Tim O'reilly in Japan

Tim O'reilly came to Japan for Web2.0 Expo Tokyo.
Joi is on the advisory board of Web2.0 Expo Tokyo, and one of the keynote speakers.

I thank CMP and O'reilly media for organizing this event in Tokyo,
getting Tim, Evan and all other interesting people to gather here.




http://flickr.com/photos/nobihaya/2029828565/
Photo CC-BY Nobuyuki Hayashi

The keynote  "Conversation with Joichi Ito, by Tim O'reilly" touched upon the Japanese reality that
in Japan, it is difficult to have changes and venture businesses face difficulties.
Also, Japanese market is large enough for Japanese companies to focus on Japanese market and
become ignorant on the world trends. (and I think there is language barrier too...)

Joi mentions the data "In US, 80% of the people admires the entrepreneurs, in Japan less than 10%"
When people face failures with their startup, you are still respected in US- not in Japan.

Localization was another topic. Yahoo and Microsoft had wonderful partners in Japan,
and it is those "individuals" who makes the localization successful- not merely the business models.
-Which reminds me of Reid Hoffman's speech at New Context Conference
that it is always the individuals who makes the companies successful,
and it is important to be networked with those individuals.

When talking about the Japanese market, mobile industry is something you can't miss.
Joi introduced as an example of Second Life, which started in US,
but it might take off in mobile in Japan earlier than the U.S.
(I've seen Sun -not Sun Microsystems - at Virtual World Summit Tokyo
already started the development and is going to start the testing with Docomo.)

It is important to start your company at young age, Tim says.
Although - as mentioned earlier- Japanese public is not opt to changes,
so entrepreneurs trying to do new things face difficulties,
also when they fail, the public recognizes them as "people who failed"
and there is not much incentive to take that risk.
Also, most companies (including the company I work for) prohibits their employee to start companies,
so you really need to quit your job to start a company legally.

This reminded me of a friend of mine from my NTT days
(NTT is the largest telecom in Japan, similar to AT&T in US)
who started Amazon Japan when he was actually working for NTT
insisting that it says "it is prohibited to work for another company,
but it doesn't say we are prohibited to start another company" (LOL :P)
In the end he quit NTT, forcefully made Amazon Japan successful,
and he started his own company Fujisan.com.
Not many people are like that... most Japanese are obedient and just follow the rules,
which makes this country very far from entrepreneurship.

This argument sort of links to the courage and entrepreneurship of Evan,
which was the central topic ot the keynote on Day 2
-conversation between Tim and Evan Williams, the founder of Twitter (and Blogger in the past).

http://flickr.com/photos/nobihaya/2037076904/
Photo CC-BY-NC-SA Nobuyuki Hayashi

Here is the brief history of Evan's entrepreneur life:

In 1993, he started an internet company in Nebraska which he eventually shut down,
went to California where there seemed to be more interesting things are happening,
and worked for Tim O'reilly, but realized he doesn't like working for others.
             
In 1996, he started a company called Pyra
-this company lacked funding, especially because of the dotcom bubble bust.
They started Blogger as a side project, and in 2003 sold Blogger to Google.
He worked for Google for 2 years until he was confident Blogger will survive without him.

He then became the advisor of Odeo which his friend started
- this company raised money too much before we knew what they were doing,
focused on the company more than the product which was a big problem.
Twitter was a side project to Odeo.

The important take away here was:
1) start with decent funding, don't fundraise too much in the early stage
   as you will be distracted by the investers etc, the company stuff. instead,
2) focus on your service, product.
   If the service is good and the users are using the service- then there is a way in making money in some way.
3) Open APIs helps you in various ways. Sites and services using their APIs
    (like Flickrvision etc) itself will not help Twitter directly, but it makes branding etc.
4) Don't fear failures. Evan faced many difficulties too.

These are my favorite "learning" clips from and on Evan from the past:
Ten Rules for Web Startups
Gigaom's article on Evan Williams


BTW, it seems that Tim O'reilly met "Hiroyuki", who started "2channel", one of the largest BBS in Japan,
and also "nico-nico-douga (nico video)", one of the hot video sites in Japan.
(CNet Japan article covering the meeting between Hiroyuki and Tim)

Create a product or service that the users want (don't focus on the company, focus on the services)
and I think Hiroyuki always created what the people wanted
- and that is why the users are using those service so much (some of them becoming addicted...)
Lots of youngsters are addicted to 2 Channel (called jyunin or 2channel residents).
Lots of youngsters are becoming addicted to Nico Video (called Nico Chu or Nico video addicts).



For those of you who doesn't know what Nico Video is,
it is a video sharing site except you can write comments "on" the video,
which enables you to have a conversation-like comment with other viewers.
YouTube etc enables you to comment beneath the videos, but commenting on the screen of the video itself
gives you a sense of feeling that you are watching together with other viewers.

It has 570,054 video clips, 2,702,639,096 views, and 584,413,493 comments.

NetRatings Japan released an interesting report in August, and you can read the full article here:
http://csp.netratings.co.jp/nnr/PDF/Newsrelease09212007_e.pdf

Nico Nico Doga (nicovideo.jp) is fast surpassing YouTube (youtube.com) in
average length of visit and average number of visits per user.