Year: 2009

Many thanks to all who made it out for our Le Jazz at Tableaux event in Daikanyama, it was a fantastic evening at a super venue with an awesome buffet and 200 great people in the house to mix & mingle at the show & tell tables. Looking back on 2009 MoMo Tokyo experienced somewhat of a renaissance, starting with our call-to-action in January which resulted in an impressive group of ‘Ambassadors’ who stepped forward to examine the true meaning of MoMo and deliver on that vision. Together we proceeded to plan our events, with a much sharper focus, balancing business merit and – of course – Fun!

Looking forward, we are thrilled to join the Tokyo Tech Tribes for a Monster year-end Bonenkai on December 17th – See Full Details Below – and enjoy a little hard-earned R&R before heading into 2010. We have some ambitious plans for next year, including the MM Summit and 10th Anniversary event, along with some targeted chapter exchange missions and a new Biz-Match platform. After 5-years it remains our great pleasure to be involved with this effort to “Bring the Mobile Community Together.”

MoMo Tokyo Team — Yoroshiku!

Tokyo Tech Tribes Party — Bonenkai 2009
When: December 17th, 2009 :: 7-10pm
Where: Fifty Seven — Map
Cost: Free Entry — Cash bar, light food
RSVP via email by Sunday, Dec. 13th, 2009
rsvp.tokyos.biggest.techparty@gmail.com

Participating Groups:
Asiajin, Digital Eve Japan, Intl Computer Assoc, Mobile Monday Tokyo, Ninjava, Tokyo 2.0, Tokyo Hacker Space, Tokyo Linux Users Group, Tokyo PC Users Group

Charity Benefit: This will be the first ever ‘Beers for Bytes’, an offshoot of the acclaimed Beers for Books event. The money will be donated to Room to Read’s wireless computer lab projects in Nepal and Vietnam.

Play it again Sam..

日本語版

Ok – whew – we are finally getting back in the swing here with a brand spanking new website and plan for gathering the MoMo Tokyo community together on November 30th. We’ve had tons of great feedback from you after the 5th Anniversary party and will be taking those comments forward on our upcoming events. For starters.. Food! Indeed, as most of us head straight to MoMo from work, hunger is a factor. So, we’ve arranged with the nice folks at Tableaux Lounge for a yummy buffet – that means no greasy fries – at only 1,000jpy per head. Get all the niggly details and be sure to RSVP Here.

Along with a cool jazz scene, a quasi outdoor patio and huge leather couches, there are also several Show & Tell table spots for some hands-on fun. We have confirmed five super interesting companies will be setup there for face 2 face interaction with you!

Digital Garage, Yes those demi-gods responsible for Twitter Japan, will be in the house with their latest products to #stream along with the MoMo community. TwiNavi is the gateway that guides users through the twitter world of official accounts by famous celebs and companies. TwitVideo is the new media portal where people can share their fun and memorable photos and videos. Our hearty congrats to the DG Mobile crew, as their Japanese client for Twitter launched here in October, check-out the site and take the product for a test-drive.. if you haven’t already?!? Meanwhile, be sure to follow @dg_mobile, and @momo_tokyo of course, for all the action!

We’re thrilled to welcome representatives from 34 SME European ICT companies who are visiting Tokyo the week of Nov 30 – Dec 4 as part of the EU Gateway programme. They will be bringing a broad range of technologies – several in the wireless related space – and clearly MoMo is a unique opportunity for them to meet with people from leading mobile companies in Japan. Note, these folks will also be running a trade fair at the Hilton hotel in Shinjuku on December 2nd and 3rd, Full Details Here.

It’s an honor to have Hitoshi Miyata from Dream Ranch coming to show his Memory Tree iPhone application. Created to help users track and trace memories, it uses basic hand gestures to enable easy operations to archive events on the fly, at any given location, in order to be saved as a keepsake. Record your memories onto invisible maps with time line layers using three amazingly simple motion-sensor actions: Shoot. Fly. Catch. This AR styled tool, compatible in both English and Japanese, will enable folks to visualize their experiences and help link memories by sharing key information such as when, where and what in order to connect with other members who have been there before or will visit the same place in the future!

