Mozilla in Asia

On September 27th, Mitchell Baker visited Jakarta for a number of media interviews and a community gathering organized by Viking Karwur.

This was the first time Mitchell had visited Indonesia for Mozilla, and as such there was high demand to interview her, not only because of the success of Firefox globally, but also because Firefox enjoys a commanding market share in the Indonesian Internet market.

Mitchell started out with an interview at MetroTV with Timothy Marbun. We had originally hoped for Mitchell to get onto MetroTV’s morning news show, Indonesia Now, however, her plane was delayed and she missed the live taping window.

Mitchell prepping for the interview with Timothy Marbun of MetroTV.

Mitchell and Timothy Marbun (MetroTV)

After the TV interview, we traveled to the hotel where the rest of the media interviews were scheduled. Mitchell was interviewed by a number of key media resulting in articles such as:

Wawancara dengan Bos Mozilla Mitchell Baker (Vivanews)

Firefox Siap Hadang Browser Anyar Microsoft (Detik)

Sosok Nyentrik di Balik Kesuksesan Firefox (Detik)

Ponsel Futuristik di Mata Bos Firefox (Detik)

Mozilla Takkan Usung Premium Add-On (Detik)
“Pemasukan Kami dari Google” – Yahoo! Indonesia News

Mitchell Baker, Wanita ‘Rubah Api’ Dibalik Kesuksesan Firefox (Okezone)

Di Negara Asalnya Mozilla Firefox Tidak Populer (Okezone)

Mozilla Kembangkan Layanan Jejaring Sosial? (Okezone)

70% Gunakan Firefox, Indonesia Penting bagi Mozilla (Okezone)

Firefox Mobile Siap Menyasar Semua Platform (Okezone)

After the interviews, we moved on to the community gathering. We had almost 170 people registered to attend and we were concerned about overcrowding because the venue was smaller than this number, but due to very heavy rains in Jakarta that evening a number of people who had planned to attend could not. Still we had well over 100 enthusiastic attendees, including a number of old friends from my May trip.

Mozilla Indonesia Community Meetup: Jakarta, Indonesia | Sep 27

Kumi and Mozilla Indonesia Community Meetup

So how on earth did Firefox reach 70% market share in Indonesia?

The community meetup was a chance to make a number of announcements including,

- the winner of the mascot naming contest; ‘Kumi’ is the Indonesian Firefox mascot’s name.

- the announcement that Mozilla will partner with Pesta Blogger 2010 and Gen Kanai and William Quiviger from Mozilla will participate;

Cake made by a friend of the Indonesian Firefox localizer Romi Hardiyanto AND the papercraft ‘Kumi fox’ mascot of the Mozilla Indonesia community.

We will be distributing the papercraft doll via PDF asap from the Mozilla Indonesia community site so you can print and make your own.

Mitchell and Viking Karwur

Thank you to Viking and Romi and everyone else who helped make this first official Mozilla event a big success. We’ll be back for PestaBlogger and are actively considering what to do for 2010 and beyond.

Also additional photos by Naif Al’as

Mozilla Indonesia Community Meetup

Introduction

I spent a week in Jakarta in late May, starting to learn about the Indonesian web/Internet market. I had planned to go to Indonesia in 2009 but my schedule prevented it and in hindsight, I wish that I had gone sooner.

It’s clear that as of this year, 2010, the Indonesian Internet/web market is exploding, most obviously with Yahoo!’s acquisition of the Indonesian startup Koprol.com, but also further movements that have been less visible such as non-Indonesian venture capital firms moving into the country and starting to make their first investments.

TechCrunch’s Sarah Lacy, who was in Indonesia around the same time I was filed these stories which provide additional perspectives into the Internet market in Indonesia: What the Hell Is Going on in Indonesia? and Is “Remarkable Indonesia” the New “Incredible India” for Investors?

Mozilla and Firefox are in uncharted territory in Indonesia because we enjoy being the dominant browser. Firefox’s share on many of the top Indonesian websites is between 65-75%. It’s not clear exactly why Firefox is so popular (I go into more detail below), but I believe Mozilla needs to be more active in Indonesia moving forward in order to keep the market share that we have today, and to understand why Firefox is as popular as it is for both the Indonesian market as well as other emerging markets (other parts of S. E. Asia and S. America at the very least.)

With respect to the size of the Internet and Internet users in Indonesia, I was given wildly varying figures between 25 and 40 Mil. users. I think that no one really knows for sure but whatever the exact figure is, it is clear that not even 20% of the population of Indonesia is online and with 26% growth of the Internet in the past year (Yahoo!/TNS) it is clear that there will be significant growth of Internet users in Indonesia for many years to come.

