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HackerNews meetups offer much-needed diversity for Japan’s tech ecosystem

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Last week I had a chance to swing by the HackerNews Tokyo event in Roppongi. As most readers know, HackerNews is a social news site for tech enthusiasts and entrepreneurs. There is a strong community of contributors and commenters, and many community meetups take place all over the world, including here in Japan. There are a number of tech events that take place in Japan, and because HackerNews is an English language site, participants in this one are mostly expats. But speaking to them at a recent Tokyo meetup, I found the place filled with smart interesting folks, many working on their own startup or app – contributing to the local community in ways that often go overlooked. Many entrepreneurs in attendance were given a few quick moments to share what they were working on, and I’m sure that resulted in quality feedback from those in attendance afterwards. Tokyo HackerNews organizer Jason Winder explained that these events represent a great opportunity for founders, coders, investors, CEOs, marketers and everyone interested in business and technology to get together and talk shop.” With those advantages in mind, it would be great to see an event like this grow [1]. Beyond the capital…

HackerNews Tokyo event in Roppongi last week
HackerNews Tokyo event in Roppongi last week

Last week I had a chance to swing by the HackerNews Tokyo event in Roppongi. As most readers know, HackerNews is a social news site for tech enthusiasts and entrepreneurs. There is a strong community of contributors and commenters, and many community meetups take place all over the world, including here in Japan.

There are a number of tech events that take place in Japan, and because HackerNews is an English language site, participants in this one are mostly expats. But speaking to them at a recent Tokyo meetup, I found the place filled with smart interesting folks, many working on their own startup or app – contributing to the local community in ways that often go overlooked.

Many entrepreneurs in attendance were given a few quick moments to share what they were working on, and I’m sure that resulted in quality feedback from those in attendance afterwards.

Tokyo HackerNews organizer Jason Winder explained that these events represent a great opportunity for founders, coders, investors, CEOs, marketers and everyone interested in business and technology to get together and talk shop.” With those advantages in mind, it would be great to see an event like this grow [1].

Beyond the capital

hackernews_kansai

Meanwhile, there are other HackerNews events taking place beyond the Tokyo as well, with HackerNews Kansai getting a foothold in the past year or so. I spoke to Sacha Greif, a very well-known French designer based in Osaka [2], who has been involved with organizing HackerNews events in the Kansai region, along with Raphael Guyot and Paco Alcantara. He describes the events thusly:

We’ve had quite a few interesting presentations from HNKansai members and visitors (including one by a YCombinator entrepreneur) on topics ranging from startups and Bitcoins, to quadrocopters and electromagnetic brain stimulation. The meetup also helped a few people find new jobs or freelancing gigs. So altogether I think it has been a very positive initiative. Now our next goal is to reach more of the local Japanese startup and tech community. The meetup is still very foreigner-centric, and we’d like to change that to promote more exchanges between the two communities.

There are some talks from HN Kansai events over on their YouTube channel including one below from Sacha on the importance of side projects (see below).

Groups like these are great bridge events. As we have written here before (citing Rakuten’s Hiroshi Mikitani, no less), since Japan is lacking engineers, making use of skilled foreigners may be a good way to pick up the slack. They make for a more diverse tech ecosystem, people of different backgrounds and specialities can learn from one another.

If you’d like to attend one of the HackerNews events, there is one coming up this Friday in Osaka, and another in Tokyo on on August 15th.


  1. Jason is the founder of Japan-based invoicing startup MakeLeaps, a company we have featured on here previously.  ↩

  2. Creator of The Toolbox, Telescope, Patternify, and co-author of Discover Meteor.  ↩

Tokyo-based invoicing solution MakeLeaps is now used by 10,000 business

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Tokyo-based invoicing system MakeLeaps has announced (PDF) today that the company has reached its previously stated goal of 10,000 business users. The service was initially launched back in 2009, and last year it acquired competing invoicing service Noroshi, a significant step for the company. At the time, the CEO of MakeLeaps’ parent company Webnet IT corporation, Jason Winder, hoped that the acquisition would bring them to 10,000 businesses by August 2013. Now they have reached that benchmark with time to spare. Companies in Japan have not been as quick to jump on the cloud computing band wagon as in the US market. But they’re coming around, says Winder, largely thanks to cloud success stories like Salesforce which is used by many prominent Japanese companies. He adds: Our biggest challenge is really just letting people know that these solutions now exist, and they’re low cost, and easily available. Our biggest competitor is not a competing software package, it’s still very much Microsoft Excel, since that’s what most Japanese companies are using to create/send their documents. Back in April MakeLeaps also added Evernote integration (PDF) so that users can sync their quotes and invoices into an Evernote notebook. About 20% of Evernote’s…

make-leaps

Tokyo-based invoicing system MakeLeaps has announced (PDF) today that the company has reached its previously stated goal of 10,000 business users.

The service was initially launched back in 2009, and last year it acquired competing invoicing service Noroshi, a significant step for the company. At the time, the CEO of MakeLeaps’ parent company Webnet IT corporation, Jason Winder, hoped that the acquisition would bring them to 10,000 businesses by August 2013. Now they have reached that benchmark with time to spare.

Companies in Japan have not been as quick to jump on the cloud computing band wagon as in the US market. But they’re coming around, says Winder, largely thanks to cloud success stories like Salesforce which is used by many prominent Japanese companies. He adds:

Our biggest challenge is really just letting people know that these solutions now exist, and they’re low cost, and easily available. Our biggest competitor is not a competing software package, it’s still very much Microsoft Excel, since that’s what most Japanese companies are using to create/send their documents.

Back in April MakeLeaps also added Evernote integration (PDF) so that users can sync their quotes and invoices into an Evernote notebook. About 20% of Evernote’s users come from Japan, so this is a pretty wise addition.

MakeLeaps has been growing an average of 18% each month this year (see chart below), and is now focused on reaching 25,000 companies by July of 2014.

chart_makeleaps