GazoPa is a search engine using graphics (i.e. images), instead of text, for search input. Why is that useful? Because, as Hideki Kobayashi, GazoPa’s Project Leader pointed out, “Keywords are insufficient for accurate image searches”, GazoPa delivers more precisely because it uses shapes and colors to deliver comparable results to whatever you’re literally looking at and for. GazoPa is a start-up project within Hitachi.

Using GazoPa, upload any image, and GazoPa’s engine searches through a database of more than 80 million archived images, delivering you the closest images to your graphical query.

Kobayashi, noted its particular usefulness for consumer comparison shopping, especially when it comes to fashion. Simply plug in a graphical image of the high-end item you’re looking for, GazoPa scours the internet, showing similar, less pricey, items.  Think of it as similar to sites like kayak.com for travel, in its quest for lower priced, similar items based on images as input.

GazoPa’s goal is to provide the service to consumers, ecommerce sites and photo sites. Given they’ve indexed more images than any competitor, yet can deliver quicker than any similar products, they’re proud of their technology.

In the past 6 months alone, they’ve moved from 30K to 70K visitors a month. Given their style search capability was launched 2 months ago, Kobayashi is now betting on traffic increasing and declared that they’re ready for it!

If you’re a designer or engineer looking for a cool new gig, want meet the brains behind FailCon, have $3+ million to invest in a language learning social network… then click on over to the 60 Second Spot listings now to track down those leads… and more!

Cheers!

The first ever JapanNight ( twitter hashtag #SFJN ) is just a day away! Are you as excited as we are? SFNewTech and Btrax are jointly hosting this event featuring top startups from the Land of the Rising Sun.

Late last week, I caught up with BTrax CEO and founder Brandon Hill and asked him to tell us more about this unique cross-cultural tech event.

What inspired you to start Japan Night?

Brandon: I have attended many of the SFNewTech events before and observed how you were doing French Night that showcased French Companies and then Belgian Nights that featured Belgian Startups. So that really inspired me to see if there could be a Japan Night for showcasing up and coming Japanese tech companies.
We also thought that we (Btrax) were a pretty good company to organize the event. Besides that, there are so many Japanese companies who try to get exposure overseas but there is no single event for them to present their apps or services in front of the US tech audience.

Is this a one time event or do you plan on doing Japan Night with SFNewTech regularly?

Brandon: Initially we thought this was going to be a one time thing. But, we got so much attention from both the United States and Japan, that we have decided to do this regularly. Hopefully twice a year, so one Japan Night every 6 months.

Who will we be seeing in the first Japan Night?

Brandon: There are 6 companies presenting at Japan Night. Coopa, Drrop, GazoPa, Lang-8, myGengo and Spysee!

Were you aware of what these companies were doing before you established a connection with them?

Brandon: I was aware of only a couple of companies because they are friends of mine. For the rest of the companies, when we publicly announced the event we got over 40 applications. We auditioned these companies and then chose the remaining four.

Do you have any surprises for the SFNewTech fans that you would like to share right now? Or, do you want to keep it a surprise?

Brandon: We actually are in the process of getting the surprises. We did, however, just receive an event prize from one of our clients. Movies.They have donated a Japanese DVD package for us.

Red Vines
Mike Kelly, Consumer Communications Manager
American Licorice Company began making Red Vines in San Francisco in 1920. While the process used to make Red Vines hasn’t changed much in nearly 100 years, the technology used to market the brand is changing dramatically. Introducing the Red Vines World of Sharing, a social media platform engineered to spread goodwill and happiness from the Bay Area to the world. http://www.redvines.com

EasySign Sunil Patro, Founder

EasySign enables you to sign any document using your iPhone or iPod Touch without any need for printing, scanning and/or faxing. http://www.easysignmobile.com

AdRoll
Adam Berke, Co-Founder & Head of Accounts
AdRoll has created an array of advanced display advertising techniques for small and medium-sized businesses. These include, personalized retargeting, sequenced ads, contextual targeting, and other methodologies that had previously only been available to the largest brands and agencies. We offer all of these techniques with powerful campaign and reporting tools that empower any marketer. http://www.adroll.com

Nimbb
Benjamin Berube, President, D2Soft Technologies Inc.
Nimbb is a webcam API for integrating video recording in any website. Use it in your site for anything that needs quick users video (testimonial, video blog, information video, video contest, etc.) http://nimbb.com

VideoGenie

Justin Nassiri, Founder & CEO
VideoGenie helps
brands broadcast their fans across the web, through constrained video
recording (no editing!), social sharing, and targeted display. http://www.videogenie.com

FREE TACOS!!

