Mindtalk, an Indonesian start-up getting ready for launch later this year, is one of many young digital companies across Southeast Asia harboring big dreams.

“We have 12 people but are expanding and hope to add more employees soon,” explains co-founder and CEO Danny Oei Wirianto.

“Our focus at the moment is to build a great product and increase our users. We have had great traction so far, and are planning to break even at the end of our third year.”

The concept behind Mindtalk, a platform for communities of interest that flourished within earlier forms of social media such as mailing lists, blogs and discussion forums, is already taking shape through US-based sites such as Pinterest and Path.

Danny, former CMO with Kaskus, one of Indonesia’s most successful homegrown digital properties, feels the focus on social connections via social networks such as Facebook creates an opportunity for a different kind of social business based on interests.

“We want Mindtalk to be a global product, from Asia,” he adds. “But we have to conquer Asia, Africa and Brazil first.”

Entrepreneurial drive

After years in the doldrums, online optimism and dynamism are starting to become the norm in Southeast Asia, rekindling interest from entrepreneurs who are supplying the ambition required to galvanize growth, as well as investors with the capital needed to fund it.

The sheer scale of the Indonesian market makes it a strong magnet for VCs though a similar story is playing out in Bangkok, Kuala Lumpur and Manila, where scores of new businesses have been springing up in recent years, spanning three major drivers of online development – e-commerce, mobile and social – as well as media.

Good news for consumers and advertisers who will be increasingly spoilt for choice, but the aspiring web giants of the future can expect intense competition in the next few years, vying for eyeballs and wallets that now have many more places to go.

Rapid expansion of digital inventory has been accompanied by an influx of ad networks, aggregating audiences across this fragmented landscape and packaging them up for advertisers.

These middlemen are often global businesses themselves, and their arrival provides some pointers on where the market might be heading.

Networks specializing in video poured into Southeast Asia last year, anticipating demand for online video to pick up as broadband penetration spreads, especially as ad rates on terrestrial TV continue to rise.

This year it’s been the turn of the mobile networks, already uncovering plenty of buyers once they’ve made their pitch.

Knowledge is power

New tools that work across multiple categories and sites yield potentially rich information that can give an edge in online negotiations to buyer or seller.

Media agency networks are already gaining an advantage over media vendors in general, thanks to substantial investments in analytics and research, giving them a clearer picture of the value of different audiences and media for advertisers.

In the online environment, special trading desks that collate data from multiple sources, known in the industry as demand side platforms or DSPs, are also providing them with yardsticks to help plot reach and frequency for digital campaigns.

Ad networks serve both parties at present, but there’s a feeling that as the market evolves, they will have to take sides.

If information is power, then the media owners that survive will not just be those who know best what consumers want, but also those who understand what advertisers are after too, especially in terms of online engagement for specific audiences.