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/