The Japanese business world lit abuzz yesterday as it was announced that the former head Livedoor, Takafumi Horie, had his appeal rejected by the Japanese Supreme Court, thereby finalizing his conviction for accounting fraud issued 4 years ago. Takafumi Horie, or Horiemon as he is popularly known for his resemblance to the manga character Doraemon, was involved in a securities fraud and money laundering investigation in 2006 that sent Livedoor stock into an unprecedented tailspin. He was later arrested by Tokyo public prosecutors, for falsely reporting 5 billion yen ($43 million) in pre-tax income in 2004 to hide real losses of 310 million yen. When four Livedoor executives admitted guilt and became prosecution witnesses, the case centered around the extent to which Horiemon was complicit with the executives as well as his awareness of the accounting fraud that was taking place. In 2007 he was handed his 2.5 year prison sentence for "overseeing a network of decoy investment funds established for the purpose of evading the law" and to "manipulate Livedoor's accounting" but was later released on a 300 million yen bail.
As opposed to many public Japanese business scandals, usually involving the tearful admittance of guilt by executives, Horiemon retained his innocence throughout the prosecution. Further, the Horiemon drama is of immense interest to the public. Horiemon became known for his unconventional entrepreneurship and vocal criticisms of the Japanese business environment and system as he rose to fame in 2004-2005. He has gained respect and the following of many younger Japanese people who could relate to his different style of business.
Since his bail in 2007, Horiemon has maintained a very high public profile not only through his incredible social media following but by authoring his new book "Horiemon's Cosmology", which was just recently published, as well as his popular Ameblo blog. After his appeal was rejected, Horiemon tweeted "Rejected...." to his 694,000 Twitter followers he had gained over the past years. It was no wonder that when his prison fate had been publicly announced, trending topics related to Horiemon topped Japan's recently added trending lists.
It can be expected Horiemon will remain a point of immense public fascination who despite his conviction still remains one of the few symbols of rebellion against a stagnant, stringent business culture.
Digital Garage, Japan's Internet conglomerate known for operating price comparison portal Kakaku.com and helping Twitter's business operation, held a semiyearly conference event last week, which is called the New Context Conference 2011 Spring, where Japanese well-known tech investor Joi Ito and the world's Internet authorities came together, most of whom have expertise in social media, radiation measurement and disaster prevention.
Dr. Chowdhury of Twitter started his speech with the first slide of Namazu, a giant catfish which causes earthquakes in Japanese mythology.
Starting with a keynote speech by Abdur Chowdhury (@abdur), the chief scientist of Twitter Inc., he explained how Twitter work had worked efficiently to communicate among people when the massive earthquake had hit the Tohoku Region on March 11, by showing us some animated infographics of how many tweets being exchanged across the globe during the time.
In the first session, five panelists from Japanese and foreign media discussed how mass media should tell the society what happened in the disaster while Twitter and other social media succeeded to deliver up-to-the-minute voices from the devastated areas. Hiroyuki Tsuruta[J], a student entrepreneur who had developed a website collecting tweets supporting our relief efforts, Pray for Japan[J], also joined the panel.
From left to right: Joi Ito (Digital Garage), Abdur Chowdhury (Twitter), Hiroyuki Tsuruta (Pray for Japan), Hiroko Tabuchi (New York Times Tokyo Correspondent), Tomoya Sasaki (Digital Garage) and Tatehiko Koyanagi (Nikkei Inc.)
In the second session, which was titled hardware and sensor network, four experts from radiation measurement device development and crisis response, they talked about how we can obtain parameters to protect ourselves from the invisible enemy when the government and a power company don't disclose everything on the nuclear powerhouse accident. They introduced RDTN as a web mash-up that helps us learn a lot about what's happening.
From left to right: Joi Ito (Digital Garage), Jun Murai (Keio Univ.), Ray Ozzie (ex-Chief Software Architect, Microsoft), Aaron Huslage (Crisis Response ICT Specialist) and Dan Sythe (CEO, Iospectra)
The third session, which is about speed and agile software development. In the crisis time of disaster, web apps helping people are needed to developed as rapidly as possible. Joi concluded that a variety of open source resources and cloud services made it easier to launch a web service very quickly, which contributed a lot to providing disaster-related information to the people having no chance to check out news updates on TV. From left to right: Joi Ito (Digital Garage), Paul Campbell (HyperTiny), Michelle Levesque (ex-Social Product Manager, Google), Phil Libin (Evernote CEO)
Following more than a dozen of unconferences arranged by the attendees, there was an opportunity for four start-ups being incubated at Open Network Lab[J] to present what they had made for the last several months. Open Network Lab is a seed acceleration program by Digital Garage and intends to be Tokyo's version of Y-Combinator. All services introduced are currently under development, and I will try to let you figure out what they are, but no details are available at the moment.
