Ctrl+D in Internet Explorer to add the currently viewed page to the bookmark.

Back then when Netscape is still standing tall, I used the feature to bookmark sites so I can get there easily. Those are reference sites and regularly visited sites such as discussion forum. It’s really an indispensable feature of every browser, especially since not everybody had the money to buy easy to remember domain name.

Windows Live used to have part called Live Favourites that works to store that browser bookmark online and synchronize it with Internet Explorer in other computer. There are other 3rd party solutions predating that, and now we also have Opera browser’s Opera Link and Chrome had the bookmark synchronization feature soon.

Live Favourites is changed, merged with Skydrive and become a social bookmark service like Delicious or Digg. This way, we can share interesting links to our friends and the world to see and comment.

Frankly, first time I heard the term bookmarking site or social bookmark, I never grasp the concept. Bookmark that I know is keeping links so I don’t forget and can access is quickly. Because of the tree structure of desktop file, without searching feature, I tried putting value to pages and decide if it’s worthy to bookmark or not. Rather than article, I bookmark the main page because most of the sites are static with links I can quickly find back the article, unlike the hi-speed internet of nowadays.

Being that, seeing peoples who seem to bookmark (& broadcast) anything they see is… not so understandable. Not just using bookmark site, but also the currently more trendy Tweet & Retweet. As in typographical design tips, when the whole sentence is bolded, there’s no emphasize anymore.

Well, in this information super highway age… (wait, that term’s almost a decade old isn’t it?) where articles come and by quickly (yeah, Twitter) keeping them has its good side. For example, when writing articles and need those lot of reference links back (either for description or maybe arcane art of SEO) it’s easier to find from shortlist of bookmark rather than use search engine to find them back.

While at it, why not broadcast it to everyone?

Rarely I went out on Sunday because tomorrow is work. Like I believe celebration starts by afternoon and ended in the afternoon, in Sunday, what’s left from weekend is just waiting for the next work day and work load. Anyway, I rarely went out for quick shopping on weekend too, always going around out of the house (not outdoor) probably until night.

Yesterday I can’t find the book I need in the Plasa Indonesia Kinokuniya bookstore, so I decided today I’ll go to the other store to look for it. I also spent a lot yesterday so it’s best not to spend time too long and ending up using more money (for snacks).

The plan is simple, go, pick up the thing, back home. This is the fasting month in the country with largest Muslim population on Earth after all, so close to sunset all restaurant are full house. With that kind of majority market, it’s not easy to find religiously unclean restaurant that might offer more chance to sit down.

*points to the right*
The shopping bag content. The one I need is actually the rightmost. Can’t find the other title so I just pick up another title for reading. Got four star, but the ending doesn’t seem so.

Tips… when going home, it’s best to do it a while after the sunset, because most peoples would already be inside malls and restaurants to have dinner, or eating at the street side sellers. The street is relatively not so congested.

For some users, the announcement of Facebook Lite might be a holy grail even more than Apple’s announcement. It’s something close to life, and free as beer. The thing is not the lighter interface it promised, but that this alternate interface push away those annoying applications. Yes, we want to know our friends, but we don’t care about their mafia game, or who they are according to zillions of quiz applications. We want to know about their snappy thoughts (status update, groups), interesting links, or their activities (events, photos) and interact with them. Those apps, as far as I know, are just like 97% of e-mail traffic.

Some basic science class now. Evolution is triggered by change in natural environment forcing organism to adapt or die. Events like the mass extinction weeds off most of the old player and introduced new face. When Facebook decide to change their layout design so that most apps are pushed back to the next tab instead of cluttering the first page, there’s joy. No more checking profile infested by dozens of useless applications they never cleaned.

But they evolve, as we know it, into application that spam the news feed as often as possible. These are quiz applications which grow in variant faster than any other computer virus.

Then Facebook Lite will eliminate those apps from feed, keeping only the basic functions like status message, links, photos, etc. I missed groups and pages, but can live with it as long as there’s no those pesky quizzes.

