Photo Quiz Answers

Thank you to everyone who entered the Prize Draw. The winner has been notified and will receive the last Poken I have from the batch of 12 I bought.

I am planning on buying another batch, so expect to hear more about Poken in the future.

Now the answers :



Answer 1: The building is the Museum of Maritime Science (Funenokagakukan).
Situated on the island of Odaiba in Tokyo Bay, this excellent museum holds a large collection of all things nautical. The NY Times reckons you could do the museum in two hours. I've been twice and still not seen half of it.



Answer 2: This is the Rainbow Bridge.
Linking the island of Odaiba with the mainland, the Rainbow Bridge was named after its multi coloured illumination . More from the Time Out Guide to Odaiba (The link only seems to work in IE)



Answer 3: The building is the National Diet Building.
Located at 1-chome, Nagatachō, Chiyoda, Tokyo.
Sessions of the House of Representatives take place in the left wing and sessions of the House of Councillors in the right wing. It was build in the 1930s entirely from indigenous materials. Tours around some areas of the building are available from Monday to Friday. Well worth a visit.



Answer 4: Sakura Daimon leading to the Imperial Palace.



Answer 5: The dog is named Hachiko and his statue stands outside Shibuya station. Hachiko and his master Prof. Uyeno, were inseparable friends. Each day "Hachi" would accompany his master to the train station when he left for work. Upon returning, the professor would find the dog patiently waiting. One fateful day in 1925 the professor was taken ill at the university and sadly died before he could return home. Hachiko waited patiently at the station for his return that day and the next. He continued his daily vigil for over ten years, becoming well known to the commuters passing through the station, until he passed away on the same spot he last saw his friend alive. [Abridged version of the full story from here.]

I hope you enjoyed the quiz. I may run another one. Any input is welcomed.

Tokyo Photo Quiz, Two Days Left

Just two days left to enter the Tokyo Photo Quiz. I have extended the deadline for entries by one day. You now have until 9pm Monday 11 May to send the answers to me.

There have been ten correct entries so far. Last chance to get your thinking hat on, answer the five questions about the photos of Tokyo and email your answers to enter the prize draw to win a Poken.

Tokyo Photo Quiz, Win a Poken

Want to win a Poken? Simply identify these five locations from around Tokyo and send an email to the address at the end of the post.

Question 1: Name the building:



Question 2: Name the bridge:


Question 3: Name the building:



Question 4: Name the important location this gate leads to:


Question 5 : Name the railway station this famous dog stands outside:


Just send your five answers by email to :

poken [at] allenmannaro [dot] com

The winner will be drawn at random from the correctly answered entries at 9pm Tokyo time, Monday 11th May 2009. [New Date].

Only one entry person. The prize is one Poken, I will post the prize to the winner so don't worry if you don't live in Japan. More details on why I think Poken are great here.

Win A Poken, Prize Draw

I have mentioned Poken a couple of times before on the blog. I bought one at my first Beer and Blog meeting and they were discussed at the Tokyo 2.0 event. The day after that event I decided I would get more involved with Poken and I ordered a pack of twelve. My package arrived this weekend :


Of those twelve, I managed to sell five last night at the Beer and Blog event in Ningycho, and three more have been reserved. However, I am going to save one of these gadgets as a prize in a little competition I will launch tomorrow on the blog.

I will post five photographs of well known Tokyo landmarks. All you have to do is send an email, to the address I will provide, with the names of the places depicted to be entered into the draw.

On Sunday 10th May 2009 I will chose a winner, at random, from the list of emails with the correct answers. The competition is open to you where ever you live. I will post the Poken to the winner, but if the winner is local we might be able to arrange a hand over in person and exchange a "high four".

For those not aware of what Poken is: It's a gadget, small enough to put on your key chain, that you can use to exchange contact details when you are out at parties, events, meetings etc. No need for a business card, simply touch your poken to the poken of your new friend and your details are stored. When you get home, plug the poken into your computer (PC, MAC or linux) and click on the Start_Poken link to upload the contact details to the DoYouPoken.com website.



The very first time you use Poken you have to register on their site and create your E-business card. This can include your photo, a background, email addresses, phone numbers, postal addresses and links to your details on all your favourite social networking sites : Facebook, Linked In, flickr, MySpace, Youtube, Twitter, Ning etc. This is what mine looks like:



You can control what information you release to which contacts, by setting up separate identities. For business acquaintances you might not include your Facebook profile, but only Linked In and use your work email address. For other friends you can include your home email address and different links.

