id or ari.setyo[at]gmail.com
Arie M. Prasetyo,
Operational Director
We are a company located in Bandung, that specializes in Rich Internet Applications. We are expanding the team and we would like to have you aboard. And now we are looking for an experienced, kick-ass ActionScript3 programmer!
What we need is a developer who knows his/her ways around MXML and ActionScript3. If you have some experiences in developing Flash-based and AIR applications and have worked with popular web API’s (eg. Twitter, Flickr, Facebook) using ActionScript3, that would be would be a great advantage.
If the recruitment process went smoothly, we will need you to be ready for work by immediately. So send that portfolio and a bit about yourself (perhaps also your LinkedIn/Twitter account) as soon as possible to us.
Send it to : ari.setyo[at]galenic.web.id or ari.setyo[at]gmail.com
Arie M. Prasetyo,
Operational Director
a screenshot of the latest version of Gamelan. can’t wait to show you guys the one with the EchoNest API data :)
Don’t spend so much time trying to choose the perfect opportunity, that you miss the right opportunity.
- Michael Dell
