WestHost will then provide standard shared and dedicated hostings (to my understandings), but their strongest part = VPS will be offered by their sister company, VPS.net with cloud technology.

I’m using WordPress Mu and other programs that require root environment. It seems VPS.net is capable of what and more than current WestHost VPS packages offer, but still concerned if things go right.

I’ve got to test installing and running wpmu on VPS.net or if things go wrong, I’ll have to think other hosts like slicehost etc…

For those who have not yet subscribed to my Twitter, Kiva’s founder Matt Flannery is speaking at 3 different locations in Tokyo from end of August to beginnings of September.

Here’s link to my tweet.
http://twitter.com/socialpreneur/status/3532533315

If you are in Japan, interested in learning about Kiva and micro finance/loan, this is a great chance for you. You can follow Kiva updates and Matt’s updates by following the links.

Poken Japan is selling their stocks for 1,500 yen, which normally cost 2,500 yen. Poken is becoming popular among foreign business persons and Japanese bloggers around major locations such as Tokyo and Nagoya.

Before you read these instructions, you should have wpmu and buddypress running properly.

Using bbPress 1.0 Alpha

It seems most users of BuddyPress use this. Step by step instruction is provided at Integrating BuddyPress 1.0, WPMU 2.7.1 and bbPress Alpha 6.

Using bbPress 1.0 RC3

BuddyPress forum and some use this, including me. I don’t know the differences, but I just say it works fine. Nicely written instruction at WMU wiki.

If you don’t know which versions to use, this topic might help.

I’ll be writing more detailed post in Japanese, but since we already have these great instructions in English, I won’t be going into detail here.

Volkswagen logo.

WordPress logo.

Both are cool anyway… I love them.

facebook.com/socialpreneur

This will show my Facebook profile.

Paintica, a new Google Street Views mashup from Japan lets you draw anything on the maps. Users can not only draw picture, but can also create animation on the maps.

I’ve seen many Google Map mashups, but never heard of one for Street Views. But I’d like to see more like this in the future.

One participant asked if Japanese bloggers are interested to monetize their blogs, but most Japanese blogs don’t have specific topics. There are many English written blogs which focus on certain topics such as tourism, business (marketing, seo, blah, blah), but I see them rarely in blogosphere in Japan.

In Japan blogs are mostly used as public personal diaries, where bloggers write about anything happening from their life. If the blogger is famous, their diaries can be monetized, but if not famous then who’d pay?

“The earth was not given to us by our parents. It was lent to us by our children.”

My eyes hurt… watching the TEDx Tokyo live broadcasting from 9am to 6pm, mostly sitting in front of desk at home is quite a hard work. When will we see screens that don’t hurt our eyes like printed papers?

The live went well overall. But I missed the opening speech by Princess Takamado due to the live not working properly. I could hear her speech, but I’ll watch it again once TEDx Tokyo teams uploads recorded videos sometime later.

There were more than 2000 – 2500 users watching it online, twitter hushtag of tedxtokyo reached top 3 on the Twitter’s trend channel. This is great, isn’t it?

The downside was a lot of Japanese weren’t aware of the event, or the online broadcasting. It was better if translation or interpretation was provided to all the speakers for those who don’t understand English (this is originally someone else’s complaint). But this will be covered on the recoded versions, I think.

Thanks to all the volunteers behind.

Until the recorded videos come up, enjoy the scenes on YouTube, Flickr, and … anyone knows more?