While many companies and services have implemented this security method, it may have come as a surprise that nobody has bothered to check whether there’s a patent on this. As it turns out, Kim Dotcom is the one who holds this patent. Dotcom, who is currently in legal battle with the US government over his now defunct Megaupload storage service, has had it for more than a decade, predating many, perhaps all,  currently active implementations.

Dotcom has quietly been allowing companies to implement his patended method for free but has now asked the likes of Google, Facebook, and Twitter to help fund his legal defense or face a lawsuit. Torrentfreak has Dotcom’s statement regarding the patent and the request.

We spoke to Thalib a while ago about his views on the dating scene in Jakarta and why it’s necessary it have a dating site. In a nutshell, he said that while people still have a need to meet other people, the size of the city and the busy lifestyle of many of its residents warrants the presence of a dating site that can help them find the right match.

People want to seek partners from outside of their own circles, he said, but to get into the other groups it’s difficult because they tend to keep within themselves and an online dating site would be a solution to that problem.

“Online is a space where a lot of people can connect outside of their groups and expand their network,” Thalib explains.” Even in business, a lot of people connect through Twitter, a lot of people connect through LinkedIn, etc. we wanted a place where people can meet online and there’s not enough good dating sites in Indonesia to deliver that.”

Thalib sees inherent problems in online dating in general. “Number one is a lot of guys tend to contact women and they don’t get replies and on the flip side women get contacted a lot when they join these dating sites and then they don’t have time to reply”.

In an interview with Jakarta Globe, Aluwi said that when you met people at parties, “there’s no way that you can know if that person is a psychopath without spending some time with them first”, which clearly is a downside to these random encounters, although isn’t that where the fun is?

Setipe’s proposed solution is to bring a curated dating service where “you come in and you don’t search for people, you just wait for us to find you the right matches”, said Thalib to DailySocial.

Thalib told us that this actually solves a second issue whereby it eliminates the worry that people have of their friends, families, or coworkers knowing that they’ve joined an online dating site. “If you join, the only people who know that you’re on our site are the people that we’ve matched to you”. Unless of course those people happen to be members of your work or social circles, or even worse, family.

“We’re working with psychologists and building an algorithm based on their work to be able to match you better based on your compatibility with that person, so hopefully when you do meet someone through our system, eventually, it will be more like a second date rather than a first date”, Thalib explained.

The psychologists he’s talking about are Pingkan Rumondor and Nadya Pramesrani, both psychology lecturers at Bina Nusantara University who also work at the integrated clinic at the Psychology Faculty of University of Indonesia. They both maintain Setipe’s Twitter account.

Aluwi told the Globe that there will be two parts to Setipe, “one is the dating site, and the other one is to have interesting content regarding dating in Jakarta, like commentary and insights on dating in general.”

This strategy is similar to many online travel sites which not only sells travel packages but also publish articles about destinations, travel guides, tips, warnings, and so on. By having both content and service, Setipe aims to be a one stop destination for online dating.

AllThingsD’s Kara Swisher says Google has no chance since the US federal government will step in.

Will never happen for google (hello Feds!)mobile.bloomberg.com/news/2013-05-2…

— Kara Swisher (@karaswisher) May 24, 2013

Bloomberg said that the debt ridden Axis, worth about USD 1 billion (just slightly less than Tumblr!) is an attractive target for the Axiata group as it will allow XL Axiata to add services and expand coverage. Currently XL Axiata holds three non-contiguous frequency blocks, out of the available 12 blocks on the 3G band, which prevents the company from taking full advantage of its recently won 3rd block.

Following the 3G auction win by XL Axiata and Telkomsel a few months ago which earns each company one extra unused block on the 2.1GHz frequency, the government is proposing to rearrange the frequency block allocation to maximize usage by each operator as maintaining the current allocation means leaving operators with non-contiguous frequency blocks. As it stands, XL operates in blocks 8, 9, and 12 whereas Axis runs on blocks 2 and 3.

The proposed reallocation which is expected to take place in September of this year would put XL’s three frequency blocks on blocks 8, 9, and 10, adjacent to the two blocks operated by Axis on blocks 11 and 12. A merger between the two telcos would allow XL to operate in five frequency blocks in the 2.1GHz range, making it the carrier with the widest 3G band in the country. Telkomsel would be second with three blocks at 3, 4, and 5.

