This summer, I am going to work for/with the following firms.

• Startup (High Tech) @ Bay Area/Evanston, 1 month
• Venture Capital @ Bay Area/Boston/Tokyo, 1 month
• Strategy Consulting @ Tokyo, 2 weeks

Each of these firms is the great player in the respective industries, and I greatly appreciate that these firms agreed to include me as a part of team. It is not common in the US that a MBA student have as many as three internships (while it is not unusual among Japanese students) in a summer break, but I really wanted to enhance my thinking process, skill set, and mindset from the different angles, by experiencing the different industries, working-styles and cultures. The internship just started at the startup firm today and I am really excited!

As a deep music-lover, I spent my time rebuilding my computer environment for music today.

• Purchased “Cliffs of Dover”, a guitar instrumental tune by Eric Johnson, at iTunes for $0.99. This is probably a long-tail kind of song picked up by not so many people, but it is a great one.
• Played Miles Davis at an online radio station I ’created’ at Pandora.com. This is what I couldn’t try in Japan because of the area restriction for the sake of content copyrights. 
• Visited and played with Dotomi.com. This is a cool music recognition technology.
• Renewed my account at Playlog.jp (an online music society in Japan), and installed its  iTunes plug-in, which keeps track of song list I play on PC and shares the list in the community.
• Created song list (i.e., a playlist) of jazz guitar tunes to share at the community of Mixi.jp, the largest SNS in Japan. Installed “Mixistation” software, which, again, keeps track of songs I play on the PC.
• Played with Last.fm, a large online music society that also distributes its own music player software.
• Installed two applications (Pandora and iLike) on Facebook. It seems that iLike is more broadly used than Pandora in the Facebook community.
• Backed up my 25,000 iPod-songs onto the PC. The PC hard drive that contained the songs had been dead. So I ran CopyTrans (a shareware) to restore all the songs in my old iPod back to my PC, after trying three other freewares, all of which failed. I found CopyTrans a easy-to-use and reliable s/w! (e.g. The other freewares collapsed the Japanese song names imported from the iPod.)

I have been familiar with most of these online music services or software for long time, but recently I could not allocate my time to enjoy music deeply and to catch up the latest tech scene of what is going on in this area. So it has been a good chance for me to revive my hands-on spirit and refresh my mind in this kind. All of these services are very cool and most of the functions are much more easy to use and reliable than before. At the same time, using these is still somewhat time-consuming and inanimate to me though.

In particular, this April I had a chance to join the speaker event of the founder of Pandora, Tim Westergren, the event hosted by the Entrepreneurship Club at Kellogg. He said Pandora is (and will be) focusing on the internet radio and its competitor is Clear Channel, the largest radio network in the US. (I will talk about the club some time later.)

Quote from http://www.chicagoevents.com/event.cfm?eid=123 

The Fountain Square Art Festival boasts two-and-a-half decades of success as one of the most important art festivals in the Midwest. In 2005, Fountain Square Art Festival was ranked by the Sunshine Group in the top 50 of the best art festivals nationwide.

The festival is located on six city blocks in downtown Evanston amid newly built luxury condominiums, offices, restaurants such as Wolfgang Puck’s, a bevy of coffee cafes, stores and hotels. A large sculpture garden located in the middle of the festival serves as its focal point. This urban setting creates the perfect ambience for this event, which embodies the word sophistication. More than 250 fine artists show and sell their art to an audience of sophisticated, discerning, upscale, art aficionados and collectors. The event draws approximately 50,000 people who come from the upscale North Shore suburbs as well as Chicago.

This festival has been held at 2 minutes walk from where I live. I enjoyed walking around the area with my wife and just had a cup of lemonade on the street. There was also a cool blues performance.

So, it’s summer… I can spend some of my energies to try things that I wanted to but couldn’t when I was busy. I also have time to write things here in more detail than I used to. Well, all I wanted to do today is to use social bookmark…(The Internet-savvy people, that’s right. I’m way behind!) I am not interested in sharing bookmarks with others but I want to share my own bookmark between my own (or maybe public) PC and cell phone. Unfortunately, none of the following sites has worked as I desired.