And as I commented in several places, how I’m so wrong. They evolve. First day Facebook Lite is launched, I had my feed already infested by something scarier. The applications are using the access they have to post generated picture into the Wall, then tag everybody in the contact list to spread itself. What a horror, it’s no longer a virus, it’s evolving into a Photo apps cancer.

I just hope Facebook will review and kill them off as soon as possible.

After yesterday’s near-accident, today we had another one.

Old news is, my mom confirmed she had injured muscle after check up yesterday. It’s from when she got robbed during her visit to her hometown for relative’s funeral. Doctor’s advice is just wait and heal, don’t exert herself. Hope she could.

Another one. I forgot bringing my digicam again today. The bus I’ll take to work is having problem again. This time, the main water pipe from radiator to the engine leaked. The engine compartment itself is dirty with grease, oil and dust; yeah, dirty job. Their makeshift repair uses only one tool, a scissor to cut off the damaged part of the pipe which fortunately is located near the connection with the engine block. After cutting it off, they attach it back and fill the radiator with water. Never realized it need so much, but this is a bus after all, a little more than three metres tall and can take probably 70+ passengers in full load (standing packed like canned fish).

In this Ramadan month, I think I saw increase of refrigerator with Coca Cola label in the public. One of it is in Slipi junction where I transferred bus in the morning. It’s not an automatic vending machine (which will probably receive resistance from local shops) but a refrigerator placed outdoor. It’s still clean for now, but I wonder how long it would survive the heat and dust and oily smokes from buses. But the timing is just right. Sweet and cool drink as the dusk came.

Lastly, except in unbearable traffic jam in front of the marketplace, my phone had helped me avoid walking quarter way to the office door. Game, a little bit of RSS browsing or checking Windows Live mobile. I can’t browse full site with my browser, and had no intention to do so either. Seeing full site in such small screen (read: less than 7~8”) is not comfortable. My phone plan also doesn’t constitute unlimited data, so had to keep an eye on the usage. I don’t use G’ Reader. This morning I used Netvibes mobile, but maybe I should try Bloglines mobile too. Any other suggestion for web based RSS reader that can be accessed in the lowest common denominator mobile web browser ?

I still think it’s best if the traffic department close down the street at the left side of the marketplace so peoples making shortcuts won’t clog the crossroad there. That way, the officers just need to keep the public minibus to keep on going instead of waiting for passenger in the middle of the street.

When much of the population is of old age and no more as productive as they used to be, the powers being doesn’t simply give new children as the next generation. Instead, they torn away the elderly, pulling out every usable guts inside and stuck it in the newborn.

Why, you might ask. Well, isn’t it obvious? So they don’t have to deal with the cost of getting those new gutters when they can use something that’s already there.

Now sorry about the personification way of speech, but isn’t that how IT procurement works without deal contract with manufacturer?

I paid my utmost respect to notebook bag makers, they respect better credit than I’ve given all these time.

My notebook is a HP TouchSmart Tx2. My bag is a vertical messenger bag from local manufacturer.

Today when I’m just a few hundred metres from home and is crossing the street, a motorbike almost had me. As the rule of engagement in street here, they act angered first as for not being blamed. Well, my bag flies in a parabolic trajectory, probably 1.5 metres high and landed on concrete centimetres from passing car wheel approx. two metres from the place I’m standing on.

In panic, I quickly opened up the bag as soon as I got back home. Amazingly, no crack. The worst thing is the hard drive hatch is opened a bit, which I could manage to forcefully push back without screwdriver and avoid voiding the warrantee seal. Windows loaded fine so far and there’s no voice of anything broken inside. The touch screen also works fine, active nor passive.

Thank God.

As far as my memories goes, there’s no fatal quake in Jakarta. The largest damage I’ve ever heard is just cracks in the wall, once. Even so, we still enjoy evacuating the buildings. In shopping centres, this could be a nightmare for the shop owners isn’t it. Imagine, peoples grabbing things and grabbing the chance to get out with the commotion even though they know there couldn’t be any large scale disaster.

