On the plus side, we encountered an open market which makes placing new products and ideas easy. Internet users are reasonably experienced, our server logs show that Indonesian visitors use modern browsers and understand common UI concepts easily. It has a thriving tech and startup scene and is well-connected. Indonesia is the second biggest Facebook user and we found that you can indeed efficiently reach people over Facebook.

The cons we encountered so far are few, but they hurt. Throughout our communication with either individuals, the media or businesses we found a recurring pattern of either ignoring our communication attempts (mail, twitter, phonecalls, facebook) or deliberately misreading them regardless of them being on a business or personal level. As soon as we switched to personal contact (we visited them) the situation improved, leading me to believe that they have some catching up to do with modern media.

Ok now this may come across as ignorant but is language ever the problem? Maybe your emails are in english and the subtext doesn't translate over to Indonesian via written forms easily?

Also, any comments and insights on the Indian startup scene? Bangalore has been making a lot of noise lately...

We wanted to rule any language problems out from the beginning and have access to native Indonesian speakers for all of our communication.

As an anecdote I could mention that they are very mindful about where in Indonesia the addressee originates from, because social protocol advises towards custom addressing and language.

Implementing localization within the country! Wow!

The term was originally used to either distinguish countries non-aligned with either capitalism or communism during the cold war but has since gained an economic connotation and become synonymous with "poor".

The Philippines is a capitalist country and consequently doesn't fit the first definition; it most definitely is not poor, so it also doesn't fit the last.

To put that in perspective, Thailand ranks 23rd by GDP, has a literacy rate in the high 90s and has an unemployment rate of around 1%.

The average professional does make around half of what they would in the US, but their taxes are lower and their cost of living is also half or less. The health care cost/quality ratio makes many countries look barbaric.

I think "third world" could be safely replaced with "economy I know nothing about" in the majority of cases.

So jumping down someone's throat for calling the RP a poor country looks a little premature to me. (I lived there for two years and my gut feeling doesn't disagree with that, although if you've only been to Makati I can see how you might not realize that.)

That said, to me "3rd-world" has pejorative connotations regardless of income levels, and I also wish the submitter had left the title alone.

Quote:

"Using a PPP basis is arguably more useful when comparing generalized differences in living standards on the whole between nations because PPP takes into account the relative cost of living and the inflation rates of the countries, rather than using just exchange rates which may distort the real differences in income."

Thailand ranks #24, #23 and #24 in those lists. I rounded up. You picked a list to illustrate your point (that Thailand and the Philippines are poor?). I picked one that better reflected GDP vs cost of living, which was my point.

I wasn't jumping down his throat specifically, I was saying that the term "third world" as applied to Thailand (and other countries) is a worthless description today. As the original commenter pointed out, it's related to the geopolitics of the Cold War. People often swap it for "developing nation" which is a euphemism for "undeveloped by Western standards" which I think is condescending and a culturally biased value judgement. When someone says "third world" I would say they either don't really understand the economics involved or are deliberately being derogatory to another people/nation. I think that's pretty safely called ignorance.

If you're looking to compare quality of life, while not perfect, I would imagine the Human Development Index would be closer in line with average experience: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_Development_Index

Does that make them poor?

By contrast, Thailand's GDP per capita is just under $4k/year (PPP adjusted), about 1/20 that of Liechtenstein.

http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/hans_rosling_shows_the_bes...

That's a shame, because after investment capital the biggest problem in the Philippines is lack of infrastructure. Government corruption is extreme. Even in the better-off cities there it can be tough to get any work done because of the constant brownouts, and high-speed fiber buildout is lacking.

I'm from Serbia, and still living here. The local market is small and extremely undeveloped. Telecommunication infrastructure is sub-standard, no non-ISP/corporate data centers and no multiple backbone links. While the cloud/grid hosting solves that particular problem, there are others.

Running a company here costs you around 300€/month, whether you have profit or not. That doesn't include office space or bills, taxes only. Note that it is the average net monthly salary, but you can't live of it really.

Corruption. Shitty infrastructure. No Paypal and no widely available (and inexpensive) card-processing options. I'm not sure about getting a proper, signed SSL certificate either.

All of the above can be circumvented, yes. The problem is that when you are so far behind everyone else society wise, ideas and visions that are popping in your head are being sold as a commodity in the rest of the world, and even if you have a nice, modern, innovative idea, unless you are wealthy, you wont be able to implement it because of so many bureaucratic obstacles.

So, what do we have here? A bunch of IT service and programming sweatshops, outsourced of course. Because of relatively cheap labor.

It is my opinion that having an inspiring and motivating, if not competing environment helps innovation.