Tomorrow 20th February, the first BarCamp in Hokuriku area in Japan, BarCamp Kanazawa will be held at Kanazawa city, Ishikawa.
Akky, one of Asiajin core authors will become to attend it. There seem to be some slots available yet so if you are an English speaker around Kanazawa, see you tommorow.
Quick announcement for a Ustream event that’s going to take place this week:
Tokyo-based Beat Communication, widely regarded as being one of the pioneers in the Japanese social network industry, is organizing a discussion panel (in Japanese) on the development of “social media” in 2010. Beat Communication CEO Ryo Murai asked me to be one of the panelists, and I said yes.
Update:
The recording of the event is now available here.
Here’s the discussion in full:
The discussion will be streamed live on Ustream on January 20 (Wednesday), and here are the details:
Discussion topic:
Social Media Predictions 2010
Date and time:
January 20 (Wednesday), 20.30-21.30 Japanese time
URL:
http://www.ustream.tv/channel/socialmediapredictions2010
Specific areas of discussion:
1) How will social networks develop in the future?
2) How will streaming develop in the future?
3) What will happen in the social application space?
4) How will the smart phone industry develop in the future?
5) How will Japanese politics and Internet change in the future?
6) Which social media services will be hot in 2010?
Panelists:
Toshiaki Kanda
Kanda News Network (http://knn.typepad.com/knn/)
Twitter account http://twitter.com/knnkanda
Hideo Yamazaki
Knowledge Management Forum (http://bizplus.nikkei.co.jp/genre/eigyo/rensai/yamazaki.cfm)
Jonny Li
Beat Communication Evangelist
Twitter account http://twitter.com/JonnyLi
Ryo Murai (support)
Beat Communication CEO
Twitter account http://twitter.com/BeatComm
Takashi Obara (translator)
Beat Communication Research Engineer
and myself.
The discussion will be held in Japanese. If you have time this Wednesday evening, please make sure to tune in.
Here’s a news item of a different kind:
The next Winter Paralympics, basically the Winter Olympics for athletes with physical and visual disabilities, will be held in Vancouver between March 12 to March 21, 2010. Japan is sending a few different teams, and one of them, the cross-country ski team, is now counting on the web to get financial help in order win a medal in Canada.
The team has gained the support of Japan’s leading people search engine Spysee (their English search engine is here). Last year, the site has established a sub-service called “Cheering Spysee” [JP], which is a platform for people who chase a personal “dream” but lack the financial means to make it happen. Other Spysee users can donate directly on the site if they think the goal is worth pursuing.
If you go to Cheering Spysee now, you can see Japan’s cross-country ski team featured prominently in a dedicated campaign. The goal is to get people to donate 1 million yen ($11,000) in order to buy enough ski wax for the games. Everybody can donate directly on the site [JP]. The crowdsourced money collection has already begun, with the campaign ending February 24.
Spysee is also running a campaign on Twitter to “verbally” support the team. Just write an encouraging message to the team and add the hashtag #cheerpara to the tweet (here’s mine). The company plans to collect all of these messages, print them out on a big banner and give it to the athletes before they fly off to Vancouver as a final push.
Japan’s national cross-country ski team has won the gold medal in the Turin Paralympics four years ago, but the athletes, for some reason, have to cover most of the costs themselves.
Asiajin co-founder Akky Akimoto(@akky), Shunichi Arai(@araipiyo) and author Masaru Ikeda(@masaruikeda) are now staying in Taipei and will have a readers meet-up event on Sunday.
If you’re interested in attending it, please subscribe to this Plancast link to keep you update with the latest information. (We’ll keep this blog post update as well.)
Venue: Mr. Brown Coffee Shop, National Taipei Univ. of Technology (伯朗咖啡館 台北科大店), Zhongxiao Xingsheng Station(忠孝新生站) of Taipei Metro
http://www.ipeen.com.tw/shop/33236
Time: 2pm, January 10th on Sunday, 2010, Taiwan Standard Time.
(The picture of Taipei 101 shown above is reproduced from Skyscrapers of World under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 License.)
Hong Kong-, Tokyo-, Silicon Valley- and London-based tech start-up MotherApp has kindly developed the iPhone/iPod Touch app which allows Asiajin readers to get the latest news more easily on their palms. The company specializes in developing apps for multiple mobile platforms only by simple and single development process, and won the first prize of the audience votes at the first edition of TechCrunch Japan’s Start-up Meeting[J] that was held last month.
The Asiajin iPhone/iPod Touch reader app is absolutely free, and you can download it at any country’s edition of the AppStore by simply clicking on the banner which is appeared on the right sidebar of our website.
We appreciate this MotherApp’s contribution, and we’re sure it helps us to reach more people who are eager to keep themselves update with tech news and IT trends in Japan and Asia.
HongKong-, Tokyo-, London- and Silicon Valley-based tech start-up MotherApp has kindly developed the iPhone/iPod reader app for us. Click on the link below for it. Absolutely free.
