Tokyo CGM Night III (6)

Again, a great evening thanks to @dannychoo and @ashuttleworth. This time it took place in Harajuku. And I think the event is getting better! If you don't know what it is, check here : Tokyo CGM Night. For this Episode III, two main sponsors : Smart.fm previously iknow.com and Poken. I will explain later about them.

This time was again a good chance to meet "tweeple friends" for real! It's nice to have this kind of event to meet and get to know each other.

Among the tweeple I could talk with was :
@Neil_Duckett,from Australia, top blogger at neilduckett.com,
@ShaneSakata from US of Nihonsun.com,
@Chris from UK who runs a blog and jpopjapan.com,
@Joseph also from UK, blogger at tamegoeswild and recently started www.japanpodshow.com,
Peter, founder of J-List from US San Diego but already 18 years in Japan!
@Jean from Canada famous blogger at jeansnow.com and writer for many medium,
@Rick also writer at various places like asia.cnet.com and also from Canada
... and others I briefly talked to (can't remember everyone, sorry...).

For me, not being a native English speaker, the "challenge" of the evening was to switch from one English accent to an other! And I have to say that Neil has definitely, the most "colorful" accent, I loved it! (in francophone category : Jean and his Acadian French accent, for the win ;-).

I also met people from Appliya (they produce Iphone applications), here is their Katana app:

Then it was time for some people to present their company and business to the audience.

Smart.fm introduced us their recently re-launched web services.

A platform to learn languages or other stuff (music for example). Looks interesting, I will check it more later as it may help me in my Japanese learning.

Alexandre aka Daimaou, presented his group, HIC, I am sure you know his sites : akihabaranews.com and www.nihoncar.com : the best gadgets and electronic stuff from Asia and luxury cars reviews : lucky guy, almost every week a different fancy car in his garage!

Poken was the gadget of the night with a nice geeky concept : some electronic/USB plugs used as card names.

When 2 poken owner meet-up they "check" hands and so exchange data.

poken

The good thing is you don't have to register before using it, you can do it after. It was really a good idea for them to launch their product in Japan during this event as the people here (including me) are all more or less geeks and already users of many social networks.

As a matter of a fact the founder, S. Doutriaux came to Japan just for this launch! A 2 days trip to Japan! Wow... Can't imagine the jet lag effect...

Finally Kristopher Tate, founder of Zooomr.com (that I use for my photo gallery) and Bluebridge, presented his new project AM6. To understand what it is, just check the following video.

I registered today to the service, it looks useful especially during the morning commuting time to retrieve news about subjects of interest. I will test it more next week. Also, we can set-up our own channel, I have to investigate more about what I can do with that.

Then Danny started the now ritual "battle for the goodies" : this time no paper scissors but the old school arm-wrestling...

The first goodies to win was the Anakin figurine and I ended up to "fight" against Kristopher for it!

The fight was not really fair as in boxing weight category, I think I am 1 or 2 category heavier than him... So I won but it was not that easy, obviously as an entrepreneur he is a winner guy. (Finally, lessons from Sly in Over the Top were useful, ah!)
As a second thought, from a networking point of view (kind of the goal of the evening) maybe it was not a good move to win :)

Other fights took places,

Even ladies!

Miss Harada (on the left) won in a 2 seconds blast fight a Microsoft Office Package!

Then some little more chat and it was time to get back home... where a new fixed gear bicycle was waiting for me :) but that's an other story.

PS : good photos are from Steve Nagata's flickr (check his site : thewesternworld.net), crappy ones by me...

Posted on Mar 14, 2009

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By Rick Martin,

http://www.1rick.com
Mar 15, 2009 07:56:51

Great to meet you at CGM Jerome!

Excellent post!

By Neil_Duckett, Senior Technical Advisor
Tokyo
http://www.neilduckett.com
Mar 16, 2009 00:17:10

Great meeting you the other night Jerome, looking forward to the next meet-up already!

By Shane,

www.nihonsun.com
Mar 16, 2009 00:19:42

It was nice to chat with you, however briefly, at this event. I really enjoyed meeting everyone and will look forward to future events like this.

You really caught the spirit of the event in this post!

By Jérôme, Eating satsuma imo
Kamaya Cho
http://www.jeromesadou.com
Mar 16, 2009 06:16:58

Thanks everyone for the comments, me too I enjoyed meeting you. Danny and Andrew had really a great idea with this concept, it's only good vibes! (I am levitating right now ;-)