Asiajin

Today, YAPC::Asia 2008, one of the biggest Perl conference, had been held at Tokyo Institute of Technology, Japan. Serkan, Akky, and I attended the conference.

This time, YAPC has three parallel sessions during two days, and number of registered attendees reached 500. With a help of abundant sponsorship from Perl user companies such as Recruit, livedoor, DeNA, mixi , Yahoo!, and so on, the conference has a free dinner and lunches. It’s really a generous deal considering mere 4500yen ($45) entrance fee.

The atomosphere was truly international. Many people are attending from overseas. Half of sessions are done in English.

Jesse Vincent introduced his new distributed database called Prophet. Prophet is an asynchronously replicated distributed database system. It means user can change the database when he’s offline, and can upload when he gets connected. Jesse implemented a bug tracking system on it.

Ikuhiro Ihara revealed Livedoor’s spam filtering engine. Livedoor is providing many services such as blog, wiki, and bulletin board system. All services share same engine to previous dataset of spams. An automatically created IP based apache filter rejects 50,000 to 5 million accesses each day.

He said, on New Year’s Day, everyone writes “Happy new year” on a same time. His filter needs an ad hoc fix not to label those posts as spams.

YAPC::Asia 2008 is organised by volunteers (shibuya.pm). I want to thank them for organising such a great event every year.

I will write a photo report of the conference dinner later.

Tags: Community, Japan by shunichi arai
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The Japanese government is planning to legislate regulations of “harmful” Internet content. Now, Liberal Democratic Party’s Sanae Takaichi is preparing to pass an Internet censorship law.

Now several groups are acting against the legislation.

Microsoft, Yahoo, Rakuten, DeNA, and NetStar made an official statement against the legislation. One of the leaders of this action is Masanori Kusunoki (@masanork or mkusunok at hatena, both in JP), a deputy CTO of Microsoft KK.

MiAU (JP) (Movement for the Internet Active Users) is a vocal political NPO acting against the abuse of copyrights and Internet censorship. They are acting against the law too.

WIDE project made a statement in English too. WIDE is a leading Internet research group in Japan.

Tags: Community, Japan by shunichi arai
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The Japan’s biggest conference on Ruby, RubyKaigi 2008, will start to sell tickets from 10th of May 10:00 JST (GMT+0900). Ticket will be sold out immediately (in few hours, probably).

The conference will be held from 20th-22nd June, but talks are planned only on 21st and 22nd. The venue is Tsukuba International Congress Center in Tsukuba City, Ibaraki, Japan, 45 minutes from Tokyo.

RubyKaigi 2008 is a less international conference than YAPC::Asia 2008. Most talks will be given with Japanese, but still a few talks in English are planned at this moment. If you are living in Japan, or East Asia, it is worth considering to join.

Ticked can be bought at Lawson convinience store chain in Japan. If you are living outside of Japan, you have to contact them by e-mail.

I’m going to talk at the conference too. See you there.

Tags: Community, Japan by shunichi arai
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This month’s Mobile Monday Tokyo event was held at Google Japan’s HQ in Shibuya (entrance fee: 2000 Yen/19 USD/12 Euro). As always, the venue was totally packed. The event is organized by Mobikyo.

It was not allowed to take pictures. Two presentations were given, followed by a networking session.

Solving big problems on small devices - Google’s approach to the mobile internet evolution

John Lagerling, Strategic Partner Development Manager at Google Japan, delivered the first presentation of the evening.

In essence, John talked about how seriously Google views the development of the mobile Internet. He said that “big G” regards the fragmentation of the wireless market as the main problem in the process: There are dozens of different operating systems in the world, various national carriers, thousands of handsets etc. However, Google apparently is determined to bring their search engine, online advertisement expertise and applications to mobile devices in an optimized version.

John went on saying that his company views the future of the mobile Internet in a bright light: Bigger handset screens, better networks and improved mobile browsers with full HTML rendering capability and AJAX support leave little space for excuses for software producers. Of course, Google’s very own Android was mentioned as a way to bridge the gap between the fixed Internet and the mobile web.

Leaving this Marketingese on the side, what I found interesting was a slide which illustrated mobile access to Google from Japanese users during the day. John said that people in this country like accessing Google (on mobile devices) particularly during lunch break, the evening news (around 6 pm) and before bed time. Contrary to popular belief, mobile web access in Japan cannot be reduced to usage during commuting on trains. According to John, that is, but I agree actually.

