Inspired by Geeks On A Plane that was organized by Founder Fund co-founder Dave McClure and took 50 Silicon Valley tech geeks to Japan, Korea and Mainland China to meet up with Asian friends last June, a group of Tokyo-based mobile service entrepreneurs is now planning to visit San Francisco Bay Area at the end of this month, which is titled “JIMs (Japanese Internets & Mobiles) on the Plane”.
The main purpose of JIMs guys’ 3-day visit is to tour tech start-up companies in the region to give entrepreneurs a series of presentations on what they’ve developed and Japanese mobile business trends, and to establish relationships for the possible future collaboration over the Pacific.
Here is a brief of the tour:
Date: October 26(Mon) thru October 28(Wed), 2009, PT.
Places to visit: Almost a dozen of tech start-ups in Sunny Vale, San Mateo, Mountain View, Palo Alto and San Francisco. They will bustle around from a lodging in San Jose.
Participants:
- Ryo Umezawa (co-organizer of the tour)
Mr. Umezawa serves as the business development unit director for Traffic Gate[J], a Rakuten subsidiary in affiliate marketing and search advertising, as well as the director for J-seed Ventures, a Tokyo-based independent incubator for tech start-ups. In the past, he used to host the Tokyo edition of global mobile networking event Mobile Monday. He has a great network with lots of mobile and tech start-up entrepreneurs in Tokyo, and has been working hard on hooking them up with the others.
- Sadayuki Matsumoto (co-organizer of the tour)
Mr. Matsumoto co-founded a Tokyo-based mobile start-up company called Xtone[J] (pronounced e-k-s tone) and serves as the managing director. He’s been involved in developing a number of web and mobile application services such as iPhone virtual girlfriend app Amamiya MoMo and a new feature that monetizes the country’s best-known video sharing service[J].
- Junji Oshita
Mr. Oshita is the CEO of FRoute[J] (pronounced ef-route), the provider of the country’s 3rd ranked search engine service for cellphone users in the number of usage volume.
- Yusuke Tanaka
Mr. Tanaka founded mobile SEO (search engine optimization) and marketing company Fractalist[J] (listed at Centrex, the growth company market section at Nagoya Stock Exchange) in 2000, and serves as the managing director. Prior to that, he co-founded a company that had released a number of mobile game apps for Japanese cellphone handsets, and he succeeded to sell the company to Yahoo Japan.
It seems their schedule is getting crammed up with many appointments, but if you’re interested in meeting these unique guys and having an opportunity to talk with them for exchanging opinions, kindly contact Mr. Umezawa (e-mail: ryo [at] j-seed.com) for more details.
Masaru IKEDA