Below is an archived version of the Tokyo StartupDigest Events List – a weekly curated listing of the best tech startup events in Tokyo. If you would like to get next week’s digest on Monday, sign up here.

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From November 14 to November 20, there will be a Global Entrepreneurship Week in Japan as it happens every year during this season. Please look forward to a bunch of startup-related events that will be happening all across the country.

Masaru

Highlighted Events

Contents:
Thursday, November 3rd thru Friday, November 4th – THE NEW CONTEXT CONFENRENCE 2011 Fall

Friday, November 4th – DebutDay 002, Where Brandnew Apps Debut

Tuesday, November 8th – Open Network Lab Startup School @ Keio Univ. SFC (Fujisawa)

Tuesday, November 8th – Venture Finance Lessons for CEOs and CFOs

Thursday, November 10th – SXSW Kick Off Party in Tokyo

Saturday, November 12th – Pre-event:Tech-Tokyo, an app development contest for students

Tuesday, November15th – Initiador Tokyo Vol. 5

Saturday, November 19th – U-22 Startup Conference

Tuesday, November 29th – TechCrunch Tokyo 2011

THE NEW CONTEXT CONFERENCE 2011 Fall

When: Thursday, November 3rd 9:00-21:00 Friday, November 4th 9:30-17:50

Where: Daikanyama, Digital Garage Bldg. 9th Flr.

This edition is subtitled as Lean Startup Camp Tokyo, and focuses on the lean startup movement. A few speakers from the SF Bay Area as well as the rest of the world will be invited to a panel discussion to talk about what to do to adopt lean startups methods in practical ways.

DebutDay 002 – Where Brandnew Apps Debut

When: Friday, November 4th

Where: Voyage Group (previously known as EC Navi)

There will be a series of pitches and Q&A by 10 startups, followed by a networking party.

Open Network Lab Startup School @ SFC on theme with the UX Approach of Silicon Valley Style

When: Tuesday, November 8th 18:30-20:30

Where: Fujisawa, Keio Univ. SFC, Classroom Tau #11

The user experience is one of the most important factors that determines user impression and future revenue growth of a web service. This edition focuses on production development and design, with Janice Fraser as a special guest lecturer, a Silicon Valley-based interaction design expert.

Venture Finance Lessons for CEOs and CFOs Vol. 3

When: Tuesday, November 8th, 19:00-22:00

Where: Auditing firm Tohmatsu Corporation, Yurakucho Office

The third event expects to invite Mr. Masashi Kobayashi from Infinity Ventures LLP, who has launched the Japanese subsidiary of Groupon and invested in Rekoo Japan, running a popular social app Sunshine Ranch.

SXSW Kick off Party in Tokyo

When: Thursday, November 10th

Where: WOMBLUNGE (2-16, Maruyama-cho, Shibuya-ku, Tokyo)

The organizer is planning to organize a group of Japanese techpreneurs who aim to attend and present at the world’s largest multimedia festial, South by South West (SXSW). Attending fee for the party is expected to be around 3,500 yen.

Pre-event: Tech-Tokyo, an app development contest for students

When: Saturday, November 12th

Where: Recruit, Inc., Academy Hall

A non-student attendee must have an invitation from the secretariat for attending.

Initiador Tokyo Vol. 5

When: Tuesday, November 15

Where: Moboff Coworking Space (Yotsuya Kojimachi)

This time, we are proud to announce another exceptional speaker: Serkan Toto. You have probably heard about him: TechCrunch USA correspondent and web, mobile and gaming industry consultant, he is one of the foreigners who better understands the internet and technology environment in Asia. For sure we will learn a lot, since he will show us how to pitch to tech bloggers and journalist, key point for the promotion of our brand-new startup.

U-22 Startup Conference

When: Saturday, November 19

Where: TBA

This event is organized especially for those who are younger than 22 years old or so and want to pitch your services or business ideas. They expect to have pitches by about six attending presenters and a panel discussion on theme with “how student startups make succeed?”

