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Tokyotronic

Directly from Tokyo: A gaijin’s take on the Japanese Web and IT industry.


Jason Calacanis, Japan's super bloggers and entrepreneurs plus myselfNovember 10
Silicon Valley hero Jason Calacanis (founder of Weblogs and Mahalo, legendary blogger,VC etc.) is on his first visit to Japan (which lasts until Wednesday) and I had the possibility to meet him tonight.

What can I say, it was pretty cool to talk to Jason and also meet Japan's best-known bloggers, i.e. Dan Kogai (who is also the ex-CTO of Livedoor), Masato Kogure from Netafull (English version), Masaki Ishitani from Mitaimon and many more.

Take a look at the pictures below: It was (thankfully) a very "intimate" get-together - in the same Tokyo restaurant Quentin Tarantino used for the final scene in Kill Bill 1!











I took part at Digital Garage's New Context Conference 2008November 6
Today and yesterday, Joi Ito's Tokyo-based Digital Garage held the New Context Conference, an event which (at least for this year) took over the place of a relevant conference for the local web industry (instead of the Web 2.0 Tokyo, which was canceled).

The conference slogan was "Open Networks come to life - post Web 2.0", with celebrities like Joi Ito (CEO of Creative Commons, investor, entrepreneur etc.), Loic LeMeur (CEO of Seesmic), Reid Hoffman (founder of LinkedIn but video/Skype only), Lisa Sounio (CEO of Dopplr), Natsuno Takeshi (the father of Docomo's imode system) and many more attending.

My god, Tetsuya Mizuguchi, ex-Sega mastermind and now CEO of Q Entertainment) was there and I could see him live. That alone was awesome!

And I think it's great that Digital Garage managed to get all these outstanding web celebrities to come to Japan (yet Reid Hoffman appearing via video only was disappointing) - and the event was totally free for attendees!









Reminder: ObenWebAsia conference in Seoul takes place October 14thOctober 3
Although I will most probably not be able to make it to Korea (shame on me, I am part of the initiative), I would like to remind the readers of my blog that you can still register for the first Openweb Asia 2008 that will take place October 14th in Seoul.



Here is my former post on the 1-day conference.

There will be a number of panels, presentations and speeches, for example by
- Jason Calacanis, CEO of Mahalo and co-founder of TechCrunch50
- Loic Le Meur (CEO of Seesmic and responsible for LeWeb3, Europe's biggest web industry conference)
- James W Kim, CEO of Yahoo Korea
- Kent Lindstrom, Senior VP of Friendster
- Yozo Ka










10 things I learnt and saw during this year's TechCrunch50 conferenceSeptember 13
Yesterday, I came back to Tokyo from the TechCrunch50 conference that took place in San Francisco.



Here are 10 things I found particularly interesting about the event (in no particular order):

1)
The three days of the conference began with a professional singer who sang the Star-Spangled Banner. Speak about culture shocks!

2)
At the afterparty (held by Seesmic) of the last day, Michael Arrington stood in line for 10 minutes in the cold to enter the venue. And Michael is a) the organizer of TC50 and b) an investor in Seesmic.

3)
This was a highly international event with Israel and Japan being particularly strong. But Europe was VERY weak this year. I think my home country of Germany (Europe's biggest Internet market) was represented by one company only (Plista).

4)














I am currently at TechCrunch50 in San FranciscoSeptember 10
I am at TechCrunch50 in San Francisco now, the web industry conference/contest organized by mega Tech blog TechCrunch - which I happen to write for ;). Today (Wednesday) is the last day of the conference.



TechCrunch50 is much better than I expected actually: A positive vibe, perfectly organized (OK, the Internet connection was an issue but is solved now), tons of VIPs, VCs, "technical people", entrepreneurs etc. etc.

Please check out my Twitter, my articles on Asiajin and of course TechCrunch (my articles only) itself for more of my personal impressions of the conference, especially on the three Japanese companies presenting here: Opentrace, Tonchidot and Gazopa.

Here are some photos from TechCrunch50 (partly cou