Last Friday evening I had the wonderful opportunity to hear 2.5 hours of Mari Matsunaga (松永真理氏) at a lecture hosted by Sony University. Matsunaga-san is one of the three muskateers who helped build Docomo and the iMode empire (BW article), and has been named many things, not the least as Fortune’s “Most Powerful Woman [...]
Last night was my (now ex) group’s 解散会 (kai san kai), or “disbanding party”. Yes, you read that correctly. In Japan, we all celebrate when a group gets disbanded. In America, it’s not uncommon to throw a farewell party but that’s usually for one or two people leaving a group. However, [...]
Joel Spolsky has an interesting writeup of his company’s new office. Some interesting architectural design choices with otherwise underappreciated decisions for the programmer in mind. During my internships at U.S. companies, I always had a private desk, and it definitely made for productive output. Now I’m starting to think the Japanese communal [...]
Probably should have made it a trackback, but for those interested in a bit of Japanese culture I followed up on Jim’s blog with a comment to his Conbini Nation post.
Every year, all Sony employees are required to undergo a health check administered by the company’s health center. In fact, since all overtime hours are logged, if “the system” catches an employee with over 35 hours of overtime a month for more than 2 or 3 consecutive months (actual numbers may vary), then a [...]
Fast Company held their RealTime Conference a few months ago, and now they’ve got transcripts from some of the speaker sessions up. I say Sony should work with David Rockwell after having read his speech. It’s a bit incohesive, but I like his key points.
Why Great Customer Experiences Start with Great Design
Some of you have already heard the news, while others may have noticed an abnormally high frequency of entries recently. Technically as of last Friday evening, and officially as of this past Monday morning, my group’s research has been terminated and the group is being disbanded. Luckily I saw this coming almost six [...]
Gen posted a link with a nice long list of bloggers over at Microsoft. Thanks to Safari’s tabbing feature, I managed to scan every blog rather efficiently[1]. It was apparent that many were working on web-services and web-related protocols (particularly XML). One that particularly caught my eye was Brian Keller’s blog, with [...]
I haven’t been very good about updating recently thanks to a rather hectic schedule and general crappiness, but I promise to post some goodies soon. In the mean time, I somehow managed to lose a substantial amount of my hair. Actually, although my work environment was very cool about my
Okay, so after almost a month of sales training, I thought I had figured out the weekly customer shopping cycle, but today’s random spurt has thrown me for a loop. It could be the recent “SARS is gone” news, but something tells me the government’s efforts to spur tourism is actually having an effect. [...]
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