Over 700 web and web-related companies from all over world handed in an application for last year’s Techcrunch 40 event, organized by the famous Tech blog of the same name.
This year, the competition is called Techcrunch 50 and it is again organized by Techcrunch USA. It will be conducted from September 8-10th in San Francisco. Following the absence of Japanese web companies in last year’s event, potential participants from this country are encouraged to take part this year.
My friend Umihiko Namekawa from Techcrunch Japan asked me to publish the announcement on Asiajin as well, on top of his article he wrote today in his blog. Asiajin thinks it is a great chance for entrepreneurs in Japan to challenge such a competition.
In the light of the tight time schedule, professional support will be provided by Techcrunch Japan for all companies interested in this initiative.
More information (in Japanese) can be found here on the official site.
Serkan Toto
It would be interesting Serkan if you could maybe list some example companies in Japan that you think have sites, web applications, or projects that you think have a chance to compete with the rest of the TC50 applicants. I would love to see Japanese companies enter into this as I think more light needs to be pointed onto what is happening in the industry here. Or, anyone else that reads this post, please post their sites of choice. Thanks!
Also, I think that having people to sign up with Asiajin in order to post a comment is pretty tedious. You might want to consider just taking someone’s email address and info details instead…. just a suggestion.
Your suggestion will be discussed, let’s see what we can do. Thank you very much for the pointer.
As to the TC50 companies:
There were no really overwhelming products in last year’s contest, if you ask me. All entries were surely good, some even great but there was no Google 2 or anything. And I don’t think a company which manages to participate must be. Mild innovation is OK, I guess.
From Japan, I can see some companies especially in the mobile field with chances.
http://www.stargames.co.jp/ (translation via mobile phones)
Mobage
Dena
http://www.rockbird.jp/ (CMS system for mobiles)
http://nextninja.net/ (mobile videos)
and many others come to mind.
On the web front, companies like Nico Nico (obviously) are interesting. Enigmo’s Rollmio is cool. I covered KakikoTV on my personal blog Tokyotronic. And narabe.com, of course ;).
Actually any existing company can apply if they have a cool new product, maybe there is one being developed in Japan as of now (which we don’t know of yet). TC50 would be a great chance for exposure…
Thanks for your feedback Christophe,
I changed to turn off the CAPTCHA for Asiajin registered users so now it is only required when you register Asiajin.
I agree that free comments calls more feedbacks and feedback is so important for us to decide which news we take, which give up.
This “user only” comment limitation is mainly because we cannot take enough time to handle comment spammer’s robots. Sorry for inconvenience.
Thanks for your responses.
Yeah, I am interested to find a cool product or web service in Japan that I don’t know of yet, and especially one that could compete on an international level.
I did find this company recently:
http://www.sprasia.com/
They seem to be a mixup of Youtube, Nico Nico, and desktop video editing, and will be launching an English and Chinese version of their service.
Also, although I am not a big fan of the whole “Web 2.0” phrase, there was an event held here in Tokyo in May called the Web 2.0 Marketing Fair. Here are some of their links to English resources:
http://www.web20-expo.jp/en/
http://www.web20-expo.jp/en/exhibitor/
https://www.exhibitor.jp/SODEC/en/index.php?ID=PUB
I did not attend the event, but maybe there were some applicable companies that were there. Does anyone know?
Akky, and Serkan, I think it would still be better though if you could get things to a point were people don’t have to sign up. I would actually prefer a CAPTCHA to signing up. And there are services like Akismet that you can use with WordPress to help fight against spam. Another thing you can do is add “nofollow” on links in comments so that Google doesn’t follow through with the link. Keep up the great reporting though!