Report: Asiajin Meeting #1 (part two)

This is the second part of our coverage of the Asiajin meeting #1 which took part this Tuesday.

Presentation No. 4

“The 4th presenter abused the meeting by violating its regulation of not speaking in one’s mother tongue against agreement. Thus we do not cover the presentation. You may find the information somewhere else. (Akky AKIMOTO)”

Presentation No. 5
(“Ememo – not a web application but an email application”)

Daisuke Furukawa -who is a freelance web developer- spoke about a product he developed by himself called ememo. Ememo is basically an electronic account book, mainly for private use. Daisuke coded the application for use with mobile phones in particular.

Here is how it works:

Users just write a mail to me@ememo.jp stating what they bought by how much. Ememo automatically lists all items, calculates the prices and also shows the amount of money you spent in a given time frame! The interface is that simple.
It’s free and very easy to use, so please check ememo out. If you would like to cancel the service, you can do so by mailing the word “UNDO” to the address above.

Ememo was launched in October last year. You can access the slides of Daisuke’s presentation here.

Presentation No. 6
(“How to live like Japanese in ?”)

“Yoski” Yosuke Akamatsu’s performance made the audience laugh constantly. Yoski is a president of sidefeed, a “feed” technologies provider (seven of sidefeed’s 14 services are available also in English. One of those services is ranked in 24th [J] by traffic in Japan.), but his talk was nothing about his company this time.

In his ironic presentation (which he didn’t hold on his company’s behalf), Yoski pointed out some of the various cultural differences he came across when thinking about Japan’s popular and geeky social portal service Hatena.

According to Yoski, Hatena hosts a lot of particularly enthusiastic users. In his view, Hatena is more “Web 2.0”-like than Yahoo! Japan or 2ch, the wildly popular BBS. He went on explaining Japanese terms like “ota”, “wabi” or “moe” and how they can be linked to this country’s unique Internet culture.
You had to be there to understand Yoski’s jokes!

Presentation No. 7
(“Differences between Japanese and American web communities”)

“Kensuu” (who has the cool title of “HeadPresident and Manager of 3rd creative division”, rocketstart) delivered another presentation focusing on cultural issues. He talked about differences in user behavior when participating in web communities in particular. He has been a community expert who managed popular forum services for youth. He recently published a Japanese book “Web community de ichiban taisetsu na koto”(“The most important thing on Web community”).

Kensuu’s two key points were:

a)

Japanese people generally love to stay totally anonymous on the web. For example, the majority of 2ch users are registered by the name of “nanashisan” (名無しさん) which means “nameless”.

b)

Japanese users do not “join” a web community but “mix” with it. According to Kensuu, this difference -which may seem purely semantic at first- reflects a unique characteristic of this country’s Internet culture.

The Japanese see members in online communities as a cohesive unit which they can blend into and become a part of. On the contrary, Western users tend to keep and stress their own identity and individuality in such a case.
Kensuu also said Japanese people like to “read” and enjoy the overall atmosphere in web communities, explaining why names are not important to them.

The aftermath

Amazingly, almost all participants of Asiajin Meeting #1 went to the following Nijikai (a kind of post-event get-together Japanese style). This was a pleasant surprise and a first for me to see!
Thank you very much to all the presenters, guests, viewers and Andrew Shuttleworth for his great job with the livecast.
Be sure to join us for Asiajin Meeting Tokyo #2 (coming soon)!