Background on the Indonesian Internet

Of the first wave of Indonesian Internet sites, which enjoy dominance in Indonesia today, the ones to note are

* Kaskus.us (the leading forum and web community)
* Detik.com (a leading online-only news service)
* Kompas.com (a portal affiliated with a major media publisher and one of the leading newspapers)
* Vivanews.com (another leading publisher and online news service)
* Plasa.com (originally a web community, retooled to be a commerce site, owned by a large Indonesian media firm)

These were either bootstrapped sites early on which got popular or sites developed with the backing of a major Indonesian media or telecom entity.

In addition to these Indonesian sites:

* Google is the most popular search service
* Yahoo! is most popular for IM and Webmail, and Yahoo! News is #2 or #3 and gaining share
* Facebook has almost ubiquitous reach in Indonesia from young to old, male and female.

In fact many Indonesians only sign up for a webmail account in order to reigster at Facebook- i.e. for many Indonesians, Facebook _is_ the Internet of Indonesia.

Status of Mozilla in Indonesia

As far as I can tell, after speaking with a number of the top websites and web services in Indonesia, Firefox enjoys something between 65-75% market share on the desktop. Based on Mozilla’s own data, Indonesia is consistently in the top 10 of top locations for Firefox worldwide. 80% of Indonesian Firefox users use the en-US Firefox; only 16% use the Bahasa Indonesia version of Firefox.  Many Indonesian users told me that “software in Indonesian is hard to understand” and while I don’t doubt that, this is most true for the most English-fluent users.  While English is taught widely, everyday conversation is in Bahasa Indonesia, and the media (newspapers, TV, radio, most websites) are also in Bahasa Indonesia.  Therefore there is a growing need for a Bahasa Indonesia Firefox, especially as the Internet expands beyond the wealthy and educated to more average Indonesian users.

We have known for some time that Mozilla’s highest market share in the world is Indonesia, but we have only had guesses as to why that is the case. While I tried to pinpoint the reasons as to why Indonesia has the world’s highest market share for Firefox, none of the reasons that came up in discussions are unique to Indonesia.

Some Indonesians I spoke to told me, ‘Indonesians don’t like to pay for software’ and like many other SE Asian nations, a significant majority of computer users in Indonesia are using pirated Windows. Those users can’t easily upgrade to IE 7 or IE 8, and choose to install and use Firefox instead. However software piracy is a major issue across Asia and is not unique to Indonesia.

Others have said that it is the features and/or security, and/or speed of Firefox in comparison to IE that makes it the browser of choice for Indonesians.

Still others tell me that Internet cafe owners like to install Firefox with AdBlock in order to better manage their bandwidth. However, AdBlock is popular across the world and while many Internet users in Indonesia connect via Internet cafes, and will continue to do so as the Internet expands across the nation, those users alone can’t skew our data that far.

The closest I came to understanding why Firefox is so popular in Indonesia is trying to understand how certain technology products have become popular and why. For instance currently in Jakarta, the Blackberry is far and away the most popular smart phone in the market. But the BlackBerry’s popularity is very recent- just a few years ago it was Nokia’s phones.  However due to the popularity of the qwerty keyboard and the cheapest plans such that more than 4 carriers are competing to provide the cheapest rates for BlackBerry service, and no need to pay for SMS because BBMail between BlackBerry users is free, RIM has taken significant share of the high end of the smart phone market in Indonesia. I think the reason Blackberry is popular in Indonesia right, and indeed how certain technology products are virally promoted within Indonesia, holds the reason as to why Firefox is so popular in Indonesia.

Government stance on OSS

I was able to get a meeting with the Deputy Director of Software for the Ministry of Communication and Information Technology. We discussed the Indonesian government’s stance on open source software and the deputy director informed me that the ICT Ministry is actively promoting both OSS (including both Firefox and Thunderbird) within the government but also is actively promoting programs around open content as well.  The day I visited the ICT Ministry, there was a press event around a contest that the government was co-funding around the creation of content for the Bahasa Indonesia Wikipedia.

Indonesian Internetworks

Via an introduction, I was able to meet Johar Rangkuti, chairman of IDC Indonesia, a leading data center operator.  IDC Indonesia houses the (Indonesian) National Inter Connection Exchange (NiCE) popularly known as the OpenIXP.  This is the only carrier neutral data center in Indonesia and as such all of the 200+ ISPs in Indonesia peer at IDC.  What this also means is that this one physical location is also a single point of failure for the Internet within Indonesia.  If the big Cisco switch that all of the Indonesian ISPs peer at IDC Indonesia goes down, the entire Internet in Indonesia goes down.  It works for them but it is certainly a sight to behold. Johar was kind enough to agree to host a new mirror for Mozilla at IDC, which is now available at http://mozilla.the.net.id/ As the founder of the OpenIXP and the host that houses this key piece of Internet infrastructure in Indonesia, Johar is in fact a very influential person with respect to the Internet in Indonesia.  Luckily for us he is a big Mozilla fan.