Today, in the middle of heated meeting to discuss the upcoming publishing schedule, things starts shaking. Standing on the 3rd floor, the shaking can be felt. We then evacuate the building, no panic. Shortly after, the meeting continue with talk about how if the printing company said there won’t be last week delivery then there will be local quake in the room (epicentre: the sales manager).

This month is troublesome. We had the Ied, where many Indonesian have the tradition of going back to their hometown to meet with their relatives. The homecoming is in such a large scale that it congested all inter-province highway out of the major cities such as Jakarta capital area. So congested, seems like the government declared, except the nine prime commodities, there will be no logistic shipment for a week before and after the Ied. Book’s not included in prime commodities of course. That’s why we’re in tight schedule.

From various news sources, the epicentre of the quake is 30 km under the sea, southeast of the town of Tasikmalaya. At 7.8 Richter scale, it’s quite big. A mosque in that city’s downtown is ruined.

While I spent the afternoon doing proof checking in the pre-printing division, there’s something interesting happened in the elevator at the back of the office. I heard from colleague who passed the place around 13.30 that they hear voice coming from inside the elevator.

According to witness A, there’s sound he thought to sounds like the elevator is falling down. There’s also voices like female screaming from inside. When checked, there’s nothing wrong with the elevator. He also mentioned, once when he’s doing overtime work and is going back using the elevator, he’s almost trapped inside and emergency intercom not working at all. When the door opened, first floor’s surface is already knee-high.

Witness F gave a less scary description. He said it sounds like a woman being pushed inside.

The third witness, I hasn’t had the chance to ask about this experience.

But it’s not that surprising. Our new building does seem to have a lot of problem. One of it is yesterday’s fire. That elevator in particular is believed to be used item (cheaper) and it’s not the first time there are story about something close to apparition there. With today’s event, it would be interesting if we had the resource to trace back where that elevator came from.

I’m glad that I’m working in the second floor, we go up and down through the emergency staircase.

Peoples who likes exploring Bing’s hotspots should’ve notices a new type of search from the hotspot. In addition to Web search, image search, video search, map search, travel search. Reference search. The search result link starts with http://www.bing.com/reference/semhtml/ (but that link itself redirect to the homepage).

I’m interested in the Semantic result in the name. So far, it seems to be pulling information directly from one of the most favourite site which has semantic result to search engines, Wikipedia, featuring content and a floating outline box, but seems like not much else.

The feature itself is not new, just that it’s difficult to find. I tried searching some terms and can’t find any link to reference search at all.

But if you’re interested in using this Reference search feature, try using Powerset that’s acquired by Microsoft back then and feature integrated to Bing. The Powerset result has different layout and more bell-and-whistles compared to the result it returned to Bing. But it also has link to Bing’s reference search (which is just http://www.bing.com/reference/search?q=[search_query] compared to the usual result).

For something as virtual as pre-paid voucher card, it sure is difficult to find.

Situation description. Here, we have several type of payment for cell-phone.

• Post-paid, paid by the end of the month.
• Pre-paid, paid in front using top-up vouchers.
  • Physical voucher cards.
  • Electronic, where reseller get a special number and they can send the credit to customer who buy from them.
• Contract, actually pre-paid. For the iPhone, unlike in other countries where they sacrifice part of revenue to gain customer by subsidizing phone, here customer pay for monthly fee+phone’s mortgage.

My wireless card is pre-paid too. Lately I don’t have time to go to shop in the local mall to buy the top up voucher. But no problem right, after all, in Indonesia where pre-paid is far more popular (no commitment culture?), there are voucher seller virtually everywhere. There’s mom&pop shop selling voucher with other stuffs (snack, drink, etc), street side peddlers, even in the promotion division there are employee who had side income from selling electronic voucher to other employee (payment can be done when pay check arrives and order can be made from internal PBX line).

