The President PostT H E S P I R I T O F I N D O N E S I A

www.thepresidentpost.comDisplay until March 17, 2011 /// N0. 21

Teaching Revolution as New Software Enters ClassroomSoftware developers have now introduced a new approach to teaching—using the love of Facebook as a magnet to boost learners’ attitude toward learning.

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TOURISM

SUTANTO HARTONO:A Visionary LeaderThough he became the CEO of Microsoft only a year ago, Sutanto Hartono has managed to make Microsoft the leader in the IT market in Indonesia.

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INTERVIEW

RI to Attract Rp240 t Investment this YearThe 2011 investment climate would largely depend on the domestic political and economic conditions which had of late been very conducive

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INVESTMENT

IDR 20,000

THE REGION

East Asia and Its Big ChallengesWhile the world expects East Asia to become the locomotive of global growth, East Asia will face considerable challenges.

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JAKARTA (TPP) – When President Susilo Bambang Yud-hoyono set up the National In-novation Committee (KIN) last year, he reminded the nation that “science and technology and in-novation play a very crucial role in determining the prosperity of a country.”

“It has become increasingly ev-ident that the economic growth and the competitiveness of a country are contributed by tech-nology skills. This tendency will

continue to grow because tech-nology development will never stop,” he said.

To accelerate invention and de-velopment of technology and sci-ences, the president said the gov-ernment is allocating a budget amounting to Rp1.9 trillion for research and development.

The president also said the technology that should be devel-oped will have to be relevant with the current or future problems that the country faces, namely

poverty, food and energy resil-ience, environmental conserva-tion, industry development, state defense, and control of future technology.

The 30-member KIN is direct-ly under the president’s supervi-sion. The committee is headed by Prof Dr Ir Zuhal with Bogor In-stitute of Agriculture Rector Her-ry Suhardiyanto as his deputy.

Former National Education Minister Prof Juwono Sudar-sono, who is now chairman of President University Foundation. also stressed on the importance of innovation during a recent in-terview with Industrial Post.

“Some of the key factors to success for developed nations are innovation, application and

President: Innovation is Crucialto Nation’s ProsperityTo accelerate invention and development of technology and sciences, the president said the government is allocating a budget amounting to Rp1.9 trillion for research and development.

Carmine Gallo, in “The Innovation Secrets of Steve Jobs”, made a road map of innovation process that had been proven successful by Steve Jobs, founder and CEO of Apple Corp. Gallo wrote that “Not ev-eryone can become an inventor, but everyone can become an innovator. A person who runs a small busi-ness and comes up with an idea that attracted many visitors to his store is called an innovator.”

The innovation process is as follows:The first principle, do things that you like to do. Jobs

believed that to become an innovative person, we need to follow our hearts. Jobs decided to drop out of school because he did not see any benefit in con-tinuing his study at the expense of his parents’ money. He decided to study caligraphy and with that skill he created Macintosh, the first computer that presented beautiful typography.

The second principle: the drive to do something can affect the world—very clear passion and vision. Apple conducted a revolution on personal computers by launching Apple II in 1977 when IBM ruled the com-puter market. Apple II became the most successful personal computer at the time.

The third principle: Dare to try something new and always willing to think differently. Jobs is not an inven-tor of personal computers or MP3, but he innovated them and created Macintosh and Ipod.

The fourth principle: whatever you do, it should be intended to help product buyers to achieve their dreams. To do this, we have to get to know our cus-tomers better.

The fifth principle: have the courage to get rid of things that are considered not the best. This principle always resulted in the best product in its class.

The sixth principle: Give customers a very impres-sive experience. Apple stores have no cashiers or salesper- sons, they only have computer experts and people who can provide ex-planations about prod-ucts and services for all questions raised by customers.

The seventh principle: have the ability to communicate and impress people and to make them believe that our idea is brilliant.

Innovation from Steve Jobs’ Perspective

www.wired.com

Compared to the year before, the number of tourist ar-rivals last year repre-sented a 10.74 per-cent increase, BPS Chief Rusman Heri-awan said here early this month.

In December 2010 alone, more than 644.2 thousand for-eign tourists visited

the country, up 11.43 percent from a month earlier or 3.01 percent from the same period the year before, he said.

Over 6.32 million tourists visited Indonesia in 2009.

Rusman said the number of tourist arrivals through the country s three largest airports increased last year. They are Ngurah Rai Airport in Bali (2.54 million), Soekarno-Hat-ta Airport in Jakarta (1.82 million) Hang Nadim Airport in Batam (1.007 million).

“The conducive climate throughout 2010 helped increase the number of tourist arrivals particularly through Bali, Jakar-ta and Batam,” he said.

In total, the foreign tourists visiting the country last year spent an estimated US$7.6 billion, up 20.63 percent from the year before (US$6.3 billion), he said.

Meanwhile, the occupancy rates of star-rated hotels in 17 of the country s 33 provinces in December 2010 averaged 53.84 percent, up 3.59 points from a month earlier or 1.31 points from December 2009, he said.

“On average the foreign tourists stayed at star-rated hotels in the 17 provinces for 1.99 days in December 2010, up 0.03 per-cent compared to December 2009,” he said.

RI tourist arrivalsIn 2010: Over 7 m

The 5.1 percent industrial growth surpassed the govern-ment-set target of 4.65 percent for 2010, Secretary General of the Industry Ministry Anshari Bukhari said here recently.

Among the nine industrial sectors only the wood and forest-ry product industry recorded negative growth of 3.5 percent last year, he said.

Quoting data from the Central Statistics Agency (BPS), he said transportation, machinery and equipment industry grew 10.4 percent, fertilizer, chemical and rubber product industry 4.7 percent, food, beverage and tobacco industry 2.7 percent last year.

Meanwhile, the base metal, iron and steel industry grew 2.6 percent, cement and non-metal mineral industry 2.2 percent, textile, leather product and footwear industry 1.7 percent, and paper and printed goods industry 1.6 percent, he said.

The ministry has set the industrial growth target for this year at 6.1 percent.

RI’s industrial growth doubledto 5.1 pct last yearcommercialization through part-

nerships with the private sector,” he said.

To bolster entrepreneurship and innovation culture among the young people, State Minis-try of Research and Technology will continue its financial incen-tive program for idea develop-ment and inventions of products with commercial values.

Edi Sukur, expert staff at the ministry, said last month that the incentive comes in the form of seed capital for young inventors.

“We want to push for devel-opment of ‘technopreneurship’ among university students who like to innovate,” he said.

Idwan Suhardi, a senior offi-cial at the State Ministry of Re-

search and Technology, said the program was launched last year.

It offers Rp50 million for each project whose number has now reached 60 (chosen from 150 submitted proposals) for “incu-bation” of inventions in the first year.

Every project was evaluated a year later to determine wheth-er they are qualified to receive an additional capital of Rp50-100 million.

The same program will be con-tinued this year with the same amount of incentive of Rp50 mil-lion.

Idwan said the goal of the pro-gram is to train young innova-tors as early as possible and ideal-ly that should be done while they are still studying in university.

He added that young people can become agents of change if they can turn their innovations into profitable businesses that of-fer ‘multiplier effects’ on the na-tional economy by creating job opportunities.

More than 7.002 million foreign tourists visited Indonesia last year, surpassing the government-set target of 7 million, the Central Statistics Agency (BPS) said.

National industrial growth last year doubled to 5.1 percent from 2.6 percent the year before, fueled by growing investment, exports and public consumption, an official said.

Rusman Heriawan

Government asked the national banking system to not raise interest rates in February 2011 and keep maintain banking growth at 20-22% of a single digit level. Seen in the picture is bank building at night.

THE POLO CLUB BAR & RESTAURANTMenara Batavia 2nd floor

K.H. Mas Mansyur Kav 126 Jakarta Pusat 10230 Indonesia

Phone : 021 5723767Fax : 021 5723767

ViewpointThe President Post www.thepresidentpost.comFebruary 17, 2011A2

Compared to other East and Southeast Asian countries, the teacher-student ra-tio (RGM) in In-donesia is quite suf-

ficient. The ratio in Indonesia is the same as in Japan, which is 1:20 or one teacher handling 20 students on average.

World Bank data showed that Indonesia’s 52 million students are handled by 2.6 million teach-ers in more than 250,000 schools. This makes Indonesia the third largest education community in Asia and the fourth largest in the world after the People’s Repub-lic of China, India and the Unit-ed States.

In the Bank’s report titled “Teacher Certification in Indone-sia: A Strategy for Teacher Quali-ty Improvement” issued in 2009, it said that Indonesia will see a surplus of teacher supply in the next two decades if the National Education Ministry’s teacher cer-tification program runs smooth-ly.

However, Agency for Civil Ser-vice Management (BAKN) not-ed that more than one million teachers will enter retirement age in the next decade and that new graduates from various teacher education schools are needed to fill the vacancies.

So far, the capacity of Indo-nesian universities to produce

teachers is only 90,000 graduates per annum. Initially, the number is sufficient to meet demand for teachers in the country. But as the number of new schools continues to emerge in recent years in line with population growth, Indone-sia as of 2010 needed 50,000 new teachers for all levels, said Na-tional Education Minister Prof. Dr. Muhammad Nuh.

The teacher shortage is not re-ally a major problem because in terms of quantity, the number of graduates from teacher educa-tion schools exceeds the number of new teachers needed each year. The main problem is an uneven deployment of teachers both hor-izontally throughout the country and vertically in all education lev-el.

Ironically, although Indone-sia produces a sufficient number of teachers of 90,000 per year, the country has another problem that needs to be handled wisely.

In a report titled “Teacher Em-ployment and Deployment in In-donesia” released in 2008, the World Bank found a disturbing fact about teacher scarcity in re-mote areas. Up to 93% of schools in those areas did not have suffi-cient number of teachers.

Nationally, teacher supply in high schools reached 81% and only 13% were facing scarcity, in elementary school level up to 66% schools in remote areas bad-ly needed teachers, while 68% el-ementary schools in urban ar-

eas were experiencing surplus of teacher supply.

As a result, teachers in remote areas face a heavier teaching bur-den that left them with very lit-tle time to innovate and develop creativity during learning-teach-ing process.

In terms of academic qualifi-cation, only 17% teachers in el-ementary school level had S-1 (univertsity) qualification and the percentage for high school level was 29%.

The government had since 2005 implemented academic qualification to support efforts to improve education quality.

Tragically, the World Bank re-port also said that since the refor-mation movement was launched in May 1998, many things have changed in the national scene, but not much has happened in the teaching profession.

As an example, teachers often don’t show up in class rooms, the reputation of Indonesian teach-ers remains poor compared to teachers in other ASEAN coun-tries, the public’s appreciation to-wards teaching profession has not changed since the reformation movement, while in other sec-tors—law, creative industry, and business sectors—the reputation of their professions continue to improve.

Now many hope the govern-ment, especially the National Ed-ucation Ministry, which is head-ed by Prof Dr Muhammad Nuh,

will complete the teacher quali-fication program for around 1.7 million teachers who need the certification to carry out their jobs.

The teacher certification pro-gram is expected to be completed by 2014 before the United Indo-nesia Cabinet II ended its term.

In elementary school level, a survey conducted by Nation-al Education Ministry in 2008 showed that Indonesia had a total of 1,445,132 teachers nationwide, comprising 542,065 male teach-ers and 774,044 female teachers in state-run schools; and 49,636 male teachers and 70,387 female teachers in private schools.

In junior high schools, the number of men that taught in state-run schools across the coun-try reached 206,419 and 110,336 in private schools.

Female teachers in the same level reached 214,682 in state-run schools and 90,441 in pri-vate schools. Thus, nationwide the total number of teachers that taught in junior high schools reached 621,878, with 421,101 teaching in state-run schools and 200,777 in private schools.

Meanwhile, the number of male teachers in state-run se-nior high schools was 85,978 and 76,886 in private senior high schools. The number of female teachers in state-run senior high schools was 86,956 and 59,032 in private schools. The total number of senior high school teachers na-tionwide stood at 305.852, with

172,934 teaching in state-run schools and 132,918 in private schools.

The number of teachers in vo-cational schools is not as high. The survey showed there were only 230,787 teachers with 79,327 of them teaching in state-run schools and 151,460 in pri-vate schools.

The number of male teachers in state-run vocational schools was 45,114 and female teachers 34,213; there were 94,63 male teachers and 56,825 female teach-ers in private vocational schools.

Meanwhile, in universities across the country there were a total of 250,357 lecturers in 2,680 universities. The number increased to 270,000 in 2010.

Antara news agency report-ed that the National Education Minister, who spoke in an event called “Indonesian Education Minister Speaks Out” at the In-donesian Embassy in Paris, said that Indonesia was still in need of doctorates or S3 graduates to teach in universities.

To realize the goal, the minis-try has increased its scholarship budget for this year by Rp2.5 tril-lion.

All those figures describe only one thing: the government is de-termined to improve the quality of teachers and make deployment of teachers become more even to support education and to fill job opportunities with educated, trained and skilled people.

Hard Challengesin the Realm of Education

By Wayan Santana The government is determined to improve the quality of teachers and make deployment of teachers become more even to support education and to fill job opportunities with educated, trained and skilled people.

In a report titled “Teacher Employment

and Deployment in Indonesia” released in 2008, the World Bank found a disturbing fact about teacher scarcity

in remote areas. Up to 93% of schools in those areas did not

have sufficient number of teachers.

The President Postwww.thepresidentpost.com February 17, 2011 A3

Interview

What is Microsoft’s mar-keting strategy in 2011? What products are the focus of Mi-crosoft this year?

It’s quite hard to answer this question with one simple sen-tence because we have a lot of products.

Our largest product is Win-dows and Microsoft Office. We already have Windows Phone, though actually we’re fairly at the tail of competition with smart phones. We were there before smart phones entered the market, but we were complacent because our orientation was American. Anyway, we’ve made a break-through with Windows Phone 7, which is a mobile device that we believe is more superior in tech-nology, easy-to-use and others. We also have Xbox Kinect that sold more than 8 million cop-ies. The problem is those prod-ucts are still not available in In-donesia.

Beside Windows 7, we rely on online products. Users that al-ready use Windows as operating system are expected to use In-ternet Explorer as their browser, Bing as search engine, Hotmail for email account and Window-sLive for personal portal. So ac-tually we have complete range of offerings.

Now, we are trying to raise the public’s awareness on these prod-ucts, and align public perception with our features. For example, Internet Explorer (IE) was once the favorite browser but is now somewhat less so in Indonesia. IE is considered slower than other browsers. We have now launched IE beta version 9, acknowledged to be the fastest browser though only it is only for Windows 7 us-ers.

To enhance hotmail and Win-dowsLive users, we set up a stra-tegic partnership with other in-stitutions. For example Plaza.com, we took over the services and brought better features to the site so consumers will stay longer on the web. Plaza.com has about 500.000 active accounts that are automatically transferred to our email.

For corporations, we keep do-ing business as usual – competing with competitors in data base, Windows platform, Office and others. But we are focusing on three themes: Microsoft Cloud, Business Intelligence and Collab-oration.

We believe that Cloud Com-puting will be a success, because we are totally committed to de-velop it.

If people ask what Microsoft

excels in, I would say that it is products that are easy to use. We have many applications to bridge complex core applications that are easy to use. This is what we call Business Intelligence. We want to help enterprises to opti-mize their current system.

Last but not least is collabo-ration. All collaborations can be done in our technology. For ex-ample, Lync Software or Office Communication Server (OCS) connects people anytime, any-where through PCs, phones or browsers. Lync could make a connection that allows face-to-face meetings virtually. All inter-actions include video and audio conferences.

Microsoft is said to have been unfairly treated as the govern-ment prefers to use open source software. Any comment?

Unfairness is relative. To me it’s not unfair treatment but mis-perception. People take a black-or-white point of view when it comes to open source as opposed to Microsoft.

only Microsoft), and that open source is not always free.

Actually Microsoft has a co-operation agreement with open source in doing some citizenship activities i.e. sharing free soft-ware, training, build start-ups and others.

Indonesia is not a place for your development or research center. To what extent does Mi-crosoft explore its IT personnel in Indonesia?

Our development center is based in America, and we bring the software here as required by local needs. We need local part-ners to set up the ecosystem; we train and make them familiar with our products. That’s called local elements.

On innovation, it’s not always about inventing products. Devel-oping and modifying platforms also require innovations. We have a special team called Evan-gelist to go to student communi-ties, developer communities, or software company communities to introduce and teach them our platform.

We also do innovations in mar-keting. Actually all marketing campaigns are already in place, but in Indonesia we need to be one step ahead due to the high level of piracy. If we promote Windows 7 the usual way, people will use Windows 7 but the ille-gal version. We need also to ex-plain that it is better to use the original version of Windows 7!

Do you think that the anti-piracy law is not functioning well?

Nothing’s wrong with the laws and regulations. The prob-lem is implementation. People’s awareness and understanding are still low. And I can say that it’s the culture that taught them “it’s okay to use illegal products”. It takes education to make peo-ple understand, and that is our homework.

Let us think that using an orig-inal product is like having an in-surance policy, as the chance to lose data is small. Such software is more reliable and the chance to be infected by virus is also small-er.

We also need to inform the IT community that if they want the IT business to grow, this is the time to make the right business model, and we have to put a value to this industry.

Indonesia has a high number of potential IT players, from hackers to professionals. Does Microsoft have a special pro-gram to accommodate their abilities?

We are creating the ecosys-tem and developing a local soft-ware company. We also support a start-up company by giving them free software for three years. We hope that after that period and they succeed, they will pay for using the software again. If not, then it’s still okay.

We also want to educate hack-ers not to feel satisfied after they have cracked something, as they do not earn anything from that. We want to see them have a great career because of their ability.

Sutanto Hartono:

By Jeannifer Filly Sumayku

Though he became the CEO of Microsoft only a year ago, Sutanto Hartono has managed to make Microsoft the leader in the IT market in Indonesia.

To be the number one person in a company has always been his dream. After obtaining a Bachelor of Science degree in Chemical Engineering from

University of Notre Dame, Indiana, Sutanto worked as a Technical Assistant Brand Manager at P&G Indonesia.

“At that time I thought to be a company director is very cool, so I decided to take an MBA degree because I wished to become a GM,” said Sutanto.

He then took the degree in Marketing & Finance from the University of California and then returned to Indonesia to take a consulting job.

“Actually, I preferred banking or consumer goods, but at that time consulting was booming, and I kept holding on to the ambition of becoming a CEO. How to get there is a second thing,” he said.

“In the end I took a consulting job. Besides an attractive salary, the job also offered many opportunities and allowed me to set up networking. The fact is, the consulting job was the real door-opened for my career.”

His dream came true when he become one of the founders of Sony Music Indonesia and Senior Vice President in Southeast Asia. I thought at the time, “When will there ever be another opportunity to start a company under the banner of Sony Music?”

After that he went on to develop RCTI, where he was the CEO in 2008 after being Managing Director since 2003. The TV station garnered the “Most Admired Company” award presented by BusinessWeek Indonesia. He also played role as Director of Media Nusantara Citra, a multimedia company that is the parent company of RCTI.

His experience in leading media and entertainment companies allowed Sutanto to bring new perspectives on Microsoft’s approach to the business community, the government, the education sector and the consumer market in Indonesia.

A Visionary Leader

The following are excerpts from an interview with Sutanto, who also explained Microsoft’s goals and achievements in Indonesia.

Open Source Software (OSS) is computer software that is avail-able in source code form for which the source code and certain other rights normally reserved for copy-right holders are provided under a software license that permits us-ers to study, change, improve and at times also to distribute the software. It’s the opposite of closed system (proprietary) used by Microsoft and others like Or-acle, IBM and others. So actually, it’s a common thing that there are two types of businesses.

Another misperception is that people think that open source is always free. There is Independent Software Vendor (ISV) that takes codes from open source, mod-ifies, and makes it as a proprie-tary. Though it’s claimed as open source, it’s not free.

Software utilization isn’t only about licenses. After licenses there will be modifications, de-ployments, and maintenance. These three steps are absolutely not free.

So, the real truth is open source software versus proprietary (not

We are creating the ecosystem and developing a local software company. We also support a start-up company by giving them free software for three years. We hope that after that period and they succeed, they will pay for using the software again. If not, then it’s still okay.

www.biskom.web.id

Microsoft Indonesia

The EconomyThe President Post www.thepresidentpost.comFebruary 17, 2011A4

Govt ready to open 2 million hectaresof farm land

The government is ready to open two million hectares of farm land in anticipation of declining food production due to global climate change and extreme climate, a minister said.

