At the beginning of 2009, during a now-famous strategy meeting, Twitter’s executives asked themselves, “Are we building a new Internet?” At the crux of that question was the realization that Twitter “introduced a new form of communication to the world.” Public micro-messages are now everywhere—on Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, Google, Bing, Yahoo, AIM. They are infiltrating every part of the Web, particularly as the backbone of realtime search.

Yes, status updates (which are a form of micro-message) existed before Twitter, but it is the growing public nature of these messages which makes them exciting. For one thing, they need to be public in order to be visible to search engines. But when Twitter and other companies talk about building a new Internet, they don’t mean that 140-character messages are going to replace web pages. Rather it is that these realtime streams are becoming the center of people’s attention on the Web, and sending them off in all different sorts of directions.

These streams are the new Internet not so much because of the micro-content which they contain, but because they are a more efficient means of communication. Remember, the Internet at its core is a communications system. The battle going on now between Twitter, Facebook, Google, and others is to control this new realtime layer of communications on the Internet. Each one wants to be driving the micro-message bus.

I am currently in Miyazaki/Japan, attending the Infinity Ventures Summit (IVS), one of Asia’s most prestigious web industry events. Organizing VC company Infinity Venture Partners reserved some hours of the program to give a total of twelve 12 Japanese start-ups the chance to present their services onstage to a panel of judges and an international crowd of over 300 people.

A speech recognition and transcribing service called Moji Moji TV was selected as “Best Startup” of the IVS Fall 2009 Launch Pad (that ended just now). Here are short profiles of all the services that demo’d at the event. (Please note some of the companies have yet to launch homepages in English, but some do offer globalized services, too.)

The TechCrunch Japan TokyoCamp 2009, a demo event for web startups that took place this Friday, was a total blast. No less than 350 people came to the demo pit and meetup, which were co-organized by DESIGN IT!, LLC (a Sociomedia group company that runs TechCrunch Japan) and Nikkei Digital Core (a community under the umbrella of the Nikkei, Japan’s biggest business publication).

This time, TokyoCamp gave a total of 29 startups from three Asian countries (Japan, Singapore and Korea) the chance to present their services to Japan’s leading journalists, fellow entrepreneurs, top-level VCs and TechCrunch readers. Here are thumbnail sketches (of varying depth) of all companies that were present at the event. (Here is my report on the first TokyoCamp that took place in August this year.)

Quick descriptions of all demo companies after the jump.

The first TechCrunch Japan TokyoCamp that was held in August was a blast, but my guess is the next one will be even bigger and better:

I’m delighted to announce the TechCrunch Japan TokyoCamp 2009, which will be held on Friday, November 6. TokyoCamp 2009 is co-organized by by DESIGN IT!, LLC. (a Sociomedia group company that runs TechCrunch Japan) and Nikkei Digital Core (a community under the umbrella of the Nikkei, Japan’s biggest business publication).

There’s going to be a demo pit (no less than 21 of Japan’s finest startups will demo their wares) and a meetup/networking party afterward. Registration is required for both events.

Asus, Acer, HTC or BenQ: Taiwan is well-known as a significant player in the global electronics industry, but it’s safe to say the Taiwanese web landscape is still a black box for many of us. Taiwan ranks 10th in Asia in terms of Internet population, with around 15 million people currently online. Add to this an online ad market that grew by 14.9% to $208 million in 2009, and you have a fairly attractive Internet market overall.

I’m in Taiwan now and as announced last week, there will be a TechCrunch/CrunchGear meetup tomorrow (Monday, October 5) in Taipei at 7.30pm (open door at 7pm). We are holding the meetup with our partner and co-organizer Chili Consulting, a Taipei-based innovation strategy firm.

Every guest should have received the invitation by now, and please remember the venue changed (the schedule remains the same though). Thank you very much for the incredible interest in the meetup, which is sponsored by Taipei- and San Jose-based hardware maker IPEVO.

I’ll be in Taiwan next week and am delighted to announce that TechCrunch / CrunchGear are holding a meetup with our partner and co-organizer Chili Consulting, a local innovation strategy firm. The TechCrunch / Chili Consulting Party will take place in Taipei, on October 5 (Monday) and is invitation-only.

Details after the jump.

Nearly 130 million people use the web in Japan and Korea combined, with Japan itself boasting the world’s third biggest Internet population (94 million users). But getting exposure on an international scale is a big problem for globally positioned web startups in these (and many other Asian) markets.

TechCrunch50 has always been very welcoming towards companies from countries other than the US. Last year, for example, a total of five companies from Japan made a showing at the event (three startups presented onstage, two were in the DemoPit).

This year, Korea sent four promising companies to TechCrunch50 (finalist Sealtale, and DemoPit participants UniQube, touchring and FillThat), while Japan had two startups exhibiting in the DemoPit (LIFEmee and Spysee).