Community

Romi Hardiyanto, who has been our Bahasa Indonesian localizer since before 1.0 should be credited for the bulk of the work that has been done to develop a Mozilla community in Indonesia. We have an active mailing list and the community gets together usually once or twice a year, normally for release parties.

As Romi does not live in Jakarta (he was based in Germany studying for his advanced degree for many years) Viking Karwur, a freelance web designer based in Jakarta has been the defacto community leader. Viking has organized the release parties for Firefox for a number of years and was kind enough to help organize the community event for when I visited in May.

While we do have a small and active community in place, considering the market share that Firefox enjoys in Indonesia, and the growth of the Internet overall, my sense is that that the community could be much larger and more active.

A free press

One of the key differentiating factors for Indonesia currently that is not obvious at first is that today Indonesians enjoy free speech online. This is important because in Asia, free speech is not as common as we might hope. China, Vietnam, Singapore, Malaysia and Australia among others all censor the media or the Internet to one degree or another. Indonesian lawmakers have recently stated a desire to start filtering certain content from the Indonesian Internet, but for the time being Indonesia enjoys free speech, which has meant a huge boom in the popularity of weblogs and more importantly Facebook which has become an absolute must-have service in Indonesia from teenager to grand parent.

Some reports show that Indonesian is the #3 country in Facebook (after the US and the UK) and is clearly the most popular Asian language (mainly because other Asian markets either restrict access to Facebook (China, Vietnam in places) or are markets where there are domestic equivalents such that Facebook is not popular (Japan, Korea).

Competition

If we consider the fact that a majority of browser users in Indonesia use Firefox, there is logic to say that there is no need to focus on Indonesia- that Firefox has ‘won.’ I would disagree and would say that I think that our current situation in Indonesia is something serendipitous and that we could have our leading position taken away from us.

In discussions with Indonesians in the Internet and online advertising industries, it is clear that Google is exploring the market seriously in order to launch a number of key properties in country, including Maps and Chrome. Indonesian ad agencies have been asked to pitch online and offline ad campaigns for Google Maps and Chrome browser to Google and while none have been chosen as far as anyone knows, it’s only a matter of time before Google opens and office and begins to promote Chrome and Maps and other Google properties directly in country.  With the cost of offline and online advertising as low as it is, Google could certainly afford to blitz the Indonesian media with ads to promote their properties and software. The challenge then for Firefox is whether we will be able to hold onto the users that we have.

Conclusion

Due to hard work by Romi as well as Viking and the existing “id-Moz” community in Indonesia, Firefox enjoys a 60-70% market share in Indonesia.  Indonesia is also the top location in Asia for Mozilla, with a larger community of users than Japan or China.  As Mozilla has not traditionally been active in Indonesia, now that we have a better understanding of the market and the some of the key players, hopefully we can be more active in Indonesia in the future.  We still need to learn what it is about the Indonesian market which makes it Firefox so compelling for Internet users in hopes that we can keep Firefox popular in Indonesia and take those lessons elsewhere.

Thanks

I’d like to thank Romi for all of his hard work localizing Firefox for all these years. We’ll miss you at Summit this year. I’d also like to thank Viking for all of the arrangement of the meetups both this year and in the past years. I’d also like to thank Andi ‘Belutz‘ Darmawan, who has been a kind friend and guide to the OSS communities of Indonesia. I also need to thank Enda Nasution, A-list blogger extraordinaire, for his guidance and consultation. I also must thank my good friends and Asia Society Fellows Hendra Sutandinata and Lia Sunarjo who were my guides to Jakarta.

Photos

(Above) The server racks of IDC Indonesia’s new data center are hand-painted to match the four seasons. 15 years in technology and I’ve never seen anything quite like it.

(Above) Skyline of Jakarta with many minarets visible

(Above) The ubiquitous traffic of Jakarta. Outdoor ad for the iPhone which almost no one in Indonesia uses.

(Above) The TransJakarta (local city) bus. Can anyone tell me why the entrance and exit to the bus is like 4 feet off the ground and requires an elevated platform?

