מגניב! Picitup, Shopitup, and Buyitup
I am actually exicted to write this post. It is very rare that I exhibit emotional outbursts in blog form, but for this, I have to say one thing. Picitup’s recent expansion into the shopping market—it’s FREAKISHLY amazing what they have done, really. I’m actually typing with enthusiasm. Alon Atsmon, the picitup guy I talked with on the phone a few days ago while I was half asleep and kind of waking up from a nap in a sweaty Tel Aviv suburb (the city of internet startups it seems), will probably be somewhat surprised as per my unabashed show of emotion here being that I was recovering from fatigue and general confusion at the time, but I am really impressed. I just showed this to my wife and she was wide-eyed. And her eyes are already round and big and cute and blueish, so for her to get wide-eyed requires something really worth stretching those lids for.
As is oft my habit in these sorts of posts, I will forthwith demonstrate by example. Before a few weeks ago, Picitup was just some picture search engine that would find pictures of things you were looking for, and similar pictures that you could filter by shape, color, landsape, face, or whatever. It could also match your face with a celebrity. Now that’s all fun and fluffy, but not THAT practical, as practical things go.
But say you are an average Rafi, or Joe, or whatever your name is, like me, and you want a simple knife set in your kitchen to cut meat with - really sharp stuff. However, you don’t want these sharp knives to be lying around the kitchen unholstered, so you really want something to stick the knives in, like a wooden block with slots for the knives. This way, no schlemiel (that’s Yiddish for idiot) whose not the sharpest knife in the drawer, slices his finger in the actual sharpest knife in the drawer because it’s not holstered in a block of wood with a slot. So you want to buy a set of knives, holstered in a block of wood. THAT’S what you want to buy, OK?
So you have this beautiful picture of a bunch of knives in a block of wood in your mind. With that picture in mind, just go to Picitup. Type in “knife set”. What you’ll get is a whole bunch of sets of knives. Fair enough. Now what you’ve gotta do is look for the one that looks like the one you have in your head, and click similar images. Now check this out. As they say, a picture is worth 9 words, at least in this case.
No longer are we tethered to one shopping site to find things that look like what we actually want to buy! Now we can find the thing that actually looks like the thing we want to buy, and actually buy it! If that doesn’t make you excited to be part of the 21st century, then you probably skipped to the last paragraph of this post without reading any of it. Go back and start over, will you?
More on Picitup in tomorrow’s “Search in Israel Part III”, where we will unveil the newest expansions in the Israeli startup machine. They may not have a very stable governmental system, but they can sure write those algorithms.
