Spotlight: Like.com Invigorates Crowded Online Shopping Sector with Visual Search

Authored by Scott Goldberg on November 28, 2006 - 5:59am.

It takes guts to willingly join a market as crowded as the online shopping space, which Riya's offspring Like.com did at the beginning of November. Online shopping has exploded in 2006. According to Patti Freeman Evans, an analyst with JupiterResearch, online sales will reach $100 billion dollars this year for the first time, and will constitute 6% of total merchandise sales this holiday season. Riya co-founder and CEO Munjal Shah said he loves crowded spaces. "That's where the money is. That's why they're crowded."

But it's not quite as simple as slapping a site together and selling merchandise, as Shah knows. The concept must be good enough to separate the startup from the pack.

"It's what I call the 'Dragon-and-the-Gold Problem,'" said Shah. "Other entrepreneurs say, 'I'm not going after the gold on the mountain because there's a dragon there, and he's going to eat my lunch. I'm going to go over to the tin mountain.' Well the tin mountain sucks. Nobody's there. You've got to go for the gold mountain, but you don't want to go without an unfair advantage, because you will get eaten, so our focus has been on the technology. It allows us to go after the big markets even though they're fairly crowded."

Saying the online shopping space is fairly crowded, however, is like saying Bill Gates is fairly rich. There are currently so many choices for online goods that it's difficult to develop any loyalty to one site. But while some of the top tier sites like Shopping.com and Shopzilla.com offer interesting slants on the online shopping experience, no companies do it as innovatively as Like.

The technology offers the shopper the next level of visual search. Currently limited to watches, shoes, jewelry, and handbags, the user clicks on an item and has the option to manually draw a box over the part of the item he or she most enjoys. A text box then appears and asks the user to identify whether it is the shape, color, or both that he or she is looking for. Say, for instance, that you like the brown leather wristband of a particular watch, but don't care for the face. You can draw a box around the band and find other watches with similar bands. Or if you like the wrinkles on a pair of knee-high boots, you can box that specific part and find the other knee-high boots with wrinkles. Best and most important of all, it works.

"What we do is convert each picture into a mathematical vector of numbers," Shah explained. "We take each picture and convert it into what we call a 'visual signature,' which is a math equation. It takes 10,000 numbers to represent each picture. And when we compare two pictures, we're not actually comparing the pixels, we're comparing the mathematical representation. Like runs today on a thousand servers. In these visual signatures we encode all kinds of information. We encode the color histogram of the item; what colors, and what percentages, and what quadrants. We encode whether we think it's glossy or not. There are about 30 of these factors."

Shah, who has a graduate degree from Stanford's computer science program, is among good company at Riya. The team is comprised of eight PhDs and dozens of experienced engineers. But a fashion merchandise company cannot hope to succeed with a revolutionary technology alone. "About 65% of the purchasers on Zappos” – an enormous shoe site that Like refers users to – “are women," said Shah. "So you want to make sure the shopping experience is optimized for the people who do it." He recruited Beth Kirsch as the Marketing Director and Jacquie Phillips as the Chief Fashion Educator to give Like.com the look of a cutting edge fashion site. "So what I've learned," he said, "is that the site is what men think girls want versus what girls actually want, which is the story of my life. So we're going to tweak it more with the help of Beth and her team."

The company will also continue to develop the technology. In the few weeks since its release, improvements have already been made. The local search feature, for example, where the user draws a box around a specific part of the item, is not yet to Shah's standard. "That part isn't working well today because we rolled out a version that was a couple months old on our research timeline," he said. "And the new version is a lot more powerful and you should see a lot of improvement. But it took a lot of memory and a lot more computing power, and it was taking too long. It was way more accurate, but it took 2 minutes! And now we've got it down to about 2 seconds. That's still longer than the 1 second we'd like, but it's a lot more accurate. So you're going to see improvements week after week."

The Future of Visual Search

Shah is candid about his company's place in the visual search evolution. Visual search, as he sees it, has lacked innovation. He believes the company's technology is ahead of competitors like Google and Yahoo. "With Google images and Yahoo images, that product hasn't changed for 5 years or more. Since that product's launch we've seen no major innovation."

As for shopping comparison engines like Shopzilla, or Shopwiki, a site that crawls the web for products and that features user-created buying guides, he says, "I consider those sites not going from Shopping 1.0 to 2.0, but more like Shopping 1.0 to 1.1."

Like.com currently uploads its own images (approximately 30,000 per day, according to Shah), but the company is developing a program where users will be able to submit their own photos for a Like search. "It'll ask you to draw a box around which part of the photo you want us to focus on," he said. "And then it will run the search and show you the things that look similar. And it may even ask you for a keyword. It'll also probably come with instructions. It'll say, 'When you take a picture of a shirt make sure you lay it flat.'"

The variety of product offerings will also improve. The site is currently in its alpha phase, and Shah believes it was important to start small and develop the technology, as well as a strong user base.

Munjal Shah and the Entrepreneurial Spirit

Shah epitomizes the entrepreneur, and he's been around the block enough to know the good and the bad that come with a startup. The entrepreneurial drive was in his blood at an early age. "It's kind of corny," he said, "but you can actually ask my 6th grade computer science teacher Mrs. Lundgren and she will tell you I told her I was going to start a company. I didn't know what experience you needed. There's not a career path to becoming an entrepreneur. It's not as well defined as becoming a lawyer. So the early part of my career was just about gathering lots of different experiences, just trying to gather enough skills to the point that I was willing to take the plunge."

He worked full time for a pharmaceutical company as an undergrad at UCSD, then worked for IBM while they paid for his graduate degree at Stanford. In 1999 he started Andale, an eBay auction management company. "I took the plunge in '99 thinking I had enough skills," he said, "and to be honest, looking back, man, I didn't. I thought I was ready but I wasn't. I mean being a CEO at 26 of a company that raises $60 million was frightening. And so I just learned and learned and figured it out. And I probably wasn't a very good CEO in the early days."

But he was good enough to build a profitable product and see the eventual sale of Andale to online auction management company Vendio. He now discusses some of his experiences on his blog Recognizing Deven, named after his son, as well as personal aspects of the entrepreneurial lifestyle.

Balancing the 24/7 schedule of a startup with his young family, for one, is something he knows well. "For me there are many things I've done that fundamentally bring those two parts together," he said. "First thing is that I don't really hang out with my buddies, I just hang out with Deven every spare minute I get. And that's okay to me. As long as my son is my friend I'm happy. And with my wife, Vijay actually co-founded my last company with me, so she's been with me in a startup and that's made my life a lot easier. It's important that you have a spouse who is supportive of your startup rather than regretting that you did it, and mine has always been supportive."

Shah's blog is also vocal about hot button issues of the day. A commentary on the well-circulated "Peanut Butter Memo" from Yahoo SVP Brad Garlinghouse, which called for overhauls of the company structure to increase efficiency, is Shah's most recent blog addition. "It took a lot of strength for Brad to do what he did," said Shah. "And frankly, like most people, I want Yahoo to do better. Because right now it feels like Google is winning everything. And in my own selfish interest, it's not in my interest to have Google win everything. It's in the interest of all startups to have an equally strong Google and Yahoo. So I'm just glad somebody is saying something, and that he really had the strength to show the leadership to do it. I know he's gotten a lot of criticism for it, but I don't think there's a lot of people who were like, 'Man, he's totally wrong, Yahoo is doing great.'"

You get the sense when talking to Shah that he is ten moves ahead in his thinking. He discusses his company with the lucidity of a person who already knows the venture will succeed. Online shopping competitors will undoubtedly be watching closely.

Scott Goldberg

Related Links:
www.like.com
www.shopping.com
www.shopzilla.com
Recognizing Deven
http://blog.like.com

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Comments

Like.com, is this guy kidding?

Submitted by Agnot Dewho (not verified) on December 1, 2006 - 12:45pm.

So let me get this right, this guy takes probably copyrighted pictures of who knows what that are wearing watches, shoes, jewelry and handbags for someone to buy in one of these categories. Yeah, righ,really imaginative and advanced, instead of having on his site "SEARCH WATCHES,SHOES,JEWELRY AND HANDBAGS," in so and so price range he claims he is better than shoping 101 because he shows pictures of these items. As I said possibly using copyrighted pictures that he is not paying rights for???? Oh big deal, let's put his site on YOUTUBE under the comedy section, because IT AINT GOING TO COMPETE WITH THE DRAGONS as he puts it if it remains anything like this.