Visual search and image recognition is one of the holy grails of consumer Internet technologies. Picitup is jumping into the deep end of this space by announcing the launch of its public beta.
Unlike Like.com (formerly Riya) which focuses on likeness, Picitup focuses on attaining matching images. This differentiation is important as it sets the company on a completely different trajectory in terms of both offering quantifiable value to users, as well as delivering a business model at the end of the day.
An image search on Picitup beings with a textual search actually queried on Google or Yahoo. Picitup will display a set of results only from one of the two—the basis of the decision is the speed and quality of the results. The user can then select which image Picitup should fetch similar images for, or filter the results by Faces, Products, Landscapes and Color. The analysis is made in real time and is based on 100+ parameters including a propriety color space the company developed.
Erick recently wrote that:
It’s hard to compete in the search engine market, but one approach taken by several startups is to sit on top of the big search engines and try to improve their results or interface. Why reinvent the wheel when you can simply add new spokes?
From a practicality point-of-view, relying on the likes of Google and Yahoo makes sense, but it should be noted that they forbid the reordering of their results, a sticking point that surely has a negative effect on the quality of results Picitup ultimately delivers.
Picitup claims it shortens the number of pages needed for an image search from 10 to 2. However, from my experimentation its engine’s match reliability was shaky. Results were pretty good for Ford Focus, but not even close for this Running Shoe. Note that all images should theoretically correspond to the top left-hand image.
Another issue that left a sour taste in my mouth was CelebrityMatchUp, an attempt to add some light-hearted fun to the beta interface. The idea here is that users upload photos of individuals and have Picitup produce results of people they resemble. This doesn’t exactly work. For instance, consider that Michael Arrington’s photo brought back results that he resembles both Barack Obama and John McCain. Huh?
Erick Schonfeld’s photo results are also somewhat curious, although the bright side is that Erick’s wife should be delighted to know she married a Kevin Costner look-alike. For a company claiming its forté is in image matching, Picitup should not have opened this door.
Alon Atsmon, co-founder & CEO, believes the company’s technology is compelling enough to drive revenue both from ads and through licensing a white label version of the engine for integration into ecommerce sites.
True, my initial impressions of Picitup are not necessarily positive ones. However, considering Atsmon is a serial entrepreneur I’ll remain optimistic and wait for Picitup to iterate a couple of more times before I cement my judgment.
This post was originally posted on TechCrunch.com where I cover the Israeli startup scene.
Many of us think we know what’s going to happen to the stock market. Few of us actually do. MarketGuru enables the more talented investors to reap the benefits of their predictive capacities and help others along the way.
While many social investment sites rank members almost entirely on their portfolio yields, the MarketGuru experience centers on trust. Your goal is to establish yourself as a “guru” - a member that other investors will turn to for advice. Gurus post their trade activity and motivations, which are then relayed to their followers through email. These followers can pay a premium of $30 per month to have messages from a maximum of three gurus delivered to them so they can execute their own transactions under similar market conditions.
The site currently offers no options for actual trading - instead, everything is carried out in a self-reported portfolio. MarketGuru hopes to implement real trading at some point in the future but it is still a long ways off.
Gurus are paid $5 per month for each follower they have, providing an incentive for them to attract and take care of their supporters. This meager bonus seems pretty lousy when compared to the vast sums of money that stand to be lost or gained on the market. I suspect that a few all-star gurus who collect hundreds of followers will do quite well for themselves, but most people will be left with just some additional pocket change.
MarketGuru’s concept has promise but the site is entering a space with a number competitors who provide very similar offerings. These include Covestor, CakeFinancial, SocialPicks, and Mint, which has just introducing investment tracking. That said, the social investment space can certainly support more than a few competitors, so MarketGuru has a fighting chance (especially with people who don’t actually want to play with real money).
This post was originally posted on TechCrunch.com where I cover the Israeli startup scene.
Part III of DH Consulting’s business plan series is now available.
In this installment, Doron discusses what topics should be covered under the Market Analysis section of the business plan.
Quick update on the Meetup being organized by DH Consulting… The panel of experts has been finalized–here it is:
- Doron Habshush – Group leader and CEO of DHConsulting
- Joeri Kreisberg, ADV. Yigal Arnon & Co.
- Ron Porat, Hacktics CEO. Security Panelist
- Roi Carthy - Internet Investment Principal, L Capital Partners
- Technology panelist, Shlomy Gantz, BlueBrick Inc CEO
- Financial panelist, Tal S. Karmon- KarmonTax CEO
For more info, go here.
