StyleFeeder, a Cambridge, Massachusetts based personal shopping engine startup, is announcing its open API that lets developers create third-party applications, widgets and
even integrate all of StyleFeeder's key functionality into any
e-commerce website.
According to a recent release, StyleFeeder founder and CTO Philip Jacob had this to say:
"Essentially, we're
offering a potent set of personal and social online shopping tools to
developers -- the possibilities are endless."
StyleFeeder offers a Web 2.0 social and personalized shopping recommendation
engine. By learning about a user's likes and dislikes,
StyleFeeder helps them shop and discover new products they might just want to buy or share with others. StyleFeeder also has leveraged social media to offer a pretty solid fashion and style blog.
Are you a fashion trend setter? If so, you might want to check out Polyvore. Polyvore is a social fashion site where users can create arrange outfits or inspiration boards to share where you and others can potentially buy the included items. Polyvore enables users to drag and drop clothing items or snag items
from the Web to create new outfits which are then tied into various
shopping sites and could offer some interesting revenue sharing options. Launched in February 2007 and backed by Benchmark Capital,
Polyvore recently hit the one million outfit mark.
CuteCircuit thinks you need a hug as the company has created an innovative shirt called the Hug Shirt. Leveraging Bluetooth technology and SMS text messaging, the Hug Shirt lets you send a hug to your fellow hug shirt wearing friends via your mobile phone. Each hug you send is played back like a message. So if you tap on your left shoulder the receiver of the message will feel that tap wherever they receive the message.
Is window shopping your thing? If so, you might like what BrowseGoods has to offer as it recently launched a new way to shop online. Rather than searching directly for the items you are looking to buy, BrowseGoods allows you to casually browse for items.
BrowseGoods enables users to shop visually by browsing over a number of items in a handful of categories. BrowseGoods is not a visual search in the same sense as Like.com which actually returns search results based of an image. Instead, BrowseGoods incorporates an drag and drop interface, similar to any Ajax map product, which allows users to easily move across a number of items very quickly. If you find something you like you can save it for later, email it to a friend or buy it immediately from Amazon.com. The screen-shot below was taken as I browsed the men's shoe selection. The BrowseGoods experience may be something worth giving a try, especially if you don't quite know what you are looking to buy. For other perspectives check out Search Engine Journal, TechCrunch and Ajax Magazine.
innerTee, an Austin, Texas based
startup, came of out private beta this week to publicly launch a social network for custom t-shirt design
and creation. Community members can create their own custom
t-shirt from a selection of designer contributed artwork.
innerTee offers an interesting opportunity for designers that
contribute artwork to get paid for the usage of their contributed
artwork.
The interface used to create a tee shirt is simple to use and
is referred to as "mixing" a tee. Once you have mixed a garment to
your liking you can purchase it online. You can also share the design with
everyone in the community, embed it into a webpage or send it
along via email.
I created a quick design that can be accessed by the rest of the community to buy or re-mix (click the button below to see the design or look at the screen-shot above). Users can leave feedback in the form of comments under each design. Additionally, the site offers forums for designers, artists and t-shirt shoppers to further interact.
innerTee offers a place for t-shirt addicts to go creatively wild
taking the idea of community submitted garments, that Chicago-based Threadless has banked on for a few years, to the next level. For more information on innerTee check out the innerTee blog.
Bottom-line: innerTee is an interesting new social site for personalized garment creation that came out of private beta this week. I
like the fact that designers can contribute and profit from their
work within the community. My only real negative thought about innerTee is that the pricing seems
to be a little bit inflated. We will see if it
catches on and innerTee cashes in.
Like.com, a product created by Riya, launched today (November 8, 2006) to offer what appears to be the first visual image recognition search engine in a consumer facing application. The site offers the ability to search by photos to identify similar items. Like.com applies this functionality to shopping to help shoppers to find items like shoes, watches, and handbags. Like.com could really help the loads of celebrate crazed, "I gotta have one if they have one" types find just what they are looking for online. For example, take this photo below of Mike Arrington sporting a sweet watch at the ONA conference in Washington, DC. Soon, you will be able to use Like.com to be Mike.
On the Like.com site a highlighted area which contains an item, in the photo above a watch, returns similar watch search results. Currently, Like.com does not offer Mike Arrington photos for search though but you can search for items worn by other celebrities. Within the next month Like.com will let users submit photo uploads to apply the same type of technology.
How does Like.com do it? Like.com applies learnings from photo recognition site Riya to enable Like.com to converts each image into variables that map to contextual meta-data which is then used to perform the search to match shape, texture and a number of other characteristics.
TechCrunch recently provided more information and some videos here.
Bottom-line: Sounds pretty innovate, not to mention helpful in finding a similar watch as Mike Arrington.
Startup Mixology: Tech Cocktail's Guide To Building, Growing & Celebrating Startup Success by Frank Gruber
StyleFeeder, a Cambridge, Massachusetts based personal shopping engine startup, is announcing its open API that lets developers create third-party applications, widgets and
even integrate all of StyleFeeder's key functionality into any
e-commerce website.
