The Hub is the world’s largest network of co-working spaces, with venues at more than 40 locations worldwide, and 100 more coming soon. At its most recently-launched branch in Tokyo, a ‘Spark Plug’ meet-up event was held yesterday. Five startups pitched their ideas to an enthusiastic audience.

Hub Tokyo was officially launched on February 11th of this year. I’ve met with some of the people behind the co-working space, but I visited the venue for the first time just yesterday. Most Hub locations around the world are located in the very heart of a given city, typically in a nicely designed or renovated building. But this Tokyo branch is surprisingly a 10-minute walk from Meguro station on Tokyo’s central Yamanote line, a cozy space set up in a former print factory.

The venue’s co-founder, Shingo Potier de la Morandière, explains:

Unlike our other locations in Europe or the rest of the world, we need to pay much more to rent a venue here in Tokyo. Even with some sponsorships from big companies, it’s very hard to make our business sustainable and keep operations running. However, we are really keen to help Japanese entrepreneurs connect to the global community. We’ll intensify interactive community-based activities with our global network, including person-to-person exchanges with foreign startups.

Hopefully we can see more great work coming out of this space in the future. But for now, let’s hear about the five startups that pitched at this Spark Plug event.

Website: getgamba.com
Pitched by: Masahiro Morita

Some of our readers may recall that we featured this startup in our recent coverage of Samurai Venture Summit.

Gamba is a corporate communication platform that facilitates the submission of daily reports. It has deployed short status message input on its business communication platform, which helps office workers share what they are doing with colleagues and management. Interestingly, the app is not only used among SMEs or startups but also bigger companies.

Competitors in this space include Chatwork, Co-work, and Talknote.

Japanese social networking site operator mixi Inc. is hoping to shore up its faltering earnings in the face of stiff competition from the U.S.-based Facebook by seeking new businesses and doing away with complacency with its past success, incoming President Yusuke Asakura said Friday.

Asakura, who will be heading the company from June, said the company will offer 50 smartphone apps to access its services, up from two now, as part of its diversification drive, and increase paid gaming content.

The company is anticipating roughly 60 percent fall in group operating profit, a gauge of income from its mainline operations, in the year ending March 2014.

Asakura, 30, who joined mixi in 2011 after running his own company, said mixi experienced a sharp expansion of its business in 2006 and was obsessed with maintaining the status quo, making it difficult to undertake radical reforms.

"I would like to create a corporate culture for 'perpetual changes' to challenge something new," Asakura told Kyodo News.

Hiroshi Mikitani, the CEO of Rakuten, says mandating that his employees speak English at work was tougher than expected; it slowed meetings and embarrassed senior managers. But Mikitani says he's sticking with it.

By Mayumi Negishi and Yuko Takeo

Why does Japan waste so much IT talent? The shortage of Japanese software engineers for tech startups has long been a puzzle in a land of 4G telecom networks and pioneering mobile social networking.

Excessive regulation, excessive modesty and excessively cautious moms were among the slew of explanations offered Tuesday by some of Silicon Valley’s hottest names at a Tokyo forum organized by Internet billionaire Hiroshi Mikitani’s new lobby group.

Mr. Mikitani is chief executive of Japan’s biggest Web-based retailer Rakuten anda leading figure on Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s advisory panel on improving Japan’s competitiveness. Mr. Abe’s pledges to deregulate Japan’s regimented economy helped inspire a mood of optimism at the forum.

Among the keynote speakers looking to bring some entrepreneurial disruptiveness to Japan’s Old Guard at the New Economy Summit were Google Senior Vice PresidentAndy Rubin and Twitter and Square co-founder Jack Dorsey.

The reasons cited for Japan’s surprisingly low number of software engineers willing to embrace the challenges of working for new IT ventures included the following:

1) Regulatory hurdles for new entrants

2) Limited focus of education

3) Fear of failure

4) Modesty

5) Discouraging mothers

By Jay Alabaster

So-net Entertainment said its 'Nuro' fiber service for home use will also offer 1Gbps uploads, for about US$50 per month.

IDG News Service - A Sony-backed ISP in Japan has launched a 2Gbps Internet service, which it said is the world's fastest for home use.

So-net Entertainment began offering its "Nuro" fiber-based service on Monday to homes, apartments, and small businesses in Tokyo and six surrounding prefectures. Nuro will cost AY=4,980 ($51) per month on a two-year contract, plus a AY=52,500 installation fee that it is currently offering for free for those that apply online. The upload speed is 1Gbps.

The company said the service includes rental of an ONU (optical network unit) designed to handle the high speeds. ONU devices are commonly used in homes and business to convert fiber to broadband Internet. Individual users of the service are unlikely to see 2Gbps speeds on their devices, as it exceeds the capacity of most consumer network adaptors.