It’s just unfortunate, there’s no detail map for Indonesia. There’s a quite good Google map for Jakarta and other cities, but only covers the Satellite view. Street view? Maybe later in 2015 after Google gives Jakarta roadmap and Govt can untangles transportation haywire. What can be used for property classified beside map? I suppose it would be property data. Property type, square meters, price, and facilities (rooms, pool, local market, etc).

Even map cannot be used in detail manner, map can still be used to show overview of property area, eg: how big is the complex, nearest highway entrance, etc. For national coverage, province view, and district (kabupaten, kecamatan, kotamadya) view can be a handy navigation tool. Other big scope attributes can still be layered to compensate the missing details such as colors to represent price, population density, etc. A good search feature will also be truly helpful to give a jump navigation tool for newcomer or advanced user.

Photo Author Stuck in Customs

Disclaimer: I, by any chance, am not a CEO or ever run any company. Yet, that should not prevent me from having a CEO/enterpreneur-like perspective, no? Please share any of your dissagreement, fact correction, etc onto the comment box. It’s free

What has happened?

You should have been selling items and closed many great deals. If your product doesn’t sell but you are 100% sure you’re on the right market then go revise your product. be open to receive feedback. Probe your customers, ask their feeling and what to improve their overall experience with your product. If you are feeling you have the greatest product but doesn’t feel to stand in the right market then why keep standing there?! Go look for a better wet-ground!

You can go Ad, SaaS, PaaS

Now that your product sells, but you feel somehow your market is pretty saturated, you can start spicing up your product. Try SaaS (Software as a Service) strategy, go freemium, or push some ads into your product. Or you can even create your own economy ecosystem with your product, try PaaS (Platform as a Service)

What about your database?

You can start looking into your data and what value you can derive from it? Are you industry spesific player? That’s even better! That menas you are holding a very specific and precious data. Think up something, you can always monetize your database. Oh, should I even ahve to give you any example? You must have user data right? e-mails? Birth date? Location? Try overlaying in on a map, or create a non-obstrusive newsletter service, rent it, anything!

My product doesn’t sell (anymore), and there’s no market visible!

If it doesn’t work. Try creating new product (related to your current product). Maybe it’s just a little twist that’s all needed. Shift focus, even Flickr wasn’t started as photo sharing site.

I’m totally frustrated, everything doesn’t work!

It doesn’t work either? Told your board of directors to hire new CEO :p. Oh you’re the CEO? Well, maybe it’s time to execute your exit strategy.

Photo via Flickr. Author is dsevilla. License is

PS: sebenarnya ide post ini terinspirasi oleh blog uculan. Jangan sedih yo cul

Kenapa harus SOLR, tidak cukupkah google site search/google coop?

Google memang mengindeks dengan handal,akan tetapi Google sepertinya tak akan bisa memberikan banyak interpretasi semantic. Di sinilah implementasi SOLR akan banyak membantu kita. Model searching yang dicontohkan Google adalah evolusi dari search jaman dulu. Walau model ini bekerja dengan baik, kebutuhan search terus berkembang, pada akhirnya pengalaman yang didapat dari aktivitas pencarian lewat Google tidak akan mampu mengakomodasi seluruh permintaan konsumen. Konsumen membutuhkan pengalaman pencarian yang lebih berkesan. Vertical search adalah salah satu jawaban dan harapan. Vertical search hanya bisa dibangun jika semua data dan relasi antar data tersebut tersedia. Dan tentu saja hanya yang pemilik data itu sendiri yang tahu dan mempunyai informasi yang telah disebutkan sebelumnya. Ya, berarti semua orang terkualifikasi untuk mendayagunakan SOLR. Dan sang pemilik data itu sendirilah memang pihak yang paling tepat untuk mengendalikan pengalaman aktivitas pencarian.

