It seemed everyone who wasn't at the Good party last night was being bad at Hiro, where Google was sponsoring an mb party for ad sales types. The Internet giant is on a recruiting binge in the area and has just opened an office (700 people and growing) across the street from the Japanese club in the basement of the Maritime Hotel. After the first (or was it second, or third) round of drinks it got tough for Laurel to calm the crowd into listening to her welcome talk, and the drinking went on unabated shortly. We got to speak to Tom Fochetta, the Google sales manager to helped us put the event together. Jim Cheney of Webcast company TalkPoint, John Ruvolo of contextWeb, a tech company that's getting into content, and Lori Weinstein of Zango, which gives you a toolbar then sends ads to your machine (10-20 million people, she said).

Most startling for us was the name of the not terribly well known Japanese prefecture (Shizuoka) we used to live in, written up on the wall in Chinese characters.

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