One of the richest areas of experimentation in search right now is how to rank real-time results. For the most part, that means finding relevance in Twitter and bringing up the most important Tweets for any given keyword (see OneRiot, Collecta,Scoopler). Today, real-time search engine CrowdEye is introducing its own real-time ranking algorithm called CrowdRank. It’s supposed to be like Google’s PageRank, but for the crowd.

Right now,real-time search is Twitter search because that is the richest source of real-time data. And Twitter search is essentially a form of people search. Twitter’s own search engine simply brings back a reverse-chronological list of the most recent Tweets that match the keyword you enter.

CrowdEye does that as well because often in real-time search you just want to see what is happening at this second. But now CrowdEye will let you sort by relevance as well, rearranging results by the most influential people on Twitter.

Following last week’s startup contest WISH 2009, Japan just got another event that gave twelve selected tech companies the chance to demo their web services, apps and tools (almost all of which are thankfully available in English). This Friday, around 130 guests attended Tokyo Camp [JP], a demo event organized by TechCrunch Japan.

The occasion: The blog, which is one of Japan’s biggest and mainly translates articles from TechCrunch into Japanese, is under new management (by DESIGN IT!, LLC., a Sociomedia (Japan’s anwer to Adaptive Path) group company).

Here are my thumbnail sketches of all of the twelve demos I saw at Tokyo Camp.

I’vRead by Akky Akimoto
Officially launched at Tokyo Camp, I’vRead keeps a record of all books you’ve read via your Twitter account and lets you find users with a similar taste in books. All you need to do is to type the title of the book (or its ISBN or Amazon URL), add “@ivread” to the tweet and (as an option) write what you thought of it. Each of these tweets will then be automatically added to your personal user page on the I’vRead site (you don’t need to register at the site itself, being a Twitter user is enough). Look here for an example.

dango
dango wants to empower online game creators worldwide to focus more on the development of content and less on the things they have to deal with after a game is finished, especially the distribution problem. The company of the same name offers a comprehensive, integrated framework called “dango-PLAY”. The system delivers online games to a number of social networks (i.e. Facebook or Japan’s Mixi) and dango’s homepage itself, using a single program and source code (dango is open source [JP]).

dango-Play aims at creating an integrated ecosystem for online games by matching users, linking to other games based on the framework, providing SMS services, managing user ID data, freeing developers from tracking user behavior etc. etc.

One of the first games that’s been released based on the dango system is Facebook app “meromero park”, an ultra-cute mix between a social network, a virtual world and a pet-rearing game (the web version has already gained massive popularity in Japan and Taiwan). The Facebook app is available in English and French.

Did you know the first .com domain name that was ever registered was Symbolics.com, on the 15th of March 1985 by the now defunct Massachusetts-based computer manufacturer Symbolics?

While the first that was created in January of that same year was Nordu.net (used to serve as the identifier of the first root server, nic.nordu.net), symbolics.com was the first domain name to actually be registered through the appropriate process a few months later. This was of course long before there was a WWW, but you already had the Internet. In fact, the first TCP/IP-based wide-area network had already been operational for two years when nordu.net was created, right around the time the United States’ National Science Foundation (NSF) commissioned the construction of the legendary NSFNET, a university 56 kilobit/second network backbone. Only six companies thought it’d be a good idea to reserve the domain name on the root servers in 1985 (the others were bbn.com, think.com, mcc.com, dec.com and northrop.com). But Symbolics was first to make the move.

Facebook just added the ability to invite friends to an event based on who was invited to past events that you’ve been to. The new feature basically lets you filter your friends by recent events when creating an invitee list.

So when you create an event on Facebook, you will now see a “Filter Friends” tab in the upper-left corner. The drop-down menu will display the five most recent events you either created or attended in the past month. If you click on one of these events, you can see the invitee list for this event. Of course, only your friends will appear in this list; you will not be able to see or invite anyone who you aren’t friends with from past lists. One drawback is that you can only access the lists from recent events and can’t see the lists from older events.

I attended WISH 2009 [JP] on Friday, a newly launched web industry event offering fourteen Japanese startups the chance to demo their wares onstage to a panel of judges and an audience of 400 people. The event was held in Tokyo and organized by online marketing company Agile Media Network (Japan’s answer to Federated Media).

A service called Joker Racer emerged as the big winner of the evening, but the other presentations weren’t too shabby either, with some of them earning special jury awards from various Japanese media. A good number of the fourteen services are available in English (or will be soon). Here’s a rundown on all of the companies that presented at WISH 2009:

Joker Racer (Winner: Grand Prix and Agile Media Network Award)
Joker Racer lets you remote-control model cars via your browser window, from anywhere in the world and in real-time. The Linux-powered and Wi-Fi-enabled model cars are equipped with GPS, a mini Linux server and a web cam mounted on top of them. It will even be possible to control the cars with the iPhone.

TechCrunch50 is just a few weeks away, and it’s time to announce more expert panelists who’ll judge the fifty launching startups in front of a crowd of 2,000 or so eager attendees.

