Explore instead of search

One of the people I enjoyed hanging out with in Paris last month at Le Web was Steve Dukes from Pixsta. We met first during the sponsors/speakers dinner on Sunday night and crossed paths on a couple occasions during the event. Pixsta is a UK based company that let’s you browse and search visually.

“pixsta software reaches beyond the current text-based approach to search by automatically extracting visual content from images. we can organize large image collections into hyperlinked networks of visual similarity, so that users can browse the network to find images that come close to what they want, and also spark off new searches.”

Steve wasn’t able to show me that much of the technology in Paris but recently they’ve launched Elle’s browse&buy as well as Explore on Net-a-porter.com. I especially enjoyed the experience on Explore because the navigation is better, although the technology is the same. I can imagine that people will like this, it allows you to ‘browse’ clothes not thinking about the categories. Well done Steve.