Friday, September 10, 2010

Two years has passed since our launch in private beta

Two years has passed since launch of GazoPa.com in private beta. It was during my trip in summer vacation that I heard news we were selected as a finalist for TechCrunch50. When I applied to the contest, no one including us believed that we would be selected finally. But fortunately, we got a ticket to pitch our service in front of many audiences. I sometimes imagine what situation we were in if we were not selected. Our situation would have been totally different.

We have released one iPhone app, two facebook app and three web services during this two years. When we released GazoPa.com in private beta two years ago, some people said 'Image search? Is it promising?' But during this two years, situation has been changed a lot. Google implemented similar search feature at Google images and they display advertisements on result pages as they do in web search. They finally acquired like.com last month. EBay started offering beta service of similar image search on fashion category this year.

Situation around image search is moving fast. Image search has been studied many years and it's not a new area as research. Lots of companies have been trying to find a fortune in this field and they failed. Monetizing has been a critical issue for these companies. But e-commerce has been grown rapidly and navigation tool among tons of products has been awaited to be implemented. Image search meets e-commerce and this growing field would be a good application for it.

Our GazoPa Style Search is one of examples of this friendship. Current phase is in very early one and this is closer to our proof of concept rather than final service. We'll add new features continuously so that we can show image search would be a must-have features in e-commerce.

Trend toward image search just started and we'd like to provide necessary services over this tide and celebrate our next two years.