Aaaaaand we’re back. As you may have noticed.. it was a (re)Construction zone here for the month of October 2023 with tons of archive material, including many video programs in legacy file formats — all running on backend looong overdue for modern update, Whew!
It’s been ‘fun’ wandering down memory lane — we hope you enjoy this new version, online again as promised in time for Halloween!
While our WWJ activities technically started in the spring of 2001, with the J@pan Inc newsletter, it wasn’t until near that year-end we really got underway. By close of 2022 we marked two full decades focused on the business of mobile in Japan – it was time for a break.
Certainly taking a defrag year to reflect & consider will be a good chance to review options for our next steps — We’ll be back.. 😎
Right about this time ten years ago (Ya, Ten Years!) email was flying, as it does, related to plans for a large executive tour group set to visit Tokyo. Considering the agenda of meetings expected it was obvious there was No Way we would see everyone. So an evening welcome mixer to ‘gather the tribes’ was a logical solution and then out of the blue a note from Finland suggesting we host a so-called MobileMonday event. The rest, so they *say, is history.
On June 16th 2004 DoCoMo held a press conference at the Teikoku Hotel to introduce the world first commercial launch of NFC enabled mobile phones. While the 10th anniversary is coming up next week, we have not seen anything about it (yet), suppose that’s why you love us.. as we’ve always been ‘just slightly’ ahead of the curve.
Yet another exciting visit to Barcelona for the annual ‘must-do’ Mobile World Congress event, with a record 85,000 folks in attendance this year, it was classic chaos as always with more than 1,800 exhibiting companies showcasing across 98,000 square metres of hall space and 3,800+ international media covering the action.
There’s plenty of chatter about the global startup scene along with so-called ‘innovation’ opportunities and many challenges faced by players at all levels in that space. It would be easy to pepper this with a gazillion links to material describing how Japan is risk-adverse and/or has no VC base to build next-gen. companies.. bla-bla-bla. Such simplistic points, seldom well balanced, need another post to counter with a wave of my magic reality wand.
No, the tight focus today is two-fold: we are headed into a “Startup Renaissance” in Japan and, therefore, considering carefully near to mid-term road ahead with that being the case.
