Asiajin

Here is a concise list of famous venture capitalists in the Japanese IT industry.

Soichi Kariyazono (仮屋薗 聡一) of Globis Capital Partners has a fantastic track record. Six companies out of 13 companies he invested in, like Works applications, are now listed. Kariyazono is an investor in Gree, a social network site which is partnering with AU.

Ryu Muramatsu (村松 竜) of GMO Venture Partners is running a ‘Blog Business Fund’ which focuses on Web 2.0 ventures. Muramatsu had founded Payment-one, an Internet payment provider, which got successfully listed. Probably the only VC with an entreprenuerial record in Japan.

Allen Miner, CEO of Sunbridge, is listed as at #40 in Forbes ranking of venture capitalists in the world. He invested in Salesforce and ITMedia.

Hisashi Katsuya (勝屋 久) of IBM Venture Capital Group, and Masashi Kobayashi (小林 雅) of Infinity Ventures are probably the most frequently blogging VCs in Japan.

Cyberagent, an Internet ad agency, also has a great investing track record. They invested in Mixi, OKWave, and Drecom. Their powerful sales force helped many venture companies such as Webmoney or Drecom.

Also there are bigger and older VC firms such as JAFCO, NIFSMBC, JAIC. Their employees are considered more conservative and do not appear in the media or blogosphere.

If I forgot to mention your favorite venture capitalist, please leave a comment!

See Also: (in Japanese)

1. Venture-za VC interview articles
2. A blog of Ryu Muramatsu
3. A blog of Hisashi Katsuya
4. A blog of Masashi Kobayashi

Tags: Japan, Person by shunichi arai
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On Tuesday, the monthly Tokyo2point0 event in Omotesandou/Tokyo was held for the 8th time. The venue was really packed. Andrew Shuttleworth (the organizer) told me he would love to see more people to RSVP before coming. Also, companies can contact Andrew directly for sponsorship to help the volunteers currently running the event.

You can sign up directly on the Tokyo2point0 site itself, go to Tokyo2point0’s Facebook group or get some information on Mixi.

Besides the (very important) networking part, the event mainly focused on three presentations. Two of them were English only. Judging from what I have seen, the Japanese people present were able to follow the speakers without problems though.

1) HTML 5
Michael Smith from the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) delivered a detailed speech about HTML 5. Mike talked about the changes the fifth major revision of the Web’s main language will bring.

(all pictures in this posting courtesy of my friend Professor Ichinohe)

The core issue HTML 5 addresses is the problem of interoperability between browsers. The W3C is working to determine conformant user agent/Web browser behavior to overcome one of the biggest obstacles Web developers are faced with nowadays.

The new HTML version is still a draft. Michael was expectedly not able to predict precisely when all advantages HTML 5 delivers will come into effect.

(This presentation was off-the-record so the video will not be published.)

2) ONGMAP
Yuki Naotori from Open Associates/7ns presented his Award-winning Google maps mash up “ONGMAP”.

ONGMAP is thankfully also available in English. The service is describing itself as being the sum of “Google Maps+Web API+Tons of Geo Data”. Yuki said he wanted to create a very easy-to-use Web site.

Users can click on an area of interest on ONGMAP and the service scrapes various info about that particular place from external sources. Depending on the country, this info may include:

- weather
- WiFi spots
- local events
- hotels, restaurants, schools, convenience stores, beauty salons (!) and much more
- videos
- etc. etc.

Yuki also talked about his new project called “Japaaan”. In essence, Japaaan is a social network for people interested in discovering Japan’s “hidden” and cool tourist spots. Moreover, members will also meet offline and actually travel to selected sites. Gaijin and Japanese people are invited to join.

You can view Yuki’s presentation slides here.

Watch his presentation here.

3) Trendmap
My Swiss friend Oliver Reichenstein from Information Architects caused a great stir last year in the Web world with what inititally was a joke. His company basically used the Tokyo metro map as a design background to display the relationship between Web services worldwide. Oliver told me he wanted to use this idea for the company name cards and later was overwhelmed by the huge international interest in his concept!

The map illustrates popularity, success, importance and other factors of about 200 Web sites from all countries. You can download the second version (from July 2007) here for free (PDF).

Oliver explained the yet-to-be released third and updated version of the Web trendmap. This time, Information Architects decided to go for an isometric approach.

Watch his presentation here.