Agriculture Minister Suswono said here early this month that food-producing countries had of late seen a shortfall in their production due to the uncertain climate, leading to a steady decline in global food stocks.

This prompted the food-producing countries not to export their food production any longer in order to safeguard their food stocks, he said.

“Looking ahead, the quantity of food commodities traded in the international market will be getting smaller while at the same time food demand will be on the increase. This will lead to the higher price of food commodities in the international market,” he said.

“With the existing farm land potentials it is still possible to open new paddy field to keep the balance of land conversion rate particularly in Java,” he said.

Dumai airport built toaccommodate Boeings

The Pinang Kampai airport of Dumai, Riau, normally used by Fokker planes, will be built for use by bigger planes like Boeings.

Head of the Dumai transportation agency H Marwan said here recently that the upgrading is first of all carried out by increasing the length of the runway from 1,800 x 40 meters to 2,250 x 40 meters.

“We are doing this because the runway of a Boeing is basically 2,000 meters long. We therefore have to renovate the airport by making its runway longer,” he said.

Marwan also said other facilities of the airport which are thought to be not enough need to be renewed by the procurement of supporting heavy equipment.

“The improvements and building of Pinang Kampai will have its funding and budget from the State Budget of the Transportation Ministry estimated at Rp 34 billion,” Marwan said.

West Sulawesi to build 10,000-tonfuel oil depot

The West Sulawesi provincial administration will build a 10,00 ton fuel oil depot at Belang Belang Port in Mamuju district, West Sulawesi, a local official said here recently.

The fuel oil depot owned by state owned company PT Pertamina was reported to be built in this year, an information obtained from the provincial administration office said.

Haeruddin Anas, a spokesman for the administration office, said the local government had actually prepared about two hectares of land for the construction of the depot, the location of which is close to Belang Belang Mamuju port area.

“Pertamina was reported to have agreed with the depot construction and a feasibility study on the location will be conducted in a relatively short time, he said.

“So far, fuel oil for West Sulawesi is supplied by Pare-pare depot, the distance of which is about 300 kilometers long from Mamuju city.

BI: year-end forex reserves $112.6 b

Bank Indonesia said direct capital investment may play a bigger role in capital inflow, so that total balance payments may reach a surplus of US$16.4 billion and foreign exchange reserves US$112.6 billion by the end of 2011.

“The amount may cover 7.5 months of government imports and short-term foreign debt payments and increase Indonesia`s economic resilience in mitigating various external shocks,” Bank Indonesia Governor Darmin Nasution said in a banking annual meeting or Bankers Dinner here recently.

Last year`s foreign exchange reserves reached US$96.2 billion with a balance payment surplus of US$30 billion.

Besides, Darmin estimated that in the short term there will be an opportunity to continue economic activities for high economic growth in 2011 reaching 6.0 - 6.5 pct, and increased to 6.1 - 6.6 pct by 2012.

Darmin said he saw three risks faced in 2010 which remained a challenge in the future, namely risks relating to a global economic imbalance, related to global capital traffic and currency war, and risks related to domestic demands and the pressure of inflation.

He said that two years after the crisis the global economy was proceeding in two different speeds, namely the country`s economic restoration the emerging market far exceeding those of the advanced countries.

Central Bureau of Sta-tistics (BPS) Chair-man Rusman He-riawan recently said Indonesia’s exports in the period Janu-

ary-November 2010 reached a to-tal value of US$140 billion while the figure for December 2010 was expected to be above US$10 billion.

He said natural resource-based commodities such as Crude Palm Oil (CPO) were still the biggest contributors to Indonesia s export revenue followed by such goods as rubber, textiles, textile prod-ucts and electronics.

RI’s imports up 20 pct last yearIndonesia s imports last

year jumped 40.05 percent to US$135.61 billion from the year before, the Central Statistics Agency (BPS) said.

Oil and gas imports in 2010 rose 44.16 percent to US$27.36 billion from the previous year, with crude oil imports increasing 15.16 percent to US$1.12 billion, and oil products 61.93 percent to US$6.89 billion, BPS Chief Rus-man Heriawan said here on Tues-day.

“Gas imports also rose US$374.1 million or 76.49 per-cent,” he said.

Meanwhile, non-oil/non-

gas imports last year reached US$108.24 billion, an 39.04 per-cent increase compared to a year earlier.

Rusman said the 2011 non-oil/non-gas imports were dominat-ed by machinery and mechanical appliances (18.49 percent), elec-trical appliances (14.44 percent) and motor vehicles and spare parts (5.30 percent).

“The import of consumer goods only contributed 7.37 per-cent to the overall non-oil/non-gas imports, with the import of raw and auxiliary materials for manufacturing industries reach-ing 72.78 percent,” he said.

RI 2010 Exports Value Reaches All-time High

Indonesia’s exports in 2010 reached a total value of US$150 billion, the highest figure ever achieved in the country`s foreign trade.

ECONOMIC UPDATES

Agriculture Minister Suswono

Central Bureau of Statistics (BPS) Chairman Rusman Heriawan recently said Indonesia’s exports in the period January-November 2010 reached a total value of US$140 billion while the figure for December 2010 was expected to be above US$10 billion.

Veep Calls on Officials, Bizmen to Abide by RulesVice President Boediono said

the case of former tax official Gayus Tambunan should be-come an eye opener for all offi-cials and businessmen on the im-portance of abiding by existing rules.

“As of now we must real-ly abide by the rules and should never make wrong compromis-es,” he said at the commemora-tion of the 59th anniversary of

the Association of Indonesian businessmen (APINDO) here early this month.

Gayus had recently been con-victed of corruption and sen-tenced to seven years in jail. His case has drawn a lot of public scrutiny because of its web of in-volvement that includes business-es and law enforcement officials.

Boediono said the govern-ment supported positive partner-

ship with businessmen to boost the country s economy so that it would be better and able to com-pete in global competition.

“The government is very com-mitted to creating strong and clean governance and this needs to be responded well by business-men,” he said.

“Our goal is the same namely developing better national econ-omy which will be competitive

at global levels. Differences are a common thing. There must be agrement that could be made. It is here that positive partnership is needed, in which the government and the business play their roles positively in line with rules that have been agreed upon,” he said.

“Do not even make wrong compromises like the ones shown in legal cases so far. The state and the business community must

know and abide by the rules,” he said.

Boediono said positive part-nership between the government and the business was a must that had to be built honestly in a posi-tive atmosphere.

“That way I agree that Indo-nesia will be able to meet var-ious current global economic challenges and uncertainties,” he said.

www.matanews.com

Property Growth

The property industry is expected to book a growth of 15% this year in line with large demand for office space.

The President Post/Nandi Nanti

While the world expects East Asia to become the locomotive of global growth, East Asia will face considerable challenges.

The President Postwww.thepresidentpost.com February 17, 2011 A5

The Region

THREE-WAY SPLIT

During the year 2010 global growth was stron-ger than expect-ed compared to the crisis years of

2008-09. However, as predicted before, world recovery remained to be fragile, lacking the needed strength for a robust recovery.

The world is still facing a num-ber of hard issues which remain unresolved. It is happening in such key areas as money, finance and banking. There is still the continuation of global imbalanc-es and the acceleration of large debts. These are all happening in the more advanced region of Eu-rope and North America.

When looking at the year 2011 from broader perspectives one will get the impression again that the overall outlook remains un-certain. Although more guard-ed optimism is beginning to pre-vail, much will depend on the effective actions taken by the Eu-ro-zone countries and the Unit-ed States.

In this era of interdependent world, Asia would like to know what the economic reality of 2011 is going to be, how the glob-al economy will behave during the current year and what poli-cies will come up. Will there be different approaches?

On this score it may be rele-vant to note what The Economist stated some months ago. The Economist was talking about a “Three-way Split” involving the Euro-zone, North America and the Emerging World. The three zones are most likely heading in different directions. This three-way split alone will bring about sources of stress to the global economy.

It is also being assumed that the world is set for a “three-speed” re-covery this year in addition to the “three-way split” among the countries in the global economy. This indicates that the year 2011 will most probably be a complex year, difficult to assess with more precision.

One can also assume that there will be different strategies among the emerging countries. Perhaps the world will face not only a three-way split but a multi-way split. There are some countries or business groups which reject in total the growth of capitalism. There also many which are not keen to continue to promote free trade policies and prefer to go the protectionist way.

THE EMINENT ROLE OFEAST ASIA

During the critical years 2009-2010 America and Europe have worked together and shared sim-ilar economic philosophy. Now both are obsessed with their in-ternal problems and adopt oppo-

site strategies. The large emerg-ing countries stretching from Shenzhen in China to Sao Paulo in Brazil are in a better situation. They are in a position of relative high growth with a high degree of consumers’ confidence.

Various observers including in-ternational financial institutions such as the World Bank and the Asian Development have made their views known. Some state-ments made at the Davos WEF 2011 (World Economic Forum) also confirmed that the locomo-tive of global growth will com-prise of a number of emerging

countries.The emerging countries which

are expected to be the locomotive of growth are China, India, South Korea and most of the ASEAN member countries and especial-ly Indonesia, Malaysia, Singa-pore, Vietnam and Thailand. They are all East Asian countries. To that group of emerging coun-tries of East Asia should be add-ed a country from Latin Ameri-ca, notably buoyant Brazil.

Largely thanks to China, East Asia has recovered from the eco-nomic and financial crisis. With-in one year East Asia shifted from

a collapse in exports and invest-ment to a swift rebound. The re-gion’s output, exports and em-ployment have mostly returned to the levels before the crisis. Af-ter slowing in real GDP growth from 8.5% in 2008 to 7.0% in 2009, it is expected that growth in 2010 amounts to 8.8%.

The world is presently attract-ed to Asia for the following rea-sons: China and India are expect-ed to enjoy growth of 8-10% in 2011 and together comprise a consumers market with a total of 2.4 billion people. Add to China

and India the population of near-ly 600 million consumers in the ASEAN nations and their aver-age 6% growth rate, and you are looking at three billion people and the driving force of the glob-al economy. This is not just true for this year, but hopefully for many years to come.

Big challengesTo assume the informal role as

the locomotive of global growth, it will be most pertinent for Asia, in particular ASEAN, to bolster in the first place their own eco-nomic growth. According to ADB (Asian Development Bank) the economies of East Asia will grow 8.8% in 2010 but will taper off this year because of the weak global outlook and the phasing out of stimulus programs.

On the external side Asia will face a fragile global environment. Some uncomfortable views were expressed at the recent Davos Fo-rum. Some senior economists, among others Nouriel Roubini and Martin Sorrel, warned that stewardship of the global econo-my is in disarray due to a vacuum of leadership.

There are a number of unre-solved and new issues such as the problem of global imbalanc-es, the spread of trade imbalanc-es, the question of unpredictable capital flows, a “currency war”, climate change and other up-coming issues.

All this will be thrown on the plates of the G20 where Asia is well-represented. Asian countries members of the G20 are: China, Japan, India, South Korea and In-donesia. Indonesia with ASEAN

on its side will be highly involved in the upcoming G20 summits

While the world expects East Asia to become the locomotive of global growth, East Asia will face considerable challenges. Indo-nesia will be right in the middle of “guarded optimism” and the “wavering views” of many coun-tries on current economic affairs.

The first ASEAN Summit will be held in Jakarta in April, while the second ASEAN summit will be held in Bali in October this year. One of the key issues con-cerns the development of the ASEAN Community and how to make ASEAN a “people- cen-tered” and “people-driven ASE-AN”.

Furthermore, the highly im-portant East Asia Summit, which will also meet in Bali in Octo-ber this year, will most possibly turn out to become a summit of increased importance. After all, leaders of the prominent EAS (East Asia Summit) will come from the 10 ASEAN countries plus 8 (dialogue countries): Chi-na, Japan, India, South Korea, Australia, New Zealand, Russia and the United States.

In addition to the East Asia Summit, leaders of APEC (Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation) will also gather in Indonesia. In addition Indonesia intends to hold the World Economic Forum (WEF) on East Asia in Indone-sia in June of this year. ASEAN with Indonesia in the chair will have a most busy year as ASEAN intends to remain on the driver’s seat in East Asia’s meetings.

The writer is a retired senior diploamt and former ambassador to the EU.

East Asia and Its Big Challenges

By Atmono Suryo

The City of Shanghai, China. China and India are expected to enjoy growth of 8-10% in 2011 and together comprise a consumers market with a total of 2.4 billion people.

www.mulk.co.cc

ASEANThe President Post www.thepresidentpost.comFebruary 17, 2011A6

2011 CHAIRMANSHIP

It is quite a relief for many observers and outsiders (like myself) to observe that presently Indone-sia intends to give much greater attention to ASE-

AN. This is a very welcome deci-sion and an important step in the right direction. This intention will hopefully be a permanent one: that Indonesia will continue to give high priority to ASEAN.

There are quite different views, but the reality will show there is the need for Indonesia’s greater involvement with ASEAN. Not-withstanding the many obstacles and frictions happening on the ground, it is important to realize that there is much at stake in In-donesia-ASEAN relations.

Indonesia’s greater commit-ment could be a signal that a new ASEAN momentum will be ap-pearing on the horizon. East Asia with China and India in the lead is already moving to become the epicenter of the global econo-my. The world looks at Asia, in-cluding ASEAN, as the world’s most dynamic region and home to two-thirds of the global pop-

ulation. Being part of Asia it is now ASEAN’s turn to create a new drive within the ASEAN-10 to become a dynamic and a more integrated regional grouping.

In 1967 the founding fathers of ASEAN rightly recognized the advantages of ASEAN’s strategic location at the heart of Asia. They were aware of ASEAN’s relative wealth in natural and human re-sources and its potential political significance. They also correctly presumed that the day will come when ASEAN would represent a significant political and econom-ic force in Asia.

ASEAN has shown that dur-ing the last decades or so it has won the respect of many coun-tries, including the United States, Russia the European Union and Latin American countries. On top of it ASEAN has been able to be on the driver’s seat in the de-velopment of East Asia coopera-tion.

We should also remember that at that time Indonesia’s leader-ship within ASEAN was wide-ly accepted and highly respected. It is, therefore, with regret to see that internally there has been the declining trend of Indonesia’s in-terest in ASEAN.

There was even deep concern that Indonesia was (for various reasons) just losing total interest in ASEAN. In the area of busi-ness other ASEAN countries are being considered merely as strong rivals, not as potential business partners with common interest and objectives. It is no wonder that Indonesia’s intra-ASEAN trade is among the lowest among the ASEAN countries.

There was also the impression that ASEAN was also no more considered as the cornerstone of Indonesia’s foreign policy. It is also continuously felt that In-donesia is often the victim of all

Indonesia’s Leadership in ASEAN

By Atmono Suryo

The Indonesian community should welcome and support Indonesia’s commitment to take a more active role in ASEAN’s “collective leadership”. Indonesia would be in the lead to strengthen ASEAN to take the “Great Leap forward” to ensure that ASEAN would bring peace, welfare, employment and sustainable growth to the people.

www.presidensby.info/Abror

President SBY honored as new leader of ASEAN 2011 on the 17th ASEAN Summit Conference at National Convention Center, Hanoi, Vietnam, Oktober 2010. The previous leader is PM Vietnam, Nguyen Tan Dung.

sorts of crime conducted by some irresponsible quarters in the other South-Eastern countries.

Apparently one of the main reasons is that the political cli-mate in the country has not been conducive to promote clos-er relations with the other ASE-AN countries. With the result that Indonesia has somehow lost its credibility and leadership in ASEAN.

BIG LEAP FORWARDFortunately a big change is

now in the air with regard to In-donesia’s position vis-à-vis ASE-AN. This change will not only benefit and strengthen Indone-

sia but also ASEAN. This change will undoubtedly contribute to-wards the development of ASE-AN’s “big leap forward” in the years to come, especially after the successful achievement of ASE-AN Community by 2015.

In the area of economics ASE-AN is already making consider-able progress as its members grew at a fast pace until 2008. Despite the difficult years of 2009-2010 ASEAN is among the few which has come out of the crisis in a bet-ter condition than before the cri-sis.

The process of ASEAN eco-nomic integration involves a huge market of 600 million consumers with a rapid growing middle-in-come group. ASEAN has be-come an attractive market and a potential economic partner for non-ASEAN countries all over the world.

Asia is moving fast and is be-coming a world economic leader in the global economy. As it now stands the largest countries in Asia are China, Japan, ASEAN and India. They will be the front-runners in Asia’s development.

INDONESIA’S POSITION In terms of size Indonesia is the

largest country in ASEAN. But what is most encouraging to note is that Indonesia is not only keen to make its chairmanship a suc-cess; Indonesia now appears to prepare itself to take a more ac-tive leadership role in ASEAN.

Such assurances primarly come from Foreign Minister Marty Natalagawa and Trade Minis-ter Mary Elka Pangestu. A chair-manship position will only take a year while a leadership role can take some more years.

To take a leadership role, how-ever, requires firm commitments on the side of all stakeholders in Indonesia, including political parties, the Parliament and the entire business community.

Indonesia has indicated some goals which it would like to achieve. Indonesia is paving the way for ASEAN to achieve among others, the following lon-ger-term objectives in addition to immediate or short-term objec-tives:

To take the ASEAN commu-•nity to the Global Communi-ty of Nations;To establish the ASEAN Com-•munity by 2015 based on three pillars (political-security; econ-omy and social-cultural); and To establish “People-centered •and People-driven ASEAN”

Indonesia is also aware of the need to further strengthen the ASEAN Secretariat in Jakarta. More than 50 countries have al-ready accredited their Permanent Representatives (ambassadors) to ASEAN, including Indonesia, which has accredited its special envoy to ASEAN.

The Indonesian communi-ty should welcome and support Indonesia’s commitment to take a more active role in ASEAN’s “collective leadership”. Indonesia would be in the lead to strengthen ASEAN to take the “Great Leap forward” to ensure that ASEAN would bring peace, welfare, em-ployment and sustainable growth to the people. And also to make ASEAN to become a significant political-economic and stabiliz-ing force in Asia as was assumed by ASEAN’s founding fathers 44 years ago in 1967.

To take a leadership role,

however, requires firm commitments

on the side of all stakeholders in Indonesia,

including political parties, the

Parliament and the entire business

community.

The President Postwww.thepresidentpost.com February 17, 2011 A7

Around Jababeka

“The Cikarang Dry Port (CDP) is the first of its kind in Indonesia and is expected to start operating in April,” said S. D. Darmono, President Commis-sioner of PT Cikarang Inland Port, the company that manages the facility.

The development of CDP is es-timated to cost up to over Rp 500 billion and will be done in sever-al stages. The first phase is to build 10 hectares of port area as part of the original plan that cov-ers 70 hectares. In its entirety, the port will take up 150 hectares of land, covering the port area and 80 hectares of logistics area.

Deputy Transportation Min-ister Bambang Susantono in a working visit to CDP said that CDP will play a very important role for the import-export busi-ness in Indonesia. Also, there are seven industrial estates in Cikarang that contribute 60%-65% of total exports and imports through Tanjung Priok port.

In Jababeka there are approxi-mately 2,500 companies, includ-ing Mattel, Unilever, Samsung and others.

“To date, Tanjung Priok is still the main destination for import-ed goods. If the dry port could start operations in April, CDP can be the final destination port. This will make the export-import business efficient,” said Bam-bang.

He said that Jababeka and the Cikarang Dry Port will be a mod-el for the implementation of spe-cial economic zones, especially in terms of handling logistics.

CDP uses two modes of trans-portation, namely trains and trucks. However, trains from CDP are still unable to reach Tanjung Priok because the rail-way from Pasoso station to the Jakarta International Container Terminal (JICT), Tanjung Pri-ok, is not yet available. So the lo-

gistics have to transit at Sungai Lagoa station.

“From there, it will continue to Tanjung Priok using trucks,” said Noor Yusuf, Director of CDP.

Bambang Susantono said the main obstacle of the CDP road system development to Tanjung Priok is the unresolved land ac-

Cikarang Dry Port Starts Operations in April

quisition for both railways and roads connecting Jababeka with national, provincial or district roads. Uncompleted land acqui-sitions for railway lines are in the area of hHll 21 and 22.

“There are about 40 families still living there and the value of acquisitions is around Rp 30 bil-

lion,” said Bambang.That access is the responsibility

of the Bekasi local government. For that, Vice Minister of Public Works Hermanto Dardak urged the Bekasi local government to immediately provide high-quali-ty road access in order to bolster Bekasi’s economy.

