Our first TechCrunch/CrunchGear meetup in Tokyo (TechCrunch Japan is one of Japan’s main blogs) yesterday night was a blast. Peter Ha was in town and over 100 people attended the event on very short notice, including representatives from Yahoo Japan, telecommunications giants KDDI and NTT, Opera, MySpace Japan, mobile social network GREE and many more. Japan’s super blogger Danny Choo also joined, spending the whole evening in Stormtrooper gear.
There were a lot of companies with iPhone apps in the room: iPhone manga, iPhone Othello, iPhone Meow Cam, even an iPhone newspaper. Here is a selection of some of the web services and iPhone apps from smaller start-ups that were pitched to me yesterday (in no particular order). Next time we really need to schedule more than two hours for these events. → Read More
Hello my pretties! It’s the moment you’ve been waiting for: the big photo upload from the meetup on Thursday. We had a great time and I think it was a huge success. Thanks to everyone who came out, and to our sponsors of course for making it possible. Some answers to questions I know are coming: The photos themselves are of course much bigger but in the interest of getting them up sooner (my bandwidth is limited in this cafe) I downsized them to 1024-ish size. Yes, they are supposed to look like that. The blur/halo effect is a long exposure in addition to the flash. Sometimes it looks cool, sometimes not. I didn’t do it all the time. Sorry if you’re not pictured, I tried to get as many people as possible but I had to throw away a ton of shots due to the usual bad photo circumstances: focus, exposure, framing, etc. The shots are, for whatever reason, in reverse chronological order. I have no idea why. In case you were wondering why there are drunk people eating Korean food first thing. Lastly, if you really like a photo, drop me an email (devin at crunchgear dot com) and I can send you a bigger version for your personal collection. Thanks again for coming out. → Read More
The firstTechStars startup has gotten funded over this weekend. Eventvue has closed a round estimated to be about a quarter million dollars from Brad Feld, David Cohen, Dave McClure, Wendy Lea, amongst others. See our earlier coverage of them here. Eventvue brings social networking to the context of conferences, helping conference goers re-connect or follow up with business they couldn’t follow up with in the limited span of a conference. Networking at a conference is a fairly inefficient process, left up to chance encounters and stacks of business cards. Anything that can help optimize the limited conference time that thousand dollar ticket bought you is an easy sell. Confabb is the most direct competitor in the space, but has focused on being a comprehensive directory of the who, what, and where of industry conferences rather than on the palm greasing that goes on at the events. More social competitors include Meetup.com and Eventwax. Eventvue is set for a public launch later this year. → Read More
San Francisco, CA
