NextWeb Japan - Enterprise

Aoyama Gakuin Open Lecture: VC Funding and Venture Management in a Time of Rapidly Dropping IPOs

Sun, 16 Nov 2008 08:55:00 -0700

Pina Hirano from Infoteria is a regular at the monthly Tokyo Blog Dinner in Gotanda. At last week's event, we got chatting, and he was kind enough to invite me to a lecture at Aoyama Gakuin, where he leads a business course. Most of the lectures are just for the handful of postgrad students on the course, but this one was open to others, and about a dozen other guests attended. [More]

PostgreSQL Conference 2008 and Party

Sun, 08 Jun 2008 20:10:00 -0700

Friday saw Japan's annual PostgreSQL conference held at the Izumi Garden Conference Centre in Roppongi Itchome. Billed as "Learn everything there is to know about PostgreSQL in one day" - the conference is the main event in the local PostgreSQL community.

With major organisational backing and sponsorship from SRA OSS Inc., Sun Microsystems, EnterpriseDB, NEC Software and others, the event had a distinctly corporate flavour to it. Along with the plush Roppongi location, I suppose this matches the image of PostgreSQL as the Oracle of Open Source Databases.

I have recently started as CTO of a company that uses an OSS stack, and PostgreSQL as the DB platform. With my DB background being MSSQL, Oracle and Sybase, I have some catch up to do, so this was a great opportunity to get some concentrated exposure.

Morning saw the keynotes, the afternoon was sessions ....

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Business Blog and SNS World 2008

Thu, 29 May 2008 15:14:00 -0700

I am at Tokyo BigSight right now for Business Blog and SNS World 2008. The midday session that Andrew and I led went very well. Despite the terrible weather and a smaller than expected turnout for the event, we had about 120 to 150 people come along to the session.

After the MC's introduction, first up I introduced the session survey. I put together a simple mobile based survey system for the event, and projected a QRCode onto the screen. This went pretty well, and about 30 people responded in the first few minutes. Then I talked about the network event we are running this evening, and launched into the panel discussion.

Andrew was moderator, and the panelists did most of the talking. 45 minutes was soon up, and I presented the real-time survey results. Although there was Q&A time at the end, no-one had questions.

In the green room	With Andrew Shuttleworth	The Panel
The eSynapse Booth	Kim-san

BlogTalk2008 - Brian O'Donovan (IBM), Gabriela Avram - What is happening behind the firewall at IBM

Fri, 14 Mar 2008 16:28:00 -0700

Brian O'Donovan* (IBM), Gabriela Avram*

What is happening behind the firewall? The emerging role of social software in IBM [More]

ZDNet Japan Builder Techday: Open API & Beyond - 6) Good Evening - I am an XML DB

Thu, 13 Mar 2008 19:00:00 -0700

The final presentation of the afternoon session was from CyberTech, makers of an XML Database. They gave a rather unsexy demo of their product, showing XPath queries extracting parts of an XHTML document from a db table, and - IIRC - displaying them in a groovy template. A cool technology in want of a cool demonstration ;) Should be extremely useful in this XML-infested generation, so please do something more eye-catching next time!

Links: Session Prologue (Japanese)

Technorati Tags: XMLDb,Cybertech Japan

SaaS World 2007: Platforms, Verticals, Mashups and Mashups of Mashups

Thu, 29 Nov 2007 22:31:00 -0700

Roppongi Midtown was awash with Enterprise 2.0 yesterday and today, as vendors, startups, mashup developers and numerous grey suits gatherered for IDG's SaaS World 2007 Conference and Demo.

The two days saw 40 main sessions, a dozen mashup presentations, and a series of open talks in the exhibition hall, where about 50 companies had booths.

The audience was very much business IT oriented, and the event was packed. It seems that Japanese corporates are keenly interested in the SaaS model, and the agility, ROI and unparalleled integration possibilities it promises.

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Google Announces OpenSocial API for Basic Social Interop

Sun, 04 Nov 2007 09:59:00 -0700

Google's OpenSocial API

In a direct challenge to Facebook's emerging status as the default Social Platform, Google has announced a set of API standards that allows Social Website plugin applications to share data and basic functionality across multiple sites.

Here is a bit of a hokey video where Google gets together with some of the partners they developed the spec with, and show off some of the initial apps released on the API.

This move is an interesting start that should see Social Apps become more powerful, especially as the standard matures and alternatives appear. It will be interesting to see what this does to differentiation in the market, given that apps will be a lot more portable.

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Nikkei Digital Media Web Business Forum 2007

Sat, 29 Sep 2007 10:52:00 -0700

Nikkei Digital Media will be holding the Web Business Forum 2007 at the Mandarin Oriental Hotel on Friday the 12th of October.

The Forum is a primarily Japanese language event, and entry is free. Registration is required from the website.

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