Visual Shopping

Just got back from playing tennis with a guy who works in the peninsula at a startup named Like.com. Turns out the company allows users to shop via a new kind of visual search engine (called Riya). The search is personalized based on metadata as well as an actual vector-based image matching of an item (picture of an item, obviously) you like. Then, you click on that item (or you can even select a certain portion of the item you like), it finds all that look similar, and links to you to online shop to purchase the item. It's always quite interesting to see how the 'dotcoms' continue to manage to innovate on such simple concepts -- fashion magazines should love this!