Driving Traffic and Monetization of mobile social media

Jaehong Lee, COO of Mikle Inc., spoke about his company’s mobile social media service of the same name.

The online community enjoyed a very healthy growth since its launch in November 2005. At the moment, 130 million page views are registered-monthly! In 2006, Mikle became the official community for Japan’s No. 2 mobile carrier au (KDDI). Not bad at all!

Jaehong explained not the service itself but elaborated on economic details. However, he said his company is proud to put serious efforts into keeping Mikle “clean” of spamming and insults. For example, users need to identify themselves before being able to post in the community boards.

Jaehong said Mikle integrated mobile AdSense in 2007 and that as a result, revenues doubled within five months. Also, Mikle users can add tags which lead to a separate search results page (including AdSense links) after being clicked on. The CTR in this case is six times higher than usual! Jaehong went on revealing the top key word on Mikle in terms of generating CTR is “music”. The highest CPC comes from the term “travel” while top eCPM can be gained from “music”, “travel” and “diet”.

Conclusion

Overall, I thought the event was not bad but I liked the one in April better (OK, an awards show is more spectacular in itself). Both presentations became interesting when the presenters went into details (Google: mobile usage over the time span of a day, Mikle: concrete results of AdSense integration).

There is no Mobile Monday event in May. The next one is scheduled for June 23rd, 2008.

Tags: Community, Japan by Serkan Toto
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This month’s Tokyo2point0 event drew a huge crowd this week on Tuesday. Again, two presentations were held between and before networking sessions.

Venture Capital for Tech Startups

My friend Aki Ohashi from ngi capital, the investment arm of ngi group (an investor in and operator of -mostly Asian- Tech companies) spoke about the current state of affairs in Japan’s venture capital industry.

Aki and his 8 colleagues are investing in a whopping 60 companies at the moment. NGI capital is predominantly active in early phase and seed financing. The flagship investment is mixi, Japan’s uber social network which is valued at approximately two billion USD.

According to the presenter, early stage investments are shrinking in size and quantity at the moment as far as the Japanese VC industry as a whole is concerned. Aki evaluated this general trend as the market getting more conservative in an unstable economic environment.

I found it interesting that ngi capital as a genuine Japanese VC firm basically values the same factors when it comes to assessing a candidate company for investment as Western ones: human resources (background of the team), technology (differentiation and IP) and market potential. Also, Aki said personal introductions or connections within ngi capital’s network are most efficient when it comes to opening doors for startups. Again, the same is true for Western VCs. In sharp contrast to the USA however, Aki commented that in Japan NDA are used frequently during the following screening process.

As to why startups should cooperate with VCs, he listed the following main factors:
- outside validation
- assistance with business plan
- assistance with recruitment
- introductions to partners, other VCs, potential new clients etc.

In ngi capital’s philosophy, a good pitch from a startup should be centered on a good “overall story”. Aki said this point almost outshadows other elements such as the solution the candidate company provides, its competitive advantage or proprietary technologies.

As a person with a business background, I found this presentation particularly insightful and interesting!

LIMS: the Multi-level Blogging and Ecommerce Platform

Robert Cawte, Kiwi and fellow IT-blogger, delivered a presentation on a multi-level blogging and Ecommerce platform. Robert became CTO of the producer of the platform, Kojimachi-based web startup eSynapse, just one week ago and had to prepare his appearance at the event on short notice.

The service explained -which is called LIMS (Live Information Management System)- is eSynapse’s flagship product. In essence, LIMS is a commercial blog platform with integrated ecommerce functions and a mobile phone interface.

Click here for an actual site which was built using eSynapse’s technology.

As Robert decided to go for a “live” and hands-on presentation, it is recommended you watch the corresponding video (part 1 (starting at the 12:00 mark), part 2, part 3 - made by mover and shaker Andrew Shuttleworth, the event’s main organizer).

More info about the event and network can be found on the official Tokyo2point0 site, the Facebook group or on Mixi.

Tags: Community, Japan by Serkan Toto
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This month’s Mobile Monday Tokyo event (held on March 24th near Hibiya park in central Tokyo) was actually an awards show. The so-called “MoMo Tokyo Peer Awards” event featured a total of 12 companies aiming to go to Malaysia in May to represent Japan in the Mobile Monday Global Summit.

Speaking time was limited to three minutes - the awards show was based on an “elevator pitch” approach.

Bluntly put, I am not sure if all of the contestants were aware what kind of opportunity the event on Monday represented to them. Most of the presentations simply didn’t seem to be well-prepared (slides, flow, language, organization). Some were even just awful, I am sorry to say. Given that approximately 200 industry insiders were present and Mobile Monday events generally attract a lot of attention in the media, this is beyond my understanding.