• del.icio.us: It cannot correctly display Japanese text in bookmarks imported from IE.
• Hatena (Social Bookmark service well-known in Japan): It does not even have import functionality! This is amazing to me since I thought this kind of function is supposed to be developed in the very first stage.
• Yahoo.com: Same problem with del.icio.us. It also produces a simple error message like: “There is a problem processing your bookmark. Please try again later.”…

Probably there is something wrong with the character encoding in the bookmark file I am trying to import to the services. The encoding system which is used in the export file does not match the one used in the services. The bookmark file, exported from my Internet Explorer, contains lots of Japanese characters. I am using standard Japanese input/output methods built in Windows XP system of my laptop.

Guys, please fix the problem if you are involved in any of these sites! This is something you can do quickly to differentiate your service.

MMM New Product Innovation Fair is an exhibition event where our MMM (i.e., MBA + MEM program) students display and present their design projects done by their teams during “The Design of Services and Products” class. This spring quarter, each team has been going through an iterative design process including observation, brainstorming, prototyping and so on, and finally had the chance to show the design concept to people now. Although at the beginning of the project there was a little pain until our team came up with a solid design concept, overall it was a fun event and we had a great team collaboration.

This friday we had Japan Night party at the lounge in McManus (Kellogg’s dormitory). It is an event totally run by students and we, Kellogg Japanese student group (mainly 1st year students), provided foods like Sushi, Udon, and Yakitori, unlimited Sake, Japanese games (such as Yoyo-fishing) and performances like Kagamiwari-openings, Enbu (a Japanese martial-arts-style performance), Skit and Dance and so on. Thanks to the great marketing effort, around 350 tickets were quickly sold out! I played Taiko (i.e., Japanese drum) for Enbu, acted in the skit (”Post-MBAs visit Yakuza office”) as a lover of the Yakuza boss, and danced (music: ”DJ OZMA”, a Japanese artist)…It was a blast!! It has been a great opportunity to showcase Japanese cultures and people to the non-Japanese classmates, as well as to deepen the internal teamwork and friendship among Japanese students through such intense preparation efforts.

Special K! is an annual theater show run by students in Kellogg. It is composed of live musical/skit and short movies whose story basically describe student’s life at Kellogg with humor, irony and passion. The quality of the performances is so high that the show is one of the most popular events here. Most of the students, even some professors and administrators at Kellogg go to see the show. The total Special K! company involves around 100 students including directors, cast, band, creative team, business team, marketing team, technical team and movie team. So, it is a quite big project and the people’s motivation and commitment are extraordinarily strong. It is a great opportunity for students not only to have fun but to exercise their leadership, team work and to bond tightly with each other. This year, there have been five shows titled “Avenue K!” and played during May 1st – 3rd.
 
Me? I have joined the band as a guitarist. Our band includes trombone, trumpet, violin, flute, guitar, bass and drums. We played 15-20 popular songs arranged by professional musicians. The sound we made was very, very energetic and we really rocked at the show! This has been my first “big band” experience and also one of the best music performances I was involved in my life. It is also our privilege that people come to us and say “hey, your performance was great!”.

There is going to be a revival show some time in this fall (November?). If you are thinking of visiting Kellogg to discover something about the school, I really recommend that you see the show!

I belong to ”Special K!” Band and there has been a rehearsal today. It is basically a comedic musical performed by students. I will tell you more story some time later. (The photo is my guitar ES-335.)

“How was your break?” or “Did you do GIM?” is the common way to start the conversation with the friends here. (GIM stands for Global Initiatives in Management). We are back to the school and the classes have begun. Everybody is enthusiastically talking about his/her unique experiences during the break.

I am taking the following classes in this quarter:

• The Design of Services and Products (Norman)
• Successful Entrepreneurship (Shefsky)
• Venture Capital and Private Equity Investing (Collins)
• Media and Integrated Marketing (Calder)
• Finance II (Eisfeldt)

“The Design of Services and Products” is a design side of MMM course taught by Don Norman. Taking five classes might be too challenging for me, so I might have to drop one of the classes. We’ll see.