GazoPa Presentation at Hitachi's Conference

It's glad to inform you that Hideki Kobayashi, a project leader of GazoPa, (it's me) will make a presentation about GazoPa at Hitachi's private conference, uVALUE convention on July23. Hitachi celebrates 100 year anniversary this year and we're honored to be a presenter at their main conference.

I have made presentations at not a few places in USA such as TechCrunch50, Summit at Stanford and Silicon Valley Launch 2009 etc. But this is the first time that I would introduce our service in Japan. It's a good opportunity for us to share our story with Japanese people, although our site has no Japanese version.

All speech would be in Japanese, so please feel free to join our seminar.

Date : 10:00-11:00, July23
Place : Tokyo International Forum

See seminar in detail (in Japanese)

iPhone and Ruby on Rails developer

We have already found a Ruby Front End Developer for previous post.

In addition to this, we're looking for an iPhone and Ruby on Rails developer as well due to our large volume of development.

Requirement is as follows. Please also see our post on Monster in detail.

The following skills are required
In-depth knowledge and prior experience developing iPhone applications
In-depth knowledge of Objective C
In-depth knowledge of Cocoa Touch
In-depth knowledge of iPhone SDK
In-depth knowledge Interface Builder
Three years experience developing web applications
Three years of applied Ruby on Rails experience
Developing social media experience is preferred
Prior experience using JAVA, MySQL, HTML and CSS
Energetic and Self Motivated
Excellent communication skills

Location : Santa Clara, CA
Duration : Three months

Ruby Front End Developer (contractor)

We're planning to develop a new social media service and are looking for a Ruby Front End
Developer as a contractor.

Please also see our post on craiglist.

Responsibilities
Design and implement web applications using Ruby on Rails
Develop clear and intuitive front end user interfaces from mock ups or wireframes

Requirements
Three year of applied Ruby on Rails experience
Three years experience developing web applications
Developing social media experience is preferred
Prior experience using Ruby, JAVA, MySQL, HTML and CSS
Energetic and Self Motivated
Excellent communication skills
Must be local to bay area

Contractors work on site in Santa Clara, CA one day per week at least.
Start Date: ASAP
Term: Three month duration (It may be extended.)

Please send us a resume with a recent portfolio to contact (at) gazopa.com.

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.

GazoPa Bloom enters private beta

We recently released flower community site, GazoPa Bloom. This site enables users to search for candidate flower names by uploading flower photos that are unfamiliar to them. GazoPa Bloom is not just a flower search site. Users can also share flower knowledge as well as flower photos.

When we released image search engine service, GazoPa.com, we received feedback that praised us for our achievement. But some feedback requested us to improve our service, because unexpected category of images appeared as search results. Since our image search is based on similarity and our database consists from images from web, mixture of different category of images is inevitable.

One of solution for this issue is to improve our technology. The second one is to let users select category of image when users upload images. Third one is to have a database that consists from one category of image. GazoPa Bloom has been developed to materialize this third approach.

Since GazoPa Bloom is still in private beta stage, I should admit that our image search technology and list of classification are not perfect and search results may not be so accurate. In order to fulfill this gap, we rely on power of users. GazoPa Bloom has a feature that asks other users to help users identify flowers. This can increase possibility to find an appropriate name for users.

GazoPa Bloom currently has very simple features i.e. search, share and discover flowers. We'll add more attractive features soon.

New Video : Get Inspired by GazoPa

Web2.0 Expo

We'll exhibit at the Web2.0 Expo in San Francisco on May4-5 this year, too. The Expo is short for one day this year and I'm not sure if it's because people is moving on to Web3.0.

I think we can announce a nice thing during the Expo. Free Expo Pass is available now (discount code EXPOPASS). See you again in San Francisco!