Strengthen Edtech Ecosystem, Cakap Prepares Three New Services

After changing the name from Squlines, Cakap is currently preparing three new services, namely Cakap Chat, Cakap Live, and Cakap Lifestyle. Among these platforms, Cakap Chat has a definite launch date in the third quarter of 2019.

Cakap CEO Tomy Yunus said that the expansion of this service was to accommodate Cakap's focus on becoming a more affordable foreign language course platform provider and opening access to professional teachers and high-quality education in Indonesia.

"Through this new service, we want to strengthen the ecosystem by adding more diverse teaching partners and learning content," Tomy told DailySocial.

Tomy explained, Cakap Chat is an application that can be used to study, consult, or chat one on one with the teacher/tutor. User can send chat (text) or voice notes (voice). The business model is subscription-based over a period of time.

Meanwhile, Cakap Live is an application live streaming for learning activities with professional teachers with a maximum of 100 participants in one session. Content and filler will be curated. This application has not officially launched, but is already accessible to users.

About Cakap Lifestyle, Tomy could not provide further information about this service. What is certain is that Cakap Lifestyle will present a variety of content regarding skill and lifestyles. 

"We hope that there will be a significant increase in users so that the Cakap application can further improve the quality of life of users," he said.

In the long term, said Yunus, Cakap has ambitions to become a great app in the field educational technology or EdTech in Indonesia. Especially with the service expansion that is being carried out to strengthen its ecosystem.

"We are optimistic that Cakap can become a great app in the next five years. Moreover, programs in President Jokowi's government will focus on human resource development rather than infrastructure spending. This is a breath of fresh air for actors in the education industry, including EdTech," he explained.

Practice Area EdTech Currently, startups in the country are looking at quite a lot. The presence of technology is one of the tool to address a number of problems in Indonesia's education sector, ranging from limited access to roads, the internet, and the number of teachers. On the other hand, it is still difficult to change mindset Indonesians to learn through the platform.

The Ministry of Education and Culture stated that the total number of teachers in Indonesia as of 2018 was only 3,2 million people. This number is very far from Indonesia's population which reaches more than 260 million people.