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month after foregoing Koprol, Yahoo! Indonesia announced that they have reached a deal to return the trademarks and domain names related to the geo-tagging site back to its founders, Satya Witoelar, Fajar Budiprasetyo and Daniel Armanto.

According to Satya Witoelar, the deal involved the founders purchasing back the Koprol brand, as part of the required legal formalities. “Payments were involved, but the sum was insubstantial. It was more about Yahoo! presenting Koprol to us as a form of appreciation for the work we’ve done,” Satya told The Jakarta Post.

Yahoo! Indonesia acquired Koprol from its founders in 2010 with the aim of developing the site into a serious competitor to other geo-tagging sites such as Foursquare. Yet, impacted by the tech giant’s lackluster financial performance, Yahoo! Indonesia decided to relinquish Koprol in June to refocus on existing properties, including Yahoo! News and Yahoo! OMG.

Satya added that the payment was made for the purchase of trademarks and domains related to Koprol. However, the payment did not include the repossession of the product and its database. “The product, including all data, will still officially wrap up on Aug. 28,” he said, pointing to Koprol’s official shut down date. He added that the founders had set up their own companies, Barito Labs and Ice House, which would continue to churn out tech products.

Satya pointed out that Barito Labs would manage the Koprol brand, but remarked that they would not create a copy of Koprol. “There’s more products based on geo-tagging which we would like to explore,” he said.

Meanwhile, Ice House — which Daniel and Fajar would run — have received investments from the Silicon Valley-based private firm, Pacific Technology Partners. “They’ll be working on projects from Silicon Valley,” he said, adding that several engineers from the Yahoo! Koprol team were now part of the new company.

Following global layoffs, Yahoo! Indonesia let go of approximately 30 developers and engineers working for the company as well as Koprol.

Donny Budhi Utomo, a tech observer from ICT Watch, said that it was a good move by Yahoo! Indonesia to return the Koprol brand to the founders. “Yes, it was good of them. But the question is not about being good, but the scale of good,” he told the Post. According to Donny, the initial aim of Yahoo! Indonesia was to grow Koprol into a site with clout, partly by acquiring a considerable user base.

In 2011, Koprol said that they had acquired 1.5 million users — 80 percent of them coming from Indonesia with the rest from countries such as Singapore and Vietnam. However, returning just the brand means that the founders have to rebuild their user database from scratch, if the founders were to launch a similar product to the old Koprol. “The brand has to once again acquire new members, and it is three times more expensive to acquire new users than it is to retain them,” he remarked.

He added that Yahoo! Indonesia could have returned Koprol with its pre-acquisition database to allow the founders to rebuild again from that point onwards instead. However, he noted that the founders would not have much problem in finding new users if they were to launch a product like the previous Koprol, given that each site and founder had their own “loyal followers”.

“But the challenge would not be in rebuilding the brand, which is quite famous already. The challenge would be in facing off substantial competition from the likes of Twitter, Facebook and Instagram,” he said.