NextWeb Japan - General

Twitter Killed my Blog

Mon, 20 Jul 2009 12:43:00 -0700

And then it killed itself... it was horrible...

... But it didn't kill my digital camera!!

2009.03.23 - Green Mondays

2009.04.30 - Danny Choo's Consumer Generated Arm Wrestling Night

2009.04.27 - Tokyo Beer and Blog #4 - Swagat Indian Restaurant

2009.06.08 - Tokyo2.0 #25 - The Web and Language

2009.06.09 - Geeks on a Plane

Everything's gone black.....

Tue, 17 Feb 2009 10:34:00 -0700

Wow ... little old New Zealand, eh? First thing that happens when we get bored and toss out the Labour Government is the new folks hire Franz Kafka to rewrite our copyright laws.... (Well, the second thing really - first was global economic catastrophsk, but I hesitate to pin that on the Nats!) The guts is this ... soon ISPs will be forced to take down internet connections and websites of anyone accused (not convicted) of copyright infringement. We doth protest ... hence the internet blackout. [More]

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]

Presenting ... Twitterlater - the future of microblogging...

Sun, 23 Nov 2008 10:09:00 -0700

... or rather, microblogging in the future! Recently I have started working on some pet projects around social networking and personal data control. It's been about 4 years since I actually designed, built and released a whole web site, so in order to ease myself back into the whole www-facing thing, I thought I would try wheeling out a low impact app in an afternoon. I use twitter quite a lot, and find it great for passive news gathering, and occasional communications. I thought it would be nice if you could schedule your tweets in the future, for reminders, or perhaps some kind of game or promotion. So after lunch yesterday, I set about putting together just such a thing. Several hours later, and http://twitterlater.com/ was born. It is a simple site that allows you to set a time in the future (currently UTC only, but I'm working on it ...) or a countdown timer to a tweet, and have it posted then. If you're interested, please go and kick the tires... it's very beta, but the initial basic functions should be working. Not 5 minutes after I uploaded the site, I was back on Twitter where Tim O'Reilly and Eric Burke were discussing their desire for a service that would spread out "bursty" tweets - people like Robert Scoble have good content, but sometimes they tweet in bulk, pushing everyone else's tweets off the page... drip feeding tweets to help this issue is now on the road map. Please let me know if there is anything like that you'd find useful. Oh ... and as you can probably see from the logo, If anyone would like to contribute some high-end pixel-mongering to my look and feel ... shout out!

Tokyo 2.0 - 2008-11-10

Sat, 15 Nov 2008 23:23:00 -0700

Well... it's that time of the month again. Tokyo 2.0 was packed to the brim this month ... maybe the slowdown means people leave the office at a sensible hour now (see below :) [More]

New Context Conference 2008 - Day 2

Sat, 15 Nov 2008 19:45:00 -0700

I had a couple of things on, so I didn't catch the whole of the second day. I missed the opening session on the mobile internet, and Joi's closing about "The Next Big Thing" ... if anyone heard what the "Next Big Thing" is please drop me a note! [More]

New Context Conference 2008 - Day 1

Sat, 15 Nov 2008 15:49:00 -0700

Joi Ito and Digital Garage held their 4th "New Context Conference" at Garden Hall in Ebisu Garden Place last week. The event is free of charge, and the fact that DG can pull together such a wide variety of speakers - primarily from companies in which they have an interest - is testament to the breadth of their portfolio. The theme for this year's two day conference was the "Open Business Network" that the Internet allows. [More]

O'Reilly Cancels Web 2.0 Expo Tokyo 2008

Tue, 30 Sep 2008 16:23:00 -0700

Citing the difficult economic climate, O'Reilly and TechWeb have pulled the plug on the Web 2.0 Expo Tokyo 2008. Apparently "the current business climate was not conducive to guaranteeing the success of the event" I went along last year, and while there wasn't a lot of excitement in terms of services and startups, I made a load of good contacts. It's a shame they couldn't work out some way to reduce the cost of the event. Here is the story: http://tokyo.web2expo.com/

eSynapse Restructured

Mon, 29 Sep 2008 15:43:00 -0700

Well, it's been some time since I posted here, so here's some news and it isn't good. eSynapse - the company I joined as CTO just a few months ago - has failed to secure financing, and been forced to slash staff. As my project is still several months from bringing in any revenue, the project has been frozen, and my team let go. I have decided to go with them. This is a real shame ... the project I lead was to create a multi-level modular CMS with ECommerce and Semantic hooks. It was to be a chance to take the CMS that I had created over several years, and hacked for many clients, and rebuild it from scratch as an ASP service, in a new language, with a team of developers. Unfortunately this was not to be. So ... what to do next? Of course I'm putting the feelers out, and checking the job sites. But I want to do a little upskilling first - finally move to Eclipse, learn about Mobile Development, Flex and a little Java (eek!). I also have a couple of ideas I'd like to work on, and have started on a mental health-related site project with some friends, so I'm not going to leap back into the job market immediately.

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.

[More]

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.

[More]

The first day of the rest of my life...

Tue, 01 Apr 2008 20:28:00 -0700

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.

Technorati Tags: Job,Japan,eSynapse

Nifty Develops Spam Blog Filter - Finds 40% of Domestic Blogs to be "Spam Blogs"

Thu, 27 Mar 2008 12:49:32 -0700

Nifty Labs, the marketing research group within Nifty Corporation, has developed filtering technology to automate the detection of so-called "Spam Blogs" - blogs whose sole purpose is to artificially inflate traffic and affiliate commissions. Japan has been renowned for the number such sites, and it is certainly an issue when trying to gauge the true blogging population and activity level here.

The survey combined several filtering techniques, and data came from a 100,000 article sample from 5 months of Nifty's Buzz Pulse Blog analysis service. Nifty says Buzz Pulse indexes 90% of Japan's blogs, including over 450 million articles as of March 2008. The average level of Spam Blogging was about 40% ...

2007-10	39.3%
2007-11	40.1%
2007-12	39.7%
2008-01	39.9%
2008-02	40.5%

Nifty plans to make this information available
on their BuzzSeeQer site - the online servce for BuzzPulse.

Press Release: http://www.nifty.co.jp/cs/07shimo/detail/080326003337/1.htm (Japanese)

Original Blog: http://bb.watch.impress.co.jp/cda/news/21375.html (Japanese)

Technorati Tags: Blogs,Japan Blogs,Spam,Nifty,SpamBlogs

Visit to Shift, Auckland

Tue, 25 Mar 2008 18:25:00 -0700

It was my last day on vacation in Auckland today, and I took the opportunity to do the rounds a little this morning. First up I went into town to meet Malcolm Stenersen, ex-colleague of mine from Clearfield days, to discuss his new e-commerce venture. I can't yet divulge the details, but the concept is great, and am looking forward to seeing it take shape.

[More]