Contestants and winners

Competing companies were divided into three groups:
1) Academic: Students in an accredited University program
2) Start-ups: Recently founded with early-stage financing
3) Emerging: Operating between Series A & B funding

The winners are marked with “*”.

1) Academic: Students in an accredited University program

Mobile Krishna* (information service for tourists in India with no website)
BCmoney MobileTV (recommendation and monetization service)

2) Start-ups: Recently founded with early-stage financing

Stargame’s* (translation service)
Choten.tv (3G videocall system)
Starling Software (mobile web technology)
UTUTU (social counter system “Kaztool”)

3) Emerging: Operating between Series A & B funding

J-Magic* (face recognition system)
GMAP (location-based map service “Find Tokyo”)
Mobile Healthcare (management system for various diseases “Lifewatcher”)
Naviblog (speech-to-mobile blog service)
Next Ninja (mobile video service)
Rockbird (mobile CMS)

My personal favorites services of the show were Rockbird (marketed as “Dreamweaver” for mobile applications), Next Ninja’s video technology and Lifewatcher-which I liked the most. More on the winners can be found here.

Opinion

From the 12 companies listed above, English web pages are offered by only six contestants. The same goes for the services pitched themselves. From the three winners, two companies offer Japanese-only web pages and services. Mobile Krishna is not online at all-go figure.

At least, J-Magic’s CEO Takuya told me English translations are being prepared. Overall though, it is commendable that eight representatives of Japanese companies went onstage and made a presentation in English to such a large audience!

I liked this month’s Mobile Monday event much better than the one in February. The venue itself (20F of Shinsei Bank’s HQ) was cool and suitable for an event of this size. The show was followed by a networking session during which attendees could get more information on the competing companies at their exhibition stands.

Tags: Cellular Phone, Community by Serkan Toto
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YAPC (Yet Another Perl Conference) Asia 2008, one of the biggest hacker conferences in Asia, will start attendee registration on March 25th. Seats will be sold out really soon.

YAPC is a bilingual (Japanese/English) conference and expecting many international speakers and attendees. YAPC will be held in Tokyo on May 15th-16th.

Larry Wall gives a key note. You shouldn’t miss this opportunity.

Tags: Community, Japan by shunichi arai
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The monthly Tokyo2point0 event took place for the 10th time in Harajuku last Tuesday. More info about the event and network can be found on the official Tokyo2point0 site, the Facebook group or on Mixi.

This time, two presentations were held (in English and Japanese), leaving enough room for networking among the attendees (which is in my view always very welcome).

Kakaku.com’s new Photohito service

Kakaku.com (”Kakaku dotto komu”, is their company name) is a huge Japanese price comparison platform (more info here and here) covering a wide range of products from electronics to financial services. In fact, over time Kakaku.com evolved into a full-fledged social shopping service, providing information on over 220,000 different products.

An internal initiative spearheaded by Kakaku.com engineer Shinya Sugiyama made the management clear a budget for the development of a photo sharing site called “Photohito” (which means “photo people” in Japanese). The new service is run under the umbrella of Kakaku.com, not by a separate entity.

Shinya said the first internal pitch was given in July last year and the service went online on February 21st. Shinya’s motivation was triggered by a personal dissatisfaction with current photo management sites available on the web. So he decided to produce a service on his own.

According to Shinya, Photohito is following a “3S”-approach. The site wants to focus on showing pictures for 50%, on sharing for 25% and on searching contents for 25%.

The integration with kakaku.com is particularly interesting. For example, users can not only upload pictures but also state what camera they were taken with. Information retrieved from Kakaku.com’s database can then be used to add details regarding the hardware (i. e. lenses and other accessories). The service makes money when users click on the corresponding links and buy off kakaku.com.

Basic membership and uploading pictures is free. In addition to the integration into Kakaku.com, Photohito wants to sell storage space and advertisements to finance the site.

Shinya’s vision is to transform Photohito into a photo wiki to specifically serve Japanese camera and photo fanatics. To be honest, I didn’t see a real “killer” feature which would make members of other photo management services change to Photohito. The users seem to like it though: In 2.5 weeks, 1,500 people registered and uploaded approximately 10,000 photos already.

According to Shinya, there are no concrete plans for internationalization yet. Photohito is actually run by two people at the moment. Tokyo-based web producer Yongfook took over the design part completely on his own!

