Through a vendor to Sony Mobile I got in contact with Yagi-san who I put in contact with Eurostep as Yagi-san’s business is to help IT companies establish in Japan. Yagi-san is also one of the hosts for an event called Networking88, which was established in 1988 – double eight also means double luck in Japan.

Yagi-san invited me to this year’s spring Networking88 and it was a very interesting event. I met so many kind people, mainly Japanese. The event was scheduled 6 pm to 8:30 pm, but I looked at my watch once… And it was already 9 pm and the event was closing down. I had have no time to even eat. Just talking with all the nice people I met.

One was an ex-engineer at Sony and part of the small team that worked on the initial CD from Sony. He also went to US to study at MIT and did research for the US defense in areas of information theory and communication. He told me that the theoretical limit for a photon to carry data is 3 bits, but practically they only managed 1.5 bit. The research he did was about communicating between earth and space using light.

Another one I met was one of the engineers working on the first computer for NEC, or something he called open hardware platform. He only spoke Japanese so I think the idea with the open hardware platform was similar to Open Source.

Once the event was over I stepped out and went for my bike, but just as I stepped out of the building a guy from the NW88 that I did not have time to talk with approached me and wanted to share business cards. We talked for a while and then I got on my bike and rode home from Yurakucho to Naka-Meguro.