Tag Archives: Indonesia

Helping Indonesia prepare for disasters

In September last year, a large earthquake struck the Indonesian island of Sulawesi. Within hours, a tsunami hit Palu, the provincial capital. Over two thousand lives were lost, making it the deadliest earthquake in 2018. Google.org and Googlers around the world responded by donating $1 million to support relief efforts led by Save the Children and the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies. We also rolled out our crisis response alerts and tools to provide emergency info those impacted.


This earthquake was only one of more than 2,000 disasters to strike Indonesia last year. Altogether, the government has estimated that these disasters affected some three million people, causing billions of dollars in damages and a tragic loss of life. Unfortunately, 2018 was not an anomaly and we know that Indonesia will continue to be challenged by natural disasters. At Google.org, we look to help nonprofits on the frontlines of global crisis through funding and volunteers. But we also believe in supporting solutions that could help mitigate the impact of future crises.


This is why we’re now helping Save the Children’s Indonesian partner, Yayasan Sayangi Tunas Cilik, with a $1 million grant. Through this grant, they’ll implement a national awareness campaign using online and offline platforms to ensure that schools are safe and children are better prepared for emergencies. It’s anticipated they’ll reach over half a million people, a majority of whom are women and children, some of the most vulnerable people in a time of crisis. Yayasan Sayangi Tunas Cilik will also engage in capacity building with local government bodies in order to improve coordination, planning and response for the Provincial and District level.

Google.org and Yayasan Sayangi Tunas Cilik

Announcing a Google.org grant to Yayasan Sayangi Tunas Cilik in Jakarta. From left to right: Randy Jusuf (Google Indonesia), Rudiantara (Minister of Communication and Informatics of Indonesia); Jacquelline Fuller (Google.org), Selina Sumbung (Chairperson, Save the Children-Yayasan Sayangi Tunas Cilik), and Bambang Surya Putra (Directorate of Disaster Preparedness, National Disaster Management Agency) 

While disasters like the Sulawesi earthquake are unavoidable, I’m encouraged by the potential of what we can do together to ensure we’re as prepared as we can be. We hope that the learnings from this project will provide a strong framework to scale this work and contribute to long term sustainable disaster preparedness and awareness. 

Kormo, an app helping young job seekers find work, launches in Jakarta

I recently traveled to Jakarta, Indonesia, where I met with job seekers just starting their careers. Repeatedly, they shared that finding entry-level and part-time jobs is confusing and difficult, especially when you don’t have much in the way of work experience, professional contacts or resources. To help young Indonesians connect with employers, learn new skills and build their careers, we’re bringing the Kormo app to Jakarta. 

kormo team in jakarta

Speaking to young job seekers in Jakarta who had just spent the day at the mall going from shop to shop to drop off their CVs.

Kormo is one of many projects incubated inside of Area 120, Google’s workshop for experimental projects. Initially launched in Dhaka—the capital city of Bangladesh and one of the most densely populated cities in the world—Kormo has matched people with more than 25,000 jobs, including retail sales, delivery and contact center positions. Our time in Dhaka and Jakarta taught us a lot about the needs of young job seekers and employers in markets where rapid urbanization and growth are impacting labor markets.

Making career-building easy and assistive

Kormojakarta

A group of university students in Dhaka, creating their digital CVs on Kormo

Job seekers told us that they weren’t sure what jobs were available to them, as listings typically travel by word-of-mouth or aren’t posted online. And though many of these seekers pay someone to create a paper CV (or résumé), their busy schedules and traffic congestion in the city makes it inconvenient to drop hard copies in employer CV boxes. Even after they apply, many seekers never hear back on the status of their candidacy.

Kormo lets anyone to build a digital CV quickly, and for free. The digital CV updates dynamically as job seekers find work or enroll in trainings through the Kormo app. Kormo will also display open job listings in the city—the job opportunities listed will reflect the job seeker’s growing profiles and skills. Meanwhile, we partner with employers, ranging from large corporates to small or medium enterprises, to include their jobs in Kormo’s marketplace and enable seekers to apply directly from our app.

