F8 Event hosted in Kejora HQ

F8, Facebook's developer conference took place on April 12-13, 2016 in San Francisco. F8 originally means 8-hour hacking for coders meet up. At this annual event, Facebook introduced its newest products and shared a glimpse into its future. Since not everyone could attend this event, Facebook launched their F8 Meetups for the tech communities.

The F8 Jakarta event marked the launch of the first ever FB viewing party in Indonesia, and was intended to reinforce Facebook's commitment made to President Widodo and Pak Rudianto, Minister of ICT, during the recent meetings with Facebook's CEO Mark Zuckerberg and COO Sheryl Sandberg, to help Indonesia grow its digital economy. The event also featured one of the ignition events of the “1000 technopreneurs” program initiated by Pak Rudianto.

For this event, Facebook partnered with Kejora to cohost F8 Meetup Jakarta on April 13th, 2016 at 6:00 pm at KejoraHQ. During the event, we had a dinner and networking session followed by streaming of the opening keynote of F8 by Facebook's CEO Mark Zuckerberg. Around 80 hackers, hustlers and hipsters gathered at KejoraHQ to participate the F8 event.

Before the event, the minister, Pak Rudianto, made some time to have dinner with Andy Zain and Sebastian Togelang from Mountain Kejora Ventures and Prayogo Pangestu and Baritono from the Barito family. During this dinner they discussed about policies and impacts of the growth in the technology industries in Indonesian. Pak Rudianto shared KOMINFO's plans to train 1,000 technopreneurs through the"1,000 technopreneurs" program that he intend to achieve by 2020. And continued to discuss with the representatives from Kejora and Barito Group about what Kejora, Barito and the government can do together to advance the ecosystem through the advancement of the tech startup industry.

The event started at 7 pm with a speech from the Facebook team. Pak Daud Aditirto and Alice Wei shared to the 80 technopreneurs about Facebook's global supporting tech scene. During this speech, Pak Daud stated that the reason Facebook decided to have its first F8 Meetup in Indonesia is because Indonesia is one of the most important market for Facebook. He continued by stating that F8 Meetup is an event for developers. He stated that many developers in Indonesia benefitted from Facebook's products. Not only in terms of advertising, but also in the features like sharing button, messaging, Facebook login, and many more. Due to the following, Pak Daud believes that it is important that the Facebook team shares to Indonesian developers about how to optimize these features and what features will be available in the near future.

After Facebook's speech, Pak Andy Zain from Kejora shared to the audience information about Kejora HQ and its ecosystem. He talked about what Kejora, Ideabox and Kejora HQ is about and the mission for the existence of Kejora. He introduced two companies from our company portfolio, Cupslice and Qerja, and opened the floor for the representatives from these two startups to introduce themselves and talk about how Facebook have benefit them as a startup.

The speech from the Kejora Family was later followed with the minister of ICT's speech. Pak Rudianto opened his speech by stating that despite his title as a minister, he is still a salesman. He talked about the government "1,000 technopreneur" plan. He believes that the F8 event is a great forum to share KOMINFO's plans to train the 1,000 technopreneurs that he mentioned. During his speech, he shared some of the Indonesian government's plan in evolving policy for the dynamic nature of Indonesia's digital economy. He talked about creating a game-changing strategic plan focused on SMEs, aimed at inducing greater participation of SMEs in national economic building. He talked about the "e-Commerce Roadmap" that synchronizes 31 strategic initiatives across 8 Ministries to ensure impactful growth of the Technopreneur sector, aiming to reach estimated USD 130 Billion e-Commerce transactions in Indonesia alone by 2020. Pak Rudianto talked about the FDI friendly policies and the adoption of pro innovation policies in order to strengthen Indonesia position in the global digital economy.

Pak Rudianto also introduced the seven main issues that have been discussed with key agencies and stakeholders. These seven main issues are in education & human resources, logistics, communication infrastructure, cyber security, funding, taxation and consumer protection. To tackle these issues, he talked about the actions the Indonesian government had and are taking in order to provide solutions for these seven issues.

One of these many actions is the "1,000 technopreneur" plan. This initiative will achieved by the creation of events, workshops and supporting networks for the creation of 1,000 Indonesian technopreneurs by 2020. The "1,000 technopreneur" initiative will start with talks participated by approximately 8,000 participants through ignition events. These events will showcase the opportunity of the tech industry by bring role models that can share their thoughts and experiences to inspire the Indonesian youth to become tech entrepreneurs. The second milestone is the hosting of workshops of 4,000 participants where the government will provide educational workshops. These workshops will be a 5-day programming course in collaboration with facilitators designed to give hands-on experience for beginners. Third milestone will be the hosting of hackathons of 2,000 participants. In these hackathon, the government will host a program to help participants execute their ideas into reality with guidance and the help of mentors from industry experts. By the end of the event, participants are encouraged to pitch their prototype and develop their products further by the end of the program. The fourth milestone will be a bootcamp for 1,000 participants with educational workshops to help early stage startups to launch and scale their product. The last milestone from the "1,000 technopreneur" initiative is the incubation program with 500 incubated startups and 200 receiving seed funding per year. In this incubation stage, there will be a supporting network where the government will run a 3 to 6 months collaborative program designed to solve problems commonly associated with running startup in order to help new startups succeed in growing their business by providing workspace, seed funding, mentoring, training and many more support initiatives.

We ended the event with the keynote for the F8 San Fransisco event where CEO Mark Zuckerberg highlights Facebook's focus in building their apps to allow every individual to share anything to anyone. He talked about Facebook, Instagram, internet.org by Facebook, Oculus and many more divisions within the Facebook group and how it will grow to service the world in the near future. Mr. Zuckerberg also introduced five new technologies that Facebook is bringing to your devices, Chat Bots, Live Video, Account Kit, Aquila and Artificial Intelligence.

Chat Bots, is a framework powered by artificial intelligence that allows developers to build chat bots that can communicate one-on-one with users in the Facebook Messenger. The more a user use the service, the more personalized the bot will be. During the streaming, Mark Zuckerberg showed how people can use these chat bots through 1-800-FLOWERS. Our Kejora team tried it, and it works!

Live Video, is Facebook's new feature to allow its users to stream live video from their gadgets. In the streaming, Zuckerberg demonstrated through showing a live video that was streamed to Facebook from a drone that flew in the auditorium.

Account Kit, is a feature that will give users the choice to log into new apps using just a phone number or email address. This new feature could help developers reach new audiences with their apps according to Mark Zuckerberg.

Aquila, is Facebook's internet-beaming drone. This product is in Facebook's ten-year roadmap and his ambition to help bring connectivity to the 4 billion people around the world who live without it.

Artificial Intelligence,  is Facebook's AI. According to Zuckerberg, Facebook's AI is smart enough to describe photos to visually impaired people. The company's AI technology is capable of doing everything from organizing a person's newsfeed to analyzing a photo of a mole to determine if it could become cancerous.

The overall event was very interesting, discussions were buzzing among the attendees and there were high excitement regarding what will happen in the Indonesian digital ecosystem in the near future. Subscribe to our newsletter or keep up with our blog to find out about future events and updates about our Kejora HQ ecosystem.