A little tidbit I picked up from a fellow at Riya. They will be announcing Riya 2.0 in the next few days which will take their face-recognition know how and apply to finding similar things when out shopping. He pointed to the rather ornate carpet on which we were standing and said that Riya would be able to recognize the pattern and find matching objects that have similar patterns. Apply this to things you see in the store and you have a nice little comparison shopping device.
I asked if I could blog about it and he said that it’s already being written about by one of the founders so no beans are being spilled:
Riya 2.0 would help most in hard to describe items for which searching inside photos was most important. Objects that had this property tended to be soft goods like clothing, jewelry, handbags, shoes, home and garden, etc. Looking at Hitwise we realized that while there were $15-$30B worth of these items sold on the Web, almost 65% of the buyers for these items were women.
We knew we need to reach more women. We would talk to the fashion bloggers who were had the largest audience online, but in addition, I wanted to talk to the traditional fashion magazines like Instyle, People, Lucky, Jane, etc. Millions of women each day read their articles. The reporters at these magazines were not reading Techcrunch or my blog and had never heard of Riya.
Use case: You spot a kitchen appliance you like at the local Williams-Sonoma. Take a photo of it with your camera phone and search for the same product online or from other retailers. For more on the impact of such a device, see John Battelle’s post, The Transparent (shopping) Society.
Just in time for Christmas. Tie that into the Jellyfish Smack reverse auction and you really have something!
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