Stefan Arentz

Looking back at a year of too much code and traveling, here are some things worth mentioning about Polar Rose.

Like most startups we struggled a while to figure out our mission, vision and product roadmap. After a couple of interesting attempts we settled on being an application platform. Through the web site, firefox extension and public web services that we are currently implementing. I really hope to see some interesting applications and mashups that use our platform to appear in 2008.

A pretty solid team was established in Warsaw (Java, Web, Web Services, Data Mining) and the team in Malmö (Computer Vision, Design, HTML/CSS, Management) also grew a bit. All together we’ve accomplished a lot, even though we’re still a pretty small company with limited engineering resources. See the jobs page.

We’re still running a mostly closed beta of our software but we opened up the site much more since going live. It’s still too early too go fully public, but I guess that is what new years resolutions are for.

Privacy concerns regarding facial recognition were raised but unfortunately most of the discussion faded out pretty quickly. I personally had hoped for much more to come out of that. Hopefully that will happen when we are further along with the code to match faces that are unnamed.

On the technology side of things we made major improvements on all fronts. We succesfully moved the web site from Ruby on Rails to a Jetty/Spring/Stripes solution, we re-implemented our Firefox extension in-house with a complete redesign, we made our face recognition code magnitudes faster, we moved our storage to Amazon’s S3, we implemented web services to allow 3d party applications to interface to our technology and we started an effort to scale up the image processing with the intent to deal with a much larger volume of images to process.

The web team has also done some amazing work to make the Polar Rose web site look really great. I’m still surprised by the elegance of the design and subtle AJAX tricks that we use to improve the user experience.

We also received a bunch of interesting awards in 2007. The award for Best Technical Innovation at SIME’07. We’re a World Economic Forum Technology Pioneers. And last but not least, the Red Herring 100 Global Award.

Stay tuned for more updates in 2008! Happy new year and be careful with those fireworks.