May 02 2008
Pixsta makes plans to be Google for images
Image search engine Pixsta is to take on Google with an image-based online advertising network, and it’s already in profit
What happens if you get to Google and you can’t think of the name for the thing you want but you do know what it looks like? Well that’s where visual search engine Pixsta comes in.
London business, Pixsta is set to offer a new challenge to Google's dominance of search, in the form of the most sophisticated and accurate image search engine in the world.
Based on cutting-edge academic research into contextual image retrieval techniques, Pixsta enables image-to-image search - unlike the text-to-text or text-to-image capabilities of search engines currently in widespread use.
From a random starting point, users click on an image of an item of clothing, shoes or jewellery to return further images of items that are similar by colour, shape or texture. Clicking on any of the displayed items re-submits that item as the search term.
When the user ‘discovers' the item that they want to purchase, they click through not just to the retailer's home page but directly to the product landing page to purchase their chosen item.
Which sounds great, but more encouragingly Pixsta also revealed today that it has successfully monetised its patent-pending technology. To refine the platform and prove the business model, it has over the past 18 months developed a revenue-generating advertising network for the online fashion retail market.
Pixsta already has live deployments in place with media partners including Handbag.com, ElleUK and the News of The World's Fabulous Magazine and advertising partners including Monsoon, OASIS and Dorothy Perkins.
The advertising system is similar to Google's adwords model, but based wholly on images rather than text.
The near-universal applicability of the Pixsta AdImage platform means it has the potential to radically redefine the entire online advertising model, wherever the product or service being advertised has a visual element:
For the advertiser, customer acquisition costs are lowered, with lead-to-customer success rates in excess of 6% already recorded.
More partnerships, with both media brands and advertisers, are planned and can be set-up directly on Pixsta's website. Further online advertising networks for items such as shoes, mother and baby clothes, art, antiques and home furnishings will be launched in the future.
Pixsta is owned by Alexander Straub, last seen back in the early oughts fronting Mondus.com – a supplier-to-buyer matching service that launched in 1999 with VC funding from 3i and which subsequently disappeared in the “great dot com crashTM”
You can see a few demos here www.elleuk.com/shopping/instant-shop
While Pixsta is a useful idea it remains to be seen if people really will opt for pictures rather than words to do their searches. Mondus also sounded like a good idea but it never quite hit it off, let’s hope this time it’s successful.
