Blaast officially launched yesterday at the Kempinski Ballroom in Jakarta. Collaborating with telco XL, Blaast has brought its service to more than 40 million XL users, half of them being feature phone users. XL will get an exclusive contract for six months and after that Blaast can expand to other telcos, to reach as many users as possible.
For those not familiar with Blaast, it is a mobile app development platform based on cloud technology. Backed by the founding engineers of Skype, Veturi Venture Accelerator, Steve Blank and ex-Nokia VP Pekka Vartianen, it aims to bring the smartphone experience (mobile apps) to the next billion people who are still using feature phones. We covered them last year when they made a move to Indonesia by introducing the platform to the developer community.
Blaast is working with mobile operators (XL in this case) as the fastest way to increase data usage and offer the best apps. But the company is also working with content providers to distribute and monetize mass market segments. In the near future, Blaast is also looking to work with mobile phone vendors and manufacturers.
The CEO of Blaast, Mr. Joonas Hjeit, provides some impressive metrics: The platform has over 1000 developers in the community, more than 100 apps (of which 95 percent is local content), covering over 500 different devices among 10,000 users.
The #XLBlaast launch was attended by a number of notable figures, includes Mr. Alexander Stubb (Finland’s minister for European affairs and foreign trade, Mr. Tifatul Sembiring
, and Mr. Peter Vesterbacka from Rovio.
Blaast’s app store is called the App Planet, with the lofty intention being to turn your phone into a rocket (see pictured). Blaast also held a Hack Day competition on the day, seeing seven teams participating from all across Indonesia, with Tempalabs emerging as a the winner.
The official launch of Blaast is definitely great news for local developers and another boost to the local ecosystem. The company claims that they are helping local developers, although at the same time they don’t have a clear revenue sharing system. It will be interesting to see how Blaast will solve this question.