The Storage Muse

As I mentioned from my previous short post on Gazopa this post contains an interview from Mr. Hideki Kobayashi at Hitachi Limited in Japan.  Mr. Kobayashi is the Gazopa project leader running a team that spans both the United States and Japan.   With that said, let’s jump right in.

1. From your perspective what is the most exciting thing about Gazopa?
   
   The most exciting thing about GazoPa is that it enables users to search for  images by uploading images and through online drawings. With a conventional image search, only a key word could become a search query. So I view the approach of the technology within GazoPa.com as extremely, powerful, natural and highly intuitive.

2. What kinds of applications developers or companies are interested in the technology behind Gazopa?
   
   E-commerce sites and stock photo sellers have an interest in our technology. Game companies are also quite interested in our technology. We’ve also released a second Facebook application called GazoPa Drawing. It’s a kind of game, where seers compete with others to create the most similar drawings.

3. Is there anything that is coming to the Gazopa application which you would like to hint at?
   
   We’re planning to release a new application that uses our image search technology to solve e-commerce problems.

4. What kinds of applications do you believe that Gazopa technologies will be used in?
   
   E-commerce and stock photo sites and community sites that have lots of photos and images. However we are open to anything and anyone who has a thought an idea on how to use the technologies behind Gazopa.

5. Can you provide us some history of Gazopa from initial idea to its current state?
   
   We started development of the core engine more than 10 years. However at that time there was no iPhone and YouTube so we could not really express the capabilities of the core engine until now. We started developing GazoPa.com in the spring of 2008, and we were selected as one of finalists of TechCrunch50.  In September, 2008 we started our private beta, and later in 2008 we released our first Facebook application.  Following the Facebook  application, we also released the iPhone application to further illustrate how our technology can be used.  I’m also proud to say that GazoPa.com has entered open beta this month, so everyone should head on over to Gazopa or download the iPhone application and give it a try. (Note that to get the iPhone application to work you will have to sign-up for an account at Gazopa first.  We soon hope to remove this requirement in a future release of the iPhone for Gazopa application.)

6. There have been recent articles and releases by Google as well as others who suggest that they are in the image search business.  Google has even stated that this is a feature and not a product.  What are your response to the industry reports, analysts and competitors?
   
   Basically I view Google’s and other’s comments on this capability as business domain specific. If you want to become a general image search engine provider, keyword is still a main search query and similar image is a feature. However, if your focus is on similar image searching, one can focus on being a similar image search engine provider with specialized services and technologies suited to that business and technical problem domains.  Further one can also provide the core technologies in an ASP model to other online applications, applications on the iPhone, applications in Facebook, etc.  Hitachi is not out to compete with Google in terms of generalized search, we are looking to bring our technologies to market through other providers and we view Gazopa as an excellent demonstration of what is possible for others to make use of with our technologies.

7. A bit of a technical question.  What are the components and languages that the Gazopa application and services are written in?
   
   The Gazopa front end is developed in Ruby, and the core engine is developed in JAVA and C.

8. Finally if there are established companies, start-ups, open source developers, etc. who are interested in Gazopa who should they contact?
   
   Please contact me at: hkoba@gazopa.com