Almost a month ago, there was an international technology and start-up showcase event, which is called Echelon, at the National University of Singapore. Because of many things to do remaining after the event, I delayed making a write-up on it.

I think this year's Echelon was its second edition, and that took place on June 16 and 17. Here's a brief wrap-up.

Startup Launchpad (Part 1)

•  Cardinal Blue (a photo collage app for iPhone/iPad) - Taiwan
• WorkCrowd (a free social network for your workspace) - Malaysia
• SixReps (a social network for fitness and sportenthusiasts) - Indonesia
• JellyBus (a developer of Android-based funny apps) - Korea
• Fetch Fans (A web-based assistant to help your Facebook/Twitter designs) - Singapore
• Bouncity (A location-based gaming platform where users can hunt for bounty from participating brands and get rewards)

Startup Launchpad (Part 2)

• Moglue (A desktop platform that allows publishers, amateur authors to create interactive stories for iOS and Android devices) - Korea <See this story for more>
• Second CRM (A web-based CRM software especially for SMEs in Asia) - Malaysia
• Price Area (A shopping search engine to help you find the best deals) - Indonesia
• LocoBuzz by Spatial Ideas (an analytics, query and communications platform which integrates news and tweets onto a geographical map) - India

• [The Launchpad Winner] PlayMoolah (a web service for kids to master their money) - Singapore

Exhibitors' Booths...

Garbs, a Tokyo-based start-up that helps you recruit potential colleagues using their Facebook app.

Compath.me, 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.

Makible, a Hongkong-based start-up for making niche products.  They connect with online communities to pre-order-crowd sourced products they make and distribute.  Founded by Jonathan Buford and Nicholas Wang.

Panel...

I was invited to Lisa Katayama's panel featuring Japanese tech scene, and we talked about the latest developments on the Japanese web industry.  Also I gave some words to Asian start-ups who eagerly go into Japanese market.  From left to right, Lisa Katayama (Tokyo Mango), Ian McFarland (Digital Garage), me, Jon Yonghook Cockle (CookPad) and Brian Ritchie (Mind Valley, Malaysia).  Photo courtesy: e27.

After the event...

Penn Olson, a Singapore-based tech blog which I've been contributing for, had a party in the central Singapore, where four Japanese start-ups including Cacoo, Fashion Style Japan, Compath.me and Moso had an opportunity to present. You can find videos shooting it here[J].

Just heard Asiajin co-founder Akky is planning to stay in Singapore for several weeks next month. If you're interested in meeting him and making friendship, I recommend you to drop him a line.

Tags: Event Report, Singapore by Masaru IKEDA
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Lady Gaga's Japan visit was a sensation, left a lot of news with celebrities including Japanese' Ophra Tetsuko Kuroyanagi, prime minister Naoto Kan and SMAP, long-time ruling boys unit.

Lady Gaga's appearance on Japanese TV was estimated 135 million dollars worth [J] if it was advertising.

Gaga is recognized as a celebrity who directly talk to her fans over social media. Japanese, both media and people chased her tweets during her stay.

What happened today is that they noticed that her uploaded video, a TV program hosted by SMAP featuring her, which she had introduced on twitter on 12th, is not watchable. The same movie was posted on Rolling Stone, too.

It was not only that. Lady Gaga's YouTube official channel has been stopped, too.

The movie was claimed by Media Interactive Inc., which is the same company who mistakenly removed YouTube movie uploaded by a popular Japanese singer Hikaru Utada before. They were her own official movies.

SMAP and its agency Jhonny's Office are well known by their hard-line portrait rights control. It is not easy to find their unofficially uploaded photos, at least on Japanese web. Lady Gaga uploading such movie and a photo over Twitter was worried by Japanese users, because if other Japanese talents did that, she/he will get hard time by that. Actually, no Japanese would post their photos of Jhonny's Office talents on the web, as they know it would be troublesome.

When SMAP sang in front of Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao, who was visiting Japan, most Japanese media did not post a photo with SMAP, whilst Chinese media did.

I do not embed the photo of Lady Gaga and SMAP here, because I do now want to be cautioned.

Tags: Japan, News by Akky Akimoto
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Japanese Yen has been staying high against US dollars, especially last year. Apple finally thinks its 115 yen(US$1.45) is too much for $0.99 apps.

@kokubucamera reported [J] that all 115 yen iOS apps are now sold at 85 yen, which is $1.08 on today's rate, about 26% discount this morning.

230 yen app is now 170 yen. 350 to 250, 450 to 350, etc.

Tags: Japan, News by Akky Akimoto
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Official Japanese Twitter blog announced [J] today that Twitter is now capable of Japanese character hashtags.

Now when you use # or its Japanese version ＃ followed by Japanese keywords on your tweet, that will be automatically linked on Twitter.

As Japanese is not a language separated by spaces, it is a bit tricky to direct which part is hashtag or not. You need to insert extra spaces before and after the hashtag, or use Japanese punctuations. It is not natural writings but if you forget it, all the sentence to the end of the tweet will become a long hashtag.

Although Twitter is much more popular in Japanese than any other languages, its Japanese support has been generally poor. At the early stage Japanese users need to hack on it to send Japanese tweets. Search and trending topics were introduced very recently, now hashtag comes.

Twitter official tells that you may not use symbols (like star ☆) for hashtag. But in Unicode, it is not easy to define which letters are Japanese and which are not. So it is possible that other non-latin chatacters are involved to this change. I did not know they were available before but hangeul and cyrillic hashtags I tested are also linkified.

It is likely that non-Japanese Twitter clients/services will not be able to support this feature, so this will help Japanese third party developers' applications targeting Japanese Twitter users.

Tags: Japan, News by Akky Akimoto
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In the next month, it will be the hottest summer ever which is filled with a number of start-up events.   Jonny Li, a Tokyo-based British start-up curator and also known as a partner for the Startup Weekend organization, announced he would hold its 54-hour weekend events in Tokyo, Kyoto and Fukuoka.  The events are to be operated by Mr. Li, Mr. Masanori Hashimoto of NuLab Inc.[J] who's well known for diagram-sharing web app Cacoo, and Kyoto Research Park.

• Aug 5 (Fri) - 7 (Sun) : In Kyoto, Kyoto Research Park
• Aug 19 (Fri) - 21 (Sun) : In Tokyo, Mixi Head Office
• Aug 26 (Fri) - 28 (Sun) : In Fukuoka, Kyushu University

Mr. Li expects sponsorship from several local tech companies in each of the cities, is currently working on it, and hopes to raise a 6 or 7-digit amount of cash (in Japanese yen) to the final prize winner.

Appointed judges who will watch and evaluate the pitches of participating developers include: Junya Kondo[J] from Hatena[J] (a Kyoto-based blog hosting company, see this for the company's related stories), Kentaro Sakakibara from Samurai Incubate and Mikihiro Yasuda[J] from Tokyo-based incubator Open Network Lab[J].  More great names are expected to be seated on the judging panel, so please keep your eyes on the website of the three-city events.

If you're interested in attending any of them and co-developing with great comrades, visit the website of the event in your city and complete your sign-up before all seats are sold out.

See Also:

• Startup Weekend Tokyo 2010: Picture Crop Tool Kachop Wins 1st Prize Among Nine Teams
• 10 Ideas From Startup Weekend Tokyo (Penn Olson)

Tags: Community, Japan by Masaru IKEDA
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