With ten national mobile operators fighting for customers, Indonesia is the second most saturated mobile market in Asia after India. Over the last ten years carriers have pushed themselves into a highly competitive death spiral undercutting each other with dirt cheap text, voice, and data rates.

Even a single merger will ease the pressure among carriers and allow them to operate in a more healthy manner. Currently changes in rates occur in almost every other quarter from the majority of carriers, causing instability in market condition which contributes to a relatively high churn rate, 30% for voice subscribers and 50% for data subscribers according to Bhuwan Kulshreshtha, chief commercial officer at 3 Indonesia in December 2012.

While XL Axiata president director Hasnul Suhaimi had nothing to share to Bloomberg, he had previously said that his company would be open to efforts in consolidating the Indonesian mobile industry because maintaining the current condition is not an attractive proposition for further investments. XL Axiata currently has 46 million customers while Axis has 17 million. A merged entity between XL Axiata and Axis is said to be called Avelon.

BBM Money was launched in February to overcome mobile payment opportunity among BlackBerry users. With this product, BBM users is enabled to make real-time payments to their BBM contacts who are also signed up to the service. Also, BBM Money can be utilized to buy mobile airtime credit and transfer money to bank accounts. PermataBank is among top 10 bank in Indonesia based on assets.

PermataBank Retail Banking Director Lauren Sulistiawati commented: “We are delighted with the level of customer adoption that we have experienced so far. The popularity of the service is another indication that mobile plays a key role in the future of the banking and payments industry across Indonesia. We have also been particularly excited by the way in which BBM Money has quickly opened up a new, direct route to new-to-bank customers. The ability to engage with new customers and significantly lower the cost of customer acquisition is a real advantage for any financial institution.”

Calvin Lim, Director of AGIT Monitise, commented: “We are encouraged by the adoption trend and customer usage to date. The service can only become more popular as more functionalities are added in the near future.”

Darren Sugden, CEO of Monitise Asia Pacific, said, “It is great to see such a positive early response to BBM Money. As the first comprehensive Mobile Money service in the world to be integrated with any messaging platform, pioneering the approach of turning a social network into a payments network, BBM Money brings second-to-none convenience to Indonesian consumers and businesses. The success of the service in a major world economy which is ideally suited to this type of innovation is a great example of how the financial industry can capitalise on the fast-growing mobile, payments and banking space to meet the day-to-day needs of the consumer.”

With majority of smartphone users in Indonesia are still using older version of BlackBerry, it currently hasn’t supported the latest BlackBerry 10 platform. Previously I was writing about BBM Money in an article that it has opportunity to grow bigger as the ultimate micropayment solution if it extends its service to many aspects in community’s social life. While PermataBank may not be the top three banks in Indonesia, this solution may help attract savvy BlackBerry users who needs simple solution for micropayment among peers.

JP Morgan, a strong investor in many of Rocket Internet’s companies, first invested in Zalora in September last year for an undisclosed sum after investing a reported $50 million in Lazada. Back in March, Tengelmann put in €20 million into Zalora as the company was building a software development center in Singapore.

With all this investment, you can’t argue Zalora isn’t committed into building itself as a significant force in e-commerce in Southeast Asia. The $91 million loss in 2012 reported by German publication Manager Magazin seems inconsequential in the face of this year’s series of funding rounds as the company optimistically sees itself turning a profit in 2015 and reaching billion dollar sales.

Zalora managing director Michele Ferario proudly announced the investment in a press release sent to DailySocial. “It is an honor for us to have reputable investors place their investments into a young company such as Zalora. We aim to continue delivering world class products and services so every person in Southeast Asia can benefit from the wide range of products we carry, the comfort of online shopping, and our speedy delivery”.

The substantial investment will go towards expanding Zalora’s collection of 600 brands and 20,000 products available in each of its individual markets, according to the company. Zalora operates in seven countries across Southeast Asia including Brunei Darussalam, The Philippines, Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand, Vietnam,  as well as in Hong Kong and Taiwan.

Zalora’s mobile app which was just launched recently is seen as one of the major driving factors into Zalora’s growth as it delivers announcements of flash deals, discounts, new items, and sale periods, which are expected to push the likelihood of Zalora customers to make purchases. The company notes that more than 25% of its sales today have come from mobile phones.

Of course, the company wouldn’t simply rely on a single mobile application having created a software center in Singapore. In a separate announcement,  the company revealed that it is launching another mobile app for Android called FitzMe. As the name suggests, FitzMe would allow Zalora customers to try on the clothes available from the store by taking photos of themselves “wearing” their choice of clothing items provided from within the app, which they can then share to their friends to Facebook and Twitter. Although the company told us that the app is available from Google Play, and even provided a link to it, our search came up empty. Perhaps it will be available soon.

