Tech Mom Version E

TC50 impression

There are a number of promising web companies here at TechCrunch50 that didn’t make the cut as TechCrunch50 finalists, but were chosen as DemoPit participants instead. One of these companies, a 4-man startup based out of Tokyo called LIFEmee, has probably one of the grandest ideas of TechCrunch50 as a whole: The service intends to become a platform for recording, managing and sharing your life online – from “the cradle to the grave”, as LIFEmee itself puts it.

via www.techcrunch.com

I am at Tech Crunch 50. Today I feel much more at home than yesterday, and met a bunch of interesting people. One of them is Serkan Toto, writer of the above entry. He is covering some interesting Japanese ventures participating in this event.

Overall, lots of the presenting companies look to be focused on solving real life problem, including local business, health care, financial management, etc., and feel that they have feet on the ground - unlike the "hype" stories that sometimes popular press want to induce.

I was also quite happy to hear that Serkan, who covered WISH2009 and many other similar events, felt that WISH, that was held in Japan last month, had VERY GOOD quality companies presented, even compared to other similar events in Japan. As I was following that event from early on, I am SO happy that Mr. Tokuriki pulled off as it did.

Today, I collected enough number of t-shirts and water bottles for my kids, so now I am finally relaxed. Trying to enjoy the event now.

Michi

Walkman beats iPod the first time in 242 weeks in Japan

A Japanese digital lifestyle site BCN ranking reports that Sony Walkman's sales surpassed that of iPod, the first time in 4 years and 8 months (242 weeks!) in Japan.

source:  BCN Ranking  (Obviously, Red = Apple, Blue = Sony)

The site takes weekly survey of approximately 40% of electronic stores in Japan from their POS database, so I believe it is a pretty good statistics.

The article says that while as a single model, iPod Nano 8GB has by far the largest share (21.7%), but Sony added a whole lineup of new variations with new colors and added functionality, thus taking large chunk of top 10 models, and combining them together, Sony devices sold more than iPod in the late August week.

It also says that iPhone is not included in this number and that the Apple fans are now more divided between iPod and iPhone, after iPhone was introduced in Japan in July 2008.

Does anyone know how Walkman doing in the U.S. at all??  I really don't hear that name recently.

Michi

Newsvine - Internet campaigning arrives cautiously in Japan

In this animated image on the official Web page of Japan's ruling Liberal Democratic Party, a noodle chef, bearing an uncanny resemblance to Democratic Party leader Yukio Hatoyama, widely expected to be the next prime minister, replacing ruling party chief Taro Aso after the balloting on Aug. 30, 2009 for the lower house of parliament, presents a bowl of noodle, trying to please every customer until his bowl is an overflowing concoction of fish, fruit and ice cream. The ad, which has drawn more than 208,000 hits on YouTube, is poking fun at the alleged indecisiveness of Hatoyama and his party, the Democratic Party of Japan. (AP Photo/The official Web page of the Liberal Democratic Party)

via www.newsvine.com

OK, this is what I have been talking about. Finally, they are catching up, and there have been SO MUCH discussions about "internet usage for politics" on Japanese blogs/twitter/whatever.

Mr. Daisuke Tsuda, one of the net opinion leaders, said in his blog that the role of "gathering lots of votes" is as important as "casting your own vote" and still to me Japan's political net usage is not about THAT point and more of just "propaganda" or "advertisement" of the politicians, but I believe that people are smarter than politicians and will get it eventually.... I hope.. maybe.

Michi

Why I think that Facebook is a Final Destination

Social Media: Is Facebook a Final Destination or Just Another Social Fling?

via www.searchviews.com

Two word - "bad economy". During the bad economy, no more "me too" ventures rise up. The survivors who had built enough clout before the crash hit will have easier time with less cut throat competition, and can scoop around smaller companies with bottom price, thus stabilize their position even more.

Amazon went through this phase after the first bubble, and became the #1 e-commerce site among zillions of "dot com bubble" companies. Google came in a bit later, but also built up their basic search technology quietly while many others are going under after the bubble burst.

Now, it is extremely hard for a new "fad" SNS to attract financing. Facebook, and for a certain extent Twitter as well, is in a good lead off position like Amazon one cycle ago. During this time, they are gaining critical mass of users and are quickly becoming a default "infrastructure" of human network.

I tend to look at Facebook and Twitter as new types of communication tools, something that adds to a variety in addition to telephone, mobile phone and e-mail, rather than "media", as are often perceived. In that regard, I believe that this bad economy era is GOOD for these "emerging communication tools" to become a next gen infra.

