Kaiyzen Group

I love trade shows and conferences.  Besides the great people watching and personal encounters you have with the booth dwellers it is always the fastest way to absorb info about a market segment.

The Expo in Tokyo did not let me down.  This was my first international trade show experience.  The show was a bit smaller that I was expecting, there were about 2K exhibitors and around 100K attendees.  Compared to the MAGIC or PPAI/ASI shows in Vegas, this was relatively tame.., still great though.

It was very interesting to experience the Japanese IT and enterprise software market first hand.  It seems to me that most applications and especially user interfaces.

It was exciting to see the presence that we had at the show.  A strong showing from our partners CareBrains (now OSS CRM) and Softbank representing on our behalf.  We were there to hop nob and experience the show while helping out with some larger Japanese clients and new partners.  Here is some pics of the booth:

It was also great to have a large booth right across the aisle from our good friends Salesforce…, tried to snap some pics before they drove me away.., “no pictures here” they told me.., able to get one of them off:

I was able to swing by the Embedded Systems show in the hall across the way.., pretty interesting.  I love all sorts of gadgets and microcontrollers, flat screens, etc.  It was interesting to see first hand the massive push that Microsoft has for their embedded system of Windows.  They had an ok sized Dynamics booth on the software side.., but a HUGE booth on the embeded side of the show.

My good pals at Google K.K. had a booth there.  Lots of people flocking their booth while they pushed adsense, maps, and their applications.  I obtained their handout.., 100 ways to use Google.., will try to get some pics up from the booklet once I can get some pics snapped.

All in all good times.  The take away from the show.., the Japanese market is quite picky.., they want a corporate presense.., they want case studies.., and above all.., they love give aways just as much as companies in the states do when it comes to trade shows.

Top 2 booth give aways.., a invisible writing pen that has a black light on the end shat shows what you have written, and a mechanical calendar from Softbank that is good forever.

Also.., the Japanese seem to be taking to Open Source quite well.  They are a bit behind the Euros and Aussies, but the understanding and acceptance in on the uptick.  As we continue to close more markee customers over here and get more case studies.., this place is primed for Open Source explosion in the enterprise.

A funny thing from the show that I was not able to capture before getting chased away was the pics that Salesforce had in their booth for testimonials.., I swear that at least 3 of them were our taxi drivers.., if you dont understand this read the first Tokyo report here.

After the Expo one day we headed across the river/bay divide to one of our partners new offices for a meeting before a dinner with a new SI partner out there.., pretty amazing view of that side of the city:

Arrived in Tokyo and immediately I have the comforts of home in the form of Starbucks to welcome me at the airport.  It is actually pretty amazing/intersting to me the extent of which U.S. food and coffee places make their way over here.  Beyond Starbucks there is Tully’s and Coffee Bean as well not to mention the wide array of fast food chains.

I have been looking forward to visiting Tokyo for some time and the city has not let me down.  Much like London, Tokyo is a vast city sprawling out as far as the eye can city with great public transport to zip around and check things out.  Between my love of sushi and of course with the whole Kaizen/Kaiyzen thing you know I am crazy about Japanese culture in general.

Unfortunately work is.., and will be taking up pretty much all of my time here.  I will be getting some free time this weekend before heading to the next destination (Singapore).

One of the funny and unique thing here is the taxi cab drivers.  Most are older gentleman who are nice and nice and helpful with getting you to the destination.., but all have the funniest photos on display.., below is an example, its a little dark, but you can make out just enough to get the point across:

One thing about the taxis that are cool that I am just starting to encounter when in NY is video players in them.  They have them in a high number of the taxis.  They play some of the funniest shite on them.  One of them is a series from MTV Japan called Train Surfer.., quite entertaining.., check out the website here.

I havent got the gut busting laughs in a while.., but two of our taxis played this cartoon series that was the funniest.., most random thing I have seen in a very very long time.  I wish I would have captured the first one.., managed to get the second one on video from my phone:

Getting ready for the Expo to start, I love pretty much any trade show so should be good times.  Will report more after the show.

Some interesting news from the last couple weeks on traffic reports in the social network sector.

Hitwise released their traffic report for April and overall traffic was down 16% from April 2007.  Either April was a blip in internet habits or more and more users are seeing subdued interest in the social networks sites.  Average time spent on sites was up however 73%.

With the combo of the traffic decreasing and time spent greatly increasing it appears that the split of users may be increasing that are either all for social network sites and spending TONS of time on them, or passively checking in every so often.  There is also the possibility that the bottom portion of users are dropping off completely causing the skew the larg increase in avg time spent.

I know for myself I rarely use my MySpace, Facebook, Bebo, etc accounts.  I mostly set them up to see what all the hype was about, checking in from time to time to see new features that are reported on, and maybe respond to some alert emails I receive.  I probably visit each site once.., maybe twice a week.., spending a total of about 2-5 mins per session.

In the electronic communication arena I prefer to stick primarily with email and IM since it is so much easier to keep track of all your conversations instead of having to go to three or more sites to follow up on a thread.  Table of top 5 below:

Who the hell is MyYearbook.com, and BlackPlanet?.., and how are they number three and five for social traffic in the U.S.?  MyYearbook is up 475%!!

The only loser in the top five is bebo with a drop of 13%, you know AOL loves to see those kind of numbers after losening the purse strings a bit to add the site to their family.

No matter how you approach the data and what conclusions you want to draw two things are clear..,

1) MySpace is still pretty dominant with visitors and traffic time

2) Facebook is growing like mad in the U.S. and other regions

Been on a long break from the postings.., have waaaaaaaaay too many things going on right now.

Preparing for little trek around Asia starting this weekend.  I will be attending the CRM Expo out in Tokyo and spending a week there with partner meetings.  From there its on to Singapore then Phillipines.

I will be ramping up a bit on the postings in the next few weeks while traveling.  Also, I have started to write for some other sites.  Over the next few months I will be shoving more of my writings on the tech sector to other more maintstream sites so that I can get this site back to more personal musings.

So, hopefully I will power through this mind meltdown I have going and get a bit more rejuvinated during and after the trip.