DS-Tour: Better-B

Recently DailySocial made a visit to the offices of PT Diantara Kode Digital, better known as Better-B, to talk about mobile development with Almaujudy, one of the co-founders of the company. Better-B is a mobile application development company renowned for creating BlackBerry apps and is one of the country's earliest BlackBerry Alliance members.

Better-B started its formal operations in January 2009 with three co-founders, Abul A'la Almaujudy, Kemal Arsjad, and Oon Arfiandwi. Within two months, the company received its BlackBerry Alliance membership following a quick series of discussions and presentations with RIM's Southeast Asian representatives.

Currently Better-B has yet to launch its own apps, preferring to develop applications for corporate clients although a number of apps that they have developed so far can probably be offered as a consumer oriented apps.

The major challenge faced by the company is primarily concerned with identifying mobile developers in Indonesia. There doesn't seem to be a major interest among the country's software developers to jump into mobile development despite having a market of more than 170 million mobile subscribers as of 2009.

In trying to overcome that, the company is working with a number of universities to encourage students to at least take a peek into mobile development and see that the mobile market is much more lucrative than the traditional computer market.

Those who do come to the company for internship or employment try-outs currently tend to have little knowledge about mobile development which means they get trained in-house to familiarize themselves with the tools and skills needed to create mobile applications or mobile websites.

Almaujudy hopes that developers create products that are not only technically impressive but also marketable and commercially viable as most of the ones he has seen tend to fail at the commercial aspect of it.