Zalora Indonesia also just announced a new fashion collection from Indonesian singer Alika, which will be available until 15 november 2013. The collection was launched in Cilandak Townsquare in Jakarta earlier today. To celebrate the opening of the store, the first 50 purchases will receive Alika’s latest CD single in addition to a personalized thank you card and a shopping voucher for every purchase at the store.

IndoTelko reports that BRTI committee member Ridwan M. Effendi is adamant that the application will be ready before the end of the year although currently the team is still working to overcome both the commercial implementation as well as the interoperability issues that arise from cross-network deployment. “Anything’s possible. Even cross platform money transfer is possible, it’s merely about intent”, he said. “If Messaging Indonesia is realized, carriers will benefit because routing will occur locally so the cost expended will not be so great”.

With foreign apps and services, data connection travels outside of the country and carriers have to pay for the use of those data pipes. By keeping data traffic local, the associated cost can be reduced significantly. On the other hand, by running this service, all data will be subject to Indonesian laws and the government will be able to gain access to the channel if it sees a reason to perform such checks. This is one of the concerns that were brought up against the government’s insistence to have companies like BlackBerry and Google set up servers located within the country. The refusal of both companies to comply so far is supported by others in the industry citing legal, business and practical reasons.

Asked about the launch of the service, Effendi is optimistic, saying, “there’s progress from each routine meeting. It’s possible to launch it this year”.

Axis head of marketing Daniel Horan recently told DailySocial that an effort like this is rife with issues and that the company’s focus is on collaborating with existing services. While it may seem like a there’s a conflict of interest on Horan’s part, all other Indonesian telcos also have data package agreements with foreign messaging companies.

Axis currently has deals with Skype, Viber, KakaoTalk, Line, and others to allow subscribers to purchase messaging oriented data packages which will allow them unmetered data access to the services even after the monthly quota has been reached. The Viber partnership with Axis was signed at the Mobile World Conference earlier this year and is available to customers signed up to any of the Axis Pro data plans.

It remains to be seen whether a cross-carrier collaboration will deliver a service that is not only as comprehensive as existing messaging apps but also as easy to use and as attractive so as to gain widespread acceptance among mobile consumers across the country. Additionally, being an app may limit the adoption of such a service in a country with 70% feature phone mobile share unless all of the major features are also applicable for these devices as well.

This mobile channel is brought to you by Samsung Developer Competition 2013. SDC ’13 is an app competition for Android apps that leverage Samsung’s mobile technologies. For more information please visit http://techne.dailysocial.net/sdc

Back in July 2012 when Marissa Mayer was just announced as the new Yahoo CEO, a campaign was launched asking Mayer to “please make Flickr awesome again”. The Flickr team responded by asking the Internet to join Flickr and “help us make Flickr awesomer”. Almost exactly two months before the anniversary of that campaign, Mayer and Yahoo launched a brand new Flickr. A completely redesigned and refocused Flickr which gives members one terabyte of storage space each for free.

So what does a terabyte of space mean as far as photos are concerned? To make it easier, Flickr’s new homepage provides a slider to give some idea as to what that means. If you take photos at exactly 8 megapixels each, Flickr’s new storage allowance will let you upload 436,900 photos at full resolution. That means you will need to upload almost 50 photos per hour every hour of every day in one year to fill up that space. And if you managed to run out of space next year, well, nobody is stopping you to use a different Flickr account to grab another terabyte. Not yet anyway.

The changes on Flickr didn’t stop there. Thanks to the terabyte giveaway, Flickr now does away with Flickr Pro accounts, for the most part. The paid option to allow members access to their entire photo library has now been removed because it’s been rendered obsolete. However, Pro members will still be able to renew their membership if they wish even though nobody can sign up to it anymore.

The benefits of renewing Pro accounts include absolutely unlimited storage, detailed photo analytics, as well as the lack of advertising whereas those with free accounts will have a banner ad shown on their stream, no analytics, and a limit of 1 terabyte storage space. According to Yahoo, there are no plans to remove Pro renewals. An option to have paid Flickr accounts is still available, but will be covered separately.

Flickr’s other change is the website. Though there aren’t really any new features, Flickr has brought on a fresh design which includes the addition of a cover photo for each member page, a larger profile photo, fully laid out photos across the photo stream and feed for more prominent display.