Now, the “electronic voucher” probably starts here from carrier feature to “share” credit to friends. For example, your friend is running low on credit and don’t have access to buy top-up voucher (on the street, no money, etc), you can send a part of your available credit to him. This probably evolve into reseller feature, where they can buy credit on discount price and then transfer it to customer purchasing from them. Think of it as a paperless operation. This is also more efficient, because for the seller can buy 1 million credit for example and sell it more flexibly, easier than stocking 5 pieces of 100k and 25 pieces of 25k and have to sell all of it.
This is also convenient, because customer could ask someone else to buy the credit for them, and it’ll be sent instantly even if the customer is somewhere else, busy.

The street side retail’s main consumer are… locals, students, employee who took public transport, not exactly the type who would shell out 100k for a month or even use that much. Logically, it’s better to stock up small nomination vouchers instead of large nomination right? Those vouchers had expiry date and most likely not returnable. For peoples who want to use large nomination, here the electronic version is available.

So here’s my problem. I’m not sure if my wireless card will accept electronic voucher. I usually do top-up payment from the website and I don’t really trust electronic voucher system anyway. there’s lot of stories about bad practice in the resellers. I’ll try later during lunch, maybe try using ATM transfer. But if things don’t go well, I guess I’ll just buy 5 pieces of the 25k nomination.

For those wondering of the large nomination, €1 equals to approximately IDR 15k. I had unlimited plan at 64kbps (with the disclaimer word bestowed by the devil to network company marketing division, “up to”) costing IDR 125k / month including tax. The quality is so-so and I had experience routine disconnection at office even when the signal strength is full.

[Update] The bottom line is, I just realized it’s difficult to find a large nomination voucher. Luckily there’s a seller near office who sell large nomination. Bought it during the lunch break.

Lately, a muffled loud voice can be heard anywhere in my room. I didn’t realize it at first, or maybe I’m thinking it’s just the old air conditioning unit. But the sound is consistent from everywhere in the house.

It’s until this night when I went out to the ATM (getting money to buy top-up voucher for my pre-paid wireless internet) that so late I finally realized. It’s most likely from the mall across the street outside the complex. Some sort of building infrastructure, whether it’s the air conditioning machine or the electric generator. At night, the sound is more prominent.

By the way, night walk might be not so healthy, but after short rain before I get back from work, the night wind is wet and cold, felt nice to me. Especially the feel of cold wind blowing around my feet (wore sandal, not shoes). Been a while, I thought it’s the dry season already, but rain like this sure is a nice variation to the hot weather. If just it falls during the hot afternoon and longer to cool down the world and wash away the dusts in the air.

This morning, I woke up with my clock pointing right on 4.44, one number less from having it perfect dead x dead. Taking the bad omen, I don’t bring my notebook to work despite the cocktail of internet filter imposed on me. Well, this one day, besides, working on two screens is not that easy thing to do.

But seems like the surprise is different.

• Post 1: first conclusion
• Post 2: clarification
• Post 3: the smoke

Sometime around 8-9, smoke starts to come out from the air conditioning system. Soon, everyone evacuate the building in an orderly fashion and leaving the computer on. Something that bring up our complaint is that there’s no fire alarm, no smoke alarm (despite visible smoke in the room) and not even emergency broadcast telling the employees to evacuate.

It’s probably the air conditioner. The ventilation belch out black smoke out. Then, asking security staff, they said that the emergency generator chamber located underground is flooded. The wall breaks in the water tank buried under the parking area and flow into the generator room, thus all this mess.

But because there’s no big fire, they only need to drain the water and then all’s fine. Open the window for a while, let the smoke out, and back to work.

There’s problem with the provider, it seems. Been for several weeks now that when I want to access Facebook or Japanese websites, the proxy or gateway server will just return error screen. Overloaded perhaps, browsing using Wi-Fi from my bedroom hasn’t work well either.

