NextWeb Japan - Blogging

Twicco.jp - Twitter based communities

Sat, 10 Jan 2009 17:26:00 -0700

At the New Context Conference in November, Digital Garage announced their new Twitter-based community service - twicco. DG had announced a partnership with Twitter, Inc., at the beginning of 2008 - See PDF (PDF? c'mon... !) and the have been working on localisation issues with the service. twicco represents an extension of this relationship, and is produced by DG group's DGIncubation, Inc - although curiously there is no mention of the service on the DG Incubation website.

twicco works simply by taking @replies sent to an account, and posting them as updates to the account's timeline. This changes twitter from a one-to-many to a many-to-many communications service, hence enabling groups or communities.

The interface is only in Japanese at the moment - and the instructions on the site are a little confused - but here is the rough guide to starting up a twicco group...

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Looking for the pulse of Japan's Business SNS Scene at Softbank, Yahoo, and more...

Sun, 04 Jan 2009 00:22:00 -0700

Nothing like the slowdown over new years to spend some time digging around the net (.. as if I didn't spend enough time doing that anyway!).

I've been looking at the Business SNS Scene in Japan, signing up and kicking the tyres for a few weeks. The lights are on, but is anyone home?

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Web 2008 Expo - Day 1 - Open ID and Open Web Day

Thu, 04 Dec 2008 15:30:00 -0700

Yesterday was the first day of the Web 2008 Expo at the Shibuya. The timing was the same as the ill-fated O'Reilly event of a similar name, but this was much more of a grass-roots industry affair. Because of the timing, I did have the pleasure of meeting Brady Forrest from O'Reilly Radar - he had already booked his Tokyo tickets on the return leg of a vacation when the event was canned, so he came along acccompanied by Andrew Shuttleworth. Opening Remarks Shuji Honjo - the chief of the LLP that runs X-Shibuya SNS, and organiser of the event - kicked things off dressed in traditional Japanese office kimono. Keynotes

Next Natsuhiko Sakimura from the Japan Open ID Foundation took to the stage to explain their mission - to spread the adoption of Open ID among the general population. [More]

Web 2008 Expo in Tokyo next week (Dec. 3 & 4)

Thu, 27 Nov 2008 09:07:00 -0700

Next week sees another event in Tokyo, the "Web 2008 Expo". Organised by SNS XShibuya, the byline for the event is something along the lines of "The Vision of a Web Era the Japan Sends to the World" .... fascinating! XShibuya is an area-based invite-only SNS started in July 2006 by the Tokyo Chamber of Commerce and Industry (TCCI), designed to match up "Creators" in the Shibuya area of Tokyo for business opportunities. The site is operated by the Greater Shibuya Area Creator Matching LLP (!) ( ???????????????????????? ) , which seems to be backed by Otsuka Shokai, Takara Tomy, Total Brain and others, and is headed up by Shuji Honjo, a VC from Net Service Ventures. [More]

Tokyo Blog Dinner 5th Anniversary

Sat, 15 Nov 2008 19:28:00 -0700

Wednesday last week (2008-11-13) saw the 5th anniversary of Tokyo Blog Dinner. [More]

Brainstorming dinner for Business Blog and SNS World 08 Session

Sun, 25 May 2008 15:33:00 -0700

Last month, eSynapse was approached to put together a session for Business Blog and SNS World 08 at BigSight from May 28th to 30th.

With only a few days to settle on the session content, we quickly decided to do a panel discussion on Open Data and Mashups, and how they relate to the event main topic. The session is on the 29th (Thu) from 12:00 to 12:45.

I pulled together a collection of industry colleagues to participate, and Andrew Shuttleworth from Tokyo2Point0 volunteered to moderate the session.

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Presented LIMS Ecommerce Blogging Platform at Tokyo2Point0

Thu, 10 Apr 2008 14:26:00 -0700

On Tuesday night (2008-04-08), I took a couple of colleagues along to Tokyo2Point0 to present eSynapse to the community. We just got the call at the end of last week, so we did a short introduction and a demonstration of the Blogging Platform.

Andrew Shuttleworth broadcast the event on UStream, and recorded the session. The videos are below... We start at about 12:00 into the first clip.

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Tokyo Bloggers Dinner

Sat, 05 Apr 2008 00:24:00 -0700

On Tuesday I started working in Kojimachi, near the offices of Mozilla Corporation. Gen Kanai, a friend from Tech Talk Japan chat and Tokyo2Point0, works at Mozilla and we got together for lunch yesterday chatted about various stuff including Mozilla Messaging, portable social networks and upcoming events. He turned me on to the Tokyo Bloggers Dinner, a monthly get together of some of the local blog scene, where everyone has curry and perhaps a few beers, then gives a quick presentation about what they are doing, or some interesting sites they are using. He introduced me to the organiser, Kohichi Aoki, and I was on the list.

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BlogTalk 2008 - Robert Mao - Open Portable Social Network - a Prototype

Fri, 14 Mar 2008 16:37:00 -0700

Robert Mao is a Senior Engineer at Microsoft's Global Product Development Centre in Dublin. A very sharp guy, he comes from a Social Network background in Nanking, China. In his spare time he has been working on an interesting project to turn his blog into the hub of a social network. This concept is exactly what I am trying to achieve with my personal blog, having started by toying with OpenID and Twitter integration. So I was naturally excited to check out what he had done...

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Tokyo2Point0 - 2008-03-11 - Photohito.com and Press Army

Thu, 13 Mar 2008 20:29:00 -0700

Back in close-to-realtime now, another month, another great Tokyo2Point0 at Fujimamas. This month Andrew scored a good one, with Kakaku.com coming along to give side project Photohito.com its first public outing.

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