One Japanese startup founder is on a mission to change not only the way we think about the news, but the way we think about each other. The "filter bubble" is a term that describes the natural, but tragic, result of search engines and news services giving us more and more of what we want. We end up seeing only information that reenforces what we already believe. Ideas that contradict our beliefs, ideas that might make us uncomfortable, and ideas we have never been exposed to get filtered out in the process of "giving us what we want."

Atsuo Fujimura and his startup team at SmartNews are working to change that. This comes as no surprise to those of us here in Japan since over the past twenty years Atsuo has launched a string of startups that have changed the news industry in Japan.

What he has in store for us this time is amazing, and with his recent international launch, he's taking it global.

Show Notes for Startups

The early signs that the Japanese publishing industry we doomed
The inside story of how Japanese publishers first tried to embrace the Internet
The founding, success and impact of @IT
How Japan's two mobile revolutions changed everything, and how Atsuo tried (and failed) to adapt
The different ways in which we consume news on mobile devices
How SmartNews plans to burst the filter bubble
How Japanese publishers today are trying to survive

Links from the Founder

SmartNews
The Media Disruption Blog
Follow Atsuo on Twitter @afujimura
Friend him on Facebook
@IT Home Page (In Japanese)
How we consume news differently on mobile devices

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Transcript from Japan
[INTRO]

Tim:    Welcome to Disrupting Japan, straight talk from Japan’s most successful entrepreneurs. I am Tim Romero and thanks for listening. Today we sit down with Atsuo Fujimura, a man who more than anyone else in the country is reshaping the way Japan thinks about media. He founded Atmark IT, he IPO-ed IT Media, and now he is working with Smart News to change the way we discover and consume news.

Now Atsuo and I we talk about the effects of the filter bubble in this interview. Now for those of you unfamiliar with the term the filter bubble is an unfortunate side effect of search engines trying to show us what we want. By optimizing to what we like search engines end up not showing us news or information that contradicts our current thinking or could make us uncomfortable. Despite the fact that there is a tremendous diversity of information and opinions on the interest out Filter Bubbles provide us with a more and more narrow view of the world as they try to optimize our tastes. Fujimura Son and Smart News are trying to reverse this and it’s not always easy. After the interview he explained that some American Beta users actually got angry when presented with news from a source they considered to right wing or to left wing. But for any democracy to move forward to really function at all we need to have some level of common understanding of facts and information.

Now all our listeners in Japan will know this company names and most will be familiar with Fujimurasan himself, but many of our overseas listeners will not know him by name so please don’t let Atsuo’s humble and unassuming manner lead you to underestimate the impact that he and his companies have had in Japan over the past decades. Oh, and earlier this year Smart News announced their international expansion so this is a name you are going to be hearing a lot more in the future so let’s get right to the interview.

[Start of Interview]

Tim:                Great we are sitting here with Atsuo Fujimura. And let’s see, you founded Atmark IT. You later became after the merger the CEO of IT media. You took that through to IPO. You are now working with Smart News, and run the Media Disruption Blog.

Atsuo:             Yeah, thank you.

Tim:                Thanks for sitting down with me.