This year the third ‘Tech in Asia Tokyo’ conference was held at the Belle Salle Shibuya Garden building (September 6-7).
There were 5 stages including the main stage all including domestic and foreign speakers. On the first day visitors were moving fast, checking timetables, and aiming to visit as many stages covering topics that they were interested in. On the stages there were experts ranging from Asian Investments to Market Situations, interviews of young entrepreneur start-ups by Tomoko Namba of DeNA, a FinTech pitch tournament, and a video marketing strategy for SNS and Web Applications.
Furthermore, the start-up entrepreneurs were able to have ‘speed dating’ type 5 minute pitches, in 6 booths, with over 60 domestic and foreign venture capital Investors. Always busy, these booths became an important place for pitching ideas and appealing to investors.
The start-up booth areas had around 80 companies’ exhibits, which added up to about 150 companies over the 2 days. What really caught the eye of the visitors was the high number of SE Asian companies planning to advance into the Japanese market, as well as the amount of foreign companies who were already present in Japan. And of course there were a lot of domestic start-up companies, especially those excelling in technological and service fields. This conference is really becoming a great place to appeal to not only domestic Japanese companies but for Asian and global companies . We will introduce some of the start-up companies we spoke to in another article.
Also they had launched a lunch session for the first time this year, here you could have a lunch while listening to lectures by the sponsers Sumitomo Real Estate and SMBC Nikko Securities. There was also a media space where visitors could interview the prominent speakers.
On the second day guests were treated to reverting speeches from Silicon Valley Venture Capitalist Jeff Jordan of Andreesen Horowitz and Chika Yoshida of Bilingirl YouTube fame.
