Entries Tagged as 'Event Report'

[Update: recording now available] January 20: Ustream discussion panel “Social Media Predictions 2010″

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.

Event Wrap-up: Asiajin Readers Meet-up In Taipei

Asiajin held a readers meet-up event in Taipei on Sunday. Several Taiwanese geeks reading our blog came together for networking, and exchanged their perspective on the tech scenes of Taiwan and Japan with Asiajin contributors Akky, Shunichi and Masaru.

Here’s a summary of what we were talking about and what we’ve learned.

  • Micro-blog services such as Plurk and Twitter have regional characteristic in the level of service activity and user engagement.
  • What are Taiwan’s most popular web service top 100.
  • Japanese Internet users prefer to write about what they eat for lunch on their blogs.
  • In Taiwan, you have to expose your face on your blog in order to make your readers believe you. Otherwise, the readers consider you as being irresponsible for your words.
  • Forum is the most popular part of the Taiwanese Blogosphere as well as that of Mainland China.
  • Taiwanese entrepreneurs Jerry Yang (Yahoo!’s co-founder), Steve Chen (YouTube’s co-founder) and Kai-Fu Lee (the founding president of Google China) – All moved from Taiwan to the U.S. in their early days. Most of the meet-up participants believe Taiwan has not born the talented web business players, but the U.S. education system has highly contributed to it.
  • Most of Taiwanese job sites have numbers in their domain names.
  • Taiwanese domestic tech market is so small that Taiwanese start-ups make their interest move into the global common platforms such as Facebook and the iPhone.
  • Approximately a half of all Internet traffic in Taiwan is dominated by Taiwanese Yahoo!(雅虎奇摩)[C]. That’s why it’s so hard for new start-ups to be launched and survive.
  • You need to get an ICP license to launch a website in Mainland China. And you’ll be also ordered to place servers physically in the country to be authorized by the Chinese government.
  • A micro social network service in Mainland China, Renjian (人间网, meaning human being. Inaccessible temporarily as of this writing.) is now so popular. It has features similar to the combination of Twitter and IRC, and looks like Google Wave.
  • When the two sides of the Taiwan Strait shake hands on the ECFA, Economic Cooperation Framework Agreement, it makes Taiwan much easier to do business in Mainland China. The participants expect they will be able to enter the Mainland and invest there as easily as do so in Hong Kong.
  • In order to launch a web business in Mainland China, a Taiwanese company has to set up a joint venture with a Chinese company.
  • Both sides over the strait use the same language, but doing business in Mainland China is very hard due to a number of complicated regulations.
  • iPeen(愛評網)[C] is a Taiwan’s popular social network specializing in introducing good places to dine.  It started three years ago and the business goes well so far.
  • In Taiwan, the population of Facebook users has rapidly raised in the last six months because Facebook app Happy Farm(开心农场) attracts the users. The app is developed by Shanghai-based social app developer Five Minutes Inc.(五分钟)[C]. The rapid growth of Facebook users in the country follows Taiwanese Yahoo’s social network service Wretch(無名小站)[C] and will overtake it very soon.
  • There’s only one Internet start-up who has ever succeeded IPO in Taiwan. The country’s main industry is still remaining in semi-conductor manufacturing business, there’s no boost for breeding more tech business.
  • When a Taiwanese start-up goes to a venture capital for fundraising, they are always requested to focus on the market of Mainland China.

That was a great opportunity to see all who love Asiajin in the city. Thank you for coming by, guys.

See Also:

Asiajin Meets Chili: Akky Presents Japanese Tech Scene At Taipei’s Tech Community

Nii-hao, Taiwan!

Asiajin co-founder Akky Akimoto is now in Taiwan. On Saturday, he was invited to have a presentation on Japanese social media and tech scenes at Chili Ideas Party, a serial meet-up organized by Taipei-based Chili Consulting[C] who has been serving Taiwan’s tech community. Asiajin co-founder Shunichi Arai and author Masaru IKEDA also visited Taipei to join the event.

More than three dozens of Taiwanese web service entrepreneurs, engineers and business developers came together at Chili’s office to learn what’s happening in the Japanese web industry and the mobile service market.

Inside[C], a Taipei-based and group-edited blog on social media and mobile app developments, has well summarized what we’ve been talking about. We appreciate their rapid work.

You can watch the first ten minutes of the presentation below. (Due to technical difficulties, we have no recorded video for the rest of the presentation. Sorry for your inconvenience.)

The presentation slides that Akky has made and used at the event is available below. Just click on it to flick through. (If the slides are not appeared appropriately, check out this link).

See Also:

ESPer2009: Exploratory IT Engineers And Developers Wrap-up This Year’s Japanese Tech Scene

Since 2000, IPA, a Japanese governmental arm in charge of promoting IT industry, has been running an annual contest to find young computer engineers who have developed services and technologies that we’ve never experienced, which is titled the Exploratory IT human resources project a.k.a. MITOH.

ESPer2009: Event Scene

There was an year-end alumni meet-up where the entrepreneurs who had ever won the award of the contest came together and presented their aftermaths and business growth results. The ever award winners are called ESPer with maximum respect after the Exploratory Software Project, and also called as genius programmers for short.