Bullivant Houser Bailey PC a leading West Coast law firm has merged with Jacobs & Ferraro LLP a San Francisco technology law firm and the founding sponsor of SF New Tech. Bullivant is proud to continue as a Platinum Sponsor of SF New Tech. Our clients include private and public emerging technology companies entrepreneurs and investors in numerous sectors including software digital media Web 2.0 clean tech and mobile.

	CALinnovates.org is a statewide coalition focused on championing the conversation about the future of California’s critical technology sector. CALinnovates.org brings together industry experts, thought leaders, tech innovators, policy makers and consumers in a non-partisan mission to promote innovation, create new jobs, spur investment and support tech-friendly policies. CALinnovates.org not only provides a medium for educating policy makers and for companies to network, but helps to connect the ideas of today for an economy of tomorrow.
	Mylermedia : Popping online brands into the minds of millions.
	Future-Works : Experts in social media and new media marketing.

Streaming SF New Tech Live!

—–

Bonvoy is a facebook application that makes planning group trips a breeze. Trip planners can create trips, invite their friends, split costs and manage the entire group travel planning within the familiar Facebook interface.

Group Travel Planning Can Be Really Painful!

Fed up of dealing with group travel planning issues like long deeply-threaded email chains, scheduling disasters, never-ending searches for travel deals, discounts and trying to split up travel costs, founder Mujteba Naqvi decided he’d had enough and went off to create Bonvoy last year.

In February of this year, Mujteba took stage in front of a sold out crowd at the Feb 3rd 2010 SFNewTech event and gave us a sneek preview of what was to come.

The Bonvoy facebook app went live earlier this week and is available to everyone to download, install and use!

How do I get Bonvoy?

Bonvoy is a facebook application that can be downloaded here. Once you are logged into Facebook and you see the Bonvoy Facebook app page, click the Go To Application button.

Get the Bonvoy App on Facebook

Like all Facebook applications, you will prompted to allow Bonvoy access to your basic information. After reviewing the privacy policy, click Allow to start using Bonvoy for your group trip planning!

How does Bonvoy Help me with Group Trip Planning?

Bonvoy takes the hassle out of planning group trips like family reunions, bachelor and bachelorette parties, spring break, sporting events, and couples retreats. After you install the Facebook app, you can create a group trip in 3 easy steps that involves creating a new trip, inviting the other participants, then managing everything inside the trip page.

Create a new trip in 3 easy steps.

Once created, a group trip inside the Bonvoy app looks and feels just like a Facebook group, complete with the wall, discussion board, photos and messages.

Inside a Bonvoy Trip

Specific to group trip planning, the three sections that you will be most interested in are the Travel Info box, The Hotels box and the Cars box.

In the Hotels box and the Cars box, you have access to a booking engine which you can use to easily book your hotel and car from within the app. After you book your hotel and car, the travel info gets posted on the Travel Info box.

The Travel Info box is like the virtual travel information booth, where the trip planner and all attendees can see trip info as well as updates to the travel plans from all other invitees. With the social and viral nature, this alone makes the app so useful for group travel planning.

Who is behind Bonvoy?

Based in Houston, Texas, Bonvoy Inc. is a licensed and accredited online travel agency that brokers travel-related products, including hotel rooms and rental cars.

Bonvoy Inc Founder and CEO Mujteba Naqvi tells us that he and his team have been working on the Bonvoy app for about a year with a mix of work towards development, securing strategic partners, and becoming an accredited online travel agency.

Bonvoy is are currently trying to raise a seed round of funding.

For more information, contact Bonvoy Founder and CEO Mujteba Naqvi at 832-532-2406 or email him at muj(dot)naqvi(at)bonvoy(dot)com

WITH FREE TACOS

FOR THE
FIRST
150 PEOPLE IN THE DOOR!!