Groupelago is a web service that allows you to aggregate social feeds of people you are interested in. Two guys developing the service graduated from Keio University, and they believe it can be used to encourage freshers to join a school club, because it can show them what kind of people the club consists of prior to joining it. The service is currently running in beta and available only among Keio students.
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Frenzee by Masaru Murata (@m_murata[J])
Frenzee is a social web app that allows you to discover new digital content. It helps you connect to someone having the same interest with you by choosing pictures that have been posted on the service. The following video helps you learn how it will work.
Compath.me is a location-based smartphone app that allows you to find discoveries near-by that the other users have posted and you may be interested in.
Satoshi has grown up in Nigeria and London and is currently attending the International Christian University in Tokyo. His app Wondershake is a location-based smartphone app that visualizes your inner taste and connect you with like-minded people around you in the real world. He plans to launch the service at the end of this month, not in Japan but in the US. A judge asked him why he would launch it in the US before Japan, and he answered he believed this app would fit the US market despite average Japanese are considered to be shy and it's hard for them to make friends with someone else. His answer called a big laugh from an audience.
Finally, Joi proposed a toast to the successful event and expecting more entrepreneurial challenges to come. DJ Amiga started playing music to entertain the gathering crowd.
A cellphone shop in Yokohama offers a service to set up your smartphone for tweeting by 5,000 yen, @poppo1028 reported.
Twitter and other social media has been getting more and more attentions on TV, newspaper and magazines after the Eastern Japan earthquake. Both good side and bad side of social media at disasters were reported, and many may be thinking to have one more communication channel for another one. This shows that people who do not understand the concept of web service account and apps installation are interested in Twitter.
Gree, Japan's social gaming giant, announced today that it has acquired social platform OpenFeint for $104 million USD. OpenFeint 's social platform for iPhone and Android allows developers to add social elements to existing games with minimal programming. This low barrier to entry has accelerated its growth since its founding in 2009, now boasting a catalogue of over 5,300 games, 19,000 game developers, and 75 million users. The OpenFeint team will remain intact along with CEO and founder Jason Citron, and will look to double in size over the next year. Gree will be able to help grow and tap into OpenFeint's massive game distribution network, allowing Gree to reach over 100 million users.
This acquisition comes after a string of announcements of aggressive growth for Gree, having recently announced a major partnership with mig33 to reach 47 million users in Southeast Asia. It is evident that international partnerships with existing gaming giants like China's Tencent, mig33, and now OpenFeint are of strategic importance for a company whose core user-base and revenue stream are in a large but ultimately matured mobile game market of Japan.
We also got wind that Gree San Francisco is celebrating with champagne right now.
On Japanese official blog, Twitter announced that they have had a country manager of Japan, first corporation manager outside of US.
The blog is usually written in Japanese, but this one was both in Japanese and in English.
A Welcome to Twitter Japan’s Country Manager
I couldn’t be happier to announce that James Kondo (@jameskondo) is our new and first country manager in Japan. In fact, he’s Twitter’s first international country manager.
Japan has been an important country for Twitter for several years. It is one of the first countries that really took to Twitter outside of the United States in creative and innovative ways. And, better yet, Twitter usage in Japan continues to quickly grow.
We like to think that Twitter has been important to Japan, too. Most recently, we’ve been humbled to have played a role in helping connect the country after the tsunami and earthquakes. On behalf of everyone at Twitter, I convey our deepest condolences to everyone in Japan, especially to victims and their families.
James is perfect for the job. For the Office of the Prime Minister, James has been a policy advisor and director of global communications strategy. He has also served as an international management consultant at McKinsey & Company and been a director at a leadership program at the University of Tokyo. Somehow he’s even had time to write and edit four books.
James will be building out a team in Japan. You can see current job openings here.
Congratulations. Twitter welcomes you, James.
Mostly they tell the same thing. The one which is not so clear for me is if Twitter Japan now exists as a corporation body.