Today we’re pleased to announce Angel investor Ron Conway, LinkedIn Chairman Reid Hoffman, Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh, O’Reilly Media CEO Tim O’Reilly, and tech blogger Robert Scoble will join us on stage at the event.

They’ll join the already announced Marc Andreessen, Roelof Botha, Marissa Mayer, Yossi Vardi, Kevin Rose and Sean Parker.

And yes, the experts are already jostling for the right to judge the new product that Penn & Teller will be launching at the event. But there are 49 other awesome startups showing their stuff for the first time, too.

Over the weekend I noticed something odd going on with my iPhone: It was working! That is to say I actually had signal in the SoMa district of San Francisco, which is something that I had basically given up on long ago. But it was working, and it was actually solid 3G service. Still, I chalked it up to a fluke. I had been screwed over by AT&T too many times to get my hopes up. Maybe everyone in SoMa was just out of town, I thought.

But a few more days passed as people started telling me they were noticing the same thing. It would go in and out at certain times, but for the most part, AT&T’s network actually seemed to be working in the area. Were we all going crazy? No, says AT&T, who I contacted today to see what was going on that my service was actually working. “Improvements are underway,” is what I was told by a representative of the company after he asked around.

As Erick pointed out yesterday, IPO registrations are up. But even if all of these companies go out, does this mean VCs are out of the no liquidity woods? Hardly.

Sure everyone brings up LinkedIn and Facebook as the potentially huge homerun IPOs in the wings, but a lot of the companies queuing up look more like OpenTable.

The reservation Web site deserves props for making it out in a tricky time— the weekend it was picking its bankers one declared bankruptcy and another sold itself to a competitor. And yes, the price has impressively stayed above the $20 opening. But take a closer look at the deal: Only three million shares were floated to the public. No wonder the price has held– hardly anyone is in the stock. With a whopping 18 million still owned by insiders and investors, OpenTable looks more like a private company that just did another round of funding than a public company.

I thought I’d share this review with the TC audience because you seem like a fit lot and interested in the outdoors. Correct me if I’m wrong. So, we begin:

I swore I’d never wear them. We called them the Five Fingers of Suck a few years ago and I was sure they were crazy. Friends, I’m here to tell you I was wrong. And I’m sorry.

Here’s my story: I ran a marathon a few years ago. I got plantar fasciitis and couldn’t run after the marathon. I worked through that inflammation, but by the time I was ready to run again I had gained thirty pounds. Wham. Shin-splints. So I was a fat former runner with leg problems. The prognosis wasn’t good.

So I tried a few things – the elliptical, weight training, losing some freaking weight – but the thing that saved me were these shoes.

Earlier today I had a debate about the Realtime Web with author Andrew Keen on a Blogtalk Radio podcast hosted by Supernova’s Howard Greenstein. (It is embedded below if you have an extra hour to spare).

Andrew thinks that real time streams such as Twitter are overwhelming and not very helpful for normal people yet. He pulled out the old canard that real time media will never replace traditional media or trusted Websites. I countered that kind of misses the point. The stream—be it Twiter, Facebook, or what have you—is simply a vehicle for directing attention elsewhere via short links and commenting on what is happening now. Those short links usually take you back to regular Websites or news articles, or even documents from years ago which all of a sudden are relevant once again. In that way, even events that happened long ago can be brought into the real time stream. It is like pulling an experience from deep memory and reliving it.

The argument veered into the philosophical (Keen challenged me to explain the difference between consciousness and memory), but fortunately we didn’t get too far down that path before wiser minds stepped in. Before I knew it investor John Borthwick from betaworks and Kevin Marks (who just joined BT from Google) were on the line schooling both Keen and me.

Washington DC based LaunchBox Digital, an early stage investment firm and incubator founded in 2007 by John McKinley, Sean Green, and Julius Genachowski (now the new head of the FCC and divested from LaunchBox), just wrapped up its second annual 12-week program. Modeled after Y Combinator, LaunchBox invests seed capital of around $20,000-$25,000 into teams, and provides them with 12 weeks of education, mentorship and access to a small army of advisers.

Drawn from a pool of over 275 applicants, eight teams were selected to make up the class of 2009. (For the class of 2008, read last year’s post). Below is a brief description of each with notes written by LaunchBox founder John McKinley, as well screencasts of their products and links to their websites.

The following message is brought to you by TechCrunch50 co-host Jason Calacanis.

In order to build excitement for the TechCrunch50 conference we’ve convinced the bean counters at TechCrunch HQ to let us give away one $2,500 ticket a day for the next 45 days. That’s more than $100,000 worth of TechCrunch50 tickets.

So, if you’re broke, laid off or too cheap to buy a ticket, all you have to do is hit your followers with the hashtag #techcrunch50 at the end of each tweet. Every Tweet you send out is another chance to win the ticket being given away that day.

Every day we will pick one of the tweets from the previous day with the #techcrunch50 hashtag at random.

Some rules: