Last week in class we discussed changes in e-commerce and how many online retailers are trying to mitigate the risk of buying online by improving customer service and offering a more sophisticated shopping experience. I have a minor (well, maybe major) online shopping problem and was intrigued by an article I read on VentureBeat about a company called Like.com. Like.com is a visual shopping engine and owns several other shopping related websites. For example, weardrobe.com is a social platform that enables users to shop cool “street wear” outfits and they recently launched Couturious.com. Many people expect “Web 3.0” to make the transition from flat websites to a more 3-D, realistic world. Couturious appears to be ahead of the trend with a focus on 3-D photo-realistic styling and helping users figure out how to, not what, to wear.
VentureBear provides a good summary of the sites functionality: “You pick a photo of a model (you can choose from a variety of races and body types) and then style the model accordingly with clothes from over 100 different brands. Like.com’s computer vision technology allows your to dress a fairly realistic model and actually style them. So you can tuck pants into boots, adjust the folding of a scarf or have the model wear the shirt with top few buttons open. And you can purchase any of the items that are styled and share your styles to Facebook and Twitter.”
Because of my aforementioned shopping problem and a blog-writing block, I played around on the site for a while and was impressed by the functionality for the most part. The avatars still look a bit cheesy but creating an outfit with several lines I fun and it was easy to shop the different products. It will be interesting to follow the site as the carry more products and generate more user (i.e. stylist”) traffic.
http://techcrunch.com/2010/02/23/like-com-expands-digital-fashion-empire-with-virtual-styling-tool-couturious/
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