Submitted by Koki, review by KiM.

JPBE.net posted a review by KiM on their website about the second edition of JPBE.net in Akihabara. I've tried making sense out of it using Babelfish but that didn't really work. Thanks to Koki, here is the English version. Hit read more! Koki mentioned to me he wasn't there himself, but that the attendants told him event was good overall. The hopes for the third edition of this gathering is to have decent support for Japanese display, printing and input. JPBE.net is closely cooperating with yellowTAB to make this happen.

Event name: "JPBE.net in Akihabara -- Part 2"
Held: October 25 & 26 2003

By KiM

The event was held at a showroom that was kindly provided to us by PlatHome Inc., former distributor of BeOS in Japan (and potentially future distributor of Zeta). The showroom is located in the busy and popular Akihabara district, of Tokyo, where most of the electronics and computer shops are located.

We held three presentations, as follows:

Introduction to JPBE.net, by Matsuyama.
A brief introduction to our BUG, how we started, what our goals are and how people can join and contribute. Japanese Gobe slides are available here.

Zeta RC1 intro, by KiM.
We introduced RC1 to the attendees with a focus on what is new in comparison to R5 and previous betas of Zeta. A movie (naturally in Japanese) will be available for download at a later time.

Locale kit workshop, by SHINTA.
In this presentation, SHINTA introduced the locale kit developed by yT for Zeta, with actual samples on how to use it. Japanese presentation material and sample programs are available here.

There also was a lottery where we gave away copies of RC1 (to be delivered when released), yT T-shirts, a license of Refraction, a demo CD of TuneTracker, one USB Pulse Monitor and some other goodies.

Attendance was fairly good, with about 50 people on Saturday and another 30 on Sunday. The showroom is not very big, so this amount of people was just about right. We had 6-7 machines (a mixture of desktops and laptops) that attendees could play with in between the presentations. Needless to say, we also showed our latest advancements in the Japanese localization of Zeta.

Some of the attendees wrote some comments in our guestbook. If I were to summarize all the comments, It would put it in just three words: release Zeta soon! :-)