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...
I took part at Digital Garage’s New Context Conference 2008
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...
10 things I learnt and saw during this year’s TechCrunch50 conference
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...
I am currently at TechCrunch50 in San Francisco
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...
This month’s Mobile Monday Tokyo event: Japan’s VC scene
I attended this month’s Mobile Monday Tokyo event, which took place in a bar in Akasaka. Two presentations were given and both were focused on the venture capital industry in Japan. Aki Ohashi, partner at venture capital firm NGI, explained how to get financial support from companies like...
Google Japan Wants To Beat Yahoo Japan Via Search On Cell Phones
Google Japan is only the No. 2 in Japan’s lucrative search market, trailing the country’s biggest website, Yahoo Japan. But it now wants to win in Japan through boosting its mobile search: Google may be the leader in the worldwide search engine market, but in Nippon, it has some...