The MoU signed in 2006 calls for Jababeka to provide land, the Ministry of Public Works to build buildings, the Ministry of Transportation to issue transpor-tation permits, and the Bekasi lo-cal government road access.

“So we are expecting the con-tainer trains from Cikarang Dry Port (CDP) to Station Pasoso (Tanjung Priok) to operate this year,“ said Bambang.

He added that based on data and the progress report, the rail-way will start to operate next April.

“All fittings and preparation are ready, but the installation of the project and the rail bed is still in process,” he said.

He said that the most im-portant thing is to see contain-er trains reducing the burden on roads and facilitating the flow of logistics distribution.

“If we have reliable container trains, the burden on our roads will be eased,” he said.

The development of CDP is estimated to

cost up to over Rp 500 billion and will be done in several stages.

CDP will play a very important role for the import-export business in Indonesia. Also, there are seven industrial estates in Cikarang that contribute 60%-65% of total exports and imports through Tanjung Priok port.

Bambang said that Jababeka

and the Cikarang Dry Port will be a model for the

implementation of special economic

zones, especially in terms of handling

logistics.

By Jeannifer Filly Sumayku The MoU signed in 2006 calls for Jababeka to provide land, the Ministry of Public Works to build buildings, the Ministry of Transportation to issue transportation permits, and the Bekasi local government road access.

It was a bit cloudy with some drizzle when Muslimah planted a cacao tree in the Jababeka Bo-tanic Gardens, last Monday, Feb-ruary 14, 2011. Muslimah Nur Islami, chair person of the Pres-ident Botanical Society, was ac-companied by a dozen students and her lecturer, Mr. John Mew-burn, who is also the adviser of the club. Every one gave her a very warm applause when she finished planting the seedling and started to water it.

Theobroma cacao or chocolate tree became the major attraction of the Valentine’s Day celebration this year. “All of us enjoyed eating chocolate, but seldom we thought about cacao planters through out the country. Therefore, we invite students to pay a better attention to cacao trees that made Indone-sia the third major cacao produc-er in the world,” said Eka Budi-anta, the development consultant of Jababeka Botanic Gardens.

Occupying at least 30 out of 100 hectares land slots around the Jababeka Golf Course in Cikarang, the gardens were start-ed to be developed in 2007. The opening ceremony was officiat-ed by Mr. Rachmat Witoelar, the State Minister of the Environ-ment back then.

Indonesia has plentiful spe-cies of trees, shrubs and flowers. Yet, there are not so many botan-ic gardens established as means to educate people. There are only four state botanical gardens de-veloped in such a huge country of 237 million Indonesians. “We may compared with England, which is only the size of Suma-tra island with 61 million popu-lation, but it has more than 40 botanic gardens, including the best known Kew Botanic Gar-dens and the spectacular project of Eden,” said Eka.

Eka Budianta, a graduate of The Leadership for Environment and Development, has started to introduce the Jababeka Botan-ic concept in 2006. He also has presented the development plan of Jababeka Botanic Gardens at

the Asian Botanic Gardens Con-gress. The idealistic plan creating the first private botanic gardens in Indonesia has drawn much at-tention among botanists and tree lovers. A special package of exhi-bition was sent and displayed at the World Botanic Gardens Con-ference in Kew, England, in the late 2007.

species, date palm – Phoenix dac-tylifera is planted by the Regent of Bekasi, Drs. Sadudin at the clus-ter of Exotic Plants.

The Jababeka Botanic Gardens present special collection of trees planted by dignitaries too. The most respected environmental-ist and stateman, Prof. Dr. Emil Salim planted an Aracaucaria het-erophylla, a special type of pine that may grow up to 600 years. Other important trees are donat-ed and planted by Mrs. Sugiar-ti from Bogor Botanic Gardens, Mrs. Karen Sjarief Tambajong, the President of Indonesian Flower Association; several state ministers and ambassadors.

During his tenure as the chair person of President Exec-utive Club (PEC), Ambassador of Singapore, H.E. Mr. Edward Lee, planted a Cananga odorata tree. The famous educator and child defender, Dr. Seto Mulyadi planted a nyamplung tree, Chrys-ophylum innophylum that is large-ly known as the energy source of the future.

Most of the trees at gardens relate closely with the need of the industry. The former rec-tor of The President University, Prof. Dr. Muliawati G. Siswanto planted a Cola nitida, the main ingredient of a very popular soft drink, Coca Cola. We may also plant our favorite trees when we visit the Gardens. Among the well groomed industrial trees we could met now are: Tectona gran-dis – the famous teak wood, the keben tree – Barringtonia asiatica that is known as medicinal ma-terial for cataract treatment, and the palm oil trees that become the healthy and prosperous sym-bol of Jababeka.

Through these special species of industrial trees, students and other visitors are expected to re-member and learn what particu-lar trees are needed for our dai-ly life. “When you drink water, remember the one dug the well. When you are enjoying a choc-olate, remember its trees and its farmers who planted it.

When You Eat Chocolate, Remember its TreeOccupying at least 30 out of 100 hectares land slots around the Jababeka Golf Course in Cikarang, the Jababeka Botanic Gardens were started to be developed in 2007.

Jababeka Botanic Gardens comprised of several clusters of plants. Exotic and introducto-ry trees are planted at the back yard of The President Executive Club, at the Jababeka Central Business District. At least 20 dif-ferent kind of imported and lo-cal trees are specially treated in a classic design of the Food Prom-enade. We may enjoy the beauty of the purple jacaranda and gold Tabeuea chrysanta there in the right season.

Jababeka Botanic Gardens of-fer the beauty of flowering trees such as the orange sapatodea, the flaming red of Flamboyant - De-lonix regia and the sweet smelling of Citarexyllum spinosum, occally known as the arum dalu trees. At least 76 local species of fruits are also cultivated at the Fruit Clus-ter, next to the Jababeka Multicul-tural Centre. Among the select-ed fruits are mangos, rambutans, savodillas, and star fruits. An outstanding religiously known

Through these special species of industrial trees, students and other visitors are expected to remember and learn what particular trees are needed for our daily life.

InsightThe President Post www.thepresidentpost.comFebruary 17, 2011A8

The President PostOFFICEMenara Batavia 25th Fl. Jl. K.H. Mas Mansyur Kav. 126Jakarta 10220, IndonesiaPhone : (021) 572 7337Fax : (021) 572 7338Email : ceo@thepresidentpost.comWeb : www.thepresidentpost.com

PUBLISHED BYPT Sarana Pratama Pengembangan Kota

CEO & EDITOR IN CHIEFAli Basyah Suryo

CONTRIBUTORSAtmono SuryoCyrillus Harinowo HadiwerdoyoThomas W. ShreveJeannifer Filly SumaykuEka Putri

EDITORIAL & CIRCULATION DEPARTMENTSrimay Noviani

LAYOUT & DESIGNMohamad Akmal

SALES & MARKETINGDetia Rais

PHOTOGRAPHERNandi Nanti

Almost every country across the globe, in-cluding the United States, is experienc-ing a prolonged cri-sis, economic slow-

down and shrinking revenues. But that’s not the case with In-donesia. Indonesia’s economy re-mains stable and tends to increase although not too significantly. And this has caught the world’s attention.

What was the factor that kept Indonesia’s economy afloat amid the global economic crisis? The answer to this is Indonesia’s huge population, the fourth biggest in the world, which had driven do-mestic consumption and thus bolstered domestic market and pushed economic growth.

Foreign Police, an advertising icon in the United States, said that market players in Indonesia this year are mostly influenced by India and China. The same also applies to BRIC (Brazil, Russia, India and China), which also receives goods from Indone-sia. When Susilo Bambang Yud-hoyono was re-elected President

of the Republic of Indonesia for a second term a few years ago, he said that in 2014 and will become BRICI or Brazil, Russia, India, China and Indonesia.

Indonesia has worked on push-ing for growth for a long time be-cause US giant financial compa-ny Goldman Sachs Group once predicted BRIC would grow and that Indonesia would enjoy the impact of the economic growth especially given Indonesia’s vast oil, gas, coal and timber resourc-es.

Indonesia is also the fourth biggest labor-producing coun-try in the world as it makes up almost 40% of ASEAN’s total populations. So, even if a crisis shakes the world’s economy, In-donesia will remain stable due to its export GDP target percent-age of only 18%, while its do-mestic market reaches 60%. In 2007, Indonesia saw its econo-my grow by 6.3%, 6% in 2008, 4.5% in 2009, thanks to stability, and 6,1% in 2010 despite the eco-nomic crisis.

However, Indonesia’s income per capita of only US$2,362/per annum puts it in the lower mid-dle income countries (LMICS)

group. Although labor is cheap, unemployment rate remains high amid rapid domestic market growth. Labor percentage in In-donesia is 60%, dominated by a productive age group of below 39 years old with professional work system and better income that contributed to higher consump-tion growth.

Indonesia’s economy contin-ues to improve, thanks to the re-election of Susilo Bambang Yud-hoyono as President of Indonesia, as he managed to maintain sta-ble political and economic con-ditions. In 1997, Indonesia expe-rienced a financial turmoil that pushed the country into a state of emergency, and in October 2004, the government and the public held a presidential election which reelected SBY who helped regained international confi-dence by providing economic se-curity and invited investors in. Since then, Indonesia has seen the number of investors growing.

6.4% economic growth targetin 2011

Indonesia has revamped its eco-nomic organization which helped reduce the state’s debts to a GDP ratio of 28%, brought fuel pric-

es to a stable level, boosted the stock index to the 2,000 lev-el since 2009, making it the best performer in ASEAN. Shares in 2010 gained 40%, in October 2010 the Jakarta index reached 3667 points, while stock invest-ment reached US$22 billion. Higher stock prices would draw more investors to Indonesia and further improve domestic market conditions and bolster produc-tions. Meanwhile, banks are also providing relatively low lending rates and under very easy terms. The government is also always monitoring foreign investors in Indonesia by providing a new, safe system which is convenient for investment in Indonesia.

Countries like Vietnam, Thai-land, the Philippines, Myanmar and other ASEAN countries are also vying to lure foreign inves-tors into their countries. This condition has caught the Indo-nesian government’s attention. In 2007, the government tried to fix the legal system aimed to boost investment.

Indonesia’s-South Korea’s trade volume ranks second highest in the world with profits reaching US$200 million.

Indonesia’s investment system

has much improved and thus has attracted many South Korean, Singaporean, Dutch, Japanese, British investors. Indonesia is the fourth biggest investment recip-ient country in the world. More than US$40 billion had been in-vested in Indonesia in 2010 by 1,350 major companies employ-ing 500,000 Indonesian worjers.

In June 2007, ASEAN’s free trade agreement took effect and in 2010, ASEAN countries agreed during the ASEAN Special Sum-mit to set export-import target of US$1,500 billion by 2015. Mean-while, the South Korean govern-ment plans on opening more big companies in Indonesia in the fu-ture. This is because Indonesia is now deemed as one of the saf-est economies due to among oth-er things, its vast and cheap raw materials. South Korea has the EDCF program aimed at help-ing developing countries to devel-op their markets through a loan mechanism. In 2010, 17 Indone-sian-Korean projects were initiat-ed with a total investment cost of US$4 billion. The South Korean government is planning on col-laborating on huge projects with all ASEAN countries, including Indonesia.

New Dawn for IndonesiaBy Choi Sang MinWhat was the factor

that kept Indonesia’s economy afloat amid the global economic crisis? The answer

to this is Indonesia’s huge population,

the fourth biggest in the world, which

had driven domestic consumption and thus

bolstered domestic market and pushed

economic growth.

Indonesia is the fourth biggest investment recipient country in the world. More than US$40 billion had been invested in Indonesia in 2010 by 1,350 major companies employing 500,000 Indonesian worjers.

The President Postwww.thepresidentpost.com

Display until March 17, 2011 /// N0. 21Business BBank Mandiri to open branchin Shanghai

Bank Mandiri will open a branch in Shanghai, China, by the end of June at the latest as part of its expansion plan, its president director, Zulkifli Zaini, said.

“Now we are still finishing the preparations including renting an office, seeking consultants, preparing the information technology and recruiting workers. By the end of June they are expected to be finished,” he said here last week.

He said the opening of the branch was part of the business plan of the state-owned bank for 2011 and it was also linked with the additional funds from the rights issue in February.

Bank Mandiri also plans to expand its operations by developing remittance and funds transfer services for Indonesian citizens in the Middle East and South Korea to increase its remittance service in Hong Kong and Malaysia.

Regarding Bank Indonesia`s demand for national banks to increase operational efficiency Zaini said Bank Mandiri s efficiency has continued to improve since 10 years ago.

“Since 10 years ago the cost of our efficiency ratio kept declining from 50 percent to 40 percent. We are continuing to become more efficient from day to day,” he said.

Aneka Tambang sees 3.084 tons production

Bank Kesawan recently announced the conclusion of the bank`s rigPT Aneka Tambang (Antam) is targeting gold production in 2011 to reach 3.804 tons, up compared to last year`s 2.78 tons, the company`s corporate secretary Budi Satriyo said here recently.

He said the production target is expected from Pongkor and Cibaliung gold minne, each of which produced 2.007 tons and 1.797 tons.

“Last year`s production of 2.78 tons came from Pongkor (2.485 tons) and 295 Kg of Cibaliung,” he said.

According to Bimo Satriyo, gold sales in 2011 is expected to reach 7.304 tons, up compared to last year`s 6.561 tons.

In 2010, gold sales in 2010 reached Rp2,35 trillion with an average price of US$1227.52 per troy ounce.

Nickel ore production in 2011 is targeted at 7.65 million wet metric tonnes (wmt) consisting of 4.5 million wmt of high grade nickel ore and 3.15 million low-yield wmt.

For nickel ore sales, the target is 5.86 million with 3.71 million wet metric tons (wmt) of high grade and 2.15 million wmt of low grade nickel ores.

Bimo added, in 2010, Antam produced 104,692 wmt and sold 191,615 wmt of bauxite earning an income of Rp34 billion.

In total, Antam`s unaudited sales reached Rp8,72 trillion in 2010, a small increase compared to Rp8,71 trillion in 2009.

BUSINESS BRIEFS

The number of entre-preneurs in Indo-nesia is expected to increase by at least 500,000 within the next four years.

Future entrepreneurship pro-grams would be designed to pro-duce creative, innovative and globally competitive entrepre-neurs, Dr Handito Joewono, head of the coordinating eco-nomic ministry’s national coor-dinating team of creative entre-preneurship promotion, said here last week.

“Within the next four years, we hope there will additional new 500,000 entrepreneurs in Indo-nesia,” he said.

He also hoped that by 2025 the number would multiply to five million entrepreneurs.

Currently, the number of In-donesian entrepreneurs is around 0.24 percent of the country s to-tal population.

Sociologist David Mc Cleiland said, that to develop a country s advanced economy, the num-ber of entrepreneurs should be at

RI to Have500,000 NewEntrepreneursCurrently, the number of Indonesian entrepreneurs is around 0.24 percent of the country`s total population.

Bank Kesawan recently an-nounced the conclusion of the bank s rights ssue, and received rights issue fund of Rp 734 bil-lion (US$ 73 million dollars), a press release received here on Fri-day stated.

“The fund increased the cap-ital adequacy ratio (CAR) and reached 61,19 percent from pre-viously 11.43 percent (unaudited

ed, Bank Kesawan later moved its head office to Jakarta in 1990 as a national player.

The bank now operates 36 branches across Indonesia with total assets of approximately Rp2,5 trillion (US$270 million).

Qatar National Bank is the largest bank in Qatar with a mar-ket share approaching 40 percent of banking sector assets.

Bank Kesawan Conducts Rights Issueas per year 2010 end). Under the current CAR, we will have more room to grow,” said Gatot Sis-woyo, President Director Bank Kesawan.

Post rights issue condition marks the beginning of Qatar National Bank (QNB) ownership in the Indonesian banking indus-try through Bank Kesawan.

QNB is now the majority share-

holder of the bank representing 69,59 percent of the shares. Oth-er shareholders above 5 percent shares ownership are Adhi Tir-ta Mustika with 9,01 percent and other institutions and the public with 21,4 percent.

Gatot added that QNB pres-ence will bring added value to the bank. QNB global experiences will enhance the bank s perfor-

mance. “Arqaam Capital acted as the

exclusive financial adviser on this transaction, and has offered ex-cellent service in facilitating Bank Kesawan looking for investors,” said Gatot.

Established in 1913 as a lo-cal bank in Medan as The Chi-nese Trading Company Limit-

least two percent of the pop-ulation 4.8 million entrepre-neurs for the total Indonesian population.

As comparison, the number of entrepreneurs in Singapore is 7.2 percent of its total pop-ulation, Malaysia 2.1 percent, Thailand 4.1 percent, South Korea 4.0 percent, and the United States 11.5 percent.

It would take up to the year 2030 for Indonesia to have 4.8 million entrepreneurs or 2 per-cent of its current total popu-lation, he said.

Industrial Electricity Tariff HikeAs of January 2011 basic electricity tariffs rose by up to 20-30%, leading businessmen to protest as the decision made their products more expensive.

The President Post/Nandi Nanti

BusinessThe President Post www.thepresidentpost.comFebruary 17, 2011B2

Satellite television provider PT MNC Sky Vision (Indovision) plans to list its shares at the Indonesia Stock Exchange (BEI) this year to raise funds to finance its business expansion.

“We will appoint underwriters in the near future,” Robert Satrya, investor relations officer of PT Global Mediacom Tbk (BMRT) said here last week.

PT MNC Sky Vision, the business unit of BMRT which is en-gaged in the pay-TV industry, still has a promising future as In-donesia is among Asia-Pacific countries which have the lowest pay-TV penetration reaching less than 5 percent, he said.

Quoting data from Partners Asia, he said Indonesia was also expected to see a 30-percent growth of pay-TV subscribers, the highest among other Asia Pacific countries such as Malaysia, Sin-gapore, and Japan.

MNC Sky Vision, with Indovision & Top TV as its two leading brands, currently holds more than 78 percent share of the do-mestic pay-TV market. The number of Indovision and Top TV subscribers reached more than 800,000 at the end of last year.

Last year MSV posted income totaling Rp1.44 trillion, a 36 per-cent increase compared to Rp1.06 trillion the year before.

Indovision to list sharesto finance operations

State cement maker PT Semen Gresik is trying to reach a profit of Rp4 trillion this year, which would be a 10-15 pct increase compared to last year`s Rp3.63 trillion.

“In 2010 the company had raised its efficiency, and also this year,” the company`s president director Dwi Sutjipto said here ear-lier this week.

Dwi said that this year`s profit will be raised by boosting produc-tion and the start of the operation

of two new plants by the end of this year.The two new plants are located respectively in Tonasa, South

Sulawesi,and Tuban, East Java, with a total capacity of 5 million tons.

He said that with the two new plants total capacity will reach 25 million tons of last year`s 18.5 million tons.

“Last year we grew 5-10 pct, compared to Rp3.3 trillion in 2009,” he said.

Last year`s income may reach Rp14 trillion.He added that last year`s production was relatively stagnant

due to the natural disasters disrupting production.However, in 2011 income may increase 10 pct to Rp15.4 tril-

lion.

Semen Gresik targetsRp4t profit in 2011

State-owned planta-tion company PT Perkebunan Nu-santara (PTPN) III plans to raise Rp3 trillion through an

initial public offering of 25-30 percent of its shares this year.

“We hope the IPO can mate-rialize this year,” PTPN III Pres-ident Director Amri Siregar said on Saturday.

He said the company submit-ted a plan to conduct IPO to the committee of privatization team two years ago. But it put the plan on hold in 2009 because of unfa-vorable capital market condition.

“This year we will submit an-

other proposal to the committee of privatization team to conduct IPO,” he said.

He said the planned IPO would enable the company to ex-pand its business and allow its employees to hold shares.

“Our equities currently reach Rp7.3 trillion so that we can raise an estimated Rp3 trillion in funds (through IPO),” he said.

He said Rp1.8 trillion of pro-ceeds from the issuance of shares through the planned IPO would be used to finance the company s business expansion, including construction of oil palm process-ing plant.

“We, along with PTPN I also develops 9,300 hectare oil palm plantations in the three districts of East Aceh, North Aceh and Aceh Tamiang,” he said.

PTPN III posted a net profit of Rp1.002 trillion last year, jump-ing from Rp707.08 billion the year before.