TechCrunch Tokyo 2011

When: Tuesday, November 29, 10:00-20:00

Where: La Foret Museum Roppongi

TechCrunch Japan will make it. It invites key persons from Japan and the rest of the world, and talks about where tech business are going toward. There will be a demo contest as well, where tech startups show you their future products, followed by a networking opportunity. The organizer wishes techpreneurs, engineer and investors to join it.

Every day we meet someone who is either visiting or just moved to Silicon Valley. The first question I usually get asked is, “Where is Silicon Valley?”

If you are new to the area or just visiting, here are the best resources on Silicon Valley:

• An introduction to Silicon Valley – by Ryan Junee
• What is Silicon Valley – by Jonathan Nelson
• A visitors guide to Silicon Valley – by Steve Blank
• Where to see Silicon Valley – by Paul Graham
• What places to see in Silicon Valley – best answer by Robert Scoble
• (For international citizens) The lessons of a frozen baguette in Silicon Valley - by Ramine Darabiha

Through these guides and posts you will learn:

1. Silicon Valley is not a specific place.
   “Silicon Valley” is much more a state of mind than any one physical location. You can be in San Francisco, San Jose, Palo Alto, or Berkeley and still be in “Silicon Valley“.
   .
2. Silicon Valley runs on real interactions between doers.
   Silicon Valley is about the people who are changing the world through technology. Much of what goes on here is dependent on what you are creating or who you know.
   .
3. The currency of Silicon Valley is karma.
   The most successful people here don’t push their business cards to every person they meet; they figure out the best way to help them and enjoy what comes back around.
   .
4. The best way to get involved is to go to meetups.
   This is the main reason why we started StartupDigest. The only way you can truly experience Silicon Valley is to meet the people who create Silicon Valley in person.

Let me know if you have any additions to these resources and points in the comments.

Below is an archived version of the StartupDigest Silicon Valley Events List – a weekly curated listing of the best tech startup events in the SF Bay Area. If you would like to get next weeks digest on Monday sign up here.

What’s Going On in the Silicon Valley Startup Community

FoundersHookup with Priya Haji (Free)
When: Monday, April 18 @ 5:30pn

A co-founder meetup with guest speaker Priya Haji. Priva has raised money from 5 separate VC firms and her past company World of Good was acquired by eBay.

Mobile Enterprise App Demo Night (Free)
When: Monday, April 11 @ 6pm
Where: California St & Drumm, SF

It’s pretty cool that Mobile Monday is doing a demo night for just mobile enterprise apps.

Show Me the Money – Gaming ($10)
When: Tuesday, April 12 @ 6pm
Where: Rocket Space, SF

A panel on gaming investments with Charles Hudson (SoftTech Ventures), Tim Chang (Norwest Ventures), Jeremy Liew (Lightspeed Ventures) and Patrick Chung (SK Telecom Ventures).

SF New Tech – Year 5 Celebration ($25)
When: Wednesday, April 13 @ 5:30pm
Where: Mighty, SF

SF New Tech is officially turning 5 years old. Come see 7 tech demos and enjoy the taco truck.

Hacks/Hackers Demo Night (Free)
When: Wednesday, April 13 @ 7pm
Where: Stanford, Palo Alto

The winners of the Knight Foundation prize will be demo’ing their media and journalism centric apps and services they’ve been developing all year.

Ed-Tech Startup Mixer (Free)
When: Saturday, April 16 @ 5pm
Where: Stanford Design School, Palo Alto

A mixer for entrepreneurs in the edtech space.

Inpulse Hackathon – Hack Your Wrist (Free)
When: Sunday, April 17
Where: HackerDojo, Mountain View

inPulse just came out with a watch that has bluetooth and is fully hackable. To celebrate they are having a hackaton on the “ARM” platform.

