Urbanesia hooks up with Nexian and Yahoo isn’t pleased
Hot Indonesian startup Urbanesia is working on an Android app for Nexian’s Journey and it’s slated for a September launch.
Urbanesia’s chief executive, Selina Limman (pictured), appeared on stage on 7 Aug with executives from Nexian and Hutchison’s Tri (3) at the announcement of the Nexian Journey with 3 bundle.
Whether the location-based Urbanesia app will be preloaded or available on Android Market is unclear.
But Urbanesia’s tie-up with Nexian may have angered Yahoo!, which is in talks with the handset-maker about a location-based app by its recently acquired subsidiary Koprol.
Urbanesia is the next hot Indonesian startup. It recently received a seed investment from East Ventures. It’s an online city directory for Jakarta for visitors to find places to eat and things to do. Listings are provided by business owners and registered visitors.
We reported previously that Koprol has been in talks with Nexian, Indonesia’s top mobile phone manufacturer. The two companies have been in negotiations over the past several months.
But Urbanesia’s deal with Nexian hasn’t gone down well with Yahoo. A C-level executive at Nexian received a call from someone at Yahoo! South East Asia complaining about the Urbanesia deal.
“Someone from Yahoo! called earlier and they were not too happy about Nexian linking up with Urbanesia,” the Nexian executive said in the presence of Urbanesia’s Limman. “They said that Nexian was supposed to do an LBS (location-based app) with Koprol.”
While Koprol has been described as being in the same space as Twitter, it does provide a venue directory and user-based rating system and reviews. Recently it introduced Kurators, a group of Koprol users who are trusted with the task of verifying venue submissions.
Should Koprol expand this directory feature, it would easily be on a collision course with Urbanesia. On the other hand, Urbanesia already has a comprehensive list of venues, and Koprol, at least for the moment, doesn’t seem to be expanding its directory feature yet.
Indeed, Yahoo! Indonesia country lead Pontus Sonnerstedt told us he was not too concerned about Urbanesia’s Android app.
On Nexian’s part, the apps are not much of an issue because it has been known to be averse to exclusivity deals. Prior to the partnership with 3, Nexian bundled the Journey with Telkomsel as part of its launch program. It has also done similar deals with multiple operators with its other handsets.
What Nexian wants to do, according to Sanny Gaddafi, the newly appointed head of apps development at Nexian, is to provide a platform for Indonesian startups to have their services accessible by as many users as possible. Given the handset firms’ 25% mobile phone market share, that would be a mouth-watering offer to Indonesian developers.
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