Month: February 2009

Former Tokyo Disneyland Producer Unveils His Secret

Mr. Teiichiro Hori, who persuaded Wall Disney Company to found the Disneyland in Tokyo, authored an audiobook titled “How to Attract and Gather the People”.

I actually attended his lecture a long time ago, and then he look so frank as not to have made such a great achievement, where I was so excited to listen to his story.

Hori Teiichirou

(Clicking the image shown above will launch your iTunes and take you to the page.)

Some friends of mine and Mr. Hori’s grandson were involved in making this audiobook, and now we can listen to his great story even with the iPhone/iPod.

Leaving the story in text is good, and so is it in audio form as well.

This is like the audio edition of “My Resume Column” which is always placed on the cover of the Nihon Keizai Shimbun or Japan Economic Journal.

TV-Tokyo has been broadcast its visual edition, but we cannot watch it in crowded commuter trains.   Alternately, shall we invest in what we want to be  by listening to audiobooks where we cannot read newspaper not book?

Audiobook title: How to Attract and Gather the People
Authored by: Teiichiro Hori and Sadayuki Yamaoka
Arranged by: Leisure News Service
Narrated by: Ryoko Taki

I Went To A-list Bloggers Award Winning Ceremony

There was the winning ceremony for the alpha (a-list) bloggers award 2008 at a club in Aoyama Friday evening.   I was attending that.

Totally twelve blog posts were introduced at the ceremony, and some of them were recited by voice actress Yurika Fukui.  (This picture contains unintentionally an ad for another blog award.)
Voice Actress Fukui at the Alpha Bloggers Award Celemony

Not just reading the blog post, but listening to what someone reads it is a great new idea and so impressive.   Furthermore, it was read with the profession’s voice, which may change the weight of every word.

The year of 2008 is filled with so many incidents and accidents, not a few blog posts were so sad.   But the finally introduced one or “The Story of Disheveled-haired Dog named WASAO” were so funny.

Following the ceremony, we had a fellowship banquet where we take as much Pringles chips as we like.   And I got Rip Slyme‘s limited edition of Pringles as the sponsor’s courtesy.

Two Boxes of Pringles

I don’t need buy potato chips anymore for the time being.

Twiistup 5, A Tech Night Event in LA

At the warehouse next to Santa Monica municipal Airport.
It is Twiistup 5, a social night meet-up for tech people working and living in LA.
Venue
Twiistup 5
Santa Monica City Police is also standing by, because so many people are coming down to the event.
Shira Lasar, a popular anchor woman and publication writer served as the event host.

Shira Lazer

So pretty cute girl.

So many beautiful women come together at this kind of events in the states, which is also one of the reasons why I love my job.

Tyler Crowley introduce so many friends to me, and I’m still busy to confirm their business cards.

Anyway, here is the link to pictures taken at the event.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/masaruikeda/sets/72157613784626786/

I’m frequently in San Francisco, but not in Los Angeles.

The event was a good opportunity to see tech start-up people working in this Southern California Area.

I hope we would have such an awesome event in Tokyo in the future.

Arrive in Santa Monica, Visit Mahalo!

I escaped from freezing Las Vegas and arrived in Santa Monica.

It has so nice view whenever I come.

Santa Monica

I visited the human-powered search engine “Mahalo” locating near the downtown of Santa Monica, and Jason Calacanis and Tyler Crowley welcomed me.

http://calacanis.com/2009/02/12/green-tea-kitkats-hand-delivered-by-masaru/

Jason and Me

In the middle of chatting with them, there was a breaking news that South airliner landed in Las Vegas in emmergency where I’ve been until this morning.

Mahalo’s staffs were a little bit busy to collect and distribute the news-related tweets then.

DirecTV News Mix

A Mahalo guy working at the office said “CNN is always slower to bring breaking news”.

Now is the era of cellphone journalism as you may know.   CNN owns iReport, but they never win cellphone holders in terms of  competing the speed.

Mahalo

Digital Children and Digital Natives

I’m in Las Vegas for participating in FASTForward ’09 organized by the search engine technology leader FAST, which was merged and acquired by Microsoft last year.

Don Tapscott, who is the author of “growing up digital (Japanese Title: Digital Children)”, made a keynote speech at the top of the conference.  I’ve heard about him from someone, and I just finished reading that book a few days ago.

Don Tapscott with Grown Up Digital

When Digital Children have grown up, now how we call them?    His recent book “grown up digital” following “growing up digital”.

As Japan’s state-running TV NHK was broadcast the special program featuring “Digital Native” and the program title is also as it is, such name is more common.

Daniel Rasmus from Microsoft told us that a Digital Native would definitely change his/her working style and the way of working with his/her company, it would be very common for him/her to change the job 15 to 20 times in a lifetime.

Employees’ royalties will be changing, and the company has to change its way to recruit, train and work.

FASTForward is the place to talk about search engine stuffs, however all three keynote speakers mentioned this generation gap and Digital Native.

I cotributed a story about the same theme for a certain book to be released soon, and I feel personally I should be more flexible to meet such changes.

(There’s no option to use Internet on earth when I was born.   Therefore, I’m not a Digital Native but a Digital Immigrate.)

Local news sas, Goldman Sachs cancels its event to be held at the end of this month at the Venetian in Las Vegas, and it’s re-scheduled to be held in San Francisco.

Besides, gambling debt non-returning is making its number record, global economic downturn brings bad news even to the capital of entertainment business.

The Mirage

Digicon Salon: Maneo’s Presentation

Now I’m on my way to Las Vegas and writing this post at San Francisco International Airport.   Heavy traffic at the airport makes my flight delayed definitely.

By the way, last Friday Maneo’s CEO Mr. Seno-o was invited to the  monthly meet-up of Digicon Salon, and he brought us almost one and half hour presentation about his company that I’ve feature on this blog.

Seno-o Presents Maneo at Digicon Salon

I’ve been worried that the number of attendees could be extremely smaller than expected because the usual layer of attendees is a group of creator-like in my understanding, but actually the venue was filled with capacity of many attendees.

I appreciate the business of Mr. Seno-o who presented, the Graduate School of Digital Hollywood University which provided the venue and the organizers for Digicon Salon.

I covered many interesting stories he had told us, wrapped them in an article, and posted it for Asiajin.   Enjoy reading it.

http://asiajin.com/blog/2009/02/08/japans-1st-social-lending-site-offers-an-alternative-in-this-rough-economy/

My flight has not come by yet.

TechCrunch / CrunchGear Meet-up in Ebisu

TC Meet-up in Shibuya

Peter Ha, who is the editor of famous gadget tech blog CrunchGear, is visiting Japan, and his colleague and TechCrunch writer Serkan Toto organized a meet-up event in Ebisu.

I attended the event followed by another meet-up for the rotary club in Shinagawa, TC meet-up has been already started when I arrtived in the venue.

Danny Choo came there with having a strom trooper costume despite it was so cold.

This meet-up was arranged just a few days ago, but more than fifty people came together, it was so surprised and TC’s social power is so amazing.

I don’t feel like any recession while I was talking with someone here. Sleepy…

I appreciate the organizers’ arrangement for the schedule and the venue. Greatly thanks Namekawa-san, Takahashi-san and Hirano-san from TechCrunch Japan.

I cannot put a flickr badge for the pictures taken, and I put the link below instead.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/masaruikeda/sets/72157613325897714/detail/