Contoh kasus. Mislakan berikut ini adalah data yang kita punyai:

SOLR for Dummies
Pennington, Havoc
7888XXXXX
USD $27

Bisakah google menjawab pertanyaan “Buku apa yang ditulis oleh Havoc Pennington?”, “Buku-buku apa saja yang harganya di bawah $30?”. Google tak akan mampu menjawab satu pun dari pertanyaan tersebut kecuali Google tahu semantik/makna data dalam teks tersebut. Sebaliknya, dengan SOLR kita bisa menjawab pertanyaan di atas. Karena kita tahu bahwa “SOLR for Dummies” adalah judul buku, maka kita bisa mengindeks data ini di bawah field book_title dalam SOLR. Kemudian “Pennington, Havoc” bisa diindeks di bawah “author” dan seterusnya. Maka kita pun bisa mencari data yang kita inginkan dengan lebih akurat.

Siapakah klien potensial kita?

Mengulang kembali apa yang sempat kita singgung sebelumnya. Berikut ini adalah beberapa jenis klien potensial.

1. Blogs. Data dalam blog bisa dipastikan jauh dari terstruktur. Ini adalah klien potensial yang tersulit. Potensial karena tumpukan datanya sangat banyak dan sepertinya belum ada yang sanggup mengolahnya menjadi data berharga. Hmmm, sebentar, mari kita berimajinasi. Ada tidak kemungkinan: ”cari ulasan tentang SOLR yang ditulis oleh Akhmad Fathonih”. Dengan struktur umum kontent blog berupa title, excerpt, permalink, full-content, category, dan tags ternyata kita sudah bsia memberikan value lebih. Dengan semakin meningkatnya permintaan dan kepercayaan pengguna internet akan peer review dan citizen jurnalism, query yang baru saja saya sebut pasti akan muncul.
2. e-commerce sites. Segala situs yang bertema amazon, e-bay atau craiglist akan lebih mudah diindeks karena data telah distrukturkan dan mempunyai relasi antar data yang sudah jelas.
3. Semua pemilik data yang menginginkan datanya lebih discoverable bagi penggunanya

Apa yang harus kita bootstrap lebih dulu?

Selain infrastruktur (cores, storage, bandwidth, etc) di mana kita akan mendeploy SOLR, plugins (untuk CMS dan other data management system) adalah salah satu hal kritikal. Faktor ini akan turut menentukan rendahnya barrier of entry pada konsumen. Semakin mudah konsumer bisa memanfaatkan layanan kita maka besar peluang kita untuk mendapatkan konsumen, data (untuk di-mining is possible) dan peluang-peluang lain.

What do you say?

While I will think and write more on this subject, I’m all free for any discussion; whether you are rushing to execute this plan before anybody else, or you want a simply routine-breaking chit-chat.

Photo:

Source

Flickr

Author

Cayusa

License

So, will it work? What do we sell?

• Sell grid power. This is no-brainer. But shouldn;t be the first in the priority list. For most site, search is a non-dominant action. So, they may already have the computing power needed to run their site (includes search activity)
• Tuneable search experience. User will no longer depending on what their CMS provide, instead they can create their own search experience using their defined field and search weigthing.
• Leverage content discoverability. Some site may have a big bulk of data inside their server. Indexing this data (on SOLR) may give them added value. Eg: faceted data can be displayed to attract visitors. It’s like “simple” data mining.
• Targetted ad . We can push ad onto the search page

Then, who are our potential customers?

• e-commerce site. There are many e-commerce site in Indonesia. many of then is simply built from scratch of using off-the-shelf FOSS CMS such as osCommerce which is lacking good search feature. yes, MySQL Fultext search just won’t cut it.
• document intensive site. Eg: library (OMG, there are lots of library out there), .go.id site
• any rich content site

Ok, so how are we going to execute it, technically?

• provide REST API, or
• simply expose the SOLR endpoint for integration and searching purposes

Former option would enable us to push our ad. And the later seems fit premium service, where user can process raw SOLR data.

So, anyone interested? Or desperately wanting one for your own site? Or, you suddenly want to start your own web crawler? That’s an interesting idea … Going vertical, anyone?

Photo source: swisscan