Tokyo Shift

Tokyo CGM Episode 3: Revenge of the Swiss

Mar 15, 2009 00:11

I was lucky enough to get out to another Choo/Shuttleworth Tokyo CGM event in Harajuku last night. The evening was sponsored by Smart.fm (the slick Web service formerly known as iKnow) which is ambitiously expanding its scope from learning languages online to learning-just-about-anything online. It's great to see the company going strong after a minor hiccup last week. For more information about Smart.fm, check out my interview with CEO Andrew Smith Lewis back in January.

There was no shortage of interesting people at CGM. And complemented by good food and good beer, it had all the essentials for a spectacular event. The tech darlings of the evening were undoubtedly the Swiss guys from Poken who have just launched their neato electronic business card gadgets here in Japan.

Here's my Panda Poken. Cute little feller, isn't he?

Update: I've uploaded a video of the Poken presentation, for anyone who wants to check it out.

The company handed out free Pokens to everyone at the door, thus creating a nice micro testing ground to show us all how the product should work. So for the entire evening everyone in attendance was walking up to complete strangers and touching their pokens against one another as a means of connecting and exchanging contact information electronically. For an excellent account of how the hardware works (it's not based on RFID), head over to Hideki's blog for an indepth dissection with some great pics.

My only concern about Poken (and one I've heard from others as well) is that the service's Web site asks you to input usernames and passwords for your many social networks. It always makes me a little nervous to give up my login information to third-party services like this one, so I'm wondering if it might be wiser to just ask for the user's SNS profile URL instead. There may be some reason I'm missing as to why the company is doing it this way, and if so, someone please let me know.

But all in all, it's a really awesome product that definitely has the potential to go far in Japan. If Poken could vibrate and smoke a cigarette after liaising with other Pokens, I think its future success would be a solid lock.



In addition to the Poken crew, I should also note that Kristoper Tate of BlueBridge was in attendance as well, and he certainly deserves a big congradulations for recently launching AM6. To learn what that's all about, check out his (electrifying) presentation from Tokyo 2.0.

Others in attendance whom I was lucky enough to meet are listed below. I hope I didn't miss anyone.

• Jerome Sadou


• Claytonian of Japan Probe (to whom I lost an arm wrestling match)


• Chris Gaunt of Nihongo Notes


• Joseph Tame of TameGoeWild


• Shane Sakata of Nihon Sun


• Jay Zimmermann of TheOrchard.jp


• Hideki Francis Onda of Focal Point and Tunewear 


• Paul Papadimitriou (his name is as long as he is tall!) from MobileinJapan


• Neil Duckett


• Emily (Applemilk on YouTube)


• Kynapple


• Sam (Tkyosam on YouTube)


• Gohsuke Tamaka of Meta Associates (this guy knows a ton about security)


• Kotaro269

Photo sources: Ami Harikoshi and Hideki Francis Onda

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