There are so many telephone companies in the world, yet they can talk to each other easily. That is because there are "finite" number of international carriers and they can negotiate interconnection among themselves. It is easier to come up with standard of ways of doing business among themselves. Now that we have a clear leader in SNS, with a few more competitors, it becomes much easier to form a federation and to connect among these networks and other services.

Now things are becoming more and more connected. When I write this blog, it gets published in my Facebook, Twitter and FriendFeed automatically. For the blog and SNS providers, it is easier to form such loose federation, taking advantage of each specialties. Now it is also much easier for consumers to decide which services to turn to with less number of choices, and that they are connected to each other so you don't have to sign up to zillions of different services.

Isn't it a wonderful world!!?? I kinda like it. In Chinese old story, "Old man Sai(?)'s horse", a lucky incident turns out bad later, and a bad luck turns out to bring lucky result later. "Bad economy" can be a Sai's horse, at least in this SNS world.

Michi

Asiajin » Mixi Finally Shed ‘Beta’ With Mixi Appli

Mixi [J] (Asiajin articles), the biggest social network service in Japan, starts their OpenSocial compliant application platform Mixi Appli officially opened to every Mixi user on PC. Mixi Appli Mobile is planned to follow next month.

via asiajin.com

Now I am trying out this Typepad's "Blog It" feature - it is quite nice.

So Mixi's new Appli store, Japanese version of Facebook Apps, proved to be quite successful with a high number of launch - the number of which I saw briefly on Twitter and looks to have been deleted by now -.

Michi

AT&T to power Sony's new 3G ereader - FierceWireless

AT&T's no-rehire policy comes under fireVeriSign sells messaging biz to Syniverse for $175 millionCWA, AT&T make headway in contract talksUtilities: Cable should pay telecom rate for pole attachments FairPoint faces new allegations over Verizon network acquisitionAttention broadband providers: There's gold behind that demarc point

via www.fiercewireless.com

Sony is finally catching up with Amazon Kindle in wireless. Also interesting is that the article mentions "Kindle's ARPU is estimated as $2".

Michi

WISH2009 will be held in Tokyo next week

A new Web community event WISH2009, a sort of mini "TechCrunch50" Japan version, will be held in Tokyo on August 21, 2009.

It is a showcase of start-ups and organizations trying out a new things on the Web, and a place for Web innovators to gather and exchange ideas.  Please see the details at the following Asiajin blog.

Asiajin entry

It is held by AMN (Agile Media Network), a premier blog network in Japan, and my Japanese blog is honored to be a part of it.  The number of presenters are still small compared to TechCrunch, but am really excited to see such event happening in Japan as well, organized by a start-up.

You can still sign up to attend.  Please visit WISH2009 website.  (Sorry, Japanese only).

Michi

Net (2-channel) people corner national newspaper to near death in Japan

Mainichi newspaper is considered as one of the major national newspaperｓ in Japan, along with Nikkei, Asahi, Yomiuri and Sankei.  Yet, it is now at the verge of breakdown by people on the Net, particularly on notorious "2 channel" (anonimous bulletin board).

This article is based on the summary of events on Gigazine site.  Thank you, Gigazine-san.

It all started from series of articles on Mainichi's English site column, "Mainichi Daily News - WaiWai".  It is supposed to be a small and soft column to introduce Japanese everyday life and culture, but its editor Ryann Conell has gone too far and too soft.  He picked quite obscene and unreliable news in Japanese version of tabloids and wrote articles based on them.  As a woman, I hesitate to introduce what he wrote, and now the original site is gone, but I just say that they are so disgusting and unpermittably obscene.  Conell says he kept writing because he considers it as a separate part from the main Mainichi newspaper and he claims on his column that it is a mere translation and Mainichi does not bear responsiblity on its varidity.

The problem is that people do not read such disclaimers.  Japanese readers would understand that it is a total nonsense by looking at sources, but from the eyes of English speakers who don't know Japan very well, it is a part of a Japanese national newspaper and one of the small amount of English information about Japan.  It can be very misleading for them.  It could get away if it is a part of the original stupid tabloids or Conell's personal blog, but since it is a part of mainichi.co.jp domain, it is clearly unescapable.

According to Gigazine, the column had been going on for several years, despite some internal warnings.  Finally some concerned Japanese readers started to send complaints to Mainichi since last year.  But alas, Mainichi somehow ignored them.

