There are 123 million people in Japan and ten percent of them live in one city — Tokyo. It is a magnificent place. Tokyo has many sections like all major cities of the world. My stay for the first two days of the trip was in Shinjuku. Homebase was at the Century Hyatt, nestled among the many skyscrapers and apartments and home to two million people. Setsuro Tamai (President & CEO of IDG Japan, Inc.) and Megumi Okamoto (Director for the World Expo Unit of IDG) were kind enough to meet me at the hotel and host a wonderful dinner. We took off our shoes and enjoyed a casual but traditional Japanese meal on the 52nd floor of an office building overlooking the city. Our discussion focused on the key trends and directions of the IT industry and the upcoming conferences to take place this week.
One of the keynote speakers for the WiFi conference was Dr. Amer Hassan from Microsoft. He and I had breakfast and discussed the future of WiFi. We shared a common vision for how pervasive WiFi will become and agreed on the importance of a rapid evolution of wireless standards to make it happen. I kicked off the conference by welcoming the attendees on behalf of Jupitermedia and IDG Japan, and then offered a short presentation about the future of the Internet — rapidly evolving to be fast, always on, everywhere, natural, intelligent, easy, and trusted. One of the key elements of the Internet’s evolution is WiFi. Dr. Hassan’s talk covered protocols and provisioning in great detail.

I don’t know how many telecommunications industry people were in the audience. Their industry needs to start thinking differently about the Internet. From what I hear and read from a number of the telecom companies, they still think that the Internet is one of the many benefits that you can get via a telecom service. Unfortunately, they have it backwards. Internet telephony (a voice conversation) is one of the many things you can do with the Internet! “Voice” is just another Internet application. The evidence is mounting from the growth in Internet based “PBX’s” and more recently with the introduction of WiFi “phones”. One market research firm, TeleGeography, estimates that Voice over the Internet (VoIP) accounted for 10 percent of total call minutes worldwide last year. Experts expect demand to explode. The handwriting is on the wall.
The WiFi and Search Engine Strategies conferences were run in tandem so, during Dr. Hassan’s presentation, I kicked off the other conference. As part of the Internet evolution comments, I highlighted the the importance of “search”. Most of the information in the world is not yet available via the Net and that which is generally is not tagged so that it’s context can be known. When you search for Shakespeare, you get everything he wrote, everything written about him, information about fishing tackle and trucking companies with the Shakespeare name, and more. The opportunity to do better searching is clearly huge. I introduced the keynote speaker, Mr. Wayne Rosing, VP for Engineering from Google. He gave an excellent presentation and described Google’s strategy to continue to innovate and expand their offerings.
Tim Walsh, vice president for sales of events at Jupitermedia, joined Tamai-san and I for lunch. We discussed the conferences and various possibilities for future collaboration. Then I was met by my good friend of many years, Inatomi-san.
Shigeru Inatomi has been at IBM Japan for more than thirty years and he is a kindred spirit when it comes to the Internet and gadgets. While we made our way across Tokyo to Hakozaki, home of various IBM departments, he showed me a cell phone that folded around his wrist and then opened to be used as a phone. Shigeru works at ibm.com/jp/ja/. This is no surprise because he has been working with web projects for as long as I have known him. In the mid 90’s he helped build sites and marketing programs around an online wedding, motocross races, the Olympic Games, and Konisiki-zeki, the world famous sumo wrestler. (I met Konishiki years ago at his training barn. Hanging from the ceiling of the “Inside ibm.com/jp/ja/” team room, were a dozen fans. Using a technology from MIT, the fans turn in proportion to the number of hits that the ibm.com/jp/ja/ servers are experiencing. ibm.com/jp/ja/ is a very effective web site. It receives tens of millions of pageviews per month and sells millions of dollars worth of IBM products per year.
It was a great pleasure to spend an hour or so talking with a group of IBMers while at Hakozaki. I shared some history of ibm.com with them and also shared my perspective on the future of the Internet — fast, always on, everywhere, intelligent, easy, and trusted. I answered as many of their questions as I could.
It was the end of the business day, but in some respects it was just beginning.