Kormo job list

Providing access to skills training

As the job markets evolve in Bangladesh and Indonesia, employers are looking for candidates with new skill sets, including proficiency with new technologies. While training resources exist both online and offline, job seekers told us that they weren’t sure about whether a specific program could help them get a job. Plus, many of the programs that offer formal certificates cost money and require time commitments that can be hard to sustain.

kormo video training

Skills development expert and Kormo partner, Don Sumdany, creating localized videos to help people who use Kormo ace their next interview.

Within the Kormo app, we built a Learn tab where seekers can access relevant, up-to-date and free training content in the form of videos, articles and courses based on individual interests.

Kormo101training

While learning from job seekers in Dhaka, we met Abida, a college student beginning her career in the city. Kormo recently matched her to her first job at a well-known retail store, and she now has the financial stability she needs to continue her education. We hope to see many more stories like Abida’s emerge now that Kormo is available in another city.

Abida

Abida, a college student  in Dhaka, at her new job that she found through Kormo.

With Kormo, our ultimate goal is to provide economic opportunity and mobility to more people in countries like Bangladesh or Indonesia. If you live in one of these countries, you can download the Kormo app for free from the Google Play store. For businesses looking to hire through Kormo, please sign up from our site.

Building a better internet experience together with Indonesia

One of my favorite snacks is made by Rina Trinawati, a 45 year old entrepreneur from Indonesia who bakes cookies for a living. I like them because they’re not just a treat for the tastebuds. Her business, Tin Tin Chips, employs mothers of children with disabilities. Since Rina learned how to market her cookies online, orders have shot up 75 percent. Rina now employs 25 women and donates 50 percent of her profits to organizations caring for children with disabilities.


Indonesia has the largest and fastest growing internet economy in Southeast Asia. And Indonesians everywhere are getting involved—they’re building the companies that create jobs, provide goods and services, and make life better for everyone. Today, at our annual Google for Indonesia event, we announced the next round of products and partnerships to help us move forward together with Indonesians in the internet economy.


A more accessible internet for Indonesians


Using the internet for the first time can be daunting. We’re making it easier for first-time smartphone users to discover the web with Google Go, an AI-powered app that showcases the latest Search trends as well as Indonesia’s most popular apps and websites. Google Go makes using the internet as easy as watching TV by allowing people to listen to any webpage being read out aloud.


But there’s no point in web pages being read aloud if you don’t understand what’s being said. Less than one percent of the content on the internet is in Bahasa Indonesia, while more than half of all online content is available in English. To help close this gap, we are collaborating with Wikipedia on a new way to make English-only content accessible and useful for Indonesians. Now, our systems will identify relevant Wikipedia articles that are only available in English, translate them into Bahasa Indonesia using Google’s AI powered neural machine translation system, and then surface these translated articles in Search.


Speaking of talking AI, we launched the Google Assistant in Bahasa Indonesia in April. Now, we’re taking our Indonesian-speaking Assistant out of smartphones and putting it into feature phones. WizPhone is the first feature phone made by Indonesians that will have the Google Assistant built in and it will retail at less than $10 (IDR 99,000).


A more useful internet for Indonesians


The Assistant is becoming even more useful—and even more Indonesian—because of our partnerships with Indonesian businesses. For example, you can now ask the Assistant to Book a Ride in Indonesia––no more opening apps and typing in addresses or tell it to give you the news. With News Briefings, Indonesians can now hear the latest news hands-free and on-the-go from five Indonesian media outlets we partnered with.


To help connect those business owners with job seekers, we’re introducing Jobs on Google Search. Starting today, searches for “job vacancies,” will surface job listings in Indonesia, with options to organize them by different criteria like job type and distance.


And to support Indonesians in getting the skills to excel in the new jobs within the internet economy, we announced a new commitment to train a further one million Indonesian small and medium businesses by 2020. This is in addition to the one million that we have already trained since 2015.