Back to the daily life. Ever since that flood of returned translation result, my daily life has been filled with some sort of routinity more than ever. Had to clean up those by the end of this month, really. Not to mention is the stack of proofs yet to be finished. *sigh* But it’s not just the Islamic new year’s holiday season that’s come of great concern (because there will be shipment shut down due to the higher priority of traffic for peoples going back to their hometown).

Yesterday, the manager already asked us to list the titles we had for next year, which is admittedly not much. But the higher ups in the management seems to only care for a thing. Raise the target, more income, please the executives and share holders. The G.I.? Well, it’s our jobs to think of a way for that expectation even if it means selling soul to the devil as long as we don’t drag them down together. :P

But let’s talk about something more cheerful… holiday season… not.

Just like the Easter, for one month the Muslim will begin fasting. I don’t know about in other countries such as the west, but in Indonesia they use the to-the-words rule of observing the moon phase. Because there are several prominent groups here, we could have debate about who’s version of the 1st of Ramadhan is right. I heard in Arabia and Turkey they already do it by calculation.

Second thing is… the change of behaviour. while the sun is on the sky, there’s no eating or drinking. Other than that, eat all you can. Sunset is… coincidentally, near the time peoples will be getting home. With hungry and thirsty body and soul, more than ever everybody rush back home, filling the street with cars. Not to mention peoples dining out. Being hungry, there will be peoples who would disregard traffic rule or bear to wait for even a second.
Other part of this is… usually it’s three mostly balanced meals a day. But now, it’s feast after sunset. The stockpiling or high demand for food supply caused a rise on the price. Let’s not get to the I-day yet, added with the distribution shutdown, scarcity became worst and price will go up.

Third thing is the local tradition of going back to hometown to ask for forgiveness (most of the time for something both party don’t even remember anymore ?). This rush of traffic back to the rural area usually caused traffic jam dozens of kilometres, if not hundreds, along the major inter regional street like the Java north shore course. This year, I heard from the managers of the printing and marketing division, that expedition and distribution will be closed for a week before and after the day. This is to cope with the traffic load. No distribution could mean each cities must survive with it’s own supply of goods.

I’m not sure on how true that is, but really, it affects a lot of peoples, including those who only consider it as a No-Work-Day rather than Holy day.

Cell phone plans, basically there are two types. Pre-paid and post-paid. Post paid users are the loyal users, even if they had less features.

Not exactly loyalty. We don’t have number portability here, so all those social connection would become obsolete if we switched. Telling each and everyone is a tiresome job, not to mention costly if you choose using SMS to inform… dozens to hundreds of them ? Keeping the current number has it’s convenience, that is everyone I know already knew I’m here.

Not exactly the same problem… but I could feel the same for Facebook or Twitter. I would use it because peoples I know is already there. I don’t have to play an MLM agent promoting everyone to go there, but the mass and momentum is strong enough to pull peoples I know and don’t know into the place. The position then become so dominating, looking for alternative would be difficult. Personally, I hate posting the same thing everywhere, that’s annoying especially in the age of social web aggregator like nowadays. Second… well, not all resource I like in Twitter is available in the alternatives.

That’s old, here’s new thought of something old. Back then, the social networking which at least I know is… maybe Spartan in today’s view. The online profile we know in social networks are personal website with articles and later blogs. The networking is formed in chat, instant messenger, e-mail, forum or mailing lists, any way possible. Of course, real life if possible. Tracking the connection using link list, web ring, those days :P

Distributed network, independent. Probably nice if there could be such thing again plus new technology isn’t it. A distributed system, something like FOAF file as XML based database secured with… OpenID authentication. But because many peoples just use free hosting like Wordpress or Blogger, every host should support it. Not only because installing is a hassle for most; most doesn’t even allow saving file into the directory (e.g. saving file to add this Live Space to use Bing’s webmaster tool).

Intriguing matters for me recently. First is a lot more personal. Without warning, I received from the IT manager a cocktail of internet filter including messenger and several websites. Well, luckily it doesn’t block Windows Live, FaceFeed nor Facebook connect. Most other sites left untouched.