Bullivant Houser Bailey PC a leading West Coast law firm has merged with Jacobs & Ferraro LLP a San Francisco technology law firm and the founding sponsor of SF New Tech. Bullivant is proud to continue as a Platinum Sponsor of SF New Tech. Our clients include private and public emerging technology companies entrepreneurs and investors in numerous sectors including software digital media Web 2.0 clean tech and mobile.

btrax is a San Francisco based, cross-cultural branding and web consulting firm, specializing in the Japan and China markets. With our multi-talented, multi-cultural team members, we strive to work closely with every client that would like to expand their business to U.S., Japan and China-we enable their success. btrax, Inc. not only works at designing creative web sites and consulting on web services for our current client’s business needs, we also create ways for them to expand their business to markets outside of their current market. With this in mind, we are pleased to collaborate with SF New Tech on the SF Japan Night event.

	CALinnovates.org is a statewide coalition focused on championing the conversation about the future of California’s critical technology sector. CALinnovates.org brings together industry experts, thought leaders, tech innovators, policy makers and consumers in a non-partisan mission to promote innovation, create new jobs, spur investment and support tech-friendly policies. CALinnovates.org not only provides a medium for educating policy makers and for companies to network, but helps to connect the ideas of today for an economy of tomorrow.
	Mylermedia : Popping online brands into the minds of millions.
	Future-Works : Experts in social media and new media marketing.
	Sonic.net is a full-service Internet provider, dedicated to delivering fast, reliable and inexpensive connectivity while providing award-winning technical support. Based out of Santa Rosa, California, we were one of the first ISPs to bring DSL access to the wine country, and continue to lead the way in making new access and hosting solutions available to the public.
	Invest Fukuoka - Growing business between Fukuoka and North America.

	Asahi – Japan’s #1 Beer

	Based in San Francisco, California, VIZ Pictures, Inc. licenses and distributes selective Japanese live-action films and DVDs, with focus on Japanese “kawaii (cute) and cool” pop culture.

	Crunchyroll is an online video service and community that offers full-length episodes and movies of the very best in Japanese anime and Asian entertainment. Crunchyroll’s content is provided by Asian media leaders including TV TOKYO, Shueisha, Fuji Creative Corporation, Pony Canyon, Yomiuri Telecasting Corporation, Toei Animation, Gonzo, Munhwa Broadcasting of America, and many others.

Streaming SF New Tech Live!

—–

While small-scale artisans like Luciano Barbera are going bankrupt sitting in Italy with crates of threads in their ‘spa for yarn’, barely legal Italians exports like Augusto Marietti are already here in the United States of America, pushing the limits of their big ideas in technology and innovation.

If you’ve been coming to our SFNewTech events frequently, you may remember Augusto from our March 17th (2010) event, when he demoed Mashape – a very simple Mashup Engine that helps you create web applications without any coding experience, and that too  in near real-time! Three weeks after they took stage, Mashape landed their First Angel Round of Funding.

We met up with Augusto at the July 20th SFNewTech event, and interviewed him for all our readers who may have missed the MaShape demo. We also found out what the Mashape crew is busy doing these days and what their near future looks like.

What is MaShape?

Augusto: MaShape – imagine something like balsamic mockups, but to create real applications (not mockups). We give tools to people to create real apps by assembling different parts of components and software in a drag and drop dashboard to create your own web application.

Mashape - Create Plug and Play Applications in Minutes!

So, it’s all web applications, not mobile apps?

Augusto: Not yet. We are still in private alpha, so we’re just rolling invites to developers who can create new components and new applications inside a platform.

If I have an idea for a Web site and I’ve created wire-frames with balsamic or mockflow, what do I do next with MaShape?

Augusto: In a couple of months, what you can do is go to MaShape and just assemble a component like a wireframe and then you just publish it and your application gives just an HTML code so that you can embed it on your blog and Web site. In addition to that, Mashape will give you a custom URL (web address) where your application is going to run.

If I design and publish it once, is it dynamic or static?