PTPN III Plans to RaiseRp3t through IPO

Sumbawa Barat district`s government has decided to cooper-ate with PT Titan Metals to buy seven percent of US-based gold mining company PT Newmont Nusa Tenggara`s divested shares for 2010 worth 271,6 million dollars or Rp2,4 trilliun, a spokes-man said.

“We have already conducted a `beauty contest which was won by one of four companies that took part in it, namely Jakar-ta-based PT Titan Metals. The company will help us buy seven percent of Newmont shares up for divestment in 2010,” KH Zulki-fli, Sumbawa Barat district chief, said here recently.

PT Titan Metals, a national mining company with head office in Jakarta, was the winner of the beauty contest and PT Sumba-wa Maju Jayao, a mining company owned by an NTB business-man, the alternate winner.

The contest, participated in by PT Titan Metals, PT Sumbawa Maju Jaya, PT Bayu Kemayoran Karya and PT Maju Jaya Valco, was organized by an independent consultant in front of the lead-ership and memebrs of the Sumbawa Barat district legislative council last January 2011.

Zulkifli said PT Titan Metals would provide the funds needed by the district administration to buy the seven percent stake in PT Newmont.

He said PT Titan Metals would later obtain dividends on PT Newmont`s profits for as long as the company was operating in Sumbawa Barat district.

Private firm helps West Sumbawa to buy Newmont shares

PTPN III posted a net profit of Rp1.002 trillion last year, jumping from Rp707.08 billion the year before.

PTPN III President Director Amri Siregar said the planned IPO would enable the company to expand its business and allow its employees to hold shares.

antaranews.com/Yudhi Mahatma

Dwi Sutjipto

The CL-Class has improved its quality with a series of ma-jor changes in exterior and in-terior.

President and CEO of PT Mercedes-Benz Indone-sia Rudi Borgenheimer said that the CL-Class is a com-mitment of Mercedes-Benz to always present the most ad-vanced innovation cars in its own class.

“The CL-Class is a sym-bol of the ability of Mercedes-Benz to develop a tradition of excellence. This coupe has high exclusivity because it is made by experts who under-stand the meaning of quality,” said Rudi.

The CL 500 CGI, which made its presence in Indone-sia last December, has become the new standard of technol-ogy innovation and luxury in coupes.

Compared to previous gen-erations, the latest CGI CL

500 has a different exterior and interior design, and gives a touch of the latest technology innova-tions, including the use of highly efficient gasoline engine series M 278 BlueDIRECT V8.

InteriorNew Generation CL-Class is

emphasizing changes in order to improve perfection of quality and exclusivity in the interior so that the CL-Class may fulfill the de-mands of high sportsmanship needed on a luxury coupe.

The CL-Class offers many ex-clusive menu options for every consumer who expects a luxury character of its own.

Mercedes-Benz has deployed skilled craftsmen who are not only able to produce excellent work to look at but also soft when touched.

ExteriorThe new CL-Class is de-

signed to exude more self-con-

fidence and a sense of privilege, and provides stability to its users. The exterior reveals the harmo-ny between smooth surfaces and classic elegant lines with sports-manship.

The new CL-Class also has a different design on the front and rear, as well as increased length of the body to 30mm.

Besides to improve its appear-ance, the body elongation is em-phasized for the CL-Class to be more dynamic.

Changes to the front are shown through contour lines (bonnet) that are more assertive, accompa-nied by a large and wide incision.

Other striking features are shown on the advanced design and high-quality headlights. On

the front bumper is a pair of LED daytime on both sides, as well as a wide air intake with a chrome line.

On the body side, Mercedes-Benz changed the design of the new CL-Class coupe by strength-ening its character by improving of the roof line and adjusting the flow lines of the door with the roof. All windows are surround-ed by a chrome line, giving it a luxurious appearance.

PerformanceMercedes-Benz CL 500 CGI

is reinforced with high-tech en-gine series M 278 BlueDIRECT V8. Engine with 4.664cc capac-ity with V8 configuration is ca-pable to produce a maximum power up to 435 hp (320kW)

on 5.250rpm and 700Nm of torque at 1,800-3.250rpm.

With this engine CL 500 CGI only takes 4.9 seconds to accelerate from 0 to 100 km/h, and is able to reach a maximum speed of 250 km/h (limited-speed system).

The high-tech engine promises efficient use of fuel. To drive in the city the CL 500 CGI requires fuel sup-ply of only 13.5-13.9 liters per 100 km, while out of town te figure is 7.2-7.6 liters per 100 km.

Contacts: Yuniadi HartonoPhone/Fax: 30003612/30003662Mathilda JeanettePhone/Fax: 30003636/30003662

The RemarkableNew Mercedes-BenzCL 500 CGIPT Mercedes-Benz Indonesia has announced the commencement of sales of the New Generation Mercedes-Benz CL 500 CGI, a premium coupe that leads in innovation and exclusivity in its class.

themercedeslounge.com

The Mercedes-Benz CL 500 CGI has become the new standard of technology innovation and luxury in coupes.

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The President PostT H E S P I R I T O F I N D O N E S I A

The President Postwww.thepresidentpost.com February 17, 2011 B3

Investment

Korean investors interested in building hotels in Palembang

Korean investors expressed interest in building hotels in Palembang city, South Sumatra, because the city is considered advanced and rapidly growing, a member of a Korean investor team, Fark, told Palembang mayor H Eddy Santana Putra, here recently.

The investors were also interested in establishing luxury apartments, he added.

The Korean investor team accompanied by Sub Division Head of Promotion and Cooperation Regional Investment

Coordinating Board (BKPMD) of Palembang city, Elyani Wirza, said they came to ask for the mayor`s approval for investment in the city.

“We are interested in building luxury apartments with a total investment of around Rp300 billion to Rp500 billion,” Fark said.

He added, in addition to build apartments and hotels, they were also interested in establishing a taekwondo school in Palembang city to support the implementation of the SEA Games in November 2011 which will provide funds estimated at Rp50 million to Rp40 million.

The Palembang mayor, Eddy Santana Putra, said the city administration was basically very supportive of the Korean investors to build apartments and hotels.

Japanese investor keen on investing in kesambi oil

Bec Japan, a Japanese investor, wants to invest in kesambi oil (Schleichera oleosa) in East Nusa Tenggara province, Vice Governor Esthon Foenay said here Tuesday.

The investment plan was conveyed by President Commissioner of Bec Japan, Hiroyuki Hanzawa, along with his partners, Director of the Bogor Agro Lestari (BAL), Sarwo Budi, and Indonesian Institute of Sciences (LIPI) researcher, Dr.Joko Sulistio, at a meeting with the East Nusa Tenggara Vice Governor here last week.

All this time, kesambi seed has no economic value at all.“The presence of the investor is expected to make the kesambi

seed have economic value and continue to push up market prices,” he added.

The director of Bogor Agro Lestari (BAL), Sarwo Budi, explained, a LIPI research showed that kesambi in East Nusa Tenggara has the potential to be developed as bio-diesel.

According LIPI, there are approximately 24 million kesambi trees in East Nusa Tenggara. One tree produces 10 kilograms of wet kusambi seed, he said adding that four to five kilograms of dry kesambi seed could produce one liter of bio-diesel oil.

“Bec Japan which is ready with an investment of approximately 50 billion rupiahs. We will start this year and it will take place for 20 to 30 years,” Budi said.

The cooperation agreement will be followed by the implementation of a bio-diesel processing project with kesambi seed as raw material.

Korean investors to build dam in Bali

Korean investors are interested in constructing a dam in the Unda river`s estuary which was once a mining location, in Gunaksa village, Klungkung district, Bali, a local official said.

“There has been a discussion between the Klungkung district administration and the Korean investors about the latter`s wish to fund the dam project. But this time we are still conducting a survey on the location,” Tjokorde Gede Agung, Klungkung district deputy chief, said here last week.

Tjokorda Agung said the location of the proposed dam was once a sand mining site in Gunaksa village, Dawan sub district.

“About 100 hectares of land are needed for the project,” he added. The water reservoir was expected to meet the need of people in

Gianyar district and Denpasar city,” Tjokorda Agung said.“To supply waters to the two areas, the investor will install pipe which

will be in an approximately 38 kilometers long,” he explained.He said that if the survey is going according to the plan, the

construction will hopefully start this year.“We hope in 2013 the dam will be operated and supply waters to

Gianyar and Denpasar. The income from this project is expected to go to the Klungkung district`s original income,” Tjokorda Agung said.

Besides receiving Unda river`s water, the dam will also be developed as a water tourist site, he added.

INVESTMENT BRIEFS

The Investment Co-ordinating Board (BKPM) has set a target of lur-ing Rp240 trillion of investment this

year, up 15 percent of the real-ized investment of Rp208.5 tril-lion last year.

“We will achieve the 2011 in-vestment target by improving policies related to investment, providing better services, grant-ing fiscal facilities, and acceler-ating the development of infra-structure projects,” BKPM Chief Gita Wirjawan said on Sunday.

He said investment was expect-ed to continue to rise this year af-ter growing significantly by 54.2 percent to Rp208.5 trillion from Rp135.2 trillion a year earlier.

The 2011 investment climate would largely depend on the do-mestic political and economic conditions which had of late been very conducive, he said.

If the economic growth could be maintained at a range of 6-6.5 percent and the inflation rate reached 6-7 percent this would give positive signals to investors, he said.

In 2010, foreign investment in-flows reached Rp148 trillion, a 52 percent increase compared to Rp97.4 trillion the year before. Meanwhile, domestic investment rose to Rp60.5 trillion in 2010 from Rp37.8 trillion a year ago.

Most of the foreign investors came from South Korea, India

and a number of Middle Eastern countries.

Gita said since Pohang Steel and Iron Company (Posco) of South Korea signed a cooperation agreement with Indonesia s state-owned steel maker PT Kraka-tau Steel to make an investment of Rp6 trillion, more and more South Korean investors had ex-pressed interests in investing in the country.

One of them was tire mak-er Hancook Corp which would build a tire plant at a cost of US$1.2 billion in Bekasi, West Java, this year. The plant was ex-pected to be completed in 2014, he said.

Investment in 2010 up 54.2 pctBKPM recorded the domestic

(PMDN) and foreign (PMA) in-vestments in Indonesia in 2010 increased 54.2 percent from Rp135.2 trillion in 2009 to Rp208.5 trillion, its chief said.

He said that of the total in-vestment, Rp148.0 trillion was foreign investment (PMA) and Rp60.5 trillion was domestic one (PMDN).

“Compared with the target this year at Rp160.1 trillion, the investment realization exceeded the target by about 30.2 percent,” Gita said.

In accumulative terms, the in-crease in the PMDN in 2010 contributed 29 percent while in 2009 it only contributed 28 per-cent (Rp37.8 trillion), he said. The PMDN thus increased 60 percent in 2010.

RI to Attract Rp240 t Investment this Year

A Philippine investor is set to invest in West Sulawesi by build-ing a cacao processing plant in Mamuju this year.

“We just had a meeting in Ja-karta to follow up on the result of a cooperation with a Philip-pine investor on a plan to build a cacao processing plant,” Gover-nor H.Anwar Adnan Saleh said herelast week.

He said the Philippine inves-tor was very serious in building

a cacao processing plant in West Sulawesi because the region is a heavy chocolate consumer.

He said special machinery will be installed in Mamuju in the early days of the building of the processing plant this year.

The governor said that the Philippine investor decided to build the cacao processing plant in West Sulawesi because the area is a chocolate producer contrib-

uting 20 pct to the national out-put.

“We are merely supplying the cacao of the farmers in West Su-lawesi for processing at the plant which will be built. The result of the processing will be sent to their country,” he said.

He said another consideration which made the Philippine in-vestor to become interested in building the plant is the avail-ability of power in West Sulawesi

as this year several investors will be building hydro-electric power plants (PLTA) there.

Anwar said West Sulawesi is expected to produce 500,000 tons of cacao per year in the next few years, so that Indonesia will be able to produce one million tons per year.

He added that Indonesia can produce one million tons of ca-cao per year, it will take over the

position of the Ivory Coast as the world s biggest cacao producer.

“The cacao planting program boosted by the government in West Sulawesi is by planting 7.1 million cacao somatic embrio-genesis trees in 332,902 hect-ares,” he said.

“If the spreading of the SE seeds reached 332 hectares in West Su-lawesi, the province may be able to reach a production of 500,000 tons per year,” he said.

Philippine Firm to Build Cacao Processing Plant

The 2011 investment climate would largely depend on the domestic political and economic conditions which had of late been very conducive

Gita Wirjawan

Kesambi seed

Eddy Santana Putra

Garuda Indonesia goes public

PT Garuda Indonesia conducted an initial public offering (IPO) of about 40% of its ownership. Garuda targeted an income of Rp 3-4 trillion from the IPO.

The President Post/Nandi Nanti

MarketsThe President Post www.thepresidentpost.comFebruary 17, 2011B4

January CPI head-line inflation was an-nounced at 0.89% m-o-m or 7.02% y-o-y, which is higher than our forecast and con-

sensus (6.81%).Inflation was again pushed up

by food prices especially rice and chili, while prices of cooking oil and fish also picked up. It looks like most of the price increases were caused by a combination of bad weather negatively affecting domestic production and distri-bution, and the delayed policy re-sponse to import rice.

Up to January 2011, howev-er, the persistence of these food price increases have not started to creep through into core infla-tion yet. Prices of most of the pro-cessed food have been relatively stable; only rice meals and ciga-rettes have inflation. Note that core inflation was relatively sta-ble in January 2011 at 4.18% y-o-y vs 4.28% a month ago, and the slight decrease was probably due to the decline of gold (acces-sories) prices.

Yet inflation at the whole-sale level is still relatively stable (7.3%y-o-y in Jan-11) and is not too far above CPI inflation, and manufacturers have not passed through the costs increase to cus-tomers yet. However, BI’s De-cember 2010 consumer survey has shown an increasing trend of consumer’s expectation of infla-tion. The growth of money sup-ply has also risen rather rapid-ly (+15%y-o-y), which may push core inflation to rise.

Going forward, one key risk to watch with regard to infla-tion is the government’s forth-coming plan to ration subsidized fuel, which may not be effec-tively implemented. Our biggest

concern is more on the widening price discrepancies (between sub-sidized and market price of fuels), which have generated arbitrage activities, that push up subsidized fuel consumption beyond the al-located quota.

Meanwhile, the trade data for December 2010 registered a surplus of $3.69bn, which still looks robust, with non-oil and gas exports and imports con-tinue to post strong growth, at 5.42%mom and 4.33%mom, re-spectively.

It is still inconclusive that ex-port growth is trending down, de-spite the fact that export growth in December 2010 is down to 25.7% y-o-y from around 42.3%

in November. Coal exports shrunk amid slower demand from China, although exports of iron ore and palm oil continue to rise. Meanwhile, non-natural re-source exports (e.g. electrical ma-chinery and clothing) have been faring relatively well, although going forward they may also be impacted by the slow-down in developed economies.

Similarly the slowdown of im-port growth in Dec-10 is also in-conclusive. It looks like the Nov-10 growth number was a little bit odd.

Note that the growth in cap-ital goods imports is now stron-ger than that of raw materials (1.85%mom vs. 0.32%mom in

Dec-10), as local businesses con-tinue to invest in new machin-ery.

Despite the improvements of trade balance, we still think that the current account will like-ly shrink, as the income and ser-vices accounts in the balance of payments continue to rise due to profit and interest repatriation and higher costs of freight.

Policy ImplicationsHeadline inflation is again

above BI’s 4– 6% comfort range, and will likely remain that way in the several months to come. Although core inflation is once again relatively stable and on the low side, we think that it would not be permanent. We expect core inflation to rise rather rapid-ly towards the second half of the year, and may increase to around 5.5%yoy by the year-end. There-

Prices of Rice and Chili on the Rise, Again

By Helmi Arman

Jan-11(Actual)

Jan-11(Fcast)*

Jan-11(Cons.) Dec-10 Nov-10

Headline CPI (% chg y-o-y) 7.02 6.76 6.81 6.96 6.33

Headline CPI (% chg m-o-m) 0.89 0.65 0.71 0.92 0.60

Headline CPI (% chg y-t-d) 0.89 0.65 0.71 6.96 5.98

Core CPI (% chg y-o-y) 4.18 n.a. 4.30 4.28 4.31

Source: Bloomberg, CEIC, *Danamon Estimates

It looks like most of the price increases were caused by a combination of bad weather negatively affecting domestic production and distribution, and the delayed policy response to import rice.

fore, we think that the higher than expected January 2011 in-flation would trigger BI to raise its policy rate sooner (this Friday, 4-Jan-11, as oppose to our previ-ous expectation of Apr-11), at a gradual pace of increase (25bps) twice and consecutively. Thus, we maintain our BI rate forecast by the year end at 7.0%.

The priority for BI right now is tackling the increasing inflation-ary pressures, not managing cap-ital inflows nor pushing bank to lend more. BI’s policy action to raise foreign currency reserve re-quirement from currently 1% to 5% in March and to 8% in June 2011 is not a substitute for poli-cy rate hike at all. It is mostly in-tended to reduce its cost of mone-tary operation as it can absorb US dollar liquidity from the banking sector relatively free, compared to

doing foreign exchange sterilized intervention in the midst of mas-sive capital inflows.

With the move to raise its pol-icy rate now, financial investors will likely response positively, and thus we may see a rebound in the prices of financial instruments.

The writer is Economist/Econometri-cian Treasury & Capital Markets PT. Bank Danamon, Tbk.

Menara Bank Danamon, 8th Floor,Jalan Prof. Dr. Satrio Kav E IV No. 6, Mega Kuningan, Jakarta 12950,INDONESIA Phone:direct: +62 21 5799-1563; +62 21 5799-1001 Ext. 1128; Fax: +62 21 5799-1045/46; Mobile: +62 817 9123-111E-mail:anton.hendranata@danamon.co.id

Inflation was again pushed up by food prices especially rice and chili, while prices of cooking oil and fish also picked up.

The President Post/Nandi Nanti

2010 Dec-10 Nov-10 Oct-10 Sep-10

Export Growth (% y-o-y) 35.4 25.7 42.3 17.6 23.8

Import Growth (% y-o-y) 40.1 27.1 48.3 28.5 13.4

Trade Balance (US$bn) 22.1 3.69 2.27 2.28 2.53

Source: CEIC, BPS

FOR THE FIRST TIME IN JAKARTA, THE MINISTRY OF DEFENSE, REPUBLIC OF INDONESIA WILL HOST OFFICIAL DELEGATIONS FROM OVER 40 COUNTRIES TO MEET AND DISCUSS

STRENGTHENING GLOBAL SECURITY AND STABILITY

BALAI SIDANG JCC INDONESIA

CoordinatingMinistry of Political

Legal and Security AffairsRepublic of Indonesia

Ministry of DefenseRepublic of Indonesia

Indonesian NationalDefense Forces

Indonesian NationalPolice

Indonesian DefenseUniversity

JIDD - JAKARTA INTERNATIONALDEFENSE DIALOGUE 2011

JIDD - JAKARTA INTERNATIONALDEFENSE DIALOGUE 2011

Homeland Security, Counter-Terrorism and Counter-Insurgency will be discussed alongside Peacekeep-ing Efforts, Humanitarian Relief, Search and Rescue, Disaster Management and Prevention, as well as protecting Critical National Infrastructure - global issues that connect the security and defense commu-nity. The JIDD 2011 will highlight and discuss one of the community’s most relevant topics - building ca-pabilities by adopting the latest strategies and technologies through Technology Transfer, Countertrade, Outsourcing and Offset.

HE Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, President of the Re-public of Indonesia*HRH Prince Mohamed Bolkiah, Minister of Foreign Affairs and Trade, Brunei DarussalamHE Dr. Purnomo Yusgiantoro, Minister of Defense, Republic of IndonesiaMr. Gerald Howarth MP, Minister for International Se-curity Strategy, UKMs. Janet Napolitano, Secretary, Department of Homeland Security, USA*General Khalid Shamim Wyne HI (M), Chairman Joint Chiefs of Staff Committee of Pakistan Armed ForcesDr. Stefanie Babst, Acting Assistant Secretary General for Public Diplomacy, NATO

•

•

•

•

•

•

•

Vice Air Marshal Eris Herryanto, Secretary General, Ministry of Defense, Republic of IndonesiaMr. Shri Satyajeet Rajan, Chairperson, Defence Offset Facilitation Agency (DOFA) of Ministry of Defence, IndiaColonel Ömer Faruk Demircioğlu, Director, Centre of Excellence Defence Against Terrorism, TurkeyMr. Neil K. Rutter, European, Legal and Strategic Plan-ning Committees, Global Offset & Counter Trade (GOCA)Professor Christopher Andrew, Professor of Modern and Contemporary History, University of Cambridge, UK, Official Historian of the British Security Service (MI5)

•

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JIDD Speaker Faculty to includeJIDD Speaker Faculty to Include

JAKARTA, IS THE NEW CENTER FOR SECURITY AND DEFENSE DIALOGUEJAKARTA, IS THE NEW CENTER FOR SECURITY AND DEFENSE DIALOGUE

ASIA-PACIFICSECURITY & DEFENSE EXPOalongside and in support of JIDD 2011, APSDEX serves as the exclusive showcase to sup-port the topics being discussed within the conference. This unique pairing of conference and showcase creates a 3-D approach to explore the latest and greatest opportunities to develop a stronger industry in support of security and defense.

