Lately I'm spending more time meeting industry people who are based in Tokyo - nothing beats meeting people in person.
Over the last four days, I had lunch or dinner with the CEO of Lycos Japan, CTO of NHN Japan (the company behind the famous Naver and Hangame), Senior manager at Nokia Design, and bright young minds at NCSoft (Korea's top game company well known for Lineage and other games) and Yonsei University.
Yeah, they are all Koreans - I should improve my Japanese to talk more with the locals. Currently my Japanese is just enough to order Big Mac setto at Makudonarudo.
Obviously I can't share all the details of the conversation (confidential and all) but here are some things I learned:
- More than 20 million Nintendo DS portable gaming devices have been sold in Japan. (40M worldwide). This is remarkable: Japan has 130M people and about 30% of them are seniors. Nearly all Japanese young people seem to have a Nintendo DS. Well, these days it looks like everyone at Silicon Valley is going nuts about Facebook, which has 38M users and is positioning itself to be a "platform". Why can't Nintendo DS be a platform for social interactions when it has as many users, who are just as enthusiastic about their platform? (I'll talk about this a bit more in other post)
- Nokia is still rather a hardware-focused company but the Finnish giant is realizing the importance of the service. Beware Apple, Nokia might play from your playbook and beat you on your turf - namely the killer combination of service + hardware.
- NHN Japan will roll out the Japanese version of its famous Naver search service soon, hoping it will be the second killer app. The first killer app, of course, is Hangame online gaming service, which is the #1 online game portal of Japan.
If you are dropping by Tokyo, don't hesitate to contact me!
Over the last four days, I had lunch or dinner with the CEO of Lycos Japan, CTO of NHN Japan (the company behind the famous Naver and Hangame), Senior manager at Nokia Design, and bright young minds at NCSoft (Korea's top game company well known for Lineage and other games) and Yonsei University.
Yeah, they are all Koreans - I should improve my Japanese to talk more with the locals. Currently my Japanese is just enough to order Big Mac setto at Makudonarudo.
Obviously I can't share all the details of the conversation (confidential and all) but here are some things I learned:
- More than 20 million Nintendo DS portable gaming devices have been sold in Japan. (40M worldwide). This is remarkable: Japan has 130M people and about 30% of them are seniors. Nearly all Japanese young people seem to have a Nintendo DS. Well, these days it looks like everyone at Silicon Valley is going nuts about Facebook, which has 38M users and is positioning itself to be a "platform". Why can't Nintendo DS be a platform for social interactions when it has as many users, who are just as enthusiastic about their platform? (I'll talk about this a bit more in other post)
- Nokia is still rather a hardware-focused company but the Finnish giant is realizing the importance of the service. Beware Apple, Nokia might play from your playbook and beat you on your turf - namely the killer combination of service + hardware.
- NHN Japan will roll out the Japanese version of its famous Naver search service soon, hoping it will be the second killer app. The first killer app, of course, is Hangame online gaming service, which is the #1 online game portal of Japan.
If you are dropping by Tokyo, don't hesitate to contact me!
