This month's Tokyo2point0 event again took place in Harajuku and again it featured two great presentations. This time both speakers were Japanese!

Behind the doors of Cybozu Labs

Asiajin’s very own Akky Akimoto delivered the first presentation. Please note he doesn’t want pictures of himself published.

Personal background

Akky is one of Japan’s most famous tech bloggers. In fact, he is a professional which is very rare even in this blog-crazy country.

His company-sponsored blog on Web 2.0, IT and Tech stuff is, for example, ranked at No. 12 in Japan on feedmeter. It is No. 23 according to the list of the most popular blogs from the livedoor Reader (the favorite among Japanese geeks).

Before becoming an A-lister blogger, Akky started his career as a programmer whose speciality is internationalization and release engineering. His international career includes stints in Vietnam, the UK and the USA where he used to live in San Francisco. Akky is also authoring books and columns in various Japanese high-profile Tech media.

Cybozu as employer

Cybozu is an independent vendor of packaged software (focusing on groupware), directly competing with powerhouses like IBM/Lotus or Microsoft (Exchange). The company was founded in 1997 and listed at the Tokyo Stock exchange just 4.5 years later (in record time at that date). Almost unknown in the west, Cybozu now serves 26,000 customers (2.5 million end users) in Japan. In its market segment, Cybozu has the largest market share in this country.

Cybozu Labs’ role

Akky went on saying he is actually working for Cybozu Labs, a 100% subsidiary of Cybozu.

Cybozu Labs is a completely separated entity: geographically, culturally and economically. I have seen the Labs office myself and can confirm the very Non-Japanese environment there! It was established in 2005 by the parent company to attract engineering talent, to accelerate business development and to boost global competitiveness.

According to Akky, the now 12 engineers quickly managed to earn a lot of respect in the Japanese web community. As a side effect, general attention in the media and tech community was created for Cybozu itself. Given the drastic shortage of talent in Japan’s IT sector and the tendency of Japanese people to prefer big-name companies for employment, the establishment of Cybozu Labs must actually be seen as a very smart move.

Cybozu Labs products

Akky presented a selection of products made by Cybozu Labs:

Pathtraq

Pathtraq is a tool to monitor and measure surfing behavior of individuals who agreed to the terms of use. Pathtraq's main purpose is to filter what its users regard as the hottest topics on the web at the moment. Akky said the service can roughly be compared with Alexa.

Japanize

Japanize is essentially a translation plugin for menus on web pages and dependent on the participation of its members. The site quickly attracted people interested in Non-Japanese web services. There are over 40,000 active users per day whilst contributors already translated menus of over 760 web services from English (and other languages) into Japanese. An expanded service called Mylingual is also available not only for translating foreign languages to Japanese but also for translating menus in any language (out of 56) into German, English, Spanish and others. The service is not yet well known among the potential target users though.

Altspace

Altspace is a member-only forums service. Using the site is free but an invitation is needed for registration.

Doukaku

Web engineers in Japan form a very cohesive unit (by the way: In English, Japanese programmers prefer to be called "engineer".). That’s why Cybozu Labs decided to create a meeting point specifically for geeks. Doukaku is a platform on which Japanese engineers take part in programming quizzes from their favourite programming languages. Now more than 10 different language codes can be compared on the same question.

S6

Akky delivered his presentation with a HTML/Javascript based tool called S6 which is also made by Cybozu Labs.

Akky's own service: Narabe

In parallel to his activities at Cybozu Labs, Akky in the last months – together with a partner - secretly developed a Web 2.0 platform offering a completely fresh approach. "Narabe" (still in closed beta) will soon be released simultaneously in Japanese and English (OK, this is a must as Asiajin’s big man).

Narabe’s tag line is "Compare everything". The goal is to let people contribute comparisons of any kind as easily as possible. As one of the beta testers, I must say this user-friendly approach works. Using tables, Narabe lets members compare basically everything under the sun: software, cars, web sites, events, persons, restaurants etc. etc. All subjects and criteria can be freely chosen and commented on.

Presentation recorded by Tokyo2point0:

Phishing & Web 2.0 Security

My friend Gohsuke Takama presented the latest state of affairs on the dangers of phishing and security on the web. He is founder and owner of Meta Associates, a renowned IT journalist, the only Japanese board member of Privacy International and founding supporter of the CPSR. Wow!

Picture: Gosuke Takama from Meta Associates

Gohsuke’s presentation was actually very detailed and he touched upon a large number of topics.

Phishing and cybercrime in general

After presenting classic examples of email phishing in text and HTML form, Gohsuke delivered some details coming from McAfee’s Criminology Report 2007. The study reveals for example that the number of Americans affected by phishing/online banking fraud is in the millions. The FBI estimated the total cost of cybercrime to be 67 billion USD in the USA alone (in 2005).

Gohsuke also briefly explained some crime techniques such as website spoofing, sniffers, IP hijacking, pharming and others.

Crime in Web 2.0

Today’s Web 2.0 environment offers criminals a number of additional tools for their illegal activities. Gohsuke said that now the danger of exploiting social interaction, protocols and norms comes into play. According to him, the "human factor" became more and more important in cybercrime in the last years.

Gohsuke added a couple of recommendations for Web 2.0 developers regarding security issues:

• Don’t copy and paste AJAX code without understanding how it really works.
• Develop user interfaces with having in mind opportunities for attack by criminals.
• Test your products carefully before launching them.
• Address specialized 3rd party security services to decrease the danger of crime on your Web 2.0 site.

Presentation recorded by Tokyo2point0:

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

Tags: Event Report, Japan by Serkan Toto
3 Comments »

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, Event Report, Japan by Serkan Toto
2 Comments »

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, Event Report, Japan by Serkan Toto
4 Comments »

We have sent e-mail to people who had applied for the first Asiajin Meeting Tokyo at Cybozu Labs, Tameike-San'nou, Minatoku. Please check your e-mail for the event detail. If you need to salvage your spam folder, our sender domain of the mail is, as you might guess, "asiajin.com".

We are sorry for people to whom we are unabled to secure seats. Please wait event reports from participants. We hope this first one goes well then we will hold another meeting soon.

photo by Zach Taylor. CreativeCommons Attribution License

Tags: Announcement by Akky Akimoto
3 Comments »