Based in San Francisco with operations in Japan, doubleTwist offers simple and seamless syncing of music, videos and photos between the PC or Mac and over 200 Japanese phones, the Sony PSP, Nintendo DSi and other devices. The software also includes a store for digital content that can integrate any online store, and currently integrates the Amazon MP3 store in the US. doubleTwist is seeking OEM and e-commerce partners in Japan who want to enhance their digital media offerings and benefit from a smoother user experience in online shopping of digital goods. The Japanese website and free software is available for download at www.doubletwist.com.

Finally, you’ll wanna see MoobizSync2.0 – a Salesforce.com certified application for users to access their Salesforce.com or Force.com account information from a mobile phone. It allows users to view, create or erase data in standard and custom Salesforce.com tabs, everything from customer info and opportunities to upcoming tasks and calendar events. It also enables offline and online search functions as well as data caching and network level secure data encryption. The product is capable of running on standard Docomo and Softbank handsets. Offered by TDC Software, the product details are available for review online [JPN] or see this PDF in English.

Meanwhile – Yes Virginia there is a Bonenkai – better mark December 17th on your busy season calendars for a massive gathering of all the Tokyo networking tribes who will be coming together, for a good cause of course, under one roof to have drinks with Santa!

Event: Mobile Monday Tokyo — Le Jazz at Tableaux
Date: Monday – November 30th, 2009 :: 18:30 – 23:00
Location: Tableaux Lounge — Map
Fee: ¥1,000 with Advance Registration – OR – ¥2,000 at the door
*Your unique QR code ticket will be sent in advance of the event

日本語版

That’s Right Folks – It’s coming up on the Big 5.0 for us since launch in 2004 and we’re ready for a major celebration! Be sure to block-off your calendar for September 7 and Book Reservations for our Event of the Season.. you know it will be a Total Blast..!!

We’ve secured a fantastic venue – Legato in Shibuya – who have generously offered to provide an awesome buffet along with an open bar for two-hours! We look forward to welcome the MoMo Tokyo Alumni and expecting several special V-VIP guests will be in the house for this milestone occasion. If you would like to add a door-prize for the meishi draw, ping us here to arrange.

Looking back over the years we have held 44 events, in at least a dozen different venues, with presentations coming from over 100 speakers. Our database shows delegates attending from right across the spectrum of the smallest to largest players, based both in Japan and overseas, with an even mix of folks with domestic and international backgrounds. Yoroshiku!

It has been an honour and pleasure to be involved with this project and we extend our deepest gratitude, on behalf of the entire mobile community, to every single one of you for making this adventure possible. Kanpai..!!

BTW: If you missed the Wireless Japan event in July – for shame! – we have all the presentations uploaded Here. Also, we are thrilled to announce our NetTokyo charity fundraiser in mid-July resulted in nice donation of $1,500 on behalf of MoMo Tokyo to the kind folks at Sala Network.. Good Job.

Date: Monday, 7 September 2009 :: 19:00 – 23:00
Venue: Legato Shibuya — GMAP
Admission: ¥3,000 with Advance Registration – Or – ¥4,000 at the door
Includes Full Buffet & Nomi-Hodai from 7-9pm (a bargain at twice the price!)

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Update: What a Great Freakin Time.. 😎

We ran 5×5 for the Birthday Bash last nite; an Awesome Venue serving Fantastic Food and Open Bar with a Solid Mass of Really Great People!

It was an honor to have Jari Tammisto, CEO of Mobile Monday OY, here to pass along his best wishes, and the Golden Lion Pin award, along with an energetic delegation visiting from Helsinki and several high-level local reps from the Finnish embassy. A special hat-tip to Legato with Dinner for two going to Ken Pechter who was the first to correctly answer – by mobile of course – the exact date of our 1st event. The nice folks from Opera had a bag full of goodies and the Poken give-away started a mini-stampede!

Our eternal thanks and praise to everyone who made it an evening to remember. While we all recover from what turned-out to be a very late night, work is already well underway for our next event in November. Meanwhile, stay tuned for several other related updates along the way!

Heads-Up, our next MoMo Tokyo event is July 24 – Yep, it’s a Friday – out at Tokyo Big Sight during the Wireless Japan conference and trade show. We have lined-up some interesting and energetic speakers, see company logos below, to present on topics ranging from 3D Worlds and SNS platforms to video and next-generation UI’s with a couple of extra surprises in store. We know most folks will be heading out there anyway so Register Now and join us for an afternoon deep inside the belly of the space beast!