Augusto: It’s all dynamic. It’s not like HTML. It looks like a real application and a powerful one. You can take signups from people, log-ins from people. You can create a small Facebook type application if you want it!

Is it more like a service for creating Web sites without knowing anything about how to do Web sites?

Augusto: That Web site will run on mobile as well, because it’s just changing the HTML for iPhone and Android. We will go everywhere. Right now, it’s just for browser Web sites.

Where will the mashape app I create be hosted? Do I have to sign up for hosting?

Augusto: Everything you’re going to create is hosted on our server and our cloud computing for free. It’s completely free. Even the bandwidth is free.

What’s your business model? How do you make money or plan on making money?

Augusto: Once you start to get a lot of traffic, you start to pay us. If you are a developer, you want to bring in more components into the platform — I’m going to create a component and I’m going to put a price, like five bucks. If you want that component for your apps, you just pay five bucks to the developers and we take 20% of each transaction between the developer and the buyer.

Tell us a little bit about the company – Who you are, When you formed and what your current situation is.

Augusto: The company was founded in July 2009. We code in Italy in a garage, because we didn’t have any money to come here. When the product was already done, after 100,000 lines of code, we came here in February 2010 and we started looking for money.
We are in private alpha, so we started running our alpha in late March. In April we landed our first angel round funding from early YouTube and Paypal employees. We went back to Italy, got our visas and then we came back here again. I just came five days ago!

With that money, we plan on staying here for one year and improve the alpha based on the feedback and then release the beta so that we can develop this application in late 2010.

Awesome! Who are the Founders of MaShape?

Augusto: I’m Augusto Marietti. I’m kind of the Business Sniper. I don’t want to call myself the CEO, because that is too much for me. The other guy is Marco Palladino. He’s kind of the CTO, but we call him the Tech Mind. The front end developer is 28 years old Michele Zonca. He is – as we call him – a Java Rockstar. I’m 22.

The Mashapers - (Left to Right) Marco Palladino, Michele Zonca and Augusto Marietti

When is it possible for people to sign up and start using MaShape?

Augusto: It’s now possible if you are a developer. If you have tech skills, you want to code new components, you can do that. Just design it and you will get an alpha invite in a week or two. If you are more of a publisher side, a user side, you can sign up now and wait for an invite in late 2010.

You’re planning to launch sometime this fall?

Augusto: The beta launch will be in late 2010 — November or December.

Thank you and good luck.

Backstage at the July 20th 2010 SFNewTech, we asked DooChoo co-founders Paolo and Armanda what the TOP SECRET app advertised on doochoo.com was.

Armando started to smile, then Paolo stepped in and gave it up!

Your Web site says that the next application is TOP SECRET. Can you give the SFNewTech fans some hints?

Paolo: The next application that we are working on is Pick One and it’s a tool to organize your inner secret decision on everyday life. It’ll be ready in a few weeks.

About the TOP SECRET app, I can only say that they’re going to target two more niche markets where I don’t see competition yet, but there is a very big need!

Only one key word to define the main topic for that.

…and that keyword is….

HYPER LOOKUP!

After giving us the insider scoop on doochoo, co-founders Paolo and Armando told us how they plan on monetizing Doochoo in the near future.

What’s your business model? How do you guys make money or plan on making money?

Doochoo:We can monetize both the Doochoo platform and Doochoo applications separately. Each one of them counts with a different business model or layer — also depending on the time when we can start that.

Platform can be done in two different phases. In the beginning, we can offer a premium model for API. In the second phase, when we’ve already aggregated a lot of data, then we can also — we don’t sell data, but we can sell business intelligence tools on top of data to analyze data and use it for your business.

On the application side, each application can come with its own premium model plus advertisement, specific banners. Everything’s got to be semantic, so the application knows who is the user, which movies they like, what’s his passion, what’s everything he liked about Facebook. Companies can be ad-mob or video specific ad network.

When you say applications, are you referring to web applications or mobile apps?

Doochoo:Both, but primarily we are referring to mobile apps. I see mobile as definitely the market to go immediately.

Surfmark
Vivek Agrawal, CEO
Reclaim the web, one search at a time.  http://www.surfmark.net

FREE TACOS!!