TCP-IP: Deriz

If you want to know who’s who in today’s Indonesia business, this is the right place. Indonesia Today provides rich information about business VIPs, not only individual profiles, but complete with their family tree, business interests, political affiliations, network, track records and other background. You can find for instance, who are the members of Kalla family and what businesses they own. Interesting isn’t it ?

Yosef Ardi first contact with dotcom world began two years ago when he started his own blog: Indonesia Today. In just two years, his blog is becoming well known as source of exclusive information about what’s going on in Indonesian business and the people behind it. Many business journalist sought tips from this blog. Lots of Yosef’s posts end up as headlines.

Beside blogging, Yosef has another passion that most people would find it odd: collecting obituary ads. He has been doing it since he started his career as journalist. “At first I didn’t really know why I’m doing it. I just want to know better who a person is, it is just my passion,” he said when we chat in his cubicle.

A rather ‘odd’ passion

Then it becomes obvious to me that I can tell a person’s family relationship in obituary ads. From there, you can start building family tree of that particular person, and then attach each member with business that they own. Voila ! You just figured out the business relation between members of the family or between one family with other families. Imagine how much wealth, power and influence a family possesses in their hands!

Yosef had collected more than 2.000 companies and more than 1.000 families, hundreds of them are interesting family names such as Kalla, Salim, Soeharto and Bakrie. This database is the site’s most precious asset. While there is a monthly subscription fee for exclusive news, Yosef plans to price the people database by queries.

I asked him whether there is a market for it. “I guess there must be some party somewhere who need such information. Probably lawyers, investigators or investors who would like to know better about their partners, just do a background check or need to find ways to approach certain VIP’s,” Yosef said.

The site’s launching

Yosef plan to launch in the near time, but he didn’t gave exact date to let his team of ITB student developers finish the site. Though the database, indexing and searching engine as the hardest components of the site has been completed, he still not satisfied by the design, of which I gave him some advice.
As for payment method, Yosef prefers the simplest procedure: bank transfer. “It is still the best way, because credit card system or Paypal does not work in Indonesia.” There are lots of things to do before the site become a decent dotcom business. But I think he’s on the right track to become a Web-preneur