500 Apps! (Free)
When: Monday, April 18 @ 7pm
Where: 500startups, Mountain View

500 App Demo’s in one night, is it possible? Just kidding, but there will be App Demo’s from 7:30-9pm

Fireside Chat with Dennis Crowley ($20)
When: Tuesday, April 19 @ 6:30pm
Where: Founders Den, SF

Dennis founded foursquare which is now doing 2.6 million check-in’s per day.

Lean Back (Free)
When: Wednesday, April 20 @ 6:30pn
Where: Dogpatch Labs, SF

A demonight for startups in the video, internet TV, and connect TV space.

Top Upcoming Silicon Valley Startup Events

April 21 - When/Why to Build Marketing Team?
April 21 - Mission Startup Drinkup
April 22-23 - Hackers & Founders & Factual Open Data Hackathon
April 28 - Startup Exits
May 3 - The Founder Conference (30% off)
May 23 - Startup Lessons Learned 2011
May 26 - Startup Grind hosts Naval Ravikant

Like us below to share this weeks events with your friends

Below is Chris McCann’s interview with Edith Yeung, a well-known event producer here in the SF Bay Area, about how she got started as an events producer and then specifically how to use conference influencers to help market your event.

Edith Yeung is the founder and executive producer of BizTechDay, an entrepreneur conference where inspiring entrepreneurs share practical business and technology strategies. BizTecDay 2010 will take place in San Francisco, Seattle and New York (you can save 30% on tickets on our Conference Deals page) this fall. Edith has successfully produced over 40 entrepreneurial events and brought over 5500 people together in the past 3 years.

What’s your story, how did you get into the event production business?
In 2008, 10 years after working for many different enterprise software companies (Siebel, Oracle, and AT&T) I left my last corporate job with Autodesk and decided that I really need to find what I am truly passionate about and what really want in life.

Immediately after I left, I realized that I need a new set of friends – entrepreneurial friends. I went to a couple of networking groups which I thought really sucked, so I decided to start my own entrepreneurial meetup group.

Tell me about the first meetup you organized.
3 years ago, I started my first entrepreneur meetup with 5 people at the Hotel Kabuki, San Francisco. I paid $300 bucks and I knew 3 out of the 5 people who attended… I thought it was kind of silly I had to pay to see my friends, but I really enjoyed the process and the experience of bringing people together.

Slowly but surely, I learned and became a little bit smarter about organizing events. My meetup group grew from 5 to 10, to 20, to 50, to 100, to 300 and later on became BizTechDay – the conference!

BizTechDay’s purpose is to bring together amazing innovative and scalable technology ideas and help grow a new generation of entrepreneurs. It is about bridging the gap between technology and business people.

How long did it take for you to transition from your meetup group to your first conference, and how big was your group at the time?
It took about 12 months, my group was about 1200 people at the time.

What is the most unusual thing that has happened during an event you produced?
The first year of BizTechDay – Tim Ferriss (our 2008 morning keynote speaker) decided to come back in the evening and ended up spending almost 3 hours with us just chatting and drinking wine. It was a blast!

What was the most fun event you have organized?
I really like the Co-Founder Matching event I did recently… it’s basically speed-dating for co-founders. Over a hundred potential business partners got the chance to meet in one room. I will match them (email intro) only if both sides want to meet afterwards.

Thanks for sharing your story. Now let’s talk more about marketing your conference and getting your conference members to help you out.

Who exactly are you bringing together at your conference?
Entrepreneurs, small business owners, and investors,

If you had the resources to ask for only one type of conference member to help you with marketing, who would it be?
First, start by reading this post I wrote on identifying influencers: http://www.biztechday.com/how-to-identify-influencers-for-your-business/

My guess is that you are asking about the mavens and the connectors. These are individuals who are in the know of your industry. They are on top of things. They like to gather all the latest industry news. The mavens are the ‘Hubs’ of the human social network.