Second is something more national. The government announced new money in Indonesia, 2’000 bill. In the same time, the old 1’000 bill will be phased out. The problem is, both are supposedly low nominal money (1’000 is the smallest nomination of paper bill here) and I’ve never ever seen 2’000 bill in circulation. In the other hand, 1’000 bill destined to be phased out is… getting close to their limit.

The photo over there is sample of a 1000 Rupiah bill. From scale 1 to 5, it’s around 2-3 (1 is worst and 5 is mint condition).

There are small cracks on the paper too, and money getting fixed with tape might become more common. Getting new bills are most likely impossible, because few months before when I want to change my money (ATM machines gives only 50k or 100k bill), the bank already doesn’t have the 1’000 bill.

Anyway, I just hope they would soon give that 2’000 bill to the peoples. It’s one of the essential thing in our daily life.

I heard that teen had weird sleeping pattern. They stay awake until late at night, and sleep until much later.

My sleep pattern is… like comfortable seasons of the year.

• January (0-1): sleep
• February (2-3): sleep
• March (4-5): awaking, still rather sleepy
• April (6-7): a bit sleepy
• May (8-9): normal
• June (10-11): getting sleepy
• July (12-13): afternoon hibernation
• August (14-15): getting better
• September (16-17): concentrate
• October (18-19): somehow, enjoy
• November (20-21): late, but enjoy
• December (22-23): where the fun starts, although it ends quickly

Of course, not the yearly pattern of tropical zone where half year of rain is concentrated in 2-3 months. For those who actually experienced what it means of taking the best and worst of four seasons, forgive my stereotype-based interpretation (^-^;)

ForumPonsel gathering today @ Pronto restaurant Pondok Indah Mall, Jakarta.
A short description, it’s a forum and community for gadget fans, especially mobile phones, in Indonesia.

I went there after going to screening of Aliens in the Attic. Tight schedule, but arrived there just on time. Actually, there’s another event I want to go to, a cosplay event in Kinokuniya. But the time is the same, and I’ve already paid for this event, so there I goes.

In short, it’s fun, really. Although I’m mostly a lurker there, I can still listen and engage a little with them one by one. Personally, I’m slow at registering name and face, so I still didn’t remember who I’m talking with.
In (weak) relation with that, I didn’t remember the person sitting next to me in the bus leaving, although I’m sitting next to the alley and he had to go through me to get out. Might just be too tired and sleepy, so it’s not anything horror.

That picture up there is part of the collection bought by members. As can be seen, most are Blackberry and Nokia devices, all unlocked of course (well, maybe not the BlackBerries). Someone even have the leaf-shaped Nokia device already discontinued for years.

Finally, here’s the group photo. This is one row, there’s another row to the left and right. According to the guest book, we probably have 50+ peoples in this gathering, and all’s happy! Of course, there’s also the mood maker who act as our MC.

The quiz session asked some forum related question with concert ticket (valid until this midnight). The session by person from the Indonesian Opera user group is race to open the forum’s mobile site. Another one is race to post a one word reply to the forum. The last event, door prize, give two unit of cell phone.

After that, more eat and talk and socializing among members. Anyway, fun event, will be waiting for the next year’s too.

For more pictures, check here: http://www.cariapaaja.com/forumponsel/

From the gathering this afternoon, I heard of an interesting monetizing model from Lelang Gokil. It’s an auction site, but as members bid, the price goes down. Anyway, here’s the rundown.

• Member buy tokens. The starter pack cost IDR 200k (approx. EURO 14.17). Each token in the price is valued IDR 5k (approx. EURO 0.35).
• Seller register their item. The site check the item’s condition, and probably pay the seller in advance.
• Members starts shooting with the tokens they have.
• Until at a point, with rule I don’t really understand, the winner is selected.
• In case that the final price is minus, the winner will get the item, plus cashback.

