I went to two web industry/tech events last month (December 2008).
The first was organized by Ryo Shimizu, CEO and President of Ubiquitous Entertainment, a Tokyo-based web and technology company. Ryo was kind enough to also invite Tetsuya Mizuguchi, one of my absolute heroes.
Tetsuya is a legendary video game creator who used to work for Sega and now runs Q Entertainment. He is also making music videos and lots of other stuff (his English Wikipedia entry is here). I LOVE his stuff (he is the man behind Sega Rally, Lumines and Rez amongst others). This month, I received an email from him when he went to Paris: Very cool!
Ryo’s event was a total geek fest. See the pictures below for an example (look at the guy with the LCD glasses – totally crazy). Ryo himself introduced Zeptopad, a cool sketch pad for the iPhone.
The second event I attended was VENTURE BEAT’s year-end party. As always, the invitation-only event, backed by CNET Japan, was attended by a vast number of high-profile CEOs, VCs, tech journalists etc.
99% of people are Japanese but this month some guests from the Valley were there. Dave McClure (who has a Japanese wife) and Sean Ellis.
Dave doesn’t need an introduction I believe (he is a famous VC, entrepreneur, blogger etc.). Sean is Marketing Advisor at Xobni and currently a self-employed web marketing consultant (he also blogs). Again, famous people but very modest ;).
Thanks again to Hisashi Katsuya from IBM’s Venture Capital Group for the invitation.