How do you ask these members for help marketing your event?
Just ask the mavens!  Fundamentally, all mavens want to help. They want to be on top of things. But think about how you can help them. As much as mavens love to help people, they especially appreciate those who think from their point of view. Offer them something of value. Help them to help you. It could be:

• Member discounts
• Group discounts
• Bring a friend for free
• VIP passes

For your marketing efforts using “influencers and conference members” what marketing channel do you use most? Email, Facebook, Twitter?
We used them all!  But one thing I have to say:

• Emails serve a particular purpose. When people open your email, they expect you give them specific information. It’s OK to sell in an email.
• Twitter and Facebook, on the other hand, are for social purposes. Your audience doesn’t expect you to sell or market your event directly (or you may lose all of your friends). This is the channel where you generate buzz and conversations around your event. This is where you put your creative hats on and get people to talk about you and your event.

Can you give me an example of another conference organizer that you think does this well?
Not exactly using Twitter or Facebook, but South by Southwest successfully used Foursquare really well to let everyone else in the world know where all the tech influencers are, which certainly drives buzz and gets the tech world’s attention.

You can follow up with Edith on Twitter @edithyeung.

Here are the top 5 upcoming startup events in the Bay area. The rankings are based on data we have collected from the Silicon Valley StartupDigest.

Enjoy and share your favorite events below!

	SF Beta 4.0.3 – Thursday, July 13 in San Francisco SF Beta is San Francisco’s largest and longest-running startup mixer. Hundreds of founders, developers, investors, and geeks are joining us. Will you? Our loosely structured event attracts over 350 people from across Silicon Valley. We provide tasty gourmet appetizers and a full cash bar, along with live demos from startups throughout the night. More Info: http://sfbeta4p03.eventbrite.com/
	Startup Job Demo – Saturday, July 17 at Citizen Space 15 hiring companies will present Ignite style for 5 minutes each on what they are working on & the culture of their company. If you like what they are about, you can interview with them in real-time during a 10 minute interview slot directly after their talk. More Info: http://www.meetup.com/sanfrancisco-entrepreneur/calendar/13951390/
	Startup Waffles! Meetup @ LightSpeed Venture Partners – Thursday, July 22 Are you a founder of or an investor in a cool startup? Do you like free all you can eat yummy waffles?  If you answered yes to both of those questions, then come hang out with the Startup Digest co-founders, hackers, and founders for some breakfast between 8am-10am at Light Speed Venture Partners courtyard. More Info: http://www.meetup.com/thestartupwaffles/calendar/13614581/
	Hackers and Founders, WePay, MixPanel Tech Talk: The State of the Database – Tuesday, July 13 at Hacker Dojo These are interesting times to be in databases. We have many industry-changing shifts happening right now: the rise of SSDs, distributed databases, and frameworks to make them. Mozilla’s Principal Data Architect Tim Ellis will give you a simple overview of the state of Databases in 2010. More Info: http://www.meetup.com/Hackers-and-Founders/calendar/13987593/
	Social Media Marketing 2010 – Tomorrow in San Francisco We normally don’t feature “social media” events because most of these types of events are filled with spammy “self-proclaimed social media gurus.” But this event actually has a good roster of speakers from the media, marketing, journalists, bloggers, and PR world. More Info: http://socialmediamarketing.co.uk/sanfrancisco/

To find the best startup events in your own city every week, sign up for your local StartupDigest issue here.

Today I read this post on Hacker News which was a follow-up to Jason Baptiste’s first post about email newsletters. In fact, it was Jason’s newsletter that inspired us to focus on email newsletters in the first place. It’s been 6 months since we started StartupDigest and I wanted to give a real first-hand account into what it’s been like to start a company around email newsletters and why email newsletters are valuable.

First, here’s a little history of StartupDigest is and why it’s valuable. If you are already a subscriber feel free to skip the question below.

What is StartupDigest?
StartupDigest is a weekly email newsletter of the best technology and entrepreneurship events in your local area. We serve 43 cities, 4 Universities, and one specialty group of SF Bay Area hackers.

