Today was my first day as CTO for eSynapse, a start up based in Kojimachi, Tokyo, and creator of all manner of data driven web sites.  Our flagship product - LIMS - is an multi-level ecommerce and blogging platform that combines blog-marketing with online inventory control and sales.  Other services provided are integration and server monitoring.

My role here will cover several functions, for example -

Turn our current technologies into a fully automated, modular and customisable platform

Add geolocation. multilingual and semantic web features to make the shopping experience more "social"

Round out the ecommerce functionality by developing and partnering with other business services that can be delivered to retailers and small businesses over broadband

Localise overseas Web properties for the Japanese market.

After what was an interesting yet ultimately unrewarding two years contracting at Microsoft, it is great to be back in the thick of it.

I went down to Yokohama on Friday night to check out Zoholics - the seasonal offline event by AdventNet - producers of Zoho, one of the early ranking contenders in the online office collaboration game.

I had heard much about Zoho, but hadn't had much more than a rather unsatisfying dabble with Show, so now was a chance for a bit of a deep dive. 

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