All 5 presentations are now available in the Archive Section

In typical MoMo style we’ll have a Happy Hour mixer after the presentations, with special thanks to the good folks at Ikon-EuroPubs who will be there to make sure everyone gets some Tigers in their tank for the weekend. Also note, EJK still has a special offer for booth space rental this year, their Word .doc in Japanese is Here.

Meanwhile, we’re pumped to see you Saturday July 11 at NetTokyo

It’s always a really fantastic event with super people and supporting a number of worthy charity efforts. Bring your friends and be sure to grab some extra raffles tickets for some great prizes.. you gotta be there..!!!

Otherwise, the Ad:Tech Tokyo debut in September is coming together, be sure to check that out. Finally, we wish safe travel – and good times! – for those of you hitting the holiday highways this summer season.. Yoroshiku!

Date: Friday, 24 July 2009 :: 14:30 – 18:00
Venue: Tokyo Big Site — GMAP
Admission: ¥1,000 with Advance Registration – OR – ¥2,000 at the door
Complimentary drinks for pre-registered guests!
14:00 – Doors Open
14:30 – Presentations
15:30 – Networking
17:00 – Close — Nijikai.. 😎

Post-Event Update:
What a great evening we had on Monday night! The weather was 10×10 for a roof top patio gathering and we had a great line-up of presentations with some really super people out for a Zesty Margarita Mobile Monday.. 😎

If you missed-out (for Shame!), we have the presentations posted Here, sadly there is no video of the groovy air guitar set by Team Taito. At any rate there was a whole lotta Poken going on and, for those truly savvy at mingling, we were honored to welcome key players from AdMob who were in the house – Scoop – with their latest hire.. Congrats!

Looking forward to our next event – in late July – lets just say it’s gonna be “Big” and we’ll be sure to shoot all the details your way soon.

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Ok folks, our upcoming event on May 18th will be an exciting Demo Night styled evening – featuring lightning round of show and tell presentations with plenty of interaction afterwards – under the stars on the roof top patio at Zest in Ebisu, so be sure to mark the calendar and tell your colleagues!

We have confirmed speakers coming from Taito to air guitar with their Wii-like Chokkan Games, Find!Tokyo will show-off it’s recently released mega iPhone app. while the good folks from Poken will be High 5’ing around with their groovy Pandas and both MoCoTea and Pikkle will demo their mobile sns services. So, we’ll have something for everybody!

Sponsored by: Jonckers Translation & Engineering and Robert Leonard Consulting

Date: Monday, 18 May 2009 :: 18:30 – 23:00
Venue: Ebisu Zest Cantina — GMAP
Admission: ¥1,000 with Advance Registration – OR – ¥2,000 at the door
Complimentary drink ticket for the first 100 pre-registered guests!

18:30 – Doors Open
19:30 – Presentations
20:30 – Networking
22:30 – Last Call
23:00 – Close

Our next event is set for March 16th at the Designing Studio with a couple of great presentations and mega mixer afterwards at the Wired Cafe. Considering the ‘current economic situation’, see this fantastic keynote by Anssi Vanjoki for MoMo Peer Awards at MWC in Barcelona, we are inspired and agreed – these are the times when winners are made.. 😎

A few notes of interest: We are thrilled to announce our co-op on related industry upcoming events with the Inter-Embassy Mobile Forum and the good folks at AdTech. We have added links here for our FaceBook and Linkedin groups while the new MoMo Ambassador team is hard at work planning our next event targeted for May 18th. See you all again soon!

Special Guest Speakers

Kazuhiko Ishii – General Manager APAC – scanR Inc. .PDF
Kazuhiko Ishii is General Manager of scanR Inc. Asia Pacific Operation. Ishii is responsible for all operation in Asia Ishii has extensive telecommunications sales and business experience within the Japanese and Asia Pacific regions. He previously served as General Manager of Openwave Systems KK. Prior to Openwave Systems, he was President of Premier Global Service, North Asia, SEVEN Networks Inc.’s Regional Vice President of Asia Pacific, and General Manager of Japan operation. Ishii has additionally held various senior executive manager positions at Phone.com Inc., Nihon Cisco Systems K.K., Hewlett-Packard, and StrataCom Inc. Ishii holds a B.S. from Science University of Tokyo 1985, Applied Mathematics.