Each digest is written by a local Curator, an entrepreneur and handpicks the best events to feature each week. We don’t feature every single event in each area; instead we filter through all of the available events and highlight only the best events for you. If you haven’t received a StartupDigest issue before you can check out one here. As you can see there, we like keeping things really simple and easy to read.

We chose to distribute our content via email because everyone has an email address, no matter where they are or what language they speak. As we’ve grown, we are learning first-hand that email newsletters are even more valuable than we originally thought. We will be reiterating many of John’s points here, but here is our own account of why email newsletters are so valuable:

Email Newsletters Are Opt-in and Permission Based
To get curated events content in any of the cities we cover, all you need to do is enter your email address on our homepage. All of our subscribers have opted-in to the content we provide and enjoy our email newsletter on a consistent basis.

When a person willingly (and indefinitely) opens their inbox to your content, it’s a big commitment for both sides. There’s a bond between content producer and subscriber from day one that’s much more personal than that between content producer and website visitor.

We measure the strength of this bond by the number of people & sites who have linked to our signup form (currently 8,000+ links to our homepage), the rate at which our subscribers grow (currently 1,200+ every week), the number of digests to which an individual typically subscribes (currently 4) and how new subscribers hear about us (word of mouth from existing subscribers).

Email Newsletters Empower You to Engage a Specific Target Audience
Our newsletters serve the startup ecosystem, made up of founders, hackers, VC’s, service providers, aspiring entrepreneurs, and University students. In the past, this audience has been very difficult to collect and reach consistently., making StartupDigest very interesting to any person or businesses looking for a new, direct way to engage members of the startup world. How we handle that interest is entirely up to us (we are very picky!) but having that interest makes what we do a viable business. The same can be said for any other company (Thrillist, DailyCandy, Tasting Table, HARO are great examples) that serves a target audience with trusted content delivered through a simple email newsletter.

We updated our demographics two weeks ago here, which confirmed to us the exact people we are reaching.

Email Newsletters Empower You to Serve Key Locations and Expand at Little (or No) Cost
Since everyone has an email address anywhere in the world, you can choose the locations that are most important to you and easily distribute your content to them. Localization is a great way to provide additional value to potential subscribers and provide additional social proof for the value of your business.

To date we cover all of these cities and Universities:

US: Silicon Valley, NYC, LA, Boston, Seattle, Pittsburgh, DC, New Orleans, Baltimore, Chicago, Dallas, Columbus, Indianapolis, Salt Lake City, Phoenix, Des Moines, Philadelphia, Houston,
International: London, Paris, Vancouver, Toronto, Montreal, Tokyo, Mumbai, Cape Town, Seoul, New Zealand, Tel Aviv, Copenhagen, Singapore, Berlin, Sydney, Shanghai, Madrid, Hong Kong, Malaysia, Philippines, Lithuania, Beijing, Nürnberg, Germany, Mexico City, Middle East,
Specially: Stanford University, New York University, Columbia University, SF Bay Area Hackers

People Take Real-World Action on Emails They Receive from People They Trust
The whole point of our newsletter is to be a utility tool to make it easier for members of the startup community to meet each other in person.

If more entrepreneurs and investors get in the same room together more often, the entire startup ecosystem will benefit by creating and improving more great companies, faster. By solving the problem of high-quality technology and entrepreneurship event discovery, we are making a real difference in the amount of valuable feedback startups receive, the people they can choose from to work with, and the sheer number of startup ideas that are created and developed into real products and companies around the world.

We’re delivering all of that through email because people have shown that they are willing to take real-world action based on the emails they receive from sources they trust.

One of the ways we measure success is through our click-through rates (which average ~30%) and conversion rates on ticket sales (which average ~7%). We want to make those numbers as large as possible to make sure that the cross-pollination of people and ideas in every city around the world is as high as possible.

We believe that email is never going to go away. You can build a great business on top of email (like Thrillist, DailyCandy, etc.) and we are only one example. If you are working on an email newsletter company too, leave a comment or email me directly chris at thestartupdigest.com or @mccannatron.