For those that are skeptical, yes, I agree it's a long shot. However they are becoming popular in Europe, the company that launched the product is based in Switzerland. They are making money, which is unusual for a small technology start up company. Poken has only just been launched in Japan and these gadgets are not for sale in very many locations. The list at the moment shows only 3 places. The logic behind this approach is they are aiming for a viral marketing campaign: Getting their customers to recruit more customers. It is obviously working because that's why I am writing this blog post and running this prize draw!

Stephane Doutriaux, the founder of the company, gave an excellent presentation at a Google Tech Talk in Jan 2009. He goes into some of the technical details of how it works, what their plans are and some ideas on future directions which will include an API. This will allow 3rd party sites to access your Poken contact information.

"Why not use your mobile phone?" is a question often asked, well have you tried? It's not quick and it's not easy. Poken is designed to be fun, quick, and easy to use: no checking compatibility, no problems making sure you have the right software. That's all taken care of.

What about privacy ? The Poken website does not store any of the passwords to your social networking sites. You have to provide the passwords to authenticate your access just once, to prove that it is your profile they are connecting to for the first time. Nothing is stored on the physical Poken itself, except some unique, encrypted identifiers. If you lose it, no one else can use it to connect to your details on the website (unless you give them your password to the website.) More FAQs on their website here.

I hope I've persuaded you that you need a Poken? Come back tomorrow to enter the competition to win one. If you can't wait, Amazon is selling them online for 2,480 Yen each.

Update : here's the link to the Quiz

Prize Draw Small print:
Only one entry per person please. No alternative to the prize of one poken will be offered. Your privacy is important to me, I will not use your email address for any other purpose than contacting the winner. My decision is final, no correspondence on the result will be entered into. I reserve the right to cancel the prize draw without notice. If I have more than one Poken you may get a choice of which design, however that is not guaranteed.

Poken at Tokyo 2.0

Earlier this week I attented a Tokyo 2.0 evening at Super Deluxe in Roppongi. In contrast to the previous week's Beer and Blog night, this was a much larger event. Nine different companies each had a 10 minute time slot to present their business. The theme was The Sustainable Web.

The presentations varied in style: some were smooth and professional, others could have done with a little more polish to attract the interest of the audience of more than 100 people. Most of the talks were in English with a second person translating, or some people talked in both English and Japanese.

Flavio Souza presented his community website called GreenITers.com. It is a forum for discussion on all aspects of how IT can help the Green cause. He has a video of his presentation from the event on the site, only available if you've signed up to the site.

Kaoru Iwasaki demonstrated her project TakuTomo which, roughly translated, means 'Taxi Friends'. The site enables you to share a taxi ride home in the early morning after public transport stops running. The idea is that you register on her site along with the locations you often stay late at and your home destination. When your evening has ended and it's time to go home, you send a quick message from your mobile phone and it will match your desired route with others in the vacinity keen to share a ride to save money. I think it might work, but it will need a large user base to give you a good chance of getting a rideshare.

Hiroshi Ikeda and Hirofumi Manganzi gave a presenation on their company OpenTrace. Their idea was one of the finalists at TechCrunch50. The aim is to build an open database of the materials used in the production of various kinds of products, from cars and computers to food and clothing. The goal is to be able to calculate the impact on the planet of any product you might buy. It's a massive task, I wish them good luck.

Peter Van Der Weeën gave a short presentation on Poken. These are the little 'electronic business cards' that I mentioned last week. They have launched the Japanese website www.poken.jp now, and are planning to make them available for sale in shops in Japan very soon. They proved very popular at the event and I have now exchanged details electronically with 21 people. One feature available on the DoYouPoken.com website is the timeline of your contacts. So each time you meet it is still good to touch poken, to keep track of when you last met the person.

These mini gadgets, that plug into the USB port, normally cost 2,000 yen each, but if you go on over to JapanSoc Blog, Nick Ramsey is running a simple competion you can enter to have the chance of winning one. Check out his video where he explains how to use one too. The competion ends on April 26th, so don't waste time: get twittering, blogging or YouTubing to enter the draw.

And, if you dont win one there, I have just ordered a pack of 12 from their website and I will be running a competion on this blog very soon for another chance to win one.

If my description has not completely put you off Tokyo 2.0 events, the next meeting is titled Women in the Web Industry and will be held on May 13, 2009 from 6:30pm to 10pm – at Super Deluxe. I hope to Poken you all there.