It’s been over three months since I wrote anything here on TechCrunch, but over the next 10 days or so you’ll be hearing more from me as I travel with a group of 32 techies through East Asia as part of GeeksOnAPlane, a field trip of sorts organized by Dave McClure intended to open our Western eyes to how the technology industry works in Japan and China.
The web as experienced by the biggest continent on the planet unfortunately gets short shrift on the blogs that regularly hit Techmeme. I personally can profess to have only cursory knowledge of the trends and companies that come out of Asia, and that knowledge consists mainly of echoes that get passed along by word of mouth. Sarah Lacy has done all of us a favor by recently reporting from China, but we can always use more to enlighten us about what’s going on across the Pacific.
In a couple of minutes, I’ll be boarding a plane bound for Tokyo with the group you see above. And over the next few days we’ll be attending conference-type events, such as Startonomics Tokyo, where we’ll hear about a variety of topics such as the Japanese investment climate and startup success stories. My main goal is to share with you all what this all looks like to someone who’s familiar with the web but from an almost purely American point of view.
If you find these insights interesting, I encourage you to follow GeeksOnAPlane on Twitter. I’ll also be posting snippets of my experience to my own account. If you want to comment on any of our travels, use the hashtag #goap on Twitter.