 An Interesting Future Glimpse – Like.com
By Ross Lasley
In your web travels you may have come across a challenge response form when setting up a new account or asking for information – typically the site shows you a picture of a few numbers and asks that you type them in. This confirms that you are a “real” person and it points out one of the things that computers generally are lousy at doing – visual recognition.
A new search engine - www.like.com – has launched recently. This engine was developed by the folks at Riya and has some real visual recognition technology under the hood. These people are veterans of things like the facial visual recognition systems being used by security agencies worldwide these days.
This visual search engine is the first of it's kind but it is quite obviously the tip of the iceberg – and the long term impact on how we'll search for things on line can't be understated.
The way like.com works now is pretty simple – they only have four types of products at this time: Jewelry, Handbags, Shoes, and Watches.
The main page of the site shows you the three ways you can search – text searching, browse by type, or browse by celebrity. This last possibility seems to be the most popular - recent images from the news showing celebrities with boxes around what they are wearing (a watch, a shoe, a handbag, jewelry) – click it and you'll be presented with a list of places to buy the item.
After the initial list of items, though, is where the real visual recognition technology gets a chance to show what it can do. The featured item is in a box on the upper left, and the system allows you to draw a box around the part of the item that most interests you – the heel of a shoe, the buckle on a handbag, or the band on a watch, for instance.
The system then asks if it should focus on color, shape, or both – and the results offer three sliders to further enhance your results (color, shape, and pattern). You can drill down in a specific price range, also, by a particular brand or by color.
This allows you to search for things in new and interesting ways – if what you like about that shoe are the laces, you can search for items that have the same lace configuration. Beyond the reality that text descriptions rarely agree on things like buckle shape, this really presents an ability to do something new and different when searching.
It isn't hard to imagine the possibilities of being able to search for “like” items by visual recognition alone – they plan to have a feature allowing you to upload your own photos and search e-commerce databases by visual recognition. There are many areas where product descriptions and text are just not well suited to the task – from architectural house elements to anything artsy – the options are a bit mind boggling.
This is just one way in which we can see that for all of the technology and traditions developed, e-commerce is still just beginning. We don't know how visual search will impact your slice of the e-commerce world, but you can be sure that it will.
 What's New at KISS Computing
By Michael McGrath
KISS is pleased to introduce two new web sites launched during December, and welcome them to our family of on-line clients.
Tom McCarthy is a Vietnam Veteran and a former Secret Service Agent whose details included both Presidential Vice-Presidential assignments. Presently, he serves as a consultant to the U.S. State Department, for whom he conducts training seminars overseas in the areas of terrorism and safety of at-risk persons. Domestically, he makes himself available for training seminars on pro-active measures in the same subject areas. His new site, www.mccarthyspeaking.com will be serving as his on-line brochure and booking agent for speaking engagements within the U.S. Tom is a good fellow, and the real deal, and KISS will be helping him promote that site with SEO efforts over the first half of 2007 to pick up new speaking engagements.
Shepley Wood Products, on Cape Cod, Massachusetts, is the region's premier wood products supply company, the local contractors' greatest resource. KISS is pleased to have been able to give their old site a new face and some new features in the launch of www.shepleywood.com. Among the features that will be enhanced over the first few months of the new year are a virtual photographic tour of its Andersen and Marvin Showrooms, and an on-line product catalog. As the local contractors know, Shepley's site also includes access to their web-based system for product ordering, delivery status updates and pricing modules, and the new site provides a new gateway to that on-line system. KISS has been asked to remain as a Shepley resource for the new year to assist in new site features development and in SEO assistance and consulting. We wish the best for Shepley Wood Products and their new site, scheduled to launch on Friday, December 29.
It's been a busy time for KISS, and the new year shows no let up, as we are expecting perhaps as many as five new site launches in January, alone. We wish all of our new and most recent launches great success in the new year. |
