Hiya guys.  My good friend Keith and I decided to do something a little different and tried recording a podcast.  We’re still rather new at this, so it took for form of a freewheeling conversation.  Major topics included:

• the experience of working at large and small tech companies in Japan
• the Japanese web application market
• career advice for programmers don’t call yourself a programmer
• us trying to sell you on starting A/B testing
• conversion optimization stories, including actionable tips which have actually worked for people
• a wee bit of generic geekery.

Podcasts take a metric truckload of work to put together.  If you like it, please, say so.  If folks have interest in it, we’ll do it again.  If not, well, one more data point as to what the market wants.

Podcast Link (M4A.  Click to play, right click to download.  The play feature may not work quite right in Chrome.  Feel free to put this on your iDevice.  (You may find this URL helpful: https://www.kalzumeus.com/feed/atom/ That technically includes all the posts on the blog, but iTunes and similar software will automatically pluck out the audio ones.)

Podcast Link (MP3, for Chrome. Click to play, right click to download.)

Transcript (Because We Love You)

Patrick McKenzie:   Hi, everybody. I’m Patrick McKenzie, better known as patio11 on the Internets.  This is my buddy Keith.

Keith:  Hi, I’m Keith Perhac. I live next to Patrick’s and I’m pretty much unknown on the Internets.

Patrick:  So when we tell people we’re right next to each other, we’re right next to each other in Ogaki, Japan. How the heck did we end up here?

Keith:  Long, long story. So I’ve been here for nine years, you’ve been here for eight, pretty much. And we came here on the JET program. I was working as an English teacher, you were working at Softopia, which is apparently our prefecture’s gift to web development and iPhone development right now.

Patrick:  Yeah, the prefectural technology incubator.

Keith:  That was an interesting little incubator because it’s been losing money for the last seven years. And then when the iPhone came out, all of the iPhone developers and everything moved in there because rent is cheap. And suddenly the incubator is making tons and tons of money thanks to iPhone apps.

Patrick:  Yeah. That was crazy. The number one, number two, and number three most popular Japanese iPhone apps of all time were literally right next door to each other, all in Softopia. They’ve been saying that they were going to make Sweet Valley, the name of this region, into the Silicon Valley of Japan. And I always thought it was a pipe dream. And now we have three successful software companies in literally like a 10‑square‑meter space in one building here. [Editor’s note: Perhaps not quiiiiite Silicon Valley yet…]

Keith:  Yeah.

Patrick:  It blows my mind.

Keith:  Yeah, essentially we’re in the...

For the full transcript see here.