You can watch Shinya’s presentation here (direct link).

Press Army

The terribly jet lagged Michael Sheetal, director of Tokyo-based interactive design agency UltraSuperNew, delivered a presentation on “Press Army” (still in Alpha phase), his company’s most recent product.

In its simplest form, Press Army is a tool to monitor, collect and structure reactions to a certain project (i.e. a newly launched web service) found in various kinds of social media. This is done by using APIs from selected media aggregators on the web.

Sources covered by Press Army include Youtube, Technorati and Flickr. Users have the freedom to decide on a given media’s relevance. Press Army retrieves information from these sources and displays them on a single page, providing users with a comprehensive overview on what people think about their personal projects!

Press Army is fully bilingual (English/Japanese) but still in Alpha phase. UltraSuperNew built the site on the basis of PHP framework Symfony and Amazon’s EC2 service (the latter of which Michael couldn’t really recommend to the audience).

The company is still developing additional goodies to be included into Press Army, for example a blog widget. At the moment, it is planned to offer the service completely for free. An enterprise version with more features is supposed to actually generate revenue to cover costs for UltraSuperNew.

I think Press Army is a promising tool to keep control of the impact a given brand, web service, blog or any other product has in social media. Let’s see how the service develops and if UltraSuperNew can raise the resources necessary to efficiently market this cool idea in the industry.

The slides of the presentation can be accessed here. Watch Michael’s presentation here (direct link):
(both videos courtesy of event organizer Andrew Shuttleworth)

Tags: Community, Japan, New Service by Serkan Toto
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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.

| View | Upload your own

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”).

| View | Upload your own

Kensuu’s two key points were:

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)!

Tags: Community, Japan by Serkan Toto
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The Asiajin Meeting #1 took place this Tuesday in Akasaka/Tokyo. Courtesy of Cybozu Labs, the event was free of charge.

About 30 people participated while the number of people viewing the live broadcasting (done by Andrew Shuttleworth) peaked at 25. We will see to it that we announce the livecast earlier next time, especially for our readers from outside Japan. Also we apologize we had to turn down a lot of Asiajin readers interested in joining due to limited capacity.

A total of seven entrepreneurs, journalists and engineers held presentations. One person cancelled because of illness. All of the Japanese presenters spoke in English sharing the meeting’s underlying concept of intercultural communication.

We at Asiajin think they all did amazingly well so we can say the Asiajin Meeting #1 was a great success!

Part one of this report focuses on the first three presentations:

Presentation No. 1
(”Who will be the target consumers in the Japanese mobile content market?”)

The presenter would like to stay anonymous. She spoke about mobile content services in Japan, user demographics and how consumers in this country prefer the mobile phone over the PC. The presentation was very interesting but is unfortunately off-the-record.

Presentation No. 2
(”Natalie - English version”)

Masahiko Tachizono, director at Natasha,Inc., attended to introduce his company’s Natalie service. Essentially, “Natalie” is a J-Pop news service. Masahiko said between 20 to 30 fresh articles from the J-Pop world are put online everyday.

Readers are able to customize the service so that they view news items suitable to their tastes.

Natalie also connects with Twitter (which is very popular in Japan). When a user twitters a comment on a Natalie news article, the service retrieves the message and adds it as a comment on the web site if it includes the corresponding URL. Natalie offers a similar solution with the Japanese social bookmarking platform Hatena. I think this is a very clever idea!

There is also a mobile version available. Moreover, Natalie offers a widget for bloggers. A Facebook application and even an optimized version for Apple’s iPhone and iPod Touch are also planned.

After his presentation, Masahiko told me the English version of Natalie for J-Pop fans outside Japan will be available soon.

| View | Upload your own

Presentation No. 3
(”Project 1,000 speakers”)

amachang, a well respected JavaScript specialist working for Cybozu Labs spoke about a private project of his, named 1,000 speakers (Ustream channel). I agree with his statement that a lot of (not all) Japanese IT professionals are too shy and modest to present themselves to other people if they can’t remain anonymous.

This observation was amachang’s main motivation to hold a monthly conference which he labelled “1,000 speakers”. His aim is to have 1,000 people present their work and discuss openly until the project is finished. This is a really great idea!

amachang said speaking publicly helps young developers in particular to raise awareness of their work and improve their visibility in Japan’s huge IT community.

Please read the second part of the Asiajin Meeting #1 report for coverage of the remaining presentations and a conclusion.

Tags: Cellular Phone, Community, Japan by Serkan Toto
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