MEDIA SUPPORT

23-25 MARCH 2011

23-25 MARCH 2011

* to be confirmedJIDD Event Secretariat: Jl. Salemba Raya no 14, Jakarta Pusat 10430, Indonesia | T +62 21 367 43951

www.jidd.org info@jidd.org

APSDEX Secretariat: Jl. Teluk Betung, #43, Jakarta Pusat, 10230 | T +62 21 391 3037 www.apsdex.com info@apsdex.com

PropertyThe President Post www.thepresidentpost.comFebruary 17, 2011B6

The Indonesian econ-omy charted sig-nificant accelerat-ed growth in 2010. The economy grew by 6.1% in 2010

with contributions from the in-vestment sector higher than the previous year. Other econom-ic indicators also showed positive trends, such as the value of rupi-ah that continues to strengthen and attractive interest rates. The inflation escalation that occurred in 2010 was controllable.

Condusive economic condi-tions carry implications for the improved performance of the property market in 2010. This is shown by several indicators be-low:

More active construction ac-•tivitiesIncreasing number of new •projects Increasing number of leased •and sales transactiond in most property market sectors Occupancy and sales rate in-•creased averagelyLease and selling prices showed •positive fluctuations

Jakarta Office MarketSenior Vice President of re-

search and consultancy of Cold-well Banker Indonesia, Tommy Bastamy, explained that “the Ja-karta Office Market continues to show more positive indicators with higher contribution from business expansions and new es-tablished companies.”

Net absorption of leaseable of-fice space in Jakarta was 208,000 sqm in 2010, which increased oc-cupancy by 3.3% to 89.7%. The market office activities at CBD remains dominant with absorp-tion about 80% of total take-up. Meanwhile, the absorption in non-CBD areas were mostly ab-sorbed by developments in South Jakarta.

Improved demand and occu-pancy level of leaseable office in Jakarta resulted in an increase in rent price by 2.4% in IDR or 6.9% in US dollar.

Strata-titled office also showed improved performance in 2010. Stock in existing buildings was limited as most strata-title office space was absorbed by the mar-ket. Under-construction projects and newly completed buildings dominated strata title office space transactions in 2010.

Office market performance is estimated to increase in the next two years in line with the prog-ress of macroeconomic condi-tions and the increased invest-ment realization, both foreign and domestic. Rental and sell-ing rates are expected to acceler-ate following an improvement in demand and occupancy level.

Jakarta Retail MarketRegarding the retail market,

Tommy Bastamy explained that “The absorption of leaseable re-tail space in 2010 was hampered by limited new supply.”

Leaseable retail market in Ja-karta recorded an absorption of

99.300sqm in 2010, lower than in the previous year. Neverthe-less, limited new supply in 2010 made permanent occupancy rate rise to 87.9% or an increase of 1.5% over the previous year. New dwellings in newly completed centers such as Gandaria City and Central Park were the main contributor to the absorption in 2010. F&B outlets, Department Stores, Hypermarkets and enter-tainment venues were main con-tributors to leasing activities dur-ing 2010.

The influx of new supply in Jakarta will lead to a more com-petitive market. This leased re-tail market will remain tight in the next two years. The occu-pancy rate is expected to rise in 2011 but decrease in 2012 follow-ing the entry of new supply. The rental rates are expected to expe-rience a slight increase due to ad-justment of established leaseable retail projects.

Greater Jakarta Strata Condominium Market and Leased Apartment

Strata Condominium•Vice President of Research and

Consultancy Coldwell Banker Indonesia, Dwi Novita Yeni, re-vealed, “the strata condominium market in Jakarta recorded posi-tive performance in terms of sup-ply and demand in line with de-velopers’ active expansion.”

The net demand of condomin-ium market in Jakarta reached 8.950 units, growing by 148% in 2010. Most of this absorption, which is 83.6%, are derived from condos that are still in under con-struction, while the remaining 16.4% came from existing proj-ects. Growth of take-up rate was followed by increasing sale price reaching 9.4% for under con-struction projects and 4.3% for existing projects.

The take-up rate for under

construction projects are mostly units that were launched in 2010, which is a continuation of devel-opment of some super-blocs that re-marketed new towers. The projects generally target the mid-dle-upper segment such as Ke-mang Village with Tower Inter-con, St.Moritz with Royal Tower 2, Casablanca City with Montre-al Tower and others.

Strata condo market perfor-mance is expected to increase in the next two years mainly sup-ported by stable interest rates at low level. Though there is a pos-sibility that interest rates might increase due to inflation, it is esti-mated to remain within the lim-its of tolerance and will not inhib-it the take-up rate to rise. Selling price is expected to increase along with increasing absorption.

Leased Apartment •Dwi Novita Yeni further re-

vealed that “the leaseable apart-ment market is showing positive growth demand that grows mod-erately thanks to expatriates from Asian countries.”

Demand for lease apartment

market in 2010 reached 544 units and led the average occu-pancy to rose by 3.2% to 73.5%. Based on its location, lease apart-ment in CBD area remains the most preferable area as most mul-tinational companies are based in this area. As for non-CBD area, the absorption is mainly in South Jakarta, which has reasonably good access to the business corri-dor on Jl.TB Simatupang. Leased apartment in CBD recorded a higher occupancy level of 77,7%, whilst secondary recorded 70,7% at 2010. Rental rate remained sta-ble during 2010 as a consequence of low occupancy rate.

Rising foreign investment re-alization in 2010 and the possi-bility of continued growth in the next two years is expected to af-fect the demand for leased apart-ment. Sales rate is estimated to decrease due to massive addition-al supply in the next two years.

Some additional supplies of condominium and leased apart-ment will appear in areas with large scale residential estates that actively undertake commercial development, such as the plan of service apartments development under the management of Aston in Serpong.

Greater Jakarta Landed Residential Market

On landed residential market,

Dwi Novita Yeni explained that “the residential market record-ed a positive demand growth in all market segments, especial-ly the middle-up segment which recorded highest growth in de-mand.”

The absorption of residen-tial market in 2010 grew 23.2% with the number of sales reach-ing 6.671 units backed by stable mortgage at a low level.

Based on market segments, the highest sales growth is recorded by the upper market segment (≥ Rp. 500 million) which increased by 5 7.5%. This is due to the up-per market segment being rela-tively more stable against interest rates changes and its higher pur-chasing power.

Housing sales in 2010 was

dominated by the lower mar-ket segment, which contributed 50.6% of total sales, followed by middle and upper market with 26.4% and 23.0%

The residential market is ex-pected to continue to rise in the next two years. From the supply side, developers are starting to ex-pand by launching clusters and new products in 2011.

Condotel in Bali

The Bali Condotel develop-ment has been on the rise and

buoyant since 2006. Though some Condotel projects were there before 2006, the Condotel concept and implementation was not really popular.

“The concept of Condotel in Bali in recent years was domi-nated by local investors and is expected to further increase, al-though almost 90% Condotels in Bali have a system does not al-low the owner to occupy them,” described Fransiska Hendri - Managing Partner Svarga Prop-erty Coldwell Banker Bali.

Nevertheless, the concept of

Condotel is considered to provide greater benefits to investors rela-tive to other concepts. The ben-efits in the Condotel system is that an investor has a unit man-aged like at least a three-star ho-tel with an attractive return on investment. And if the Condo-tel units are sold back then the re-turn on investment capital is usu-ally high.

The weakness of owning a Condotel is that owners are re-quired to follow the management system by the operator, including booking procedures which have been agreed by both sides. The reputation and credibility of hotel managers are an important fac-tor that will guarantee Condotel owners’ satisfaction and comfort.

2010 Performance, 2011 Property Prospects and Recent Condotel Development in Bali

Condusive economic conditions carry

implications for the improved performance of the property market

in 2010.

COLDWELL BANKER INDONESIAColdwell Banker is a property consultant firm,

established in 1906 based in the United States. With over one hundred years of experience, Coldwell Banker is consistent in integrity and professional ethics in meeting various needs of investment, valuation and property management for each clients worldwide.

Consistent innovation and breakthroughs are tradition that bring Coldwell Banker to stay ahead and be the best option for clients who require independent and strategic navigation of property market development in decision making process.

Based on that philosophy, Coldwell Banker focuses

its services into two brands, namely Coldwell Banker Commercial (CBC®) and Coldwell Banker Property (CBP®).

Coldwell Banker Property business networks are in 50 countries with 98.000 real estate agents at 3.600 offices. Coldwell Banker Commercial has 220 companies and more than 3.400 employees worldwide.

Coldwell Banker has been in Indonesia since more than ten years as the representative for both CBP® and CBC®.

Coldwell Banker Commercial is a solution to the research and consulting services, investment, valuation, project concept development, marketing, leasing, auctions, property management and construction for various sectors of property.

Coldwell Banker Property aims to provide purchasing services and various property investment such as residential and land properties, landed residential and apartment on secondary and primary markets. CBP in this case also provides propert business opportunities for companies and individuals who want to have achievements in the real estate.

For further information, please contact:Tommy Bastamy, Senior Vice President - Research & Consultancy at 0818 0890 4700 Dwi Novita Yeni, Vice President - Research & Consultancy at 0815 9538 731Dini Priadi, Vice President - Marketing Communications & Franchise at 0811 88 1165 / 088 1165 1872

Phone +62 21 255 39 388 / Fax +62 21 255 39 399Website: www.coldwellbanker.co.idE-mail: tommybastamy@coldwellbanker.co.iddnovita@coldwellbanker.co.iddpriadi@coldwellbanker.co.id

The concept of Condotel is considered to provide greater benefits to investors relative to other concepts. The benefits in the Condotel system is that an investor has a unit managed like at least a three-star hotel with an attractive return on investment. And if the Condotel units are sold back then the return on investment capital is usually high.

Office market performance

is estimated to increase in the next

two years in line with the progress

of macroeconomic conditions and the

increased investment realization, both

foreign and domestic. Rental and selling

rates are expected to accelerate following

an improvement in demand and

occupancy level.

The President Postwww.thepresidentpost.com February 17, 2011 B7

Technology

Cloud computing greatly simplifies the processes involved in managing complex, customized, expen-sive IT infrastruc-

tures and solutions, and the large in-house IT teams that support them. By leveraging on the pow-er of Software as a Service (SaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS), and Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), cloud computing frees compa-nies from the need to have spe-cialized teams or services that handle software, platforms, and infrastructure.

“Microsoft has more than 15 years experience in Cloud Com-puting and has total commitment to continue to develop it. Cloud Summit is one form of commit-ment and our investment to im-

prove public knowledge about Cloud technology”, said Sutan-to Hartono, President Director of PT Microsoft Indonesia.

An analyst Gartner, who was featured as one of the speakers at the event, said that CIOs in Asia look at virtualization and cloud computing as a top priority in 2011, in contrast with the main priorities of information tech-nology since 2007 and 2008, i.e. around business intelligence and enterprise applications.

Cloud Computing allows busi-nesses to reduce their concern on IT infrastructure mainte-nance and will focus on business growth efforts. Changes that are supported by qualified informa-tion technology like cloud com-puting will become a strategic el-ement for business actors to adapt unforeseen challenges and to take advantage of existing opportuni-

ties.Chris Sharp, Regional Strate-

gist Cloud Microsoft Asia Pacif-ic and Japan, explained, “With the development of cloud com-puting as an important business tool, Microsoft believes that the Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS), Software-as-a -Service (SaaS) and Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS), can provide benefits for the company through several ways: changes of demand for ‘ca-pacity’ to demand for ‘capabili-ties’; reduce the cost of comput-ing resources, not only in terms of hardware but also related to space and power; to facilitate changes of technology use into value-in use or benefit consump-tion; and to get profit from pay-ing only what it is used.”

Brian Prentice, Research VP, and Gartner gave details about Cloud services around the world that reach US$68,3 billion on

Microsoft Stands as a Leaderon Cloud Computing

Microsoft once again proved itself to be

the leader in Cloud Computing. On

January, Microsoft held Cloud Summit 2011 in Jakarta as

part of a series of road shows since November 2010. Cloud Summit

2011 was also held in the Philippines,

Thailand, Singapore and Australia.

2010, an increase of 16,6% from 2009’s turnover of US$58,6 bil-lion. On 2014, the number is projected to reach US$148,8 bil-lion. “Companies apparently will spend US$112 billion cumula-tively for SaaS, PaaS, and IaaS within five years in the future,” he said.

Gartner sees 76% of compa-nies taking Private Cloud strate-gy in 2011, in which 75% of them will invest more on Private Cloud in IT organization as reported by Gartner Data Center Conference Polls on December 2009.

Sutanto explained that Mi-crosoft invited the company to choose the best scenario for the company; to use Public Cloud and Private Cloud, or even com-bine them in Hybrid Cloud envi-ronment.

“Microsoft is very flexible, we designed plans and systems ac-

“Microsoft has more than 15 years experience in Cloud Computing and has total commitment to continue to develop it. Cloud Summit is one form of commitment and our investment to improve public knowledge about Cloud technology.”

Sutanto HartonoPresident Director ofPT Microsoft Indonesia

cording to the needs businesses,” he said.

To serve the needs of Public Cloud, in Indonesia Microsoft is partnering with PT Telkom as the largest telecommunications com-pany in Indonesia, Agit. which offers a number of virtual servic-es and private online, Greenview, which focuses on infrastructure services, and PT Infynis System Indonesia, which offers integrat-ed online communication servic-es and Online Exchange.

Meanwhile, Microsoft Private

Cloud service is strengthened by Hyper-V technology and System Center, which has a number of advantages such as easy to con-nect with Public Cloud imme-diately whenever the user wants, capable of handling a variety of hypervisors from several vendors at once - across all Cloud envi-ronments.

Microsoft Private Cloud is highly profitable, while the value of investment needed is only one-third compared to that offered by competitors. In addition, Micro-soft has local and regional part-ners ready to assist corporate con-sumers of Cloud.

“Currently we have 17 corpo-rate consumers who are building Private Cloud architecture using Hyper-V technology and System Center,” said Sutanto.

“We are very proud that con-sumers are starting to under-stand how Cloud can be used to meet their business needs. Micro-soft is not saying that everyone should start using Cloud now. Nevertheless, we think consum-ers should begin to evaluate and consider the use of Cloud for spe-cific jobs to see the possibility on how Cloud can yield an improve-ment over other models,” he con-cluded.

By Jeannifer Filly Sumayku

The MostComprehensive

IT Solutions:On-Premisesto the Cloud

COMMUNICATIONPRODUCTIVITY COLLABORATION BUSINESS APPS IDENTITY PLATFORM

CLOUD SERVICES

ON-PREMISES

GDP GROWTH (%)By QuarterYear on Year

% Index*2000=100

165

95

105

115

125

135

145

155

8

0

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

05

06

07 09

08

Q1

Q2

Q3

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Q2

Q3

Q4

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Q2

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Q3

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Q1

Q2

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Q2

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201020092008200720062005

INFLATION 66 CITIES109

General

Food

WPI

Index

106

103

100

97NovJ S OJ

10F Mar A M

2010

AugJun D

107.0

J11

105.5

EXPORT AND IMPORTS(US$ Million)

16,000

14,000

12,000

10,000

8,000

6,000

4,000

2,000

0NJ S ODec

09Jan10

F Mar A M

2010

AugJun

*Q4 2000=100

Exports

Imports

Dec10

Crude Oil-LHS

Palm Oil-RHS

COMMODITY PRICES Mal$ permetric ton

Sumatran LightUS$/barrel

4,000

88

83

78

73

68

3,750

3,500

3,250

3,000

2,750

2,500

2,250

M$ 3,8140

$89.5

M$ 2,450

$72.9

NJ S OJ10

F Mar A M

2010

AugJun D10

J11

93

Executive HighlightsThe President Post www.thepresidentpost.comFebruary 17, 2011B8

Economy accelerated by 6.1% Y-O-Y for the full year 2010,

slightly higher than the market consensus of 6% and higher than the government’s target of 5.8%, driven by rising investments, ex-ports and solid domestic demand. Household consumption, which accounts for nearly two-thirds of the economy, grew by 4.6%. Fixed investments saw growth of 8.5%. Investments as a percent-age of GDP reached 32.2% as of end-2010, up from 31.1% in 2009 and 27.7% in 2008, highlighting Indonesia’s growing attractive-ness as an investment destination for global firms. Net exports also grew by 7.5%, driven by high-er commodity prices as well as higher export volume. Govern-ment consumption, meanwhile, increased by only 0.3% in 2010 compared to 15.7% growth in 2009, highlighting the remov-al of stimulus measures last year as well as state spending that con-tinues to be hampered by bureau-cratic log jams. Looking at the Q4 2010 numbers on a sector-by-sector basis, non-oil and gas man-ufacturing industries grew at its highest pace in four years at 6%. Growth in basic metals industries hit a seven-year high of 10.7%, while the textile and footwear in-dustries grew at its fastest rate in three years at 6.8%. The 2010 economic data also showed GDP per capita surpassing US$3,000 (Rp27 million) for the first time, putting Indonesia into the catego-ry of “middle-income nations” as defined by the World Bank. The government is projecting growth of 6.4% for 2011.

Bank Indonesia (BI) raised its benchmark rate by 25 basis points to 6.75% this February,

the first increase in 18 months from a historic low of 6.5%. The move was a surprise to mar-ket players, most of who predict-ed that rates would be left un-changed. It underscores efforts by the central bank to show it is se-rious in fighting inflation amidst the perception it has been behind the curve relative to other coun-tries in Asia that have already be-gun monetary tightening. Con-sumer prices increased by 7% in January, 100 basis points above BI’s indicative range of 4-6%. Food prices surged 16% and made up half of the January head-line inflation figure. In its Febru-ary policy statement, the central bank also asserted that it would adopt measures to “strengthen its exchange rate policy” and better manage market liquidity to con-tain inflation. Many analysts see this as a fundamental shift in tone by BI to allow for a signif-icantly stronger rupiah, after the bank spent a large part of 2010 fighting currency appreciation. The bank also underscored the importance of coordinating pol-icy with the government to ad-dress inflation pressures. On the economic front, the BI forecast growth of 6-6.5% this year on the back of strong domestic de-mand, rising investment and in-creasing exports in line the global economic recovery. It is project-ing growth of 6.4% in Q1.

The rupiah has strengthened to a three-month high of around Rp8,910 to the dollar as of 9 February.

BI deputy governor Budi Mulya said recently there was a good chance the rupiah would appreciate below 8,900 in the near-term amidst rising capital inflows. Analysts say several factors have come into play to drive the currency’s appreciation. BI’s unexpected rate hike earlier this month plus its bullish tone on the rupiah has boosted investor confidence the central

bank is finally serious in fighting inflation. Better than expected 2010 GDP figures, meanwhile, underscored the positive outlook for the economy.

Bank Indonesia said it would stop monthly auctions of its SBI debt with tenors of less than nine months.

The bank said the move was part of measures to reduce the risks of foreign capital flows, deepen the local financial market and reduce commercial banks’ reli-ance on BI’s short-term paper to manage excess liquidity. The lat-est move comes following previ-ous measures implemented since June last year, including a one-month minimum holding peri-od for its SBI’s, ending auctions of one-month SBI’s and issuing term deposits – which are not tradable and must be held to ma-turity. As of 1 February, foreign investors held Rp142.7 trillion of SBI’s, down from Rp200.1 tril-lion in the first week of January. Analysts expect BI’s measures to encourage more investors to in-vest in government bonds while encouraging commercial banks to increase loans instead of park-ing their money in BI paper.

The government raised Rp5.5 trillion in its latest bond auction earlier this week,

slightly higher than the Rp5 tril-lion initially targeted amid re-newed demand from foreign investors. The finance minis-try sold Rp900 billion in one-year treasury bills with a yield of 6.55%, Rp1 trillion of five-year bonds yielding 8.22%, Rp1.5 trillion of 15-year bonds yield-ing 9.54% and Rp2.1 trillion of 20-year bonds yielding 10.01%. Bid-to-cover ratios on the 20-year bonds were more than twice that of last month’s auction with yields around 10 basis points low-er, highlighting renewed interest from investors reassured of BI’s policy tightening and hawkish rhetoric on inflation. Proceeds from the bond sale will be used to help finance the budget deficit, which is projected to reach 1.8% of GDP this year. The govern-ment is looking to sell a total of more than Rp200 trillion in local and foreign debt this year to fund the deficit.

State energy firm Pertamina said it was allocating US$4.1 billion in capital expenditures this year, up 86% from 2010.

Company investment planning director Frederick Siahaan said around US$1 billion of this was earmarked for acquisitions, not-ing that it was already engaging in talks with domestic and over-seas oil and gas firms for poten-tial asset purchases. The execu-tive said Pertamina was looking for assets at the production or development stage with a mini-mum production of 5,000 barrels of oil per day or 100 million cubic feet of gas per day. The company also plans to drill 76 exploration wells and 221 production wells this year. Pertamina is looking to produce 470,310 barrels of oil equivalent per day this year, up 6% from 2010. It also projects to increase oil and condensate out-put to 208,000 barrels per day, up 8.3% from a year earlier. Nat-ural gas output, meanwhile, is projected to rise by 4.4% this year to 1.52 billion cubic feet per day.

Garuda Indonesia has signed a deal with Standard Chartered Bank for financing the purchase of 10 Boeing 737-800 Next Generation (NG) aircraft.

Financial details were not dis-closed. The airplanes are sched-uled to be delivered between De-cember 2011 and May 2012, and are part of a total of 25 737-800 NGs that Garuda has or-dered from Boeing. Simon Per-kins, managing director of Standard Chartered Bank’s avi-ation finance division, said the deal reflected the bank’s ability and commitment to support cli-ents’ business growth and expan-sion, and underscored the bank’s multi-product capabilities. Gar-uda chief executive Emirsyah Sa-tar said the financing agreement would support the carrier’s on-going fleet expansion, which is expected to bring its fleet to 153 aircraft including Boeing 737-

800 NGs, Boeing 777-300 ERs and Airbus A330s by 2015 from 87 currently.

Motorcycle financier summit OTO Finance has secured US$200 million in funding from the International Finance Corporation (IFC).

The funding will be divided into two tranches: a US$25 million loan with a three-year term pro-vided by IFC, and a US$125 mil-lion, five-year term loan sourced from a number of private funds and managed by IFC. It is Sum-mit Oto’s second credit facility from the IFC, following a US$75 million deal last year. Funds from the latest loan will be used to finance Summit Oto’s cred-it expansion this year. Company president Djohan Marzuki said the firm aimed to extend financ-

ing for more than 1.1 million motorcycles this year, up 17% from the 940,000 motorcycles fi-nanced in 2010. Summit Oto is majority owned by Japan’s Sumi-tomo Corporation. The firm fo-cuses mainly on low and middle-income consumers. The IFC is the private lending arm of the World Bank.

Bank Negara Indonesia (BNI) has signed a loan agreement worth US$150 million with the U.S. Exim Bank.

BNI corporate director Krish-na Suprapto said the loan facili-ty would support small business-es and entrepreneurs in getting better access to working capital and purchasing U.S. products. He said the loan deal implement-ed a MoU signed last year by the U.S. Exim Bank and 11 nation-al banks for a credit facility worth more than US$1 billion for In-donesian businesses purchasing U.S. goods. Other banks that are expected to receive financial sup-port from the U.S. Exim Bank include Bank Mandiri, Bank Rakyat Indonesia (BRI), Bank Central Asia (BCA), Bank Da-namon, Bank Panin and Bank CIMB-Niaga. The U.S. Exim Bank views Indonesia as a top priority, along with eight other emerging markets, to expand its financing.

State miner Aneka Tambang (Antam) said it was extending a US$140 million loan facility to its subsidiary Indonesia Chemical Alumina.Antam president director Al-win Syah Loebis said the mon-ey would help fund work on a planned chemical grade alumi-na processing facility in Tayan, West Kalimantan. The plant is slated to produce 300,000 tons of alumina per year. The facility is 80% owned by Antam and 20% owned by Japanese firm Showa

Denko. Construction is slated to start this quarter, with commer-cial production set for Q1 2014. Japan’s Tsukishima Kikai and lo-cal firms Wijaya Karya and Nu-santara Energi Abadi have been contracted to build the plant. Under the joint venture agree-ment between Antam and Showa Denko, two-thirds of the output from the Tayan facility will be ex-ported to Japan, with the remain-der to be sold on the Indonesian spot market.

Kangean Energy has signed sales and purchase agreements to supply 300 million cubic feet per day of gas to three companies: state power utility PLN, Per-tamina Gas (Petragas) and pri-vate firm Indogas Kriya Dwi-guna (Indogas). Under the terms of the deal, PLN will pur-chase 369 trillion British ther-mal units (tbtu) of gas at a price of US$5.15/million metric British thermal units (mmbtu) for a peri-od of 16 years starting 2012. Pe-tragas will buy 221 tbtu of gas at US$5.15/mmbtu over a period of nine years starting 2012. Indo-gas will purchase 79 tbtu of gas also at US$5.15 over a period of 10 years starting 2012. The gas will be supplied from Kangean’s Terang Sirasun Batur fields lo-cated offshore East Java. Imam Agustino, the president direc-tor of Kangean Energy’s parent firm Energi Mega Persada, said the deal would have a significant impact on the company’s future cash flows, but declined to pro-vide details. Kangean Energy’s production sharing contract area has gas reserves estimated at near-ly two trillion cubic feet.

Singapore telecommunications firm Spice i2i has acquired indonesian mobile handset producer and distributor Affinity

Group in a US$175 million deal. Affinity owns the “Nexian” brand mobile phones that control around 20-25% of the domestic market. The group also distrib-utes and sells handsets for com-panies like Blackberry, HTC and Motorola, as well as mobile phone connections through its network of branches and independent re-tailers. Affinity reportedly gener-ated revenues totaling more than US$600 million as of end-2010. Spice i2i said the acquisition was part of its strategy to establish an integrated telecoms business into the Southeast Asia region. ANZ Singapore and DBS Bank ad-vised Spice i2i on the deal, while Morgan Stanley acted as finan-cial advisor for Affinity.

U.S. retail giant Wal-Mart is reportedly in talks to partner with Matahari Putra Prima to develop its “Hypermart” hypermarket chain.

Matahari is controlled by the Lip-po Group. Wal-Mart was report-edly on the short-list to purchase Matahari, together with South Korea’s Lotte Shopping and France’s Casino Guichard Perra-chon, before Lippo scrapped the sale last month due to low bids. Lippo is now looking to expand Hypermart through a strategic partnership that could still in-clude a significant stake sale in Matahari. Matahari currently generates around US$1 billion in revenue from more than 50 Hy-permart outlets operating across the country. A key issue for Ma-tahari has been to strengthen its logistics operations to improve efficiency in face of increasingly tight margins.

Business Highlights are contributed to The President Post by CASTLEASIA/PT Jasa Cita from information supplied to members of their CEO Forum, the Indonesia Country Program. They are reprinted here with permission. For more information about CASTLEASIA programs, please contact Juliette or Wijayanti at 62 21 572 7321 or email castle@castleasia.com subject CEO Forum

Selected Instant Indicators

The President Post

Education CSECTION

www.thepresidentpost.comDisplay until March 17, 2011 /// N0. 21

At least that’s the idea behind a new crop of Web services sprout-ing up across high-er education insti-tutions in America.

Education observers in Asia be-lieve that very soon this will drive the way in which teachers prepare their classroom presentation ma-terial.

In North America today, col-leges, entrepreneurs, and publish-ers, all drawn by the buzz of social media, are competing to market software that makes sharing class notes or collaborating on calcu-lus problems as simple as updat-ing your Facebook status.

In countries like Indonesia, this will be very attractive giv-en the fact that most high school and university students sit in front of their laptops and person-al computers for hours every day to update their social networking accounts.

These young people generally can easily get bored of learning in the classroom but not so when they study while relaxing on their social media sites.

Already the teaching-learning revolution is changing the ways in which American university professors approach their daily assignments. This is why educa-tors believe that this pedagogical revolution will soon inspire the rest of the world to follow suit.

According to Jeffrey R. Young who writes for The Chronicle, many of the social-learning sites are, like OpenStudy, for-profit companies—or at least they as-pire to be so once their services take off. And some of their busi-ness plans rely on a controversial practice: paying students for their notes.

Students preferred using it for things like looking at friends’ photos. Many students, in fact, prefer sticking to their own notes on courses, rather than trusting friends.

Despite those concerns, more than a dozen sites are racing to sign up users for their social-studying services. Here’s a look at four of the most interesting teaching-learning forums Asian schools are now exploring:

FinalsClubWhat it does: Free site for shar-

ing Harvard University course notes that plans to expand to oth-er elite universities.

When Andrew Magliozzi posted his notes from a Harvard course on a public blog, the pro-fessor told him to stop because he was disturbing the intimacy of the classroom.

Magliozzi, who declined to identify the professor, took the notes down. But the incident spurred him to create a nonprof-it Web site, FinalsClub.org, that aspires to disturb the intimacy of classrooms across America’s elite colleges.

Magliozzi chose the name as an ironic nod to Harvard’s final clubs—those elite organizations, immortalized in the film about the founders of Facebook, The Social Network, which are ru-mored to maintain private cach-es of study guides for Harvard courses.

Now students don’t need to join an exclusive club, or even at-tend Harvard, to get the notes to lectures given by star professors.

Those few who slam their class-room doors on Internet note shar-ing, however, can be vehement in their objections. Some consider it intellectual-property theft.

One, the economist Greg

Mankiw, told The Boston Globe that he turned down FinalsClub because he didn’t want to help students skip class.

OpenStudy

What it does: Links learners who want to study free online educational content like MIT’s OpenCourseWare.

With thousands of indepen-dent students enrolling in gigan-tic open online courses, why not vast online study groups, too?

OpenStudy, a start-up compa-ny spun off by Georgia Tech and Emory, is betting that the de-mand exists.

Its Web site is the latest effort to create a social platform for in-dependent learners who want to help one another study the huge trove of educational materials published free online by univer-sities like MIT and Yale.

The free site has 11,000 us-ers so far, including a pilot proj-ect with MIT that points users to OpenStudy from the Web sites of several of the university’s open, noncredit course-content sites.

The company hopes to make money by offering a premium version of the software with more features.

paid in gift certificates for Star-bucks or other retailers.)

“At the end of the day, the cash is nice,” he says.

He has given his notes to friends for years for no payment, he says, and though he knows some pro-fessors might object if they knew about the site, he sees no problem in making public something that might help others study.

The site has had to work to dis-tinguish itself from online servic-es that give away or sell term pa-pers and exam answers.

All posted documents are re-viewed within 48 hours, she says, and any exam answers and term papers are removed. Yet some things do slip through. On a re-cent afternoon, an exam, with answers, from a course at George-town University was listed as one of the highest-rated items on the site, and had been online for months.

To build interest in the site, McGraw-Hill has designated “campus ambassadors” at 50 col-leges who have agreed to promote the service.

On some campuses, they have sent e-mails to the mailing lists of their fraternities or sororities ask-ing friends to give it a try.

Ms. Sawtell says the student representatives are not paid, al-though they are eligible for priz-es from the company. The pub-lisher hopes that colleges will end up endorsing the site and point-ing students to it. To encourage that, the company is planning to add an institutional-subscription service in January.

MixableWhat it does: Lets students

share notes and coursework as well as form study groups with-in Facebook, using a free appli-cation developed at Purdue Uni-versity.

“We’re looking to take advan-tage of the students’ native envi-ronment,” says Kyle D. Bowen, director of informatics at Purdue and one of the leaders of a univer-sity project to build a new study tool. That natural habitat was Fa-cebook, focus groups of students told him.

So Bowen and his team built Mixable, an application that plugs in to the social network. (A Web version also exists that al-lows non-Facebook users to try it.) Project leaders think that stu-dents are more comfortable now than two years ago—when Ini-gral’s Facebook Courses project flopped—with the idea of blend-ing work and play.

Anyone on the campus can download Mixable free and add it to his or her Facebook profile by simply clicking on a link and agreeing to allow the application to run.

Then they can invite Facebook friends to install it as well. Once the application is enabled, stu-dents can upload notes or oth-er documents through it, thanks to the university’s partnership

with an online file-storage service called Dropbox.

Brittany Robertson, a junior studying elementary education at Purdue University was quoted as saying recently by The Chronicle that she usually is on Facebook at least four or five hours each day,

and that she appreciates that Mix-able uses the same familiar inter-face and lets her easily shift from study to socializing.

Given the fact that this peda-gogical revolution is taking place, teachers in Asia need to make necessary adjustments otherwise

they will be left behind by stu-dents’ mastery of the information and communication technology (ICT).

In countries like Indone-sia, however, application of such technological approach requires

provision of technology-savvy teachers which itself is a big prob-lem to solve.

But, like it or not, since the world is heading in this direction, teachers only have one option—upgrade their expertise to boost the quality of teaching.

Teaching Revolutionas New Software Enters Classroom

By Widya Sanjaya

Software developers have now introduced a new approach to teaching—using the love of Facebook as a magnet to boost learners’ attitude toward learning. This is based on the belief that nowadays most students live on Facebook, so study tools that act like social networks should be student magnets.

In countries like Indonesia, however,

application of such technological approach requires

provision of technology-savvy teachers which itself is a big

problem to solve.

Here’s how OpenStudy works. Users build personal study net-works by following other stu-dents and joining groups.

When they have a question, the site pushes it out to their ex-tended network and match-es them with people available to work with them.

Similarly, if users come to the site, ask their question, and there’s no one around to answer it, they’ll quickly leave and prob-ably not come back.

When most early users exhib-it this ‘lame party’ behavior, how do you get the critical mass your site needs to succeed?”

OpenStudy understands that risk, and its founders say they hope to build up critical mass by working with university content providers beyond MIT.

GradeGuruWhat it does: The note-shar-

ing site is run by a major textbook publisher, McGraw-Hill Educa-tion, and pays students small re-wards—in cash or gift cards—based on the popularity of their notes. The site makes all of the notes free to visitors.

The draw here, for many, is getting paid for something they already did. “I take all my notes on my computer,” says Tarun Gangwani, a senior majoring in cognitive science at Indiana Uni-versity at Bloomington.

“They’re on my hard drive, so it’s not like I’m making any big hassle.”

So far he has posted notes from 65 lectures to the site, on cours-es such as “Neuroanatomy” and “Early Chinese Philosophy.” For his trouble, he’s made about $200 in credit to his PayPal account. (He also could have opted to be

EducationThe President Post www.thepresidentpost.comFebruary 17, 2011C2

Perhaps the biggest evidence of this era’s pedagogical revolu-tion is best seen in Khan Academy, a successful one-man

show on YouTube with more than 50,000 followers as of this month.

Yes, this is very unique; be-cause the most popular educa-tor on YouTube today does not have a Ph.D. He has never taught at a college or university. And he delivers all of his lectures from a bedroom closet.

An article published recently on The Chronicle by Jeffrey R. Young reveals that this upstart is Salman Khan, a 33-year-old who quit his job as a financial ana-lyst to spend more time making homemade lecture videos in his home studio that is now leading the trend in what is called tech-nologically-driven teaching.

His unusual teaching materi-als started as a way to tutor his faraway cousins, but his lectures have grown into an online phe-nomenon—and a kind of protest against what he sees as a flawed educational system.

“My single biggest goal is to try to deliver things the way I wish they were delivered to me,” he told me recently.

The resulting videos don’t look or feel like typical college lectures or any of the lecture videos that traditional colleges put on their Web sites or YouTube channels. For one thing, these lectures are short—about 10 minutes each.

And they’re low-tech: Viewers see only the scrawls of equations or bad drawings that Khan writes on his digital sketchpad software as he narrates.

The lo-fi videos seem to work for students, many of whom have written glowing testimonials or even donated a few bucks via a PayPal link.

The free videos have drawn hundreds of thousands of views, making them more popular than the lectures by the Massachu-setts Institute of Technology, fa-mous for making course materi-als free, or any other traditional institution online, according to the leaders of YouTube’s educa-tion section.

Khan calls his collection of videos “Khan Academy,” and he lists himself as founder and fac-ulty. That means he teaches ev-ery subject, and he has produced 1,400 lectures since he started in 2006. Now he records one to five lectures per day.

He started with subject matter he knows best—math and engi-neering, which he studied as an undergraduate at MIT. But late-ly he has added history lectures about the French Revolution and biology lectures on “Embryonic Stem Cells” and “Introduction to Cellular Respiration.”

If Khan is unfamiliar with a subject he wants to teach, he gives himself a crash course first.

In a recent talk he explained how he prepared for his lecture on entropy: “I took two weeks off and I just pondered it, and I called every professor and every-one I could talk to and I said, Let’s go have a glass of wine about entropy. After about two weeks it clicked in my brain, and I said, now I’m willing to make a video about entropy.”

Some critics have blogged that this learn-as-you-go approach is no way to run an educational project—and they worry that the videos may contain errors or lead students astray.

But to Khan, occasional mis-takes are part of his method. By watching him stumble through a problem, students see the process better, he argues.

Sometimes they correct him in comments on his YouTube vid-eos, and he says this makes stu-dents more engaged with the ma-terial.

“Sometimes when it’s a little rough, it’s going to be a better product than when you over-pre-pare,” he says.

The Khan Academy explicitly challenges many of higher-edu-cation’s most sacred assumptions: that professional academics make the best teachers; that hour-long lectures are the best way to re-late material; and that in-person teaching is better than videos. Khan argues that his little lec-tures disprove all of that.

Watching his videos highlights how little the Web has changed higher education. Many online courses at traditional colleges sim-ply replicate the in-person mod-el—often in ways that are not as effective. And what happens in most classrooms varies little from 50 years ago (or more). Which is why Khan’s videos come as a sur-prise, with their informal style, bite-sized units, and simple but effective use of multimedia.

The Khan Academy raises the question: What if colleges could be retooled with new technolo-gies in mind?

College from ScratchKhan is not the only one ask-

ing that question these days. Clay Shirky, an associate teacher at New York University and a pop-ular Internet guru, recently chal-lenged his more than 50,000 Twitter followers with a similar thought exercise:

“If you were going to create a college from scratch, what would you do?”

Bursts of creativity quickly Twittered in, and Shirky collect-ed and organized the responses on a Web site. The resulting vi-sions are either dreams of an ed-ucation future or nightmares, de-pending on your viewpoint:

All students should be required to teach as well, said @djstrouse. Limit tenure to eight years, ar-gued @jakewk. Have every high-school senior take a year before college to work in some kind of service project away from his or her hometown, said @alicebarr.

Some Twittering “brainstorm-ers” even named their fictional campuses. One was called Fail-ureCollege, where every grade is an F to desensitize students to failure and encourage creativity.

Another was dubbed LifeCol-lege, where only life lessons are taught. When the writer caught up with Shirky recently, he de-scribed the overall tone of the re-sponses as “bloody-minded.” Did that surprise him?

“I was surprised—by the range of responses, but also part-ly by the heat of the responses,” he said. “People were mad when they think about the gap between what is possible and what hap-pened in their own educations.”

Shirky declined to endorse any of the Twitter models or to of-fer his prediction of how soon or how much the colleges will change. But he did argue that higher education is ripe for revo-lution. For him the biggest ques-tion is not whether a new high-tech model of higher education will emerge, but whether the al-ternative will come from inside traditional higher education or from some new upstart.

Voting With Their CheckbooksLately, several prominent tech-

nology entrepreneurs have tak-en an interest in Khan’s model and have made generous contri-butions to the academy, which is now a nonprofit entity.

Khan said that several peo-ple he had never met have made $10,000 contributions. And Ann and John Doerr, well-known ven-ture capitalists, gave $100,000,

making it possible for Khan to give himself a small salary for the academy so he can spend less of his time doing consulting proj-ects to pay his mortgage.

Over all, he said, he’s collected about $150,000 in donations and makes $2,000 a month from ads on his Web site.

I called up one of the donors, Jason Fried, chief executive of 37signals, a hip business-servic-

es company, who recently gave an undisclosed amount to Khan Academy, to find out what the at-traction was.

