Kemana.com Secretly (and Finally) Launched!

Kemana.com has been building buzz since early this year and on the website they counting down to May 2010 as their launching date. By the end of May, they changed the frontpage and now they claiming April 2010 as their launching date. After June 2010, they're still not launching anything so i lost interest, until today when i randomly visit their website and there they are, launched.

Kemana.com was founded by Chris Benz (pictured left), an entrepreneur from New York who also founded CraftNetwork.com back in 2005. The reason they operate Kemana.com in Indonesia? I have no idea, but whatever it is it's not because there's no competition here. We have plenty of competition in the e-commerce/marketplace area, actually we have too many of them, but then again there's no such thing as having too many competition.

Again, i don't see anything special from Kemana.com compared to their competitors such as Plasa.com, Tokopedia.com, Krazymarket.com and any other small players. The one features from Kemana.com that other player doesn't have is phone-based confirmation where buyers can take a picture of themselves with the item he's buying to confirm that the item has arrived from the seller to buyer. But really, who wants to do that?

I guess most people will likely use the digital signature feature provided by their shipping partner, RPX.

Kemana.com is legally an American company run from New York, where the management staff are based. But they also have an operational office in Bali which is a good place for having a holiday but not a good place to run a company. Seriously.

Btw, how exactly the management people actually manage stuff from New York? Can they  understand the culture and behavior of Indonesian internet user from there?