Metcalfe & Rosseto, Doing The Digital Dynamic Duo Thing in Tokyo
Louis and Jane might have invented the Wired zeitgeist, but Doors is for the upscale digerati. Digital Boy is for, well, digital boys. And all the editors were there: the charming Ms Sato of CapeX who had a cooler digital camera than mine. My friend Katsura Hattori, editor of Doors.
On my way to Japan, Thanksgiving week, circumstances put me on the same plane out of SFO with Louis and Jane. I stopped into the Wired Japan party a few nights later, held in the fifth floor of a building in Harajuku that is totally devoted to cybercafes, cyberbars, cyberstudios. It's cyber time in Tokyo.Everyone at this place had a cooler digital camera than mine, come to think of it. Joi Ito and some pals have a scheme to get 45 megabit/sec lines run down this street to a bunch of buildings in the same neighborhood, which also happens to be the highest-density youth hangout in town these days. They call their scheme Digital Harajuku. |
They call it Digital Harajuku. |
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I gave the first public demonstration of HotWired in Tokyo last October, at the same conference that brought Yoko Ueno.Now it's Ms. Sato. |
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Carl Malamud originally laid the "Internet Samurai" title on Jun Murai. Everytime someone introduced him to one of the few people at the Wired Japan party who didn't already know him, they were compelled to say: "He's known as the Internet Samurai." The moniker certainly fits. He was fighting to get Japan on the Net back before everybody got so hot and bothered about the infobahn. And he isn't afraid of expressing his opinions forcefully. Here he is, on the phone while at one party, calling people at another party to meet us at the next party. |
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