In April 2008, people over at 2 channel picked it up, and started rallying that Mainichi is internationally spreading an inaccurate and shameful information about Japan.  On June 25, Mainichi apologized about the column, but shortly after, they announced that they would sue the people (on 2 channel) who incorrectly blame their staff on the Net.  That announcement added fuel in the fire.

2 channel people received it as the war declaration from Mainichi, and they fired the most deadly final weapon; claim e-mails to the companies who advertise on Mainichi on-line versions.

That was totally effective, and by mid-July, ads by major corporations such as Nissan, Kirin (beer), JCB (credit card) and Fujitsu disappeared from Mainichi site.  As of today, Mainichi.co.jp main page only carries Mainichi's own advertisements - just to fill the space.

On July 20, Mainichi raised the white flag.  They shut down Mainichi Daily News site, and again, officially apologized, with their own explanation of what happened.  Now, all you can see on former Mainichi Daily page is their apology statement.

But net people still don't accept their apology.  They cite that July 20 is the middle day of 3-day weekend, and that their apology is not serious enough.

On the bottom of such resentment, a deep distrust of net people against Mainichi and other mass media has been percolating for a long time.  They believe that Japanese mass media enjoy accusing people or companies who make mistakes, and often times, they even take up trivial things and extend it to extreme, until the accused companies go out of business.  In recent cases, for example, Senba Kiccho, Osaka's high-class restaurant, went out of business due to a scandal that they re-used left over food, and the media's hype against it was rather out-of-scale.  Mainichi, among newspapers, and TBS, among TV stations, are often the major target of Net people's resentment.

And among the executives of these media companies, there is also a deep distrust against the Internet at large, and particularly to 2 channel.  They despise the Internet, and Gigazine people believe that Mainichi executives probably rank "online version" of Mainichi as the secondary and did not pay attention, and it was one element that caused such a mess.

Net people do not have any central figure to negotiate with.  And they probably will not forgive Mainichi until Mainichi go bankrupt, given the background of their resentment.  Other traditional media also are quiet about this incident, because they do not want to get catch the fire either.

Shameless optimism of Silicon Valley

I just finished writing an article about "Web2.0EXPO", held last week in San Francisco, for Internet Magazine Japan.

One thing that struck me at the EXPO was the high level of collective optimism in the venue, and even more than that, the degree of surprise and envy that my friends from Japan expressed to such optimism in Silicon Valley.  It was interesting - I met quite a few friends, and all of them said the same thing.  They envy us.

I wrote in the article, among other things, that such shameless optimism is exactly the tradition of San Francisco Bay Area, since 1849.  In addition, in Web2.0 world, another local tradition of utopian community, reminiscence of hippy era, is largely blended into it.

It is easy to talk about Web2.0 with all sorts of sarcasm, but as one of my Japanese friend put it, "optimistic people always win.  They are psychologically healthy bunch, and that creates the power."  If you can choose, take the optimist side, particularly in this Silicon Valley Web2.0 world.

It is much more fun, at least.

Correlations between good-looking bunch and Web2.0

I was attending Web2.0EXPO in San Francisco earlier this week. Roaming around on the floors in Moscone West, I noticed that the ratio of good looking guys is unproportionately high compared to other tech conventions I have ever gone to. I happen to be a woman and genetically more interested in men, so the fact caught my eyes, but I also noticed, after finding out this fact, that there are also unproportionate number of women, particularly fashionable and good looking women, as well.

I casually wrote this finding on my Japanese blog, and got a comment that it is because lots of Web2.0 guys are from media and advertisement industry, not from tech industry per se. That sounds like a very legitimate explanation. In addition, low age level also helps. It is a striking difference from CTIA, the cell phone show that I just attended at the end of March.

Chad Hurley of YouTube, Kevin Rose and Jay Adelson of Digg/Revision 3, John Battelle and many other guys on the keynote stage at the EXPO are all somewhat media type people. Alas, so it probably is still the case that all geeks are not born equal.

Anyway, the point here is that Web2.0 world seems to be quickly shifting from the original geek paradise to the flashy media world, not entirely unlike Hollywood or Madison Avenue, just as the previous generation of geek world, currently known as Web1.0, was quickly reduced down to souped up catalog sales channel of sock puppets of the world.

I acknowledge that the source of revenue is important to extend these wonderful activities into mass and to keep them going. And it is also wonderful to see such a large number of nice looking young folks on the show floor. And I know some people lament this transformation of "community feel" - where the old small community was pure and motivated to make the world a better place, but the new folks are simply trying to make a quick money.

I am mixed.  I am just trying to grasp and embrace the reality of the period.