May 7th, 2008

Distributed Tweets on the brain

chicks

Now that Twitter has hit Japan in Japanese, and as I wait for the first official word about how that is going for the good people at Twitter Japan, I have been putting my mind to the future of Micro-blogging and more importantly, how important is Twitter in that picture.
There have been a lot of [...]

April 25th, 2008

Twitter Tweets in Japanese

Twitter in Japanese

I posted a story on Wednesday about the new Japanese version of Twitter over at The Next Web.
Of course you can always follow me on Twitter with @mikesheetal

April 23rd, 2008

Dutch-Japan GameJam winner decided

waterpower character

I spent Tuesday evening at the Dutch Embassy to sit on the final jury for the Dutch-Japan GameJam. I was in good company with representatives from Cell, Taito and the Dutch Embassy in Japan joining me on the jury.
This was the second jury stage of the GameJam, with the first being back in March, when [...]

April 23rd, 2008

Pimping The Puppets

gorillas

In Japan, advertising for music involves grabbing the biggest truck that will fit down the main streets in Shibuya and covering it with a huge backlit billboards or line it with oversized flatscreen TV screens. The only way we could think to combat that was to get two guys in gorilla suits to ride a tandem bicycle waving signs to promote The Last Shadow Puppets through the middle of one of the busiest shopping areas in Tokyo.

April 21st, 2008

The three stages of relevance and why the social web is broken

iron_man_wondercon_poster

I have been wanting to do this story for a while based on my experiences of working with social media and trying to make sense of the growth and subsequent abandonment of many social networks.
It seems it is every month that we have another star social network, social web concept, or interaction model. Right now [...]

April 7th, 2008

Pecha Kucha Night Tokyo hits #50!

mikesheetal-talking

Back on Wednesday 26th March it was the big 50th event for Pecha Kucha Night Tokyo and I was very happy to be invited by Mark Dytham to make one of the presentations. I gave a bit of a rundown on the Salaryman Sato campaign we put together last year. It was great to get [...]

April 7th, 2008

Sneak a peak at USN’s bookmarks

I have been a little bit off the blogging for the last couple of weeks with a busy schedule. Never fear though, we have lots of new things happening at UltraSuperNew Inc.
Freshly added to our website is the new Bookmarks page.
The page shows our latest links, images and videos pulled off the web. This is [...]

March 30th, 2008

URL Referencing in Japan

I have a new article up on TheNextWeb.org.
I write about one of the methods for URL referencing in Japan. We have several interesting ways to refer toURLs here in Japan. I have written about QRCodes before, there is also a large number of advertisements in Japan that simply show the word you should search for.
In [...]

March 21st, 2008

Kevin Rose is copying me!

Mike vs Kevin

I just read that Kevin Rose is growing a mustache for Amsterdam… surely Kevin has some more original ideas as I managed to do that already several weeks ago as my own special tribute to Holland when I visited Amsterdam and Utrecht to sit on the jury of the Dutch-Japan GameJam.

See here proof and execution [...]

March 19th, 2008

New articles up on Japan Times and The Next Web

Japan Times just published my latest article for their technology section, Techno Times. This time I am writing about the Japan GameJam, for which I was invited to go over to The Netherlands a week and a half ago. I was over there with my business partner, Marc Wesseling, to give a lecture about mobile [...]