Tags: Community, Company, Japan, Person, Technology, Trend by serkantoto
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Famous actress Chinatsu Wakatsuki, age 23, whose weblog boasts over 80 million page views per month, announced an end of her blog yesterday.

Last month she once implied about her blog’s end and caused a lot of reactions from her readers and media, which ended up to her apology for confusion, but it became real this time. Real reasons to retirement are not actually disclosed on her last post. She wrote it is not her retirement from show business, but only stops blogging “to do something else”.

Ameba blog’s celebrities section is providing blog hosting to over 1,100 Japanese celebrities, and gets 450 million page views per month. Although their free blog hosting service is not the most popular one for regular bloggers, CyberAgent has been leading to other Cocolog, Yaplog, livedoor blog, etc in this (probably) most influencial category.

Those blog system providers(such like bloggers.com and typepad.com in US) often buys popular celebtiries bloggers out of others. Officially, those companies earns from advertisement on the blogs. Since some top celebrities bloggers recommendations let apparel and cosmetic products sold out nationwide, there are rumors of hidden pay-per-post-like activities behind.

Relatively speaking, Japanese Internet users tend to follow mass media’s influences, TV, newspapers and magazines. The web is not an alternative but a cooperator/supplement. For example, Agile Media Network(AMN), bloggers network advertising agency such like Federated Media, keeps opinionated A-listers in Japanese blogosphere. However, even the top blogger from AMN earns couple of million page views per month at most.

[disclaimer] Akky AKIMOTO belongs to AMN network with his tech-blog as a pro-blogger working for Cybozu Labs in his daytime job.

See also:

Chinatsu Wakatsuki’s weblog [J]

Ameba Blog [J]

CyberAgent [J]

Agile Media Networks

Tags: Japan, Person by Akky Akimoto
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Mixi, No.1 Social Networking Service in Japan, today announced that Batara ETO will leave his CTO job at the end of December, 2007.

Eto, who is originally born in Indonesia recently naturalized (his former name was Batara Kesuma), is well know as a person to suggested Social Network Service in E-Mercury, the former name of Mixi, Inc. Mixi is the one of the biggest net services in Japan now and its traffic is generally well-handled by Mixi’s engineering team lead by him. He became Mixi’s CTO in December 2005 and sometimes made presentations about huge website scalability architecture on LAMP (Linux-Apache-MySQL-Perl) technology.

Mixi’s announcement does not include if they name another CTO or leave it blank. Eto will remain as a “Gijyutsu Komon” (Technical Adviser) so it is unlikely that he moves to other SNS competitors such like Gree(No.2 users), MySpace(opened Japan page) or friendster(recently added Japanese localization).

See Also:

Disclosed information about Batara Eto’s resign [J][pdf]

Batara Kesuma’s presentation [pdf] at MySQL Users Conference 2006, Santa Clara, CA

Tags: Japan, News, Person by Akky Akimoto
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Jun-ichiro “itojun” Hagino who as a core developer of the KAME project which enables IPv6 on BSDs, died Oct. 29th 2007. He was 37 and was living in Tokyo, Japan.

He was a hacker. A distinguished hacker. He served as a member of Internet Architecture Board which makes decisions on Internet specifications (RFCs).

Itojun was one of the only few Japanese developers well-known all over the world. He used his network to introduce Japanese developers to world wide developers.

His passion was not limited in programming. He had a good appetite for Asian foods. He was a founding member of ESD, Japan’s first restaurants review site, too.

Itojun was a symbolic person of Japanese early Internet users. We loved you and will miss you, itojun.

See Also:

1. ONLamp - IPv6: An Interview with Itojun
2. openbsd-misc: In Memoriam: Jun-ichiro Hagino

Tags: Community, Japan, Person by shunichi arai
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Mochio Umeda lives in the Bay Area but he is very influential in Japan. His best selling book, ‘Web Shinkaron’, was excitedly accepted by business people.

His word is straight-forward and impassioned. He describes what is Google, what is the Web 2.0, what is open source. Those things were not well understood by the Japanese older business populations.

Joi Ito is the best known Japanese visionary and blogger in the world but Umeda is a much more well-known visionary inside Japan.

Umeda is doing some consulting and also runs a VC firm. Umeda is a board member of the Japanese web startup ‘Hatena’.

Tags: Japan, Person by shunichi arai
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