(Above) Central Jakarta with mid-day traffic

(Above) Mozilla Jakarta meetup, May 2010

(Above) Mozilla Jakarta meetup, May 2010

My colleague, Shyam Mani, and I will be at Echelon 2010 this week, which looks to be one of the most exciting Internet events in Asia this year. Over 750 participants from all across Asia, it’s quite an accomplishment and congratulations to the e27 organizers.

I’m speaking about Addons on Tuesday morning, and will be around for the rest of the event gathering feedback from participants and sharing the news about what’s going on at Mozilla with mobile, Firefox 4, etc.

In unrelated news, I’m looking forward to some authentic chicken rice!

Bernard Leong and Daniel Cerventus of This Week in Asia interviewed me last week in advance of the Echelon 2010 conference in Singapore on June 1-2.  I will be speaking at Echelon about browser customizations and how they can help startups retain users and grow usage of your website/ webservice.

If you’re going to Echelon, I look forward to seeing you.

This Week in Asia Episode 39: Gen Kanai from Mozilla

I made one error in the interview that I need to clarify.

I said that the Firefox 4 alphas are not yet available. That is incorrect. They are available today as Mozilla Developer Preview (Gecko 1.9.3 alpha).

I got confused between the Firefox for Android builds, which were pre-alpha at the time of the interview but is now available as a nightly build for testing.

For those of you who have followed my blog, you know that it has been 3 years since I first reported on the fact that Korea does not use SSL for secure transactions over the Interent but instead a PKI mechanism that limits users to the Windows OS and Internet Explorer as a browser. Nothing fundamentally has changed but there are new pressures on the status quo that may break open South Korean for competition in the browser market in the future.

In fact, one of the new pressures on the status quo has been the popularity of the iPhone in South Korea, which wasn’t available officially until late 2009 due to a different Korean software middle-ware requirement, WIPI, which has since been deprecated. With WIPI dead and buried, Apple released the iPhone to great fanfare in the Korean market and Blackberry has also launched in the Korean market.

Another pressure on the status quo was a recent report out from 3 researchers (Hyoungshick Kim, Jun Ho Huh and Ross Anderson) from the University of Oxford’s Computing Laboratory, “On the Security of Internet Banking in South Korea.”

South Korean Internet banking systems have a unique way of enforcing security controls. Users are obliged to install proprietary security software – typically an ActiveX plugin that implements a bundle of protection mechanisms in the user’s browser. The banks and their software suppliers claim that this provides trustworthy user platforms. One side-effect is that almost everyone in Korea uses IE rather than other browsers.

We conducted a survey of bank customers who use both Korean and other banking services, and found that the Korean banks’ proprietary mechanisms impose significant usability penalties. Usability here is strongly correlated with compatability: Korean users have become stuck in an isolated backwater, and have not benefited from all the advances in mainstream browser and security technology. The proprietary mechanisms fail to provide a trustworthy platform; what’s more, alternative strategies based on trustworthy computing techniques are quite likely to suffer from the same usability problems. We conclude that transaction authentication may be the least bad of the available options.

The popularity of the iPhone (the press claims 500,000 units sold in the few months since it was released) resurfaced the issue that only Windows and IE can be used to make secure transactions with Korean Internet services. iPhone/Blackberry/Android users in Korea (not to mention Firefox/Opera/Safari/Chrome users) cannot bank online or purchase items online or do any secure transaction with the smartphone browser because Korean services only support the PKI mechanism that only works with Active-X in IE and Windows.

Dr. Keechang Kim of Korea University has been working tirelessly for many years to try to change the status quo in Korea around browsers and the reliance on a PKI mechanism that is tied to one platform. With concern being raised by different parts of the Korean government, including the Korean Communications Commission as well as the Office of the President of Korea, Keechang has gathered a very interesting panel of presentations for April 29th in Seoul.  The panelists will be addressing the (Korean) Financial Supervisory Service (FSS) which is the regulatory body in Korea that is currently mandating the PKI mechanism that is in place today (which requires Active-X, etc.)  Unless the FSS relaxes or changes their regulations, Korean banks cannot offer other mechanisms for Korean users to bank online, etc.  In short, unless the FSS changes their stance, nothing will change in Korea.

“Security Issues of Online Banking & Payment in Korea” is an open public meeting (registration recommended) starting at 10 AM on April 29th at COEX Conference Hall E1 and will feature:

• Bruce Schneier (Chief Security Technology Officer, BT) on “Security: What Works, What Doesn’t, and Why”
• Hyoungshick Kim, Jun Ho Huh (Univ. of Oxford) “What’s the danger of mandating proprietary security solutions?”
• Lucas Adamski (Dir. Security Engineering, Mozilla) on “Securing Browser Interactions”

Again this meeting is open to the public. Anyone is welcome to attend.

