Saturday, April 3, 2010

Why flower?

Two weeks have passed since our launch of GazoPa Bloom. I was asked by not a few people including venture capitalists that why we chose flower.

There are a couple of reasons that we chose flower as our theme of our new service. When we go hiking or walk on streets, we can see beautiful flowers that are unknown to us. If you use a camera phone, it's natural to search for flowers after taking photos.

Birds are also one of candidates. But since birds are animals who always move, it's not easy to snap photos with normal cameras. Flowers are still life and it's easy for people to take close shots.

Our ultimate purpose is to answer questions 'What is this?'. Current searches rely on keywords. It requires you to describe objects in words. Users need to be active when they have questions. But as proverb says 'A picture is worth a thousand words.', it's not easy to describe what you see in words. If photos become queries, search would become more natural and easier.

In this context, vertical database is required for answering questions and only one sort of database is not enough. So, flower is the first step toward this ultimate purpose. We'll have many vertical database in future. Please give us your suggestions about our database (contact at gazopa.com). For example, ResearchBuzz suggests we should have a database of car.