Those with large screen or high resolution displays will appreciate how photos on Flickr are now laid out. All the controls are still there, just relocated to a more convenient and less intrusive space. Using black instead of white as the background for individual photos makes each of them stand out even more. For all its changes, Flickr’s website still offers all the same features, just presented differently.

The third thing that Yahoo announced with regards to Flickr is the redesigned Android app. While the iOS app has had its redesign in December last year, the Android app hadn’t seen a corresponding major overhaul. You can tell that the Android app has been redesigned entirely independent of the iOS app. While the two apps share similar features, the looks, the layout, the approach to design, they’re all different from one another, each leveraging the style and familiarity of each platform’s audience.

All these changes are not guaranteed to get the public to flock back to Flickr but they’re big steps into understanding how today’s Internet works and how consumers see online services. You can probably draw parallels to the Gmail announcement back in 2004 although there was really no email equivalent of Facebook Photos back then or even Instagram and Flickr is a stagnant brand looking for a reboot instead of a brand new service.

Yahoo’s decision to give Flickr a do-over is important. With Marissa Mayer at the helm, the Tumblr acquisition just announced, a renewed focus on mobile deployment, Yahoo’s revival is just beginning and we probably won’t see Mayer’s master plan unravel in full until next year.

The forum’s purpose is to provide a place for discussion, sharing opinions and knowledge for those who work or have interest in the music industry, which hopefully will provide a common base of knowledge and ideas to further progress Indonesia’s music industry. The more people that are involved, whether from within or outside the industry, the better, because everyone will contribute something to the discourse of the industry’s development. Like I have often written in this column, the more parties involved in the development of the music industry, the better, and it would be even better if all these parties were interconnected in a mutually-influencing and mutually-beneficial ecosystem. So, the ecosystem must grow, and create situations that promote mutual simbiosis between the fans, the musicians, and the industry workers.

One interesting thing surfaced as part of the discussion led by Abang Edwin, which was that some bands or labels made social media accounts just for the sake of being ‘there’. These social media accounts, whether it be on Twitter, Facebook or even as a chat channel on services like LINE or Kakaotalk, are often used only for tour dates, album releases or even ringbacktone codes which essentially are one way information, and have no significant interactions with fans, who are practically the consumers of that band or label. Unfortunately, this phenomenon is not limited to social media.

It’s not limited to music – many parties seem to ‘force’ themselves to, say, create a social media account for their office, or find a way to sell their content online, seemingly to fulfill a ‘checklist’, with no proper management or strategy. It is like a marking of territory, which is left empty and quiet. Music sold through iTunes, are “only” promoted with one or two tweets, by way of announcement to the followers. In many ways, preparing an online identity for a band or brand can be done with a relatively low cost, but this kind of attitude, it may impact the decrease the value of brand equity which money cannot buy.

These errors – yes, I call them errors, not mistakes – can be as stupid as not placing a painstakingly-built website’s URL on other marketing collateral. Digital is not some imaginary world that is disconnected to our daily lives, as a digital ‘presence’ must be an integral extension of what the band or brand is about. A website is a home or office that contains everything that we want to communicate to our customers, and it would be even better if there was a guest reception area where they could talk to us or with other customers. These digital mediums are not a one-way loudspeaker, but are meeting points which are easily communicated to everyone, and serve as a basis for further communications.

It is the same case for digital content. People buy content, not bots or programs. The purchasing does take place through various parties and programs that help with payment and distribution, but the purchase or subscription decision remains a human one. So the human factor needs to be considered when conducting a digital business. Who is my customer, and where are they? Will a digital strategy make it easier for me to sell something to them? Will they be willing to pay, and if they are, what is the easiest way to pay for them? And of course, we will not be able to fully know who our customers are, except by opening a two-way discussion with them. Digital enables these discussions to occur on a larger scale.

So, don’t just put up your territorial flag on just any store or digital media – make sure the investment of money and time spent has more purpose. Utilize the digital’s inherent multifunction to enrich the experience with your band or brand, and increase the level of discussion with customers to increase loyalty – or at least, add to what you know about your customers.

Ario is a co-founder of Ohd.io, an Indonesian music streaming service. He worked in the digital music industry in Indonesia from 2003 to 2010, and recently worked in the movie and TV industry in Vietnam. Keep up with him on Twitter at @barijoe or his blog at http://barijoe.wordpress.com.