DNA lands in Indonesia

By Karamjit Singh September 8, 2015

Starts ecosystem coverage with two journalists
Reporting will be mostly in Bahasa Indonesia

DNA lands in Indonesia TODAY marks the beginning of another step into Digital News Asia’s vision of becoming the most credible tech media in South-East Asia.

It is the day we start covering the bubbling tech ecosystem in Indonesia more fully, with two journalists on the ground in Jakarta. Indonesia now joins Malaysia (in 2012) and Singapore (in 2014) as countries where Digital News Asia (DNA) has at least two full-time journalists on board.

It is exciting for me as Indonesia is the one country in South-East Asia that has contributed the most to the region being declared a promising market. It is not the Philippines with its almost 100 million population, or Singapore, a fully-developed nation.

The BBC describes Indonesia and its almost 250 million population as one of the world’s major emerging economies.

This especially includes the digital space, and this is why it was no surprise that almost one year ago, Japan’s Softbank and US-based Sequoia Capital invested US$100 million into leading e-commerce marketplace Tokopedia.

Despite its promise, challenges abound, be they from a policy point or just national priority. For instance, infrastructure is a huge challenge in a nation spread over 17,500 islands!

It is easy to say, mobile is the way around this physical challenge – but when mobile operators have an eye on profitability, where does national service fall on their list of priorities?

Be that as it may, DNA is now on the ground there, and we will be bringing you all the relevant stories about the tech ecosystem in Indonesia – mostly in the local language of Bahasa Indonesia, although we kick off our on-the-ground coverage with an English language story on a new government regulation that may stifle the smartphone market there.

We have chosen to go local because English is not as widely spoken in Indonesia, and because our team there wants to bring top-quality technology news to local language readers.

Having said that, every week we will bring you two articles translated from Bahasa Indonesia to English so that you can keep up to date with the most relevant of the stories that we cover in the republic.

I think it will take us some time to get into a rhythm in Indonesia, and mistakes will be made as we work with our talented journalists, Ervina Anggraini and Masyitah Baziad, and without an editor for Indonesia yet!

Bear with us. We will get it right. And you can look forward to some exciting stories that we will bring you over the course of the next few months.

Now excuse me while I go brush up on my Bahasa Indonesia.

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