Shuusuke Isoda, Media Service Planning Div., KDDI Corp. .PPT
The ‘au Box’ service was launched by KDDI late last year allowing subscribers to easily connect their keitai with the fixed-line internet to buy, transfer and enjoy music and video contents. With around 1.3 million songs and 5,000 videos on LISMO now available for download and playback on the device, or their TV set, users can also pull content recorded on CDs and forward to compatible au mobile phones as well. Customers with the ‘Hikari-one TV service’ also have access to various forms of video content such as multi-channel broadcasts. Isoda-san will walk us through the product and service on this perfect example of fixed-mobile convergence in action!

Sponsored by:
Robert Leonard Consulting and Jonckers Translation & Engineering

Date: Monday, 16 March 2009 :: 18:30 – 22:30
Venue: KDDI Designing Studio — GMAP
Admission: ¥1,000 with Advance Registration – OR – ¥2,000 at the door
Complimentary drink ticket for the firstst 200 pre-registered guests!

18:30 – Doors Open
19:00 – Welcome/introduction
19:15 – First presentation
19:45 – Second presentation
20:15 – Q & A
20:30 – Networking
22:00 – Last Call
22:30 – Close

Filed under the Good Plan – Better Plan news category, we have decided to move our 16 Feb. event back 30-days to March 16th. Please do remember to mark the new date on your calendar and note the full announcement, with agenda and registration details, will be coming your way asap.

Meanwhile, in January we called for Ambassador Agents, Chief Enthusiasts and Ministers of Mo-Mobile to step forward and help drive this effort to the next level.. Wow! A solid dozen talented and energetic folks have come together for the cause and we are now in the process of building an exciting ’09 road map from a top secret underground Izakaya location. Stay Tuned!

Finally, congrats to our winner of the LG Prada handset at the Shinnenkai last month – Mr. Shibuya would be right at home with us wandering along Las Ramblas at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona — Hola!

Have a Super Sweet Valentines Day — it’s even on a Saturday 😎

Kotoshi mo Yoroshiku! We hope you all had a great holiday season and are rip-snort’in ready for what promises to be an interesting 2009. In honour of the Year of the Ox, we have decided to hold our Shinnenkai Kanpai event on 19 January at The Pink Cow, birthplace of MoMo Tokyo way back in 2004 (details below). This will be a free, open-to-all ‘come as you are and pay as you go’ event with several special guests expected, some sweet treats and a totally awesome door-prize courtesy of the nice folks at LG. We look forward to seeing everyone – regulars, guests and friends alike – at what should be a fantastic MoMo Tokyo 2009 launch event.

Wait! While we have your attention – There’s News!
Looking back on 2008, we welcomed almost 2,000 people at 11 events and have posted a couple of graphs below based on the attendee profiles. All things considered, it was a lot of work and a lot of fun – and well worthwhile.

Support MoMo Tokyo – Boost your Exposure
However, in typical kaizen fashion, we need to explore how best to continue moving this community platform forward. So, we are calling for energetic contributors, with select skills and some bandwidth, to step up to become Ambassador Agents, Chief Enthusiasts and MoMo Tokyo Ministers of Mobile!

These key supporters will gain increased exposure and mobile community recognition while contributing to the continued improvement of MoMo Tokyo events. If you’re interested, please Contact Us for details.

Mobile Japan Catalogue – Invitation
We managed to get a little time off over New Years to reflect on projects for 2009 and it occurs to us that there really should be an English catalogue of all the mobile players who are based in Japan. Since that would be valuable and pretty straightforward to compile with your help, consider this an open invitation for all to submit [info at mobilemonday.jp] just a simple 1-page company summary (example), ideally as a Word doc, so we can pull together a grand central collection for posting here on the MoMo Tokyo site.

Strap on your sneakers & do a shoulder check for charging the year ahead!

— MoMo Tokyo Team

2008 Attendees by Job Title

2008 Attendees by Industry

Of course we have more stats – such as the 80-20 split on males vs. females (should really try to do something about that!) and essentially a 50-50 split of domestic vs. international attendees. At some point – ASAP – we’ll skin more aggregate demographics of the MoMo Tokyo community to post here.

Sponsored by: Jonckers Translation & Engineering and Robert Leonard Consulting

Date: Monday, 19 January 2009 :: 18:30 – 24:00
Venue: The Pink Cow — GMAP
Admission: Free – Register in Advance for the Door-Prize Draw

18:30 – Doors Open
19:30 – Welcome/introduction
20:30 – Dancing Cows Kanapai
21:00 – Door-Prize Draw
24:00 – Close, but not really!