The Firewatching Media Blog

Firewatching Media is a startup in Tokyo that provides hosted and custom software solutions to advertisers, agencies and ad networks.

We focus on making the complexities of marketing across multiple advertising channels easier to manage and simplifying the entire process on a large scale.

Our main product is the Ginza Digital Marketing Center, a hosted application that clients use to manage campaigns anywhere in the world.

We're a small, young company but making great progress. Current clients include some of the largest ecommerce companies in Japan as well as several agencies.

A brief description of the type of engineers we'd like to hire:

Web & Mobile Developer (somewhat client / UI focused)

Software Engineer (somewhat more systems-focused)

(Bonus points to people with enough experience to work in both types of roles above.)

Basic requirements:

Smart, resourceful individuals who have a passion for technology and using technology to disrupt and transform inefficient industries. Because we focus on marketing, familiarity with marketing concepts, CRM, search engine marketing, etc. is a plus but not required.

Strong curiosity and deep knowledge of the web and mobile web, including its major protocols, design philosophy and technologies is a must. We look favorably on candidates with an established and respected presence on sites like HackerNews and GitHub.

From a technology perspective, we have a number of technologies that we work with but don't require the candidate to have experience with the  exact platforms we use. However, the ability to quickly learn new languages and systems (eg. in under a week) is critical.

The number one requirement is the ability to self-learn and quickly get up to speed and contribute intellectually and technically in a fast-paced environment. We practice self-organizing, agile development using very short release cycles.

Specific requirements:

Experience in several programming languages (no less than 4 years in production systems.) Experience with dynamic and / or functional languages is also a plus. (We use Python mostly but experience or experimentation in other languages such as Erlang or Haskell shows the right kind of  curiosity and intelligence.)

Strong understanding and experience with relational database systems and data modeling / querying. Experience in developing database architectures for (real-time or otherwise) analytics and business intelligence is a serious plus. Also, experience with key-value / document-oriented ("NoSQL") systems like MongoDB or Redis is great. Experience in modeling and using HBase / HDFS in production systems would be super-attractive.

Capable of working with (X)HTML / CSS and values web standards. Strong Javascript skills is a definite plus with an interest in  developing cross-device, highly optimized, fast UIs without using Flash.

Experience designing and developing REST APIs with the right level of attention paid to usability, security and performance.

Experience with Amazon Web Services (S3, EC2) (Experience with Hadoop and additional systems such as Hive are very attractive.)

iPhone or other mobile app development skills is a major plus, as is mobile site creation experience. Familiarity with the differences of each of the Japanese mobile carriers from a technology perspective.

Comfortable enough working in Linux that you can build and administer servers (not part of the daily workflow but we wear many hats at times), compile software, etc. We use Macs as our primary development machines and all engineers are issued a MacBook Pro unless they really prefer to develop on a PC with Linux (self-supported in that case).

Experience with SVN or Git in a team environment.

It's not essential that you speak / read Japanese but it will definitely help. Local candidates only please. (We can talk if you live somewhere else in Japan but we don't provide relocation assistance.)

Our current technology stack:

• Python runs all of our backend systems, web crawlers, etc.
• PHP (Code Igniter for the UI framework, will be gradually moving to Python for UI services)
• Javascript (JQuery)
• Amazon Web Services (S3 / EC2),
• Hadoop
• SVN / Git
• MySQL

If you'd like to learn more, email us at jobs@firewatchingmedia.com. Please send us your LinkedIn profile and / or resume in PDF or text (no Word) format. 

Last week, I heard from one of my ex-colleagues that one of my agency
counterparts in charge of paid search, lost her health after working
too hard.

Although I feel sympathy and wish her to become well again soon, I
also feel that this is nothing new and something that has been going
on for quite some time in Japan.

Why? Pretty much every operation related to paid search is manually
processed within agencies. From keyword generation, creative
management, reporting and most of all, bid management. Agencies have
support centers in Kyushu area, where they can hire people for lower
wages and they manage remotely. Some of them even have people
monitoring bids 24-7.

I've always felt contradiction to the agency executives on how they
think about all these. Why aren't they investing in technology when
they know that ad operation is already collapsing? They're losing
people every year and if you know the paid search business, it's all
about skills and experience of the people who are managing the
campaigns.

It may be that they simply do not understand technology and how to
apply to their business. This is where we come in and I'm confident
that there's plenty of opportunities. However, C-level buy-in to
technology utilization is essential. I sincerely hope that things will
change so that people in the industry have better work environment and
vision for exciting future in digital marketing ahead.

Go and I will be speaking at Mobile Daigaku this Tuesday at 20:00 on two subjects.

First, I will be covering the recent Adobe-Omniture acquisition and analyze the phrase repeated by quite a few people that "Marketing is the New Finance."

I happen to disagree with some of the assumptions underlying this concept. I also think that the Japanese market, with all of its differences from the Western market, may provide some clues for advertisers as to how to gain a competitive advantage while everyone is looking in the other direction.

Go will be covering some of the major trends discussed at SES San Jose in August and analyze what is becoming an important evolution in the state of online marketing, specifically around cross-channel media optimization and attribution modeling.

If you'd like to join, here are the details (in Japanese):

米国発のデータドリブンビジネスの現況および検索エンジン業界の最新動向

It's been years (well, a year) since I've done any sort of blogging as Twitter and Facebook have pretty much replaced that part of my day, but Firewatching Media as a company is starting to grow at a rapid clip and I often have thoughts that take up more room than 160 characters.

Additionally, as far as I can tell, blogs are still the best way for startups to grow and provide value to their community, so this will give me a place to reach out and interact more effectively.

This will be the English version of our blog, linked from firewatchingmedia.com (which is itself currently in Japanese, but that will be changing soon.) We will have a dedicated domain for the Japanese version of the Firewatching Media (FWM) site, and an accompanying blog in Japanese, written mostly by my partner, Go Sugihara.

So, as this is our first official post, let me provide a brief introduction. I've been running FWM for the last two years, almost exclusively in Japan. I spent much of last year doing a lot of early business development, meeting customers, making friends, etc. because we also just moved here from San Diego two years ago in February and I hardly knew anybody.

Late last year, I started building a product called the Ginza Digital Marketing Center. We're still operating a little under the radar, but I will begin releasing details gradually as more and more features become available to the public.

Ginza is based on many of the ideas that I've developed through my encounters with large advertisers and agencies here in Tokyo. One of the first things I realized was that the Japanese advertising industry is radically different from the US and there were very few technology solutions that really met the needs here. I also realized that there were some things that American companies may be missing in their own markets as a result of the perspective I gained here, so I also see an opportunity for a global solution. And so Ginza was born.

To be honest, it has been difficult to do all of this by myself, but I think I've made decent progress. I came to the conclusion, however, that I didn't want to keep being a solo founder so I began to look around for a talented and passionate individual to join me. Fortunately, in very short time, and through a variety of quite unexpected events, Go Sugihara joined FWM as a director and COO. Go is probably one of the most experienced people in digital marketing in Japan. He was with Overture (Yahoo Japan) in the early days and then spent the last few years at Google Japan doing AdWords and YouTube sales.

We make a good team; I'm an engineer and he's a sales guy. While he's not an engineer, he really gets technology. In particular, he has almost unmatched experience with both the AdWords API and Yahoo Japan's Search Marketing APIs, as a former evangelist for both platforms.

So, that's our brief introduction. I'm going to try to post regularly here, and I'd be honored if you subscribed.

Also, if you're a talented and passionate engineer and you live in Tokyo, drop me a line (ray@firewatchingmedia.com). We're hiring. :-)