Features

As the result of his visit last week to Japan to speak at the 2006 ProWise Power Forum in Tokyo, Coach Wei - Chairman and CTO of Nexaweb - discovered that in Japan they have been adopting "Web 2.0" technologies for some incredibly complex and mission critical systems with great success: financial trading, current exchange, project management, insurance, and power/electricity management, etc.

Two of his fellow speakers at the conference Mr.Tatsukawa and Sakai, both from Hitachi Systems, showed some really impressive case studies and demonstrations in their session. So impressive, in fact, that Wei decided on the spot that people in US need to see what they have done.

   
Some Screen Shots of Enterprise Web 2.0 Applications in Japan

 
"I invited them to attend the upcoming AJAXWorld Conference in Santa Clara," says Wei, "and I will try to ask them to demonstrate some of their work during one of my sessions."

The reasons that Wei so strongly believes people in the US should see what they have done are:

• A lot of these systems are significant projects that requires teams of engineers and cost tens of millions of dollars. The success of such projects requires not only solid and robust Web 2.0 technologies, but also significant experience and capability to manage such big projects;
  
• An important principal for Web 2.0 is "Don't maltreat users". In the US, Wei explains, we tend to pioritize users less highly, but there is no country understands "Don't maltreat users" better than Japan.

"We all know and love the consumer electronics and cars from Japan," Wei continues. "For enterprise web 2.0 applications, Japan seems to be truly outstanding as well."

"We have seen a lot of web 2.0 demonstrations from various US companies, a lot of which emphasize sexiness rather than what is really important to users. - in contrast, if you see the demonstrations from Japan, you will see how they took care of every aspect of user-centricity: look and feel, screen layout, style, visual cues, navigation, efficiency, performance, etc. to the degree that you almost feel the Japan culture embodied within these applications."

"If you are going to be at AJAXWorld, I highly recommend you come and see the demonstrations," he adds.