“The next bubble to burst is higher education,” he said. “It’s too expensive for people—there’s no reason why parents should have to save up a hundred grand to send their kids to college. I like that there are alternative ways of thinking about teaching.”

No one I talked to saw Khan Academy as an alternative to tra-ditional colleges (for one thing, it doesn’t grant degrees). When I called a couple of students who posted enthusiastic posts to Fa-cebook, they said they saw it as a helpful supplement to the class-room experience.

According to The Chroni-cle, Khan has a vision of turning his Web site into a kind of char-ter school for middle- and high-school students.

Educators in Asia, especially Indonesia, can make use of sim-ilar forums to modify their ap-proach to teaching, given that teacher-centered learning that is commonly practiced here is no longer suitable in a technology-driven society.

Khan Academy, a Successful One-Man Show with 50,000 Followers

By Tania Wiryopratomo

For more information : 6340078

The most popular educator on YouTube today does not have a

Ph.D. He has never taught at a college or university. And he delivers all of

his lectures from a bedroom closet.

The Khan Academy explicitly challenges

many of higher-education’s most

sacred assumptions: that professional

academics make the best teachers; that hour-long lectures

are the best way to relate material;

and that in-person teaching is better than videos. Khan

argues that his little lectures disprove all

of that.

Educators in Asia, especially Indonesia, can make use of similar forums to modify their approach to teaching, given that teacher-centered learning that is commonly practiced here is no longer suitable in a technology-driven society.

The resulting videos don’t look or feel like typical college lectures or any of the lecture videos that traditional colleges put on their Web sites or YouTube channels. For one thing, these lectures are short—about 10 minutes each.

The President Postwww.thepresidentpost.com February 17, 2011 C3

Education

Not long ago, it seemed absurd for aca demics to car-ry around a com-puter, camera, and GPS device every-

where they went. Actually, it still seems absurd. But many profes-sors (and administrators) now do just that in the form of all-in-one devices.

Smartphones or tablet com-puters combine many functions in a hand-held gadget, and some users are discovering clever ways to teach and do research with the ubiquitous machines.

For many on campus, check-ing e-mail on the go is the first killer app of the hand-held world. The downside: Having that abil-ity can mean working more than ever—answering student e-mails while in line at the grocery store, responding to a journal editor during lunch.

There can be benefits, though. Some professors say they find that carrying the Inter net in their pocket helps them collaborate, teach, and collect data in new ways that include e-mail but go far beyond it.

A handful of colleges are run-ning expensive pilot projects in which they give out iPhones or iPads to students and professors to see what happens when every-one goes mobile.

Some of the most innovative applications for hand-held de-vices, however, have come from professors working on their own. They find ways to adapt popular smartphone software to the class-room setting, or even write their own code.

That’s what I discovered when I put out a call on Twitter, as well as to a major e-mail list of college public-relations officers, asking about the areas in which profes-sors and college officials are mak-ing the most of their mobile de-vices.

Here are the six scenarios that people mentioned most often. I have highlighted the apps in each category that got users’ highest marks.

Taking AttendanceCalling roll may not seem like

an activity that needs an upgrade. But David M. Reed, a professor of computer science at Capital University, in Ohio, saw his iP-hone as a way to streamline the process and keep a digital back-up.

“I used to use a piece of paper,” he said.

“What would happen is invari-ably I would lose that piece of pa-per halfway through the semes-ter.”

He couldn’t find any software to keep those paper check marks on a smartphone, so he wrote his

able for iPhones, iPads, and for smartphones or tablets running Google’s Android operating sys-tem.

David Parry, an assistant pro-fessor of emergent media and communications at the Universi-ty of Texas at Dallas, said he uses Dropbox for both scholarly read-ing and keeping track of docu-ments for the courses he teaches.

“The key for me is I store all my syllabuses there,” he told me. “Anytime someone has a ques-tion about a syllabus, I have it—anywhere.”

So when a student e-mails to ask about an assignment deadline while Parry is at the grocery store, he knows.

Other options for building a personal virtual library are Goo-dReader and Evernote, both of which allow readers to highlight and take notes on any PDF saved to the system.

Students, too, say they find the services useful. Shep McAllister, a junior at Trinity University, in Texas, who writes for the Hack-CollegeStudent blog about stu-dents’ use of technology, said he turns to the iPad version of Goo-dReader for much of his assigned reading, because his universi-ty’s electronic reserve offers doc-uments in PDF, so he can easily transfer them to the service.

Recording NotesJust having a camera on hand

can sometimes help in the class-room. Aaron Delwiche, an asso-ciate professor of communication at Trinity, often uses the camera built into his Android phone to snap a picture of his whiteboard before he erases it.

When he breaks the class into groups for a project, the photos re-mind him who was on each team and what they came up with.

High-end whiteboards offer a function to print out or e-mail their contents, but some profes-sors say their phone cameras do just as well.

McAllister, the student blog-ger at Trinity, uses his iPhone’s camera as a document scanner, with an app called JotNot Pro. After he takes a picture of a page of text, the app (which costs 99 cents), can turn it into a PDF file for easy review later.

“If I get a handout from a pro-fessor, I’m always afraid I’m going to lose it,” he said, noting that he tries to scan any class-related doc-uments with his phone.

Using Textbook ToolsCellphone screens are tiny

compared with textbook pag-es, but several publishers now of-fer apps to read their e-textbooks on mobile devices. CourseSmart, a company that sells electronic versions of textbooks from ma-jor publishers, offers a free iPhone app to read books purchased through its service.

It may not be ideal for long reading sessions, but it could be a handy way for professors to look over the material to remember what their students are reading.

Textbook publishers see the iPad and other tablets as a better medium to one day replace print-

ed textbooks completely. A company named Inkling

creates textbooks made for iPads, with interactive features and vid-eos—things that paper volumes cannot do.

Brainstorming for classroom

talks has gone high-tech with “mind mapping” software that encourages arranging thoughts and ideas in nonlinear di-agrams.

These pro-g r a m s h a v e b e e n avail-a b l e f o r years o n l a p -t o p s a n d d e s k t o p computers, but some pro-fessors say the touch-screen interface of smartphones or tablet c o m p u t -ers enhanc-es the pro-cess, letting scholars toss around ideas with a flick of the finger.

Gerald C. Gannod, director of mobile learning

at Miami University, in Ohio, recommends Thinking Space for Android devices, MindBlowing for the iPhone, and Popplet for the iPad.

For professors who shift to the app world, there’s one gadget they can do

Smartphone Applications to Improve Teaching and Research

By Jeffrey R and Dian Sasmita

Smartphones or tablet computers combine many functions in a hand-held gadget, and some users are discovering clever ways to teach and do research with the ubiquitous machines.

own app about two years ago, in a two-week burst of coding.

He called his task-specific app Attendance and put it on the iTunes store for other professors, charging a couple of bucks (and adding features as colleagues sug-gested them).

So far he has earned about $20,000 from the more than 7,500 people who have virtually shouted “Here.”

Several professors said their fa-vorite feature of the app (which now sells for $4.99) is a flashcard function that helps them learn the names of their students. It lit-erally puts names to faces, if pro-fessors add photos supplied by the college.

Some professors take pictures of their students on the first day of class and put them in the app. An iPad version takes advantage of the larger screen of Apple’s tab-let computer.

Collecting DataA professor at the University of

California at Davis is asking driv-ers to help him with his research on roadkill by logging any dead squirrel, possum, or other critter they see along the highway.

At first he asked people to write down the location and de-tails about the carcass on a scrap of paper and upload the informa-tion to a Web site when they got home.

Then the research team built an iPhone app to let citizen-scien-tists participate at the scene.

It’s more convenient, and it gives the researchers better data, because a phone’s GPS feature can send along exact location co-ordinates (and the app encourag-es users to take a picture with the phone’s camera).

The lead researcher at Davis, Fraser Shilling, in the department of environmental science and policy, said the app should hit the iTunes store any day now, though he and his colleagues haven’t de-cided whether the name will be WildlifeObs or simply Roadkill.

That’s just one of many research projects adding smartphone in-terfaces to so-called “crowd sci-ence,” in which the public is in-vited to add structured data to an online database.

“For crowd science, I think it’s definitely the next step,” Shilling told me, although he says he pre-fers logging road-kill with pen and paper, which he thinks en-courages more colorful write-ups than an app. “My kids tell me that I’m a Neanderthal,” he jokes.

Reading Scholarly ArticlesInstead of clicking print when

saving an article for later reading, many professors now send the document to their phone or tab-let computer. Those I talked with cited a range of apps designed for the task, though Dropbox was cited most frequently.

The commercial app is avail-

Taking AttendanceCalling roll may not

seem like an activity that needs an upgrade.

But David M. Reed, a professor of computer

science at Capital University, in Ohio, saw

his iPhone as a way to streamline the process

and keep a digital backup.

www.macworld.com

without: that messy ball-point pen.

ww

w.gawkerassets.com

Textbook publishers see the iPad and other tablets

as a better medium to one day replace printed

textbooks completely.

EducationThe President Post www.thepresidentpost.comFebruary 17, 2011C4

As a country advanc-es in terms of social, economic and tech-nological develop-ment, it is pertinent to raise its various

industries to a ‘world-class’ lev-el. One of the industries referred to is education, comprising state-owned and private higher educa-tional institutions.

In the race to become a so called world-class university, un-fortunately, few attempts have been done so far to clearly define the term ‘world-class’ itself. What defines a world-class university? What characteristics make up a world-class university? Is the term ‘world-class’ only some kind of public relation attempts? There-fore, since there is no clear defi-nition concerning the terminolo-gy, many state-owned and private universities claim themselves to be of world-class standard.

World class is defined by the dictionary as ‘ranking among the foremost in the world; of an inter-national standard of excellence.’ Based on that definition, clear-ly a world-class university must be one that is legally listed on some agreed-upon world ranks. The problem is, who is credible enough to make that ranks?

A research conducted by Hen-ry M. Levin, Dong Wook Jeong, Dongshu Ou from Columbia University on two internation-al universities, the Shanghai Ji-aotong University (SJU) and the Times Higher Education Supple-ment (THES), suggests each ap-plies different criteria. This ex-plains why Columbia University is ranked differently.

In the end, the question re-mains: what is a ‘world-class uni-versity’? Perhaps an attempt to define the terminology requires collecting some definitions from experts in order to better under-stand it as a whole.

Niland (2001) argued, “For universities, world-class standing is built on reputation and per-ception – often seen as subjec-tive and uncertain – and it re-quires outstanding performance in many events.” Clearly, based on Niland’s point of view, world-class is a matter of reputation and perception in the minds of glob-al societies. Further, he said, “The title of world class won’t come at a discount price, and without

world-class funding the goal of reaching, and preserving, that high standard will be rhetoric alone.”

Hobbs (1997) argued, “If a university wishes to attain world-class status, its faculty and stu-dents must understand the di-vergent cultures that inhabit the world.” Meanwhile, Wang (2001) argued, “World class uni-versities recruit first-rate profes-sors and enroll students from throughout the world.” And fi-nally, King (2003) asserted, “We are world class in that we have students from all over the world and, importantly, we have part-nerships with universities, col-leges and businesses all over the world.” From the three argu-ments, we can imply that an in-ternationalization process must occur in universities that claim to be world-class universities. That is why oversees students, a mul-ticultural environment and col-laboration with international or-ganizations must be some of the essential elements that make up world-class universities.

The Asian Development Bank (2001) argued that “Most gradu-ates are ill-equipped to work in a market economy which requires skills in interpreting and apply-ing information. The statement implies that ‘practical skills’, apart from ‘theoretical skills’, is one of the key elements to of world-class university’s graduates. Min in Ji-ang (2001) seemed to adhere to ADB’s definition by stating, “Al-though [research] is integral to the perception of being deemed a world-class institution, the true measurement is in the success of a university’s graduates.”

Lastly, Niland (2000), Liver-pool (1995) and Water (2005) agreed that a world-class universi-ty is “utilizing information tech-nology” by making information pertaining to the university (aca-demic, admission, tuition, event, etc) accessible to internal and ex-ternal parties all over the world.

President University, as one of Indonesia’s prestigious private higher educational institutions, attempts to become a world-class university by 2017. In doing so, the University recruits students from all over the world to study in Indonesia. The majority of its international admissions ev-ery year come from Asia, name-ly China, South Korea, Vietnam, Malaysia, the Philippines, India and many others.

No distinct treatment is made between local and overseas stu-dents, hence communication be-comes a crucial factor in Presi-dent University. English is used in daily conversation and cultur-al tolerance is nicely embedded in most of the subjects taught in the University.

Apart from recruiting interna-tional students, which now make up 30% of President University’s students every year, the Universi-ty also actively collaborates with other higher educational insti-

tutions all over the world such as Waseda University of Japan, Deakin University of Australia, Guang Xi University of China, ULSA University of Vietnam, International Pacific College of New Zealand and many more.

President University’s official website is quite sophisticated in the sense that all students from all over the world can find com-plete information about the Uni-versity, register online, download brochures, check their placement test scores, and see the Univer-sity’s environment in 3D from their home. The last feature is hardly found in other local uni-versities’ websites.

What makes President Univer-sity unique is not just the fact that the University has an internation-al atmosphere or that it supports digital access to make learn-ing activities interesting, but the fact that two semesters (ranging from 8-12 months) out of 10 se-mesters studying program are de-signed to pursue practical skills and learning experiences in 1,500 of its affiliates. It is noteworthy that all students could complete their studies plus some practical skills within three-year and four-month programs. Suffice to say, President University guarantees its graduates employment within six months after their graduation ceremony.

Jhanghiz Syahrivar is a Senior Education Consultant and an Assistant to Lecturer of Faculty of Economics, President University

The Race to Becomea World-Class University

By Jhanghiz Syahrivar

World class is defined by the dictionary as ‘ranking among the

foremost in the world;of an international standard of

excellence.’ Based on that definition, clearly a world-class university must be one that is legally listed on some

agreed-upon world ranks. The problem is, who is credible enough to

make that ranks?

Niland (2000), Liverpool (1995) and Water (2005)

agreed that a world-class university is

“utilizing information technology” by

making information pertaining to the

university (academic, admission, tuition,

event, etc) accessible to internal and

external parties all over the world.

President University recruits students from all over the world to study in Indonesia. The majority of its international admissions every year come from Asia, namely China, South Korea, Vietnam, Malaysia, the Philippines, India and many others.

President University actively collaborates with other higher educational institutions all over the world such as Waseda University of Japan, Deakin University of Australia, Guang Xi University of China, ULSA University of Vietnam, International Pacific College of New Zealand and many more.

President University

President University

The President Postwww.thepresidentpost.com February 17, 2011 C5

Pictorial Events

Microsoft launched the program IMulai 3.0

IMulai stands for Indonesia Mulai, which is a competition in business innovation based on ICT, held by Microsoft Indonesia and USAID.

Present at the event were RI Vice President Boediono, Minister of State Enterprises Mustofa Abubakar, Minister of Fishery and Marine Fadel Muhammad and prominent business people Ciputra, Arifin Panigoro, Mien Uno, S.D. Darmono and others.

Jababeka also launched President Executive Club at the event.

The Inauguration of Juwono Sudarsono asChairman of President University Foundation

The President Post/Nandi Nanti

The Financial Club held its regular breakfast dialogue themed “Embracing The Future: “TIME BUSINESS” with Rinaldi Firmansyah, the President Director of PT TELKOM INDONESIA. Present at the breakfast were prominent businessmen and professionals, among others, Mien Uno and Giusseppe Nicolosi.

Breakfast Dialogue at The Financial Club Jakarta

The President Post/Nandi Nanti

“Embracing The Future:TIME BUSINESS” The financial club held its regular breakfast dialogue themed “Railways

in Indonesia” this month, featuring Ignasius Jonan, President Director of PT KERETA API INDONESIA, as the speaker. Present at the breakfast were prominent businessmen and professionals, among others, Azwar Anas, Atmono Suryo and others.

Breakfast Dialogue at The Financial Club Jakarta

The President Post/Nandi Nanti

“Railways in Indonesia”

The President Post/Nandi Nanti

Microsoft IMulai 3.0

LivingThe President Post www.thepresidentpost.comFebruary 17, 2011C6

Your Mobile Phone isBecoming Your WalletWelcome to the dawn of mobile currency.

The looming game-changer in

mobile payments is a technology

called “Near Field Communication”

(NFC), which swaps data over very short

distances.

Foto: www. soft32.com

For years, tech com-panies have demoed flashy prototypes of systems that let cus-tomers use their mo-bile phones in place

of cash or credit cards. This year, those systems are heading out of the labs and into the real world.

“There’s a lot of money at stake if it’s done right,” says Omar Green, director of strategic mo-bile initiatives at Intuit (INTU).

Soon at Starbucks stores throughout the U.S., the cashier can now scan your phone to de-duct payment for your latté from the balance on your pre-loaded Starbucks card. Splitting the din-ner bill with a friend? Download Bump, and you can beam over the cash from your PayPal ac-count.

Those transactions are small slivers of a global mobile pay-ments market analysts estimate at $69 billion in 2009, the latest year for which data is available, according to research firm Gen-erator Research.

But by 2014, it expects mo-bile payments to reach $633 bil-lion annually, with 490 million customers using their phones to move cash around.

The battlefield: The mobile payments space right now is a primordial soup. Both new and entrenched players are battling about fundamental aspects of how the market will work.

PayPal created an empire for itself by making it easy for con-sumers to send money online to friends and merchants. Rivals like Google Checkout and Revo-lution Money never gained much traction.

“We are already the leader in mobile payments,” says Laura Chambers, senior director of Pay-Pal Mobile.

“We’re going to continue to in-novate, and we’re getting very ag-gressive about mobile payments in the next two years.”

PayPal, a unit of eBay, pro-cessed $700 million in mobile payments in 2010, according to Chambers. While that’s a small fraction of the more than $70 bil-lion a year PayPal handles, it’s an increase of almost 500% increase over the prior year’s $141 million mobile total. PayPal’s platform is an easy one for developers to build on top of, and the compa-ny has been actively striking inte-gration deals.

But PayPal sits in the commerce

First music replaced calling as the coolest function of the iPhone. Then gaming replaced music. Now you can use your iPhone (or your iPod or iPad) to find restaurants, book flights, predict the weather and even pack your bags,

thanks to a bunch of new travel apps nominated for a 2010 Best App Ever Award.

The list below includes, in no particular order, some nominees from the top 10 travel apps contest for iPhone, iPad and iPod touch.

1Where To?

What it does: Near-omniscience for sale at a mere US$2.99. Like a traditional GPS device, this app enables you to locate almost anything

nearby, including the nearest ATM, burger joint, medical provider, et cetera.

The app has information on 700 customizable categories and 2,400 brands, which sometimes allow users to get away with not typing at all when they’re trying to find addresses and directions.

That said, some people have complained that the app occasionally lists wrong or outdated information.

2The Cartographer

What it does: Because looks matter, this app gives Google My Maps a makeover by transplanting it in a pretty antique map interface

… but wait, there’s more. The Cartographer allows you to access their

customized maps offline to save roaming charges. You can also drop markers on their maps to record their travel information.

3Airbnb

What it does: With its current pool of 50,000 listings covering more than 8,000 cities, it appears that Airbnb has grown leaps and bounds from its

roots as a couch-swapping website for budget travelers.Users of the website’s new iPhone app can now book

accommodation with a few clicks from their iPhones, with choices ranging from an extra mattress to a private island. The app’s “Find a Place Tonight” feature allows people to locate properties available near them on a map with one click.

The “What’s My Place Worth?” feature gives hosts rough assessments of the market value of their pad. Practical? Maybe. Boredom relief? Definitely.

4Zagat to Go

What it does: Buy 1, get 44 free. Zagat to Go packs in restaurant reviews of 45 guides around the world into one nifty app, for the price of one

guide. Their offline mode, which allows you to continue browsing even when you’re in areas without reception, has won rave reviews among critics.

Zagat to Go also has a GPS feature that allows users to find restaurants nearby, as well as suss out top rated restaurants in different categories in each city. The app’s augmented reality function allows you to see restaurant ratings through your iPhone camera.

The app is available in major U.S. cities, as well as major cities outside the States including London, Hong Kong, Paris, Tokyo, and Shanghai.

5The Weather Channel App

What it does: All you will need to know about weather, any way you want it. The Weather Channel App includes full screen radar weather

maps, seasonal information and weather news.The iWitness Weather function allows users to upload

pictures of “exciting weather” to share online. Don’t we all love watching exciting weather online.

