Bouncity challenges mobile Indonesians to be more active

Following Koprol's tracks, Indonesia's up and coming application development house PhaseDev launches its location-based social gaming platform Bouncity in Jakarta earlier today at @america, Pacific Place.

While most Indonesians are more familiar with Foursquare and will associate this new game with the New York startup, it is actually much closer in concept and practice with SCVNGR. You can probably say it's the Indonesian SCVNGR given its similarities.

For those unfamiliar with the US-based game, it lets players to do more than just check in to earn rewards. Both Bouncity and SCVNGR encourage their players to perform a number of activities when they are at certain locations after which they will earn various kinds of rewards.

These activities can be something as simple as taking a photo, or answering trivia questions set by the partners of the game and each challenge can earn players points and badges. The more points the players receive, the closer they are to getting a more valuable reward.

Challenges and rewards are set not by Bouncity but by the partners. While Bouncity provides the badges, partners decide what kinds of activities or challenges they want visitors and players to perform. For brands, this provides a much easier way to track customer interaction and attachment and identify loyal customers from the casual ones.

For its launch, Bouncity has partnered with a range of companies, such as XL Axiata, Burger King, Domino's Pizza, McDonald's, Dairy Queen, Sour Sally, Celebrity Fitness, Apple Premium Resellers iBox, eStore, and Infinite, and many more.

Bouncity claims it can provide 15 minute interaction with each set of activities provided the partner can come up with the right questions and challenges. Some of the rewards may end up being free food, discounts on items, exclusive deals, and so on, so in a way Bouncity is aiming for a similar objective as discount sites but coming from a completely different angle with a vastly different approach.

"We designed Bouncity to be a bridge for interaction and communication between merchants and consumers," according to Wenas Agusetiawan, CEO of PhaseDev. Bouncity aims to provide similar results as a market survey but done in a fun way from the perspective of consumers.

To gain players, Bouncity partners with XL Axiata, Indonesia's second largest mobile telco which will provide support from the marketing and customer acquisition side.

For the moment, Bouncity is available only as a BlackBerry application, with iOS and Android apps coming soon. BlackBerry was chosen as the initial app thanks to the popularity of its devices across the country's major cities.

Before today's launch, Bouncity had about 300 players, mostly testers, but a few hours after the launch, Agusetiawan said that it now has exceeded 3500 players and he's excited about the gain.

He said to DailySocial earlier, "We are in touch with RIM in Singapore and XL Axiata's BlackBerry distributor to assist us in preloading Bouncity onto their devices as Indonesian's are not that familiar with the App World. We hope that by having Bouncity preinstalled out of the box, it will encourage new BlackBerry owners to join the game and start having fun with the rest of us."

We had a short chat with Wenas Agusetiawan and COO Kevin Osmond just after the launch event had ended and we'll have that video up real soon.