Event report | New Industry Leaders Summit in Sapporo (Japan)

We went in May to attend the most exclusive and high-level Internet and mobile related event called the “New Industry Leaders Summit” or ‘NILS‘ in Sapporo (Hokkaido, Japan). This event organized by the Japanese VC firm Globis Capital Partners attracts 300 C-level participants for a 2-days retreat far away from everyone’s office (except if you live in Sapporo). Interestingly, this invitation-only event with no web presence and no promotion is sold out regularly, which probably says something about its quality.

The fact is, it is indeed very local (95% participants are Japanese) and our presence there is somewhat unusual as we do not speak nor moderate (yet ;-) ). As an ‘innovation arbitrage‘ firm, our value is to identify innovations in a market that could be used in others. And as a result of this, we get to know and meet many great entrepreneurs whose profile is often ‘local’ or ‘regional’. Due to this, we offered to support NILS by bringing in high-profile foreign participants, and things worked out pretty well:

• Tarik Krim, CEO of Netvibes (famous in the West, but relatively unknown in Asia)
• Yong-Joon Hyoung, founder of Korea’s online phenomenon Cyworld (we even published a report about this service)
• Along with Yong-Joon also came a couple of very interesting Korean ventures such as Pandora.tv (Korea’s largest online video service which started 6 months before YouTube), and NPlugs (launching soon an advanced mobile SNS)

Other interesting foreign speakers such as Plaxo and Adobe also joined.

Some takeaway ideas:

• The mobile SNS+free mobile Flash games company DeNA is still the top hot mobile content company in Japan thanks to phenomenal growth and healthy business model (free SNS, micro-personalization, ad-supported). They are now expanding their user base with older users and used TV ads to promote their service! One quote from the CEO: “we did not calculate ad revenues potential before starting, we just thought that with millions of users – as highlighted by the interest in mobile games – something could happen“. Well, it did.

• Mobile ads are shifting from being only about mobile services & consumer loans (~30%) to a broader range: soft drinks and other traditional companies are now embracing the medium, connecting more and more mobile and offline business. One issue is that marketing managers in traditional companies have not seen mobile ads so they don’t buy them. An opportunity is seen in cross-media (mobile has advantage over PCs to link with TV, for instant search thanks to spread of mobile search engines).

• A great panel of C-levels (CEOs of Opto, Allabout, Septini, DeNA and WorksApplications) defining “what is the role of the CEO” showed a number of interesting things: many IT ventures CEOs are first-timers and defining the essence of a top exec is quite a challenge. The CEO’s role might be (1) defining the culture of the company (2) setting the strategy (3) nurturing new talent. The discussion was great and beautifully prepared and moderated by Etsuko Okajima from Globis Management Bank.

• The Launchpad attracted a lot of attention and I would think 2 of the companies there have very good potential. Maybe a global one if they can beef up their management team. One of them is Nota, a collaborative writing tool that integrates in other web services. Another one is Jiglet, offering mobile widgets and Java-based publishing environment. Very neat but still a bit geeky. The last interesting ne was Realcom, offering a sort of company SNS.

• Discussion about user interfaces: more and more functions, simplicity to use necessity, smarter interface. Automatic customization would be a way to go.

Eventually, the event was worthwhile for the information and the networking (food and venues were great too). Now, this still is a Japan-centered event so the entry barrier for regular foreign companies is pretty high unless they have a Japan strategy or an interest in learning especially about advanced mobile stuff. Anyhow, we’ll keep helping NILS for getting in foreign speakers and will likely be there again in November!