Now, the magic is when members starts bidding the price down. Normally in auction, the winner pay all, while those losing doesn’t pay anything, after all, they don’t get the item. But here, everyone use their token and it’s gone. But each token is cheap, €0.35 so the personal loss might be negligible for most. The winner get the item at a very cheap price, sometimes even for free.

The cashback… well, from example I saw, the cashback are usually petty cash in amount so negligible that not even beggar on the street want to accept.

The company then get money from all the accumulated bid, including from peoples who lose the bidding.

I just wondered, it there any site in the west that use this model too ? Or is it really the creativity of the people in this country. By the way, the site linked above is in Indonesian.

The free (and paid) blog provider LiveJournal has rolled out an update on July 29th. One of this updates includes a new LJ Messenger, which is an implementation of Web Messenger (don’t know if it uses the same code as Messenger Web Bar or not). The

Previously LiveJournal also have feature called LJ Talk, which is an XMPP chat server. Friends in LiveJournal immediately  become friends in the chat’s contact list too. Also because it’s XMPP, it can also be used to talk to Google’s GTalk  (and that’s probably the only way I ever used it because I don’t want to draft to the G).

To setup this Messenger, visit the Extension page in the Account setting in LiveJournal. Users without Live ID will be offered to create a new account, while users who already have an account will be able to link their accounts.

PS: there’s also LiveJournal web activities in Windows Live Profile to bring your updates in LJ to our Profile or our friends’ What’s New Feed.

Suggestion

Then in the spirit of bringing your networks together, I actually hoped that in the cooperation, LJ (and other partners actually) could provide suggestion for contact from my other networks who already have Live ID. Currently the suggestions are something like:

John Doe
by Windows Live
Add | Ignore

Maybe it can advance into

John Doe
by Windows Live, LiveJournal
Add | Ignore

We can have even more suggestion from wider range.

Today we had a press release event by MnC Comics. They’re comic publisher, part of the Kompas Gramedia media group, who specialized in comic publishing.

The press event today is for launching of a new label called Koloni Komik. This label will specialize in publishing works by Indonesian artists.

From explanation of the GM during the event, the group with highest volume of sales in most book stores in Indonesia is the children book group, including comic, especially licensed comics from Japan. Yes, I do aware that most are originally targeted towards teen and young adult, but in this country all comic are categorized as child book, either stereotypically, or in the business side such as when making product group placement. But the point is, the whole market is dominated by imported book and works by local authors are close to less than 10%.

There are two major (official) publishers of Japanese comics here, Elex Media Komputindo and MnC comics. There are some others, although I also heard of names who unable to cope with the licensing cost and turn into piracy (publishing without license). Both had experience in publishing local comics, but under the same label as Japanese/Korean comics, so it’s difficult to see from distance. In book store, these books are also mixed so there are no differentiation, local comics fight on the same shelf as foreign titles.
So, one of the publisher started a new label.

For now, there’s in total 8 titles launched together. Originally there’s 10, but two can’t made it by the deadline. I left all the books in the office, so can’t scan it to attach here.

The flagship is of course, IMO, Garudayana by Is Yuniarto. Other than the drawing style, I think he had the ability to communicate with the community, generating buzz for his works just like for his previous works. When the title is published, many had already known it like it’s “made by my friend”.
Hasn’t had time to check the others, but there’s at least two titles I’m personally interested in.

There’s a high expectation made when starting this label. It’s not merely to increase the presence of local comics. In the future (of course if this project is successful), they plan on licensing the titles to foreign publishers. Even more ambitious is character licensing, selling license for adaptation works such as movies or games for example.

In any case, I really admire the publisher’s effort in pushing out this kind of marketing campaign.
As far as I know, the book publishing group is very tight in budgets. Other thing is… perhaps because they used to be in the magazine publishing group (now in book publishing group), the nuances are more varied and they had less corporate aura compared to the place I’m in. Such as, there’s still fun from the staff rather than plain and tired, that shows from the designs. But maybe I’m just talking as an insider :P