• Google To Enter Fashion Shopping Territory With Launch Of Boutiques.com?

    Monday, November 15th, 2010

    Robin Wauters is the European Editor of tech blog The Next Web and lead editor of Virtualization.com. He was a senior staff writer at TechCrunch until his departure in February 2012. Aside from his professional blogging activities, he’s an entrepreneur, event organizer, occasional board adviser and angel investor but most importantly an all-round startup champion. Wauters lives and works in... → Learn More

    Fashion bloggers are busily spreading the news that many of them have received an invitation from Google to attend an event in New York City next Wednesday evening. ‘High Tech Fuses With High Fashion’, the invitation reads.

    The invitation doesn’t include any other clues as to what the event is all about, but journalist and “fashionalyst” Patty Huntington this morning pointed out that a tweet from an anonymous NY fashion PR revealed part of what’s coming late last week.

    The tweet read: “Breaking news: google is launching an ecommerce site with shop in shops by major designers #google #theyrgonnabepissed #geturshopon”.

    According to Huntington, Google will be entering the online fashion retail arena, helped by the technology and know-how it gained with the acquisition of visual search technology company Like.com last August.

    Huntington adds that the fashion ecommerce site will be called Boutiques.com (the domain name is owned by Like.com but the website is password-protected):

    Well frockwriter can fill in a few blanks. Our sources say that the new Google fashion initiative is called Boutiques.com and boasts not only online boutiques selling merchandise offered by various designers and retailers, but a large number of curated “boutiques” selling the looks worn by celebrities and other influencers.

    This is line with earlier reports (WSJ) that Google is poised to upgrade its shopping site Google Product Search (once called Froogle) to compete more fiercely with the likes of Amazon and eBay.

    Update: Google Product Search just got a major revamp.

    If the rumors check out, the launch of a fashion-specific comparison shopping site pits Google squarely against eBay first and foremost.

    The latter has steadily been ramping up its fashion offerings lately: the company released an iPhone app for the vertical, a one-stop-shop for all things fashion on its marketplace dubbed eBay Fashion and a flash sales site that sells designer clothes at discounted prices called FashionVault. eBay also launched a site that showcases street style of eBay shoppers, called LookBook.

    Undoubtedly, we’ll learn more about Google’s fashionable plans next Wednesday.

    (Via Gizmodo)

    Company: Google
    Website: google.com
    Launch Date: September 7, 1998
    IPO: NASDAQ:GOOG

    Google provides search and advertising services, which together aim to organize and monetize the world’s information. In addition to its dominant search engine, it offers a plethora of online tools and platforms including: Gmail, Maps, YouTube, and Google+, the company’s extension into the social space. Most of its Web-based products are free, funded by Google’s highly integrated online advertising platforms AdWords and AdSense. Google promotes the idea that advertising should be highly targeted and relevant to users thus providing...

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    Company: Like.com
    Website: like.com
    Launch Date: 2004
    Funding: $47.3M

    Unlike most other image search engines (including Google image search), like.com indexes images based on more than simple metadata and tags. Using Riya’s image recognition technology, like.com can search through a library of products and find ones similar to the look of any selected product. Users can shop for shoes, bags, watches, jewelry, clothes and much more without even typing in search terms if they choose. For image search queries Like.com matches users’ searches with similar or identical objects by...

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