With 500,000 Downloads, SCOOP Launches Web Store in Exclusive Partnership with Gramedia

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App Foundry’s SCOOP, a made-in-Indonesia e-reader, has quite an announcement to make this morning. As some of you might know, Scoop has always been on native applications (iOS and Android). Today, it is making a push onto the web by launching its web store.

How it works is simple: a registered user purchases an e-magazine or book on the web, and that book can then be sent to up to five devices (with the Scoop app installed) for reading.

This news comes along with the announcement of an exclusive agreement with Gramedia Book Publishing Group, which is part of the Kompas Gramedia Corporation. The deal will see 10,000 local books and novels made exclusively available on Scoop’s content library.

For extra fun, Scoop is offering discounts of up to 91 percent if you purchase through the web store. For every one year subscription to magazines and newspapers, Scoop users will be given the second year’s subscription free. The web store strategy is an interesting one knowing that users can already purchase content on mobile. But of course, purchase via PC is sometimes easier thanks to the larger screen and keyboard. So the move to web store kinda makes sense.

While talking about this news, Apps Foundry founder and CEO Willson Cuaca also shared a few of Scoop’s current statistics with me:


So far we hit 500,000 downloads, with 85 percent of revenue from iOS and the rest from Android. We expect the web store will contribute significantly and 2013 will be Android year in Indonesia.

Previously, Scoop also partnered with Ookbee, a Thailand-based e-reader company to share their knowledge, negotiate deals together with bigger publishers, and engage in cross-marketing. I’m not particularly sure how well that partnership went, but we do know that Ookbee’s three million users largely shadowed Scoop’s 500,000 downloads. To be fair, though, Scoop is largely focused on the Indonesian market only while Ookbee has presence predominantly in Thailand and Vietnam. Ookbee also offers white-label services to telcos which helps them grow quickly in user adoption.

Apps Foundry has so far raised seed investment from East Ventures with its second financing round backed by Gobi Partners and Mitsui Global. Along the way, it has also picked up Indonesian blogs Gamesaku and MakeMac within its team.

Disclaimer: Apps Foundry, the creator of SCOOP, is an East Ventures portfolio company. East Ventures also invested in TechInAsia and Willson is also a good friend/mentor of mine.

(Source: Techinasia)

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