Congratulations to our Japanese Team

While in Tokyo this past April, I divided my time at Kizuna and meetings at Six Apart KK (KK basically means corporation), our Japanese subsidiary.

Kizuna was a great opportunity for me since I'm usually too pragmatic for my own good and have a hard time talking about concepts when I'd rather just build or try to build. Also, I haven't had much opportunity to publicly talk about the space we're in so I'm not terribly confident when speaking. However, I found that spending the time with people who also approach what we're doing on academic and theoretical levels was quite rewarding.

The other half of my time was spent with Six Apart KK. They did an incredible job negotiating and supporting the recent NTT OCN deal (NTT's service, Blogzine launched on March 30) and we wanted to personally thank them for their hard work. Additionally, we had the chance to meet and thank the key people at NTT OCN who brought Blogzine powered by TypePad deal to fruition. One of the cool things that Blogzine is doing is this page where people from different regions in Japan send TrackBacks. The colors indicate where the most pings are being sent from. Very cool stuff.

We also met with Furukawa-san for lunch and expressed how impressed with what Nifty was doing to promote Cocolog -- especially TrackBackYaro the character that they use to explain TrackBack. They gave us some shirts with TrackBackYaro. Here's Mie modeling her shirt:

One of the things we realized in Japan is that we really should show the faces behind Six Apart KK. If I didn't know the team, I'd picture a room full of Japanese men in suits. They are, of course, not just a cultural stereotype.

Here's a picture of the KK team along some of us from Neoteny and Six Apart.

?From left to right: Jim O'Connell (KK), Daiji Hirata (KK), Jun Makihara (Neoteny), Hiroshi Yamato (KK), Mie (6A), Yukitake Kuriyama (KK), Me, Nob Seki (KK), Mutsumi Suzuki (KK), Barak (6A), Ben (6A), Hatsuhito Ueno (KK)

They've been quite busy lately, launching TypePad Japan and BOXERBLOG for Hitachi.