A safer internet for Indonesians


We want Indonesians to have access to more information. But we want it to be better information—and that comes from high-quality Indonesian journalism. We’ve already trained 2,000 journalists through the Google News Initiative and we’re training another 3,000 more by next year. As part of the CekFakta.com, Google News Initiative training includes fact-checking and verification best practices, plus how to fight misinformation.


Having better information is great, but using that information responsibly is greater. So that the next generation of Indonesians use the internet responsibly, our philanthropic arm Google.org is making a grant of $875,000 to non-profit organizations Maarif Institute, Peace Generation, RuangGuru and Love Frankie to teach more than 12,000 students to champion tolerance, multiculturalism, and positivity.


These are just a few of the announcements from today that we hope will build a more accessible, useful and safer internet together with Indonesians. We’re excited to keep on working with Indonesia to realize the benefits of the internet for every Indonesian and every Indonesian business.


Discover and celebrate the best local games at Indonesia Games Contest


Posted by David Yin, Business Development Manager, Indonesia, Google Play.

It is a great time to be a mobile game developer on Android with the opportunity reaching more than a billion global users on Google Play. At the same time, developers in fast growing mobile markets like Indonesia have an additional opportunity in the form of a huge local audience that is hungry for local content. We have already seen thousands of Indonesian developers launch high quality, locally relevant games for this new audience, such as "Tahu Bulat" & "Tebak Gambar".

In our continuous quest to discover, nurture growth, and showcase the best games from Indonesia, we are really happy to announce Indonesia Games Contest. This contest celebrates the passion and great potential of local game developers, and provides an opportunity to raise awareness of your game with global and local industry experts, together with gamers, from across Indonesia. It's also a chance to showcase your creativity and win cool prizes.
Entering the contest

The contest is only open to developers based in Indonesia who have published a new game on Google Play after 1 January 2016. Make sure to visit our contest website for the full list of eligibility criteria and terms. A quick summary of the process is below:
  1. If you are eligible, submit your game by 19 March 2017.
  2. Entries will be reviewed by Google Play team and industry experts, and up to 15 finalists will be announced in early April 2017.
  3. The finalists will get to showcase their games at the final event in Jakarta on 26 April 2017.
  4. Winner and runners up will be announced at final event.
To get started

Visit our contest website to find out more about the contest and submit your game.
Terima Kasih!


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Keeping one billion voters informed in India and Indonesia

Cross-posted from the Google Asia Pacific Blog

Election season is in full swing for two of the world’s largest democracies as a staggering one billion people make their way to the polls in April. To help keep Indian and Indonesian voters informed, we’ve launched tools that provide easier access to the latest news, videos, and practical details about the coming elections.

India
We’re enabling interaction between candidates and their electorates through a series of Hangouts on Air with India’s political leaders. You can view the conversation with BJP leader Arun Jaitley and stay informed about upcoming guests through our Elections Hub.

Indians can also submit an interactive Pledge to Vote on the map to share messages with fellow citizens on why voting is important. If you need any inspiration, watch this moving story of Mr. Shyam Negi, independent India’s first voter, who is 97 years old and has never missed the opportunity to cast his vote.





Indonesia 

In Indonesia, voting-rights NGO Perludem and The Asia Foundation are using our Google Maps tools to create a candidate information map that will be updated as votes come in on election day. Together with Perludem, we’ve also held workshops to enable Indonesian candidates to reach and communicate with voters across the country on platforms such as YouTube and Google+. In this year’s election, 44% of voters are between 18 and 22 years old, and are casting their ballots for the first time. We hope that through better engagement with the candidates, more young voters will be encouraged to go to the polls.

Indonesia’s Elections Hub also keeps citizens informed about how the different political parties are trending in Google Search. 



As election fever sets in, we hope the Elections Hubs at Google.co.in/elections for India and Google.co.id/elections for Indonesia provide you with all the information that you need to stay on top of these significant events.


Posted by Chetan Krishnaswamy, Head of Government Relations at Google India, and Shinto Nugruho, Head of Government Relations, Google Indonesia