6FlightTrack Pro

What it does: FlightTrack Pro is almost perfect for the obsessive air traveler. It can import flight data from airline confirmation emails. It has real-

time status updates for gates, delays and cancellations for over 4,000 international airports. It allows users to find alternative flights at a click. Its inbuilt live flight tracker maps work even when the phone is offline.

Heck, it’s even supposed to predict the future for you, by projecting flight delays based on airport warnings and historical delay forecasts.

However, there’s been customer complaints that the app had incomplete and incorrect information since its update.

7KAYAK Flight, Hotel Search

What it does: The multitasking Kayak.com app allows travelers to track flight statuses, book their travels, as well as find flight, hotel and car

rental deals -- all for free.Public opinion of this app swings wildly from adulation

to criticism of how app developers neglected to add the “My Trips” functionality.

8Packing Pro

What it does: A godsend for the absentminded traveler. The app’s Expert List Assistant creates packing lists based on the number of adults,

children and days. The functionality also takes into account temperature, destination, food preparation and even clothes-washing preferences. Excellent. We never have to think for ourselves again.

Those who like to be a bit more hands-on can use the app to create, edit and check off customized packing lists.

9Fotopedia Heritage

What it does: This app, developed jointly by Fotonauts and UNESCO World Heritage Centre, allows those who have wanderlust (or are just

plain bored) to flick through more than 25,000 photos of heritage sites with information for each location. The app also links directly to Trip Advisor for booking spur-of-the-moment trips.

Criticisms include slow loading, crashes and that it drains battery carnivorously.

10Trip Journal

What it does: With Trip Journal, users can now do scrap-booking anytime, anywhere. Trip Tracking has an inbuilt GPS

route-tracking function that also records points along a journey. It supports geo-tagged photos and videos.

It allows users to store as many recorded journeys as they want. And best of all, the app is wired to major social media portals, making it supremely easy to show off your travels to family and friends back at home.

market’s shaky middle ground. It doesn’t control the financial net-work payments run through – that’s in the hands of companies like Visa and MasterCard – and it doesn’t control the devices con-sumers use, or the data networks their transactions happen on.

The companies that do control those things are determined to get their piece of the action.

Three of the nation’s biggest wireless carriers -- Verizon Wire-less, AT&T and T-Mobile -- teamed up in November to create Isis, a new mobile commerce net-work the carriers hope to have up and running within 18 months. Working around the Visa/Mas-terCard duopoly, they picked Discover Financial Services as their financial services partner.

What happens next: The looming game-changer in mobile payments is a technology called “Near Field Communication” (NFC), which swaps data over

very short distances.Put a NFC chip – for exam-

ple, one built into in your smart-phone – near an NFC reader and you don’t need to awkward-ly scan a bar code on your phone or send a text message to trans-fer money.

“The lifecycle of a phone is fast: 18 months. If some of the big players – like Apple, RIM, Google and Motorola – all get going with NFC, it could be a standard within two years,” says VeriFone CEO Doug Bergeron.

The 30-year-old company makes point-of-sale systems that are used by millions of U.S. mer-chants. VeriFone is experiment-ing with the pay-by-phone mar-ket, striking partnerships with many of the field’s pioneers, in-cluding PayPal and Bling Na-tion.

“We’re going to play the role of Switzerland,” Bergeron says. “The more the merrier in our view.”

“There’s no cut and dry ‘this is how to do it’ approach,” says Nick Holland, a Yankee Group senior analyst. “In the U.S., it’s going to be the Wild West, since anyone can play in this space.”

Quick-moving startups are charging in. Last week, inves-tors poured $27.5 million into Square, a venture launched in 2009 by Twitter cofounder Jack Dorsey. Square lets mobile mer-chants accept credit-card pay-ments on their phones.

Holland predicts there will be much noise before clear win-ners emerge: “There’s going to be quite a lot of fragmentation.”

We’re still in the early days, and it’ll be years before smartphones are ready to completely wipe out cash and credit cards.

But don’t be surprised if some-time this year, you find yourself handing over your iPhone to pay for a Frappuccino.

10 Best Travel Apps Ever?Switch your iPhone on and your brain off. These top travel apps will book your flights, work out where you’re eating and even pack your bags.

Put a NFC chip – for example, one built into in your smartphone – near an NFC reader and you don’t need to awkwardly scan a bar code on your phone or send a text message to transfer money.

The President Postwww.thepresidentpost.com February 17, 2011 C7

Living

Get AcquaintedYou must talk money before

your relationship becomes seri-ous—a person’s financial habits are an incredible insight into his values and ethics. That doesn’t mean a lousy credit score is a rea-son to break up, but if you find that your new love interest doesn’t handle money responsibly, you have to question what else he isn’t going to be upright about. If you’re the one with the issues, be honest about your shortcom-ings. A good relationship is one in which each party helps the oth-er make better choices—and you and your beau might be able to help each other become smarter about money.

Meet in the MiddleWhether you are newly en-

gaged or suddenly find a long-term relationship challenged by a financial setback, support each other. Retreating to your cor-ners does not help. Nor does fin-ger-pointing; blame doesn’t help your balance sheet. To address any money problem, you need to work together to come up with a game plan.

Consider Yourselves EqualsWho makes what is irrelevant.

Do you hear me, stay-at-home moms? The size of your paycheck does not determine your role in the family finances. Respect each

other as equal partners, with an equal say in money manage-ment.

Put It in WritingI know there’s nothing sexy

about legal forms. But ensuring that you have the correct docu-ments in place to safeguard you and your assets is a must. A pre-nuptial agreement will clearly de-lineate what is solely yours before marriage, meaning you will be protected if you divorce. For those contemplating a second marriage, the only way to protect the assets you bring to the table—especial-ly if you want them to go to chil-dren from a prior marriage—is to create a legal trust. That doc-ument will spell out what portion of your personal assets will pass to your children, rather than to your new spouse.

Fools Rush InDebts you had prior to mar-

riage are yours alone—unless you actively merge them. When you wed, don’t automatically rush to combine everything. You can help each other out by chipping away at your loans without be-coming officially responsible for each other’s.

Divide and ConquerHere’s how I suggest ev-

ery cohabiting couple organize their cash flow: Create three ac-counts—one for you, one for your partner, and one joint fund. Once you’ve determined the total cost of your shared living expens-es, both of you should contribute your portion of these costs to the joint account each month, based on your share of household in-come. (For example, if you make $60,000 and your partner makes $40,000, you’re responsible for 60 percent of household expens-es.) Whatever money doesn’t go toward these costs stays in the in-dividual accounts, to be used at each person’s discretion.

Extra CreditEvery woman also needs one

credit card in her name only. If you become divorced or wid-owed, an individual credit his-tory will enable you to get a loan and open utility accounts with-out leaving a deposit, and may even help you land a job (some employers check applicants’ cred-it during the hiring process).

Ties That BindAfter you marry, every asset ei-

ther of you acquires is jointly held. That’s why you both need to be in sync on your long-term finan-cial goals, from paying off the mortgage to putting away for re-tirement. Ideally, you should talk about all this before you wed. If you don’t, you can end up deeply frustrated and financially spent. Discussing money with the man you hope to spend the rest of your life with doesn’t mean you don’t love him. It means you love him and yourself.

Don’t Hide Your Head in the Sand

A lot of women fall into the habit of letting their partner han-dle the money. If you are one of those women, that’s not your spouse’s fault; it’s yours. Your hus-band may be doing a fabulous job with your money—that’s not the point. You need to understand the family finances and weigh in on all decisions. The fact that women tend to live longer than men means they may need to rely on the money longer and will also find themselves managing it at some point. The longer you wait to engage, the bigger the surprises you may find down the line.(O, The Oprah Magazine)

Important Financial Moves All Couples Should Make

By Suze Orman Hashing out monetary matters may not make for romantic pillow talk, but a little financial planning can do a lot for your love life down the line. Here are a few pointers to help you stay smart when following your heart.

www.plussizebridetobe.com

Consider Yourselves EqualsRespect each other as equal partners, with

an equal say in money management.

(CNN) – When trapped within the confines of a particularly dreary workday, a carefully chosen GIF, cat video or gallery of terrible My Little Pony tattoos can act as a ray of luminous sunshine, breaking through the dark cloud structure of your mood and touching your black heart with the playful soul of levity.

Thank the nondenominational higher power for the internet, right? Yeah, unless everyone’s laughing at you.

Memes and viral videos are an increasingly integral part of our web culture – hell, The Cheezburger Network (of LOLcats fame) just scored $30 million in funding and 4chan founder Christopher Poole (aka “moot”) joined New York City seed fund Lerer Ventures as a venture adviser.

Now tell us, what’s at the root of many of those stimulating shareables? Fumbles, travesties, the hot, red-faced soul of human folly. In short: Most of these people are being laughed at.

Not to suck the delicious marrow from the bones of these meaty morsels and leave you with a dry, dusty skeleton, but inherent in these memes and vids is an instructional manual on how not to act online – if you’re looking to avoid public humiliation, that is.

So, next time your boss catches you surfing YouTube at work, just tell her you’re trying to better yourself. We’re sure she won’t fire you for that.

Without further ado, here are seven online sins that will make you go viral with your friends:

1. Poor spelling/grammarLast week, a hilarious video titled “dotdotdot”

featuring a gamer’s enraged rant went viral – after a voiceover actor and a designer brought the words to life, that is. Granted, the comment was likely penned by a 13-year-old, but a very important lesson can be gleaned from this vid: No one will take you seriously if you use nonwords like “beacuase.”

Many a browser underlines spelling errors in bright, glaring red – take heed, or everyone will (rightly) laugh at you.

2. VanityYes, it’s great to have self-esteem! We know because

our school nurse had copious posters proclaiming as much.

Still, tweeting incessantly about how you’re a “rock

star” or posting to Facebook Photobooth picture after Photobooth picture of yourself looking seductively into the webcam will, ironically, result in your friends feeling the inverse about you. Heed the lesson we learned from many a prideful teen lifecaster: Attempt to be beautiful on the inside, or be prepared to face the trolls.

3. Irritating fanboyismRemember that “Leave Britney Alone” kid? Yeah, that’s

what you look like when you get into vitriolic fights in the comments section about how your Droid Incredible is so much better than the iPhone 4.

4. Being stupidBefore being allowed to compose a status update, one

should be forced to read Failbook in its entirety. Especially people who are friends with their parents on Facebook.

5. Being a sad sackThe Sad Keanu meme (pictures of Keanu Reeves

holding various objects like sandwiches and cupcakes, looking sad) went so incredibly viral in part because Reeves’ alleged melancholia seemed so ridiculous: Who could possibly look so unhappy while holding a cupcake?

So, before you respond to an e-mail detailing exciting weekend plans with an Eeyore-esque comment about how you have a pounding headache and you’re not sure you can have fun at a concert when animal testing is still going strong, think of Keanu, and the wise words he uttered in “Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure”: “Party on, dudes!”

6. Getting really, really ridiculously angryIt’s pretty easy to use the web and various social media

tools as an outlet for your overwhelming rage.However, the question becomes – in the wake of such

a message – does anyone really care about your (totally justified) ire?

Well, take a look at Rageguy – a comic character that grew popular via 4chan – who basically just screams “ffffuuu” when something goes awry. He may be funny on the internets, but we wouldn’t want to hang with him in real life.

7. Being adorableWait, how did that get in there?

7 Internet Sins that could Make You Go Viral with Your Friends

www. mindblob.typepad.com

HealthThe President Post www.thepresidentpost.comFebruary 17, 2011C8

The two most-often diagnosed types are obstructive sleep ap-nea and central sleep apnea. The bottom line for both is that your breathing is disrupted while you sleep, waking you up sometimes dozens of time during the night, depriving your brain of oxygen and often resulting in fatigue, dif-ficulty focusing and even worse physical problems such as high blood pressure and heart disease.

If you have sleep apnea, chanc-es are, you’ll be told you need to sleep with a continuous posi-

pathetic nervous system (that is the adrenalin, fight or flight re-sponse). This puts stress on the heart. The most common symp-toms are snoring and daytime sleepiness or fatigue.

Central sleep apnea occurs when the brain, that is the central nervous system, does not signal properly to the diaphragm, the muscle that controls your breath-ing. The most common symp-toms are frequent awakenings at night and daytime sleepiness or fatigue.

The CPAP is the gold standard therapy for both obstructive and central sleep apnea, although the devices used for CSA function a bit differently from the standard CPAP.

Honestly, I couldn’t make up the things that people have said to me in their attempt to praise the CPAP and to describe how good they feel after starting this therapy. One patient likes to call CPAP his “happy pill.”

Another woman told me that she felt “20 years younger” af-ter one month using her CPAP. Today I saw a patient who said that it CPAP was “life changing.” The best to date is an older pa-tient who said that putting on his CPAP mask at night gave him great comfort, “as though some-

of treatment. That is why I han-dle all the CPAP machines and masks at my sleep center.

The mask is chosen based on patient comfort, but, at first, pa-tients need the recommendations of knowledgeable sleep profes-sionals. They need to have avail-able to them many masks to try, and I mean take home and sleep with for a week or two. When pa-tients find the right mask for their face and their sleeping positions, the battle to get accustomed to CPAP is usually won.

Tired, crabby, snoring? It might be apneaIf you’re not sleeping well, if your partner complains that you snore loudly or you’re finding yourself excessively tired and having trouble concentrating during the day, you may have sleep apnea. It’s a common disorder that should be diagnosed by a doctor.

The CPAP is the gold standard therapy for both obstructive and central sleep apnea, although the devices used for CSA function a bit differently from the standard CPAP.

Foto: www.eheandme.com

By Lisa Shives

Carolyn Hennecy had a suspicion about what was happening to her when she started having shortness of breath and tension in her left arm and jaw.

She was working as a legal assistant at a busy law firm in Lakeland, Florida, and

had witnessed her boss experience the same symptoms shortly before he had a heart attack one year earlier.

Hennecy thought her heart might be in trouble, too, but she didn’t rush to her doctor’s office or schedule an appointment with a cardiologist to address her own symptoms.

“I ignored it for two or three months because I thought it would be OK,” she explains.

“I needed to lose weight, and I figured it had to be my weight, something stress related or a figment of my imagination.”

The symptoms continued to get worse, and eventually Hennecy felt as if an elephant were sitting on her chest.

“When it got to the point where I couldn’t get out of my car and walk into the building without losing my breath, I figured it was time to deal with the elephant.”

Hennecy scheduled an appointment with her gen-eral practitioner, who ran a battery of tests. All the re-sults were normal, but her doctor knew something was wrong. She was urged to see a cardiologist.

“The cardiologist immediately scheduled a treadmill stress test,” Hennecy says. “When I got on the machine, I began having discom-fort and pain in my chest within a minute. I col-lapsed over the handle.”

Hennecy has to take a combination of pills everyday.Hennecy was having a heart attack. She was rushed to the cardiac catheterization labora-tory for more testing. Hennecy learned that her left anterior descend-ing artery was almost completely blocked, and doctors would need to insert a stent, a tube that is placed into the artery to improve blood flow to the heart muscle.

Hennecy, whose mother died of a heart attack at age 66, and whose father, brother and paternal grandfather had all experienced heart problems at relatively young ages, knew that genetic coronary artery disease ran in her family, but hoped she would be different.

“Denial is my biggest enemy” she says. “I was going to be the exception to the rule.”

Hennecy, who now blogs about her battle with heart disease, admits it was hard confessing that her heart wasn’t in the condition she wanted, but says it’s almost equally as hard to be honest with herself and the cardi-ologist about ongoing care.

“When the cardiologist asks, ‘How are things?’ my general response is ‘Just peachy,’ which can mean any-thing from absolutely wonderful to oh my God I’m going to die.”

According to a General Electric study looking at the disconnect between patients and providers, about 28% of Americans say they sometimes lie or omit facts when talking to their health care provider about their care.

Providers say they think the number is much higher. The GE study found 77% of providers say more than a fourth of their patients omit facts or lie to them about their personal health.

“There are a variety of reasons why patients withhold information,” says Dr. Nieca Goldberg, director of the Women’s Heart Program at New York University. “Some-times they are ashamed. Sometimes they can’t afford

the medications. Sometimes they feel like they might upset the doctor.”

Dr. Alfred Bove, past president of the American Col-lege of Cardiology, says there is another reason patients may not be as up front as their physicians would like.

“I think a lot of patients won’t tell you details or symp-toms because they are not aware of what the important details to share are,” he says.

“So they deny or ignore it and the next thing they just drop over.”

68 million Americans are taking medications to lower high blood pressure, a condition that increases the risk of coronary artery disease and can lead to heart attacks.

It’s never a good idea to withhold information from any doctor whom you entrust with your care. However, cardiologists say there are specific concerns that can prove to be fatal when they aren’t informed.

Here are five secrets you should not keep from your heart doctor.

1. If you are taking vitamins or supplementsAlternative medicine and herbal remedies may be

great for some to help manage chronic conditions, but cardiologists warn certain supplements can pose serious risks to people who are also taking medications for heart disease.

From alfalfa to yohimbine, a study in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology lists more than two dozen herbal products patients with cardiovascular dis-ease should avoid.

2. If you have undergone tests from other doctorsPatients may sometimes be shy about admitting to

their physician that they have received a second opinion or additional testing, says Dr. Richard Stein, a national spokesperson for the American Heart Association.

“Your goal walking out is to get the best health care – not to make the doctor feel good,” he says. If you’ve had a blood test, EKG, echocardiogram or angiogram, Stein says to keep your own patient file and bring it with you to your appointment.

3. If you have skipped your medications“Patients often lie about taking blood pressure or

cholesterol medication,” says Goldberg. She says some-times they believe these drugs aren’t necessary if they alter their diet. While that may be true in the long term, the effects of diet change are not as immediate, and the patient may be prolonging the problem.

4. If you are going through hard timesHennecy says during the time of her first heart attack,

she had been grappling with years of domestic violence and abuse, and she was at a breaking point.

However, it wasn’t until 2007, one year after having another stent implanted, when she finally brought this up to her doctor.

“When you’re under stress you have extra adrenaline that can stimulate the heart to skip beats and have palpi-tations,” says Bove.

5. If you haven’t really stuck to your diet“Everyone wants to put their best foot forward, so it’s

easy to come in and say you’ve started an exercise pro-gram when it really didn’t happen,” says Goldberg.

“But just saying you exercised doesn’t improve your cardiovascular health.”

In fact, it could be harmful, says Stein.“If a patient tells me they don’t have chest pains, but

they are doing nothing in terms of physical activity, then I’m not getting an accurate picture of the shape their heart is really in,” he explains. “I may want to do a stress test to see what really happens when you exercise.”

“Find a doctor that you have a good working relation-ship with, that you trust and who listens,” she says.

“That makes it easier to open up and be honest.”

5 Secrets Not to Keepfrom Your CardiologistAccording to a General Electric study looking at the disconnect between patients and providers, about 28% of Americans say they sometimes lie or omit facts when talking to their health care provider about their care.

“Find a doctor that you have a good working relationship with, that you trust and who listens. That makes it easier to open up and be honest.”

tive airway pressure machine, or CPAP.

Positive airway pressure is like blowing air into a balloon but in this case the balloon is the pa-tient’s throat; when there is air in the balloon (the throat), then the sides of the balloon (the soft tissues in the throat) cannot col-lapse and the tissues in the throat are propped open. The forced air functions much as a stent would. It is not oxygen therapy, but oxy-gen can be added.

Sleep apnea is usually adequate-ly treated with a CPAP even if ox-ygen levels were quite low. When oxygen is added, it is usually be-

cause patients have another lung or heart disorder that contributes to low oxygen at night. If patients have emphysema, congestive heart disease or neuromuscu-lar disorders, they will need spe-cialized PAP machines, and may need oxygen as well.

If you have obstructive sleep apnea, your upper airway collaps-es, either partially or complete-ly, during sleep and the oxygen level of your blood is often low. You’ll also have frequent very brief awakenings, called micro-arousals, that disturb the quali-ty of sleep and stimulate the sym-

one is cradling my face.” Serious-ly, could I make that up?

CPAP, for the uninitiated, in-volves wearing a mask that at the very least has some nasal prongs - yes, they go up your nose, and at the most has a mask covering most of your face. Many patients wear something in between, a mask that covers only the nose.

Studies have shown that us-age patterns are set early in the course of CPAP treatment. Pa-tients need very close follow up in the first few weeks or months