REALCOM inside

Today is Patty's last day at Realcom.

Patty did her final presentation in the morning. All Realcom employees were invited to come and it was great how many people actually participated. I was very happy that Hiro attended the presentation through conference call!

It was great how engaged were people with Patty's presentation, there were a lot of questions about many interesting topics throughout the presentation. After the presentation, Patty showed the pictures of the experiences she liked the most about her internship. It's amazing how much we learned and explored in only 3 weeks!

This is the last post of the blog. I want to thank once again all the people at Realcom for their amazing hospitality and for making this experience an amazing one!

Sayonara!

Tomorrow is Patty's last day of internship at Realcom. This three and a half weeks have gone by very fast!

Today we had lunch at the Soba place, one of my favorites places in Japan.

During lunch we talked about the Japanese education system. I learned that here in Japan, the people who study computer science, need to go to a "Professional Institute" afterwards to be trained about practical computer science. Companies will usually sponsor their employees for those courses. For example, Realcom does.

Today Patty finished her final presentation for tomorrow and she is very excited to share it with the Realcom employees tomorrow morning!

Today Patty presented the first draft of her final presentation through Knowledge Market since both Tak and Hiro are on vacation today. We had a great discussion through KM and I look forward to continue it with Tak tomorrow morning.

Today we had lunch in the office, as every Wednesday. It was a great lunch! I learned how Japanese people type in the computers using the english alphabet. It is very interesting how they type in Hiragana (It's like phonetics) and then the word processors translate that to Kanji.

Today is Amanda's last day at Realcom. After going to lunch with Katsushi and Hiro, Amanda had her final presentation. All of the Realcom employees were invited to the presentation, and it was exciting how many people showed up.

Everyone was very engaged throughout Amanda's presentation, and it turned out to be a very interactive discussion. At the end of her presentation, Amanda showed some pictures of the places we visited, the sites that we saw, the food we ate and the things we learned about the Japanese and Realcom culture.

Tonight, everyone is going to a Ninja restaurant to have a farewell celebration for Amanda and Patty. These 3 weeks sure have gone by fast! The CEO joined us for dinner, which was a great opportunity to talk with him about different topics about Realcom and Japan.

In Japan, the 3rd Monday in September is a national holiday to pay respect for the elderly. We spent the morning in Ginza, one of Tokyo's many shopping districts. H&M had just opened a store in Ginza, and people we lined up for blocks just to see the new store.

After shopping, we went to the Sumo Hall in Ryōgoku to watch the Grand Sumo Tournament. The matches were so exciting, and it was great to learn about all of the rituals that are apart of sumo, including salting the sumo pit and drinking cleansing water.

We then headed to Shinjuku to meet the AIESEC girls for Karaoke. It was great hearing the popular Japanese songs and seeing along with some well-known classics.

On Sunday, we decided to get out of the city and head to Nikko. Nikko is famous for its beautiful scenery and the amazing foliage in the fall. Ken gave us a travel book for Nikko and Soichiro recommended some amazing hikes.

After arriving in Nikko, we went straight to the Kegon Falls, a waterfall that drops 100m. We had a quick soba lunch and then headed to Lake Chuzenji for some hiking. The hike took us around the parameter of the lake and the views were amazing!

On Saturday, Ken and his wife, Takako, were around tour guides around Tokyo and Odaiba. We started the morning by visiting the Imperial Palace and learning all about the Emperors and Samurai. We then headed to "little Kyoto" for Udon noodles. This was our first time trying Udon noodles and they were delicious!

In the afternoon, we took the Rainbow Bridge to Odiaba, a man-made island off of Tokyo. We started at the Telekom Center Building 's Observation Deck, which had an amazing few of the city, and then went to Miraikan, Japan's National Museum of Emerging Science and Innovation The museum contained some of the latest technology inventions, and we even saw the local university's science fair competition,

We went to a mall that was mimicked after Venice and then to the Toyota Mega Web, where we saw the latest in hybrid and electric cars. We finished our trip to Odaiba by watching the sunset over the Rainbow bridge and taking the ferry back to the mainland.

The ferry dropped us off in Tsukiji so we headed to a nearby restaurant for some raw fish. The restaurant let us pick our own fish from the aquarium, and we decided upon squid and flat fish. It was incredible how much food can be made out of one fish - we had it raw, in soup and tempura style!

In the morning, Patty met with Hiro to discuss the first draft of her final presentation. The meeting discussion was very interesting. We discussed about the characteristics of R&D organizations and how those affect the implementation of Communities of Practice.

Since it has been 2 days without eating sushi (that is a lot!), we went to have sushi for lunch with Hiro. How we missed it!

After work, we headed to Tokyo Dome to watch the Yomiuri Giants play the Tokyo Yakult Swallows. This was Patty's first baseball game! The rules of the game were the same as in American baseball but the experience was completely different. Each team had its own band and cheerleaders, and the fans chanted rehearsed cheers throughout the entire game. The game was really close but the Giants came out with the win!

You all will be happy to hear that we have enlarged the pictures on the blog so you can see our big smiles! Today, we realized how quickly our internship is going. We are starting to construct our draft presentations and socializing our results with our Realcom teams.

Amanda met with Yuki today to discuss the preliminary results of her research. Yuki and Amanda had a great discussion around the recommendations and are working to solidify some metrics before Amanda's final presentation next Tuesday.

We ate Soba today for lunch with 5 of our colleagues from Realcom. We sat on tatami mats and learned the best way to eat Soba. After you have finished the Soba, you can pour soba broth into the dipping sauce to make soup. The soba and the soup were both great!

After work, Patty went to meet her Abbott colleagues for dinner in Shinagawa and Amanda went to meet Mika, a Stanford GSB alum, for dinner in Roppongi. Patty went to a tempura restaurant and Amanda went to Gonpachi, a restaurant famous for inspiring one of the scenes in the movie Kill Bill. Patty met up with Amanda and Mika after her dinner, and we discussed our Japanese experiences and of course, caught up on life at Stanford GSB.

Patty's morning started with a conference call with Tak and Denise, who is from the Askme team. We talked about Open Innovation and how Askme was used to help the information sharing between organizations and third party institutions.

Today we had lunch in the office, as every Wednesday. We went to buy lunch to a salad store and we also bought a nato roll to finally try it. After enjoying the meal, it was time to try the nato. We both tried a little piece first and we were both surprised that the taste and smell were not as bad as we were expecting! Actually, we could eat nato again! :)

In the afternoon, Amanda had a meeting with Katsushi to discuss the preliminary results of her project. They walked through her recommendations in detail and ended the meeting by discussing the latest trend in software coding. The meeting last for over an hour and a half - how quickly time flies when you are talking about the latest technology advancements!

We went to dinner with Hiro at an okonomiyaki (Japanese pizza) restaurant in Kameido. The restaurant was very cozy, and the waiter cooked our dinner on a skillet at our table. The menu was in Japanese so we let Hiro do the ordering - he couldn’t have picked better dishes! We started with an assortment of grilled vegetables and seafood. We then had a cheese and egg dish that was still part liquid so we ate it with miniature spatula. We ended the evening with a delicious okonomiyaki.