Entrepreneur Association of Tokyo
Speaker - Russell Willis, eigoTown & ELT News

May 11 2004 - Mr. Russell Willis President & Founder of eigoTown Limited.

About eigoTown.com
eigoTown.com is the Japan-based portal site for everything to do with English for Japanese people, with over 200,000 unique visitors to the site a month, over 80,000 members and page views in the millions. eigoTown has been recognised by MSN, Yahoo, All About and Nikkei Research, amongst others, as the premier site for English in Japan and is featured in the Japanese press at least once a week on average.

A survivor of the dot-com implosion, eigoTown (launched in June 2000) has been experiencing rapid growth over the last 18 months and is poised for even greater growth over the next few years. eigoTown's advertising clients include Nikkei, Manpower, DHC, Temple University, ALC, Fujistaff, Sony and others. It also operates sites for English teachers in Japan and has recently launched the online teacher / private student matching service, SenseiBank.

Profile
Russell Willis started his first company when he was 15, producing tourist guides for the southern seaside town in which he grew up in England. He went on to produce a number of other magazines before coming to Japan in 1991, where he worked for the (then) British Council's Cambridge English School. In 1993 he founded eigoMedia which produced multimedia software for clients as diverse as Canon, the British Government and Macmillan. Amongst many other products and publications, Russell was the creator of the Official CD-ROM for Britain's UK98 Festival that was presented to Tony Blair on his visit to Japan, as well as the acclaimed Finding Out software for children produced with Macmillan, and ELT News, the most popular independent Web site for English teachers in the world. Russell founded eigoTown.com in December 1999.

Russell is considered an expert on the multi-billion dollar English market in Japan. He is a member of the editorial board for ETJ Journal (a respected magazine for English teachers in Japan) and a councillor for the English-Speaking Union of Japan and a judge for their annual university debating competition. He is the President of eigoTown.com Limited.