Hey all you iPhone owners… Looks like an iPhone consumer network is launching… Check out: TheBlackApp.com
The ease of comparing prices on the Internet has done a lot to do away with major price differences between individual items at retailers, whether online or off. But where they still get you is when you buy many items from the same store and you throw in the high-margin coffee with the cut-rate shampoo. Higher-priced single items, such as a digital camera or an MP3 player, lend themselves more to online research. Finding the best deal is just a matter of selecting your preferred comparison shopping site (Shopping.com, mySimon, etc.). But what happens when you want to compare an entire cart of groceries across several merchants? Put simply, you are out of luck. Unless of course you happen to be living in the UK and making good use of mySupermarket.
mySupermarket, which has been around since 2006, claims to be the first comparison service that allows users to compare a cart of multiple items across retailers—in its case, groceries, across British supermarket chains Tesco, Sainsbury’s Ocado & ASDA.
It can compare not only identical items (a one-liter bottle of Coke), but also similar non-identical items, such one-liter bottles of mineral water from two separate brands. To accomplish this, mySupermarket classified 100,000 grocery products sold online in the UK according to multiple criteria and sub-criteria. The rules, weightings and relationships between different sub-criteria are incorporated into the company’s algorithms.
Up-to-date pricing is achieved using a combination of proprietary crawlers and manual validation processes to access real time prices from the supermarkets’ own sites. MySupermarket marries those prices with its own image database. It obtains products from the manufacturers and retailers and then uses in-house image production combined with post-processing facilities in Thailand.
The company claims an average online grocery cart includes approximately 50 items, with a total cost of 80-110 English pounds ($160-$220). By finding savings for consumers that average 20 percent per cart, and consumers accepting about half those recommendations, the actual savings average around 10 pounds ($20) per cart.
The way mySupermarket works is that users login to mySupermarket and fill-up a “trolley” (British for “shopping cart”). They are then presented with three types of recommendations:
- Potential savings from switching the entire cart to another supermarket.
- Potential savings from swapping items in the cart to alternatives from within the same supermarket.
- Health conscious recommendations (calories, saturates, fat, salt, sugar) for swapping items to healthier alternatives.
The final step—payment—is actually performed on the desired supermarket’s own payment page. It should be noted that the service is absolutely free to consumers.
So where does mySupermarket derive its revenue from? Two sources: The first, targeted advertising based on the cart’s contents.
The second, a data service provided to the retailers and merchants which includes price listings, inventory listings (by zipcode), as well as comparison and analysis of products sold within the UK grocery sector. These days mySupermarket is focusing on expanding its UK business, as well as adding features, ad/promotion services and data reporting capabilities.
They are also considering requests to license their technology for non-grocery multi-item comparison shopping.
Head over to DH Consulting for Part II of the series outlining the process of writing an effective business plan.
In Part II, Doron discusses what an investor expects to learn about the product/service after having read through the business plan.
Start-up consultant, Doron Habshush, is launching a new Meetup next month. The gathering is aimed at entrepreneurs seeking the input and feedback of industry experts.
More info here.
My friend Doron Habshush over at DH Consulting has set-out on a series of posts outlining the process of writing a business plan. It’s a good read so go check it out:
One of the key ingredients to success on the Web is rapid iteration, and to do so, eliciting user feedback is a must. As we know, TechCrunch is a breeding ground for avid beta testers keen to provide input and suggestions. Yet, more often than not, when we do offer feedback to a site all we receive in return is an auto-reply, thank-you email. When was the last time you submitted feedback to a site that was then followed up with an actual acknowledgment that the bug was fixed or the feature integrated? My guess, not very often.Kampyle—yet another Yossi Vardi startup from Israel—has developed a feedback management platform aimed at assisting site owners better manage this feedback loop and, along the way, increase customer loyalty and satisfaction. The underlying premise here being that users expect not only to be heard, but also responded to. This is especially true when providing feedback on services, products or customer experiences. Sites that manage their feedback right end up with deeper customer engagement, lower shopping cart abandonment, and better usability.
There are four moving parts in Kampyle’s feedback analysis platform:
1. Collection: A feedback collection form (see screenshot on right) is launched through
buttons scattered across a site. Kampyle will roll out advanced customization options throughout the coming weeks.
2. Analysis: Kampyle provides user feedback along with contextual data such as screen resolution, browser type, operating system, etc. Slicing and grouping functionality delivers a greater understanding of why an issue occurred, which ultimately translates into what to do about it.
3. Management: Data and suggested corrective actions are arranged in intuitive dashboards. Data is exportable to XML & Excel. Nothing much to write home about here.
4. Action: CRM-like functionality completes the feedback loop by allowing site owners to inform groups and individual users of the corrective action they have taken. The notification even includes a link to where the fix was made and offers a thumbs-up/down rating to further express satisfaction.
All-in-all a wide variety of companies can benefit from a service such as Kampyle’s, which is bridging the gap between CRM and site-side analytics. Extending the CRM functionality to piggyback on full-blown CRM platforms such as SalesForce, SugarCRM, and even Zoho would go a long way in popularizing the service.
Kamplye is still in closed beta so pricing is yet to be established, but once the service is commercially available 250 TechCrunch readers will get their first month free. Sign-up here to get on the list.
This post was originally posted on TechCrunch.com where I cover the Israeli startup scene.