While I have no illusions that one meeting will get the key Korean government entities to do a 180 from their current stance, I do think this will be an important opportunity to bring external, Korean and non-Korean security expertise to Korea to discuss the current state of affairs and show that a PKI-based security architecture is only as secure as the computers that those certificates are used on.  If the computers are compromised, and at least one security services provider, Network Box, claims that S. Korea is the largest source for malware in the world, (Korea reigns as king of malware threats) then there is no way to be sure that the person in control of those personal certificates is the legitimate owner.

The deletion of the requirement for WIPI in Korean mobile phones opened the Korean market to the iPhone and the Blackberry and Android phones from outside of Korea.  Korean users of these new smartphones realized that they could not bank online, buy online, etc. and are now pressuring the Korean government to change the current laws which mandate a PKI-based mechanism that has been implemented with Active-X.  As the popularity of smartphones that cannot make use of the current PKI-based architecture for encryption/authentication grows in Korea, the pressure for the government to change their regulations will only mount.  The key question for Mozilla is whether the Korean government will open up to a point where Firefox and Fennec can be used in the future for secure transactions in Korea.

Thank you to Keechang and everyone in the OpenWeb.or.kr community for your tireless efforts to try to break open the Korean market. Thank you also to Channy Yun who has put aside his own schedule in order to participate and guide Lucas in Seoul.  There is still a long road to walk to an open, competitive market in S. Korea for browsers, but I am starting to see the light at the end of the tunnel.

In the span of a few months, the brand new Mozilla community in the Philippines is active and ambitious.  A new Mozilla Philippines Community website, Five Years of Firefox in Manila, and check out the 2010 plans they have for promoting Firefox and Mozilla in the Philippines here: Mozilla Philippines Community 2010 Kick-Off.

And for photos from the 2010 kick-off meeting, be sure to visit Pics from the Mozilla Philippines 2010 Kick-Off Meeting.

Robert O’Callahan mentioned it on his blog but if you attend Linux.conf.au this week, you get to see not only ROC in action speaking on the importance of open video on the Web,  but also Chris Double on implementing HTML5 video in Firefox and Taras Gleck on The Hydras too.

Not only that, they’re screening Code Rush on Wednesday evening, so you get to see Stuart Parmenter too!

Changwon Kim, a friend of mine and a talented Internet entrepreneur who sold his blog service startup to Google in 2008 (and currently works at Google Korea), recently did a great presentation on the Korean Internet at TEDx Seoul. Changwon covers the fact that due to early broadband infrastructure and the geography of Korea, Korean companies were leading in innovations around virtual worlds, mobile Internet and social networks way before the global Internet brands that are world-wide today.  However, recently there has been less Korean innovation which has been concerning to technologists and entrepreneurs.

The video from his presentation is now online (in Windows Media) and covers some of the challenges facing the Korean Internet, including two mentions of the Microsoft browser monopoly in Korea.

TEDxSeoul Talks – [Changwon Kim] Korea Internet Galapagos

On November 26th, the newest Mozilla community, Mozilla Philippines, which started only a few weeks earlier in the Philippines, celebrated the Five Years of Firefox at the Asian Institute of Management in Manila.

Everything came together very quickly with organization driven by Regnard Raquedan, our new community leader, as well as the Filipino Campus Reps, (Ren-Ren Gabas, Allan Caeg, and Joell Lapitan among many others) who have been very active.  Sherwin Sowy of Globe Labs (a division of Globe Telecom) was kind enough to help with sponsorship and showed off a Firefox Addon that university students had recently developed which enabled the sending of web content (text or images) via SMS/MMS.

If you would like to join the new community that is growing in the Philippines to support Mozilla and Firefox, please join the Philippine Mozilla community list.

Five Years of Firefox in Manila Done!

Other blog posts on the event can be found here:

Five Years of Firefox in Manila Done! – Mozilla Philippines

Five Years of Firefox in Manila Done!

Five Years of Firefox in Manila! – a set on Flickr (Photos courtesy of Aja Lapus & Joell Lapitan)

Mozilla Firefox Turns Five

5 Years of Firefox in Manila, a Report

Happy 5th Birthday Mozilla Firefox!

2009-11-21 Five Years of Firefox in Manila – a set on Flickr:

Poramate at Kapook has organized a Firefox 5th anniversary party in Bangkok, Thailand on Nov. 26th at GreenSpace by Greyhound, Central World. If you’re in Bangkok, this is the place to be on the 26th!

Firefox 5th Anniversary @ #CODEFAIL Party Bangkok Thailand