Presenters:

Toshimitsu Dan[J], Lawyer – presents basic legal knowledge set for software engineers who wish to protect their rights. He’s well-known as the chief attorney for the defendant of the Winny Case. (Refer to these Asiajin articles for more about the case.)

Dividual's LogoRigureto's Logo

Dominique Chen, Co-founder & Director, Dividual Inc.[J] – presents his service “Rigureto[J]“, allowing users to express their depression feelings and to share them with other users on the web. (Mr. Chen is a member of the director board of Creative Commons Japan[J])

Utagoe's Logo

Tom Sonoda, CEO, Utagoe Inc. – presents his service UG Live, a high-quality but cost-effective Internet video distribution platform.

Taisei Tanaka, CEO, Geisha Tokyo Entertainment(GTE)[J] – proposes future life plans for the ESPers based on what he experienced after the award-winning. His product is described in this Asiajin article.

AIST's LogoCrowkee's Logo

Hidekazu Kubota(@hidekaz), AIST (Japan’s National Inst. of Advanced Industrial Science& Technology) – presents a web-based virtual sketchbook Crowkee[J] that allows drawing pictures, noting sentences and source-codes on a screen and execute them without preparing any other development environment.

Fillot's Logo IznaStor's Logo

Minoru Sakurai, CEO, Fillot[J] – presents IznaStor[J] and the story of its development process. IznaStor is a high-reliable storage system using the distributed technologies that have been originally developed for cutting-edge supercomputer and grid computing. Intended for high-traffic and rich media distribution on the Internet.

Mogura's Logo MaySee's Logo

Shunichi Arai[J], CTO, Mogura Inc. – presents his first ever Internet product MaySee (named after Japanese pronunciation meaning business cards), a CRM service combining outsourced data entry of your client profiles with managing them on the web. (Mr. Arai is the co-founder/author of Asiajin. His company name Mogura means a mole.)

Lightening Talk Presenters:

Norio Senda(@winmostar)[J], Tencube Lab. – presents Winmostar, his Windows application that allows molecular modeling and molecular orbital calculation.

Yohei Yamaguchi[J] (@melleo1978[J]) – presents a high-performance database system that allows to complete 20GB data processing in 300 seconds, which marks ten times faster than Java software framework Apache Hadoop and four times faster than MySQL Cluster.

Yusuke Tabata[J] who has been involved in developing more effective Japanese input methods – introduces behind-the-scenes of the recent developments on them including ChaIME[J], Anthy[J], Social IME[J] and Google IME[J].

Fuco's Logo

Mr. Nagai, FUCO[J] – introduces an image search service[J] to find what you want to buy from Japan’s largest e-commerce service Rakuten without any key input. Mr. Nagai’s service is off-deck and has no formal business partnership with Rakuten. The service scrapes images of merchandised clothes from Rakuten and shows you them in the order of image similarity. It assists cloth lovers to shop their favorite items more easily on fashion e-commerce services.

The 7th and Final Bonen Kaigi

Daiya Hashimoto and 100shiki’s Gen Taguchi’s annual year end event Bounen Kaigi (Year-forgetting party+meeting) was held at Yahoo! Japan’s headoffice, Roppongi Midtown, Tokyo.

This 7th anniversary, however, had been declared the last one.

2009 Ranking

As always, the two hosts made their (personal) year ranking what impressed them in 2009.

  1. MovaTwitter (Asiajin): unofficial Twitter site for Japanese cellular phone
  2. Lang-8 (Asiajin): Social language revision network service
  3. Joker Blog: a blog by Joker Racer (Asiajin)’s RC manager
  4. Revilist: ISBN to Amazon review viewer site mainly for mobile
  5. Homerare Salon (Asiajin): a site to encourage you by using your name
  6. Bijin Tokei (Asiajin): an iPhone watch app to show current
  7. AppBank: a Japanese blog dedicated for iPhone application reviews
  8. TV-jin: social TV programs recommendation service by 2 channel data
  9. Nanapi: social tips sharing service
  10. Twitter (Asiajin): microblog service gaining presense in Japanese web

Yahoo! Japan’s search keywords session

The event sponsor Yahoo! Japan, as always, showed some interesting stats around their massive search queries. Some interesting topics for our readers,

  • YouTube’s growth is much bigger than NicoNico Douga’s
  • Mixi got a lot more search after Mixi Appli platform release
  • New communication sites grows including Pixiv, Facebook, Ameba Pigg and Nicotto Town

Special guests session

Best selling business books author Kazuyo Katsuma, and her friend, 90’s songwriter Kohmi Hirose, both are the most popular celebrities on Japanese Twitter, appeared and got open interview by Hashimoto and Taguchi.

Taguchi, who introduced Twitter earliest to Japanese tech-savvy people when there was SXSW 2006, asked Katsuma how much Twitter is promising in Japanese web. Her answer was it would fail in a year unless Twitter Japan gets 10 times bigger mas. She said TJ has to lower hurdles for newcomers by, for example,

1. to attract people interested in entertainment (concert, etc)
2. to bridge politicians and people gap

The hashtag of the event is “#bk2009″.

See Also:

Co-organizer Gen Taguchi’s event report [J]

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