Hong Kong: Double Guests Spotlight

On Friday September 28, Hong Kong will be hosting an event featuring two speakers – Toshi Maeda and Douglas Crets.

Toshi Maeda, former Reuters producer and U.C. Berkeley graduate, is visiting Hong Kong from AAJA-Tokyo sub-chapter. As an entrepreneur, he’ll talk about a cool, new iPhone app he is developing for journalists.

This is what he says about it:

“Many journalists already use the iPhone for reporting, but what if you can instantly create a voiced package with your iPhone in less than 90 seconds with no hassle of editing?

An entrepreneurial TV journalist in Japan condensed all the work he was doing in the real newsroom into one single app, which could change the landscape of news reporting and multi-media story telling.

The new SnapCast app, which is now in its beta stage, is expected to empower professional and citizen reporters alike, and could also become a useful tool for bloggers and businesses.”

Maeda will also be speaking at AAJA-Tokyo mini-conference later this year. You can follow him on Twitter @toshicarlos.

Douglas Crets has the very cool title of Developer Evangelist and Curator at Microsoft BizSpark over in Mountain View, California. BizSpark incubates nearly 50,000 startups in 110 countries, a few select companies in that ecosystem that are scaling rapidly and seeing traction in their business are offered up to $60,000 of Azure offerings to help them in their growth. He described his work like this:

“What I do is use social media platforms to work as a kind of ‘internal’ journalist for Microsoft and for the community using the social media platforms to interact with the brands.

My work is a balance of listening, analyzing, using “lean” startup methodology to create offers and benefits for startups around the world, etc.”

Crets’ articles have been featured on Huffington Post and Fast Company. He has been a teacher in the U.S., a journalist in Asia, and is a University of Hong Kong alum of the Journalism and Media Studies Center (MJ2005). You can follow him on Twitter @douglascrets.

RSVP Details:

As usual, we welcome them at the Time Warner offices in Quarry Bay.

Address: 979 King’s Road, Quarry Bay, Oxford House, 35th Floor

Date and time: Friday Sept 28th, 7pm to 8:30pm followed by drinks at the Newsroom bar and restaurant downstairs

We only have 25 seats available and some limited standing room. E-mail: aajahk@gmail.com to RSVP. First come, first serve. Your active AAJA membership gives you FREE access to this event. Non-AAJA members welcome; HK$50 donation kindly requested.