Yahoo! buys Indonesian site Koprol

This little bit of news got me a little jealous — Indonesian social networking website, Koprol, was just bought by Yahoo! The site is actually their very own version of FourSquare.

kropol Koprol allows users to submit photos and reviews of places they “checked-in” using their mobile phone. There’s no mobile app tied to it and your phone just needs to have a browser to connect and log-in.

Indonesia is a huge market in the mobile world (BlackBerry is equally popular) and it’s not a big surprise that they have their own home-brewed location-based community. The fact that one can use Koprol using the phone’s web browser is an advantage that allows the site to be accessible from a wider set of mobile handsets (not just smartphones).

Yahoo! did not disclose how much it bought Koprol but it surely is way cheaper than the $100 million they allegedly offered to get FourSquare.

And while FourSquare is slowly becoming popular among Filipinos, the Indonesians must be proud to have their very own site snatched up by a global company like Yahoo! The closest I can recall that could have matched this milestone would have been eBay buying into Sulit.com.ph (inside source told me they had talks a couple of years back but didn’t materialized).

Abe Olandres

Abe is the founder and Editor-in-Chief of YugaTech with over 20 years of experience in the technology industry. He is one of the pioneers of blogging in the country and considered by many as the Father of Tech Blogging in the Philippines. He is also a technology consultant, a tech columnist with several national publications, resource speaker and mentor/advisor to several start-up companies.

https://www.yugatech.com

23 Comments

Paolo says:

14 years ago

wow! don’t we have our own version of foursquare?
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Winziph says:

14 years ago

i really like what you said teknisyan.
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Teknisyan says:

15 years ago

There haven’t seen many (any) pinoy developed sites, those that can attract any potential buyers. Most pinoysites are either email site, auction sites, online job hunter which can be easily developed and maintain.

for us to know more about these sites, it would be the best interest of those site for us (pinoy tech blogger) to feature them once in a while. some sort of a site review…

just my two cents!!!
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irv says:

15 years ago

The current time-based or KB-based browsing are too expensive.

Until telcos can come up with affordable schemes, mobile browsing will only be reserved to iPhone users or people willing to shell out big bucks for those expensive unlimited surfing add-on plans.
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kaninglamig says:

15 years ago

@joreel I think yugatech will be worth millions.. ;)
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kaninglamig says:

15 years ago

@joreel I think yugatech will be worth millions :D just kiddin’ ;-)

http://www.openpinas.com
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joreel says:

15 years ago

Wow lucky owners.. grabbing millions of dollars, wheew… do you know any Pinoy owned site that is worth buying by U.S based dot com giant?
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Jon says:

15 years ago

@val It is very possible, but there is not much market yet here. We still think of accessing the web via our (usually prepaid) phones kind of expensive, thus, dissuading the use of such most of the times. I hope our telcos would wake up, and provide much more affordable mobile web browsing.
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val says:

15 years ago

Why can’t Pinoys do something like Kropol? I’m sure there are web developers who could make a foursquare-like site.

Pwede kayo pa funding ni Kuya Abe, hehe :)
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Adrian says:

15 years ago

That is a good news for Yahoo.
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BLOGHAUZ says:

15 years ago

Yahoo and google are on a tug of war to buy Bloghauz
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abeolandres says:

15 years ago

Sulit could have been bought by eBay. That’s something we could have been proud of — http://www.yugatech.com/blog/the-interne… @mparaz @hip2b2 @jonasdelosreyes
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jonasdelosreyes says:

15 years ago

@abeolandres @mparaz @hip2b2 – I completely agree with Sulit. I remember suggesting this to the board of Yehey way back.
reecah says:

15 years ago

@abeolandres I don’t like sulit, whenever I google some stuff their site comes up and when I click, content is irrelevant. Just all tags.
abeolandres says:

15 years ago

@reecah the site is just super-SEO’ed.
kevinn says:

15 years ago

@abeolandres They could buy Sulit, but the content tends to be spammy and unorderly… i skip it when it shows up in search results.
digitalspidey says:

15 years ago

RT @abeolandres: Sulit could have been bought by eBay. That’s something we could have been proud of — http://www.yugatech.com/blog/the-interne… @mparaz @hip …
jvescano says:

15 years ago

@abeolandres i have a better idea, why not sell the whole phil!
doblezeta says:

15 years ago

@abeolandres will do our best to make you proud one day. Hopefully Apple will one day buy out our little pinoy dev company. :)

abeolandres says:

15 years ago

Indonesia has their very own home-brewed FourSquare called Koprol. And it was just bought by Yahoo: http://www.yugatech.com/blog/the-interne…
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