Tonchidot, a Tokyo-based start-up, was the second Japanese party presenting at this year's TechCrunch50 conference that currently takes place in San Francisco.

Their presentation today was probably the most talked about of day 2 (tomorrow is the last day of the conference) but in my view, this is because of the wrong reasons. As stated in my original report for TechCrunch, regarding the presentation for Sekai Camera, a social tagging service developed exclusively for the iPhone, I had the feeling most people laughed more at the presentation than about it.

What's worse: It was very hard to understand what Sekai Camera actually DOES and what problem it solves, even though the service seems to be very cool. Essentially, you are supposed to hold an iPhone, which is equipped with the Sekai Camera application, in front of your eyes and look at the display while walking around. What the display shows you in real time is small tags containing information about places, products, sightseeing spots etc. you are "seeing" through your iPhone's camera (in case they were tagged by somebody before).

Also, I didn't understand why they were not inclined to answer any technology-related questions. Erick Schonfeld (TechCrunch's co-editor) and myself went looking for 10 minutes to look after the Tonchidot people but they left their booth at that time, which is a pity. I talked to the CEO and Marketing Director after the presentation myself but couldn't get any deep information either. Sure, there might be some legal/patent-related issues but they didn't even say if their Tech is GPS-based, if it uses image recognition or triangulation as technical solutions.

They didn't even answer these questions when the jury experts asked them. I am aware that there was a language problem but still, it was strange.

A blogger from Germany (where I hail from) who is present in San Francisco and actually quite influential wrote in his blog [GER] that he suspects Sekai Camera is a fake product and the presenters wanted to ridicule the conference. I heard speculations like this over a dozen times today.

And I am not sure if it's a good company strategy to take a presentation as easy as that, may it be TechCrunch50 or any other, smaller conference. Opentrace did it better. Let's see what Gazopa does tomorrow.

This is a demo video of Sekai Camera:

Tags: Event Report, Japan, New Service by Serkan Toto
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Greasemonkey is a popular Firefox AddOn which enables users to insert customized Javascripts on top of websites, to extend website functionality.

Greasemetal is a Greasemonkey-like user Javascript inserter extension for Google Chrome. It is only a week after Google Chrome release, and done without having extension capability provided.

By this Greasemetal, you may add any supplemental Javascript to any website, with one of the fastest browser Javascript execution environment Google Chrome. User Javascripts are mostly compatible with Greasemonkey so that you already have bunch of usable scripts on userscripts.org.

The author, Kazuho OKU is known by making several interesting services around browser and its extension, user-generated menu translator system Japanize and Mylingual, traffic gathering analysis Pathtraq.

[disclaimer] Akky AKIMOTO is working part time for Cybozu Labs as an in-house blogger

See Also

Developer's Blog : Greasemetal - a userscript runtime for Google Chrome

Tokyo2point0 event: Cybozu Labs and Phishing / Web 2.0 security | Asiajin

Tags: Japan, New Service by Akky Akimoto
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I am at the TechCrunch 50 conference in San Francisco right now (you might know I am a writer for the TechCrunch network). The Wifi was off so my report is a little late, sorry:

Yesterday, a start-up from Tokyo called Rinen presented their product, Opentrace, to the 1,700-people crowd. Rinen has neither a company web site nor is Opentrace online now (it says "Coming soon" on the home page).

It's a "green" web site, which can help you to determine the CO2 impact of certain products you buy and things you do. Asiajin reported about Rinen being selected as a TC50 company here.

I must say the presentation was not as good as those of the American companies. Three disadvantages Japanese companies usually have compared to their competitors: The language barrier, lack of experience in speaking publicly and general presentation skills.

Americans (and to a lesser degree Europeans) are used to deliver presentations and speak to a group of people (they begin in school). Japanese people usually don't, which puts them at a disadvantage in conferences like this. I must say I didn't understand about 20-30% of what was going on during the 8 minutes.

But the Rinen guys were very calm (given the quantity and quality of people present here) and fought through the presentation without any hiccup. And two of the four judges called the site "killer", which is great.

Here is more information on the company and Opentrace. Please watch the official TechCrunch video of the presentation (plus Q&A) below:

Tags: Company, Event Report, Japan, New Service, Technology, Video by Serkan Toto
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