Idea - Shopping for visual goods | Hacker News Reader

Idea - Shopping for visual goods

2 pointsnite2 comments

I wanted to brainstorm this idea with fellow YC members. Problem: I need to buy some furniture for a room but I'm visually impaired (i.e. I lack good taste) so after seeing some furniture at crate and barrel, I went online to see some unique ways some of this furniture is being used in the real world. I did some searches on google & flickr and found some cool pictures of rooms but I'm not sure where the items are from. My life would be easier if there was a service that would tag user created photos with product links. My question to you: 1.) How would build this service? tech? 2.) Is there a real business somewhere here in this problem?

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The closest thing I have seen to what you are describing is Amazon's new iPhone app. Users take a picture of any item, then the pictures are routed to Mechanical Turk where a real person tries to match the product in the picture with the same or similar product in Amazon's inventory. It works for Amazon because they have a large, low cost workforce in Mechanical Turk workers and a massive inventory.

A service like you are describing would likely have to be people powered in the same way as Amazon's iPhone App. I could imagine the revenue model working as either a revenue share on sold good the way Amazon does or as a marketplace for furniture shoppers and interior decorators/designers (i.e. you post some photos and a budget and decorators/designers bid to get the business of helping you find the right furniture, etc). Not sure how lucrative either of these models would be.

I took a crack at this problem space a few months back: http://astartupaday.wordpress.com/2008/08/16/y-combinator-ch...

I was messing around with way I described the idea (partially because I thought it was a good idea and wanted to hide it a bit). The core idea is users can tag celebrities based on the clothes they are wearing and products they use. Similar to your tagging furniture idea...but I chose the celebrity niche as tagging celebs = interesting, tagging furniture = boring.

I think there's a business in there somewhere, the execution would need to be really fantastic and all the use cases and motivations well thought through. Feel free to ping me if you want to brainstorm around this (kleneway at hotmail)

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