2008 – 2010Acquired

Urbanesia

Co-Founder & CTO

A Web 2.0 city directory for Jakarta, acquired by Indonesia's largest media group.

Case study

My first company, run by PT Ayoklik Indonesia: Jakarta's first Web 2.0 city directory.

01
The problem
Jakarta had no Web 2.0 city directory: nowhere to search for a place, read ratings and find what was near you.
02
What I did
- Wrote the search engine myself on Sphinx, ranking places by distance, pageviews, ratings, recency and keyword weight, with stemming and synonyms for Indonesian.
- Hit a page render target under 200 milliseconds with Squid, memcached and eAccelerator.
- Signed a content partnership with Google for Maps and Places in 2010, and went deep on Yahoo Southeast Asia: Login, SearchMonkey rich snippets, YAP and YQL.
03
The result
East Ventures in Singapore invested, and Batara Eto, former CTO of Mixi, advised us. Kompas Gramedia, Indonesia's largest media group, acquired Urbanesia in 2012. It was the first of my two exits.
< 200 ms
Page render target
Google Maps & Places
Content partnership
East Ventures
Investor
Kompas Gramedia, 2012
Acquired by

The problem