Google + Boutiques.com Knows What to Wear Before You Do

This year we will spend $25 billion buying clothes and accessories online. Which is not to say we will enjoy doing it. Most big shopping sites are ugly, poorly designed and completely clueless when it comes to showing you clothes you might actually like. 

Google, the bastion of search, is hoping to change all that. Boutiques.com is designed to not only make it easier to find clothes you like, but to actually predict what those clothes will be.

The site is organized into a series of “boutiques,” which aggregate clothing from more than 250 designers and online stores. The online pages are curated by bloggers, fashion people, actresses (or their stylists), designers and, to a degree, you. 

The visual-search technology behind the online fashion aggregators teach the computer how to “look” for clothes in your style, setting Boutiques.com apart from other online shopping sites like ShopStyle, and Net-A-Porter.

While the boutiques are interesting, it’s the potential of the visual-search technology to make online shopping an intuitive experience that stands out. The idea is that the machine will know what you want before you do. This is particularly exciting to those of us masochistic enough to insist on having specific items in mind when we look for clothes. 

Keyword searches work well when shopping for a new camera. But using them to look for a new pair of jeans will often yield results that are incomplete or just plain wrong. Ladies, how many times have you searched for kitten heels and gotten kittens instead?

Theoretically, with visual search, the computer can recognize not just that a dress is short and blue, but also that it has a sailor collar and cap sleeves.

The people who make these classifications at Google are a team of fashion bloggers, journalists, buyers and design-school graduates. These are the folks creating the site and fine-tuning the algorithm. 

The people who curate the boutiques are celebrities, celebrity bloggers and designers. They pick the clothes and develop the style parameters for each of the six genres featured on the site: Romantic, Classic, Street, Edgy, Bohemian and Casual Chic.

To decide which style category you fall into, Google invites you to take a style quiz before shopping. In the first segment, you choose between two images, deciding which you like better. These are not only pictures of the latest runway looks, but also queries designed to dig out quirks in your personality.

Are you ironic T-shirt quirky or meat dress quirky? Do you prefer a Cosmopolitan or a tequila shot? The person who chooses tequila presumably falls into the Street category, with Romantic rising — fast.

The quiz can be long or short, depending on the consistency of your answers. Once it took me 35 clicks to get to Casual Chic, and another time only 25 to get to Romantic. I decided to go with Romantic, because, well, I liked the sound of it. One of the best side effects of a trip to Boutiques.com is that everyone leaves having been bestowed with a style. And thankfully it’s never “whatever’s clean.”

Next, I indicated my preferences in specific clothing categories: I like dresses that are strapless. I like black and red. I don’t like V-necks or reptile prints. Which brings us to the main problem with the quiz: As with Pandora and other recommendation engines, it’s better not to get too specific. You invariably end up weeding out things that you might like. More often than not, we don’t like or dislike something because of one detail like a V-neck. Except for reptile print. That’s never okay.

The quiz complete, I was taken to My Boutique, a page populated by a collection of items inspired by my answers. The filters seemed to be working pretty well, as I specifically indicated I liked round-toed red shoes, not pointy-toed red shoes, and I was shown lots of round-toed red shoes and no pointy-toed shoes. That didn’t mean I liked them all, or even most of them. The filter is like going into your favorite store. It makes liking more likely, not a sure thing.

My goal was to find a dress for New Year’s Eve. The dress I saw myself wearing was something reminiscent of the shimmery sleeveless number The Little Mermaid wears when she finally gets her legs. Not something I would go into a mall looking for, but this was a mall powered by Google, the bastion of search. I was optimistic.

I typed “glittery dress” into the keyword-search bar, and I was surprised by how many contenders popped up. None were exactly right, but several were close enough to warrant a click on the Visually Similar Items button, an inspired feature of the site. Of course, you hope they will be similar in the ways you want and not in the ways you don’t, but there’s no way to tell it that. In this case, a lot of sparkly dresses showed up, but they were all short, something I had specifically indicated in my style preferences that I hated (their term, not mine). Apparently, the filters I set up didn’t work with the Visually Similar Items button.

The main problem of trying to do this kind of very focused shopping on Boutiques.com: It’s hard. In offline shopping, you manage your expectations. I would never go to the mall with the goal of buying a dress even remotely similar to the one worn by a cartoon character in a 20-year-old movie. Online shopping is more focused, which is fine if you need a TV or black socks.

When you’re looking for clothes, it’s much more difficult to find something you like even if you have every dress ever made to choose from. Sometimes, one dress in the flesh can be worth 10,000 images. And sometimes even 10,000 dresses isn’t enough.

I may not have found my Little Mermaid dress, but after some refining, Boutiques.com has the potential to combine the fun of offline shopping with the efficiency of not having to put on pants to do it.

With its large images and simple, logical design, Boutiques is great for browsing and stumbling into unexplored lands like Bohemian or Carey Mulligan. From cheap Forever 21 dresses to $3,000 McQueen gowns, all clothes get the same visual treatment. And in this context it’s fun to see how arbitrary pricing can seem. 

However, if they want people to actually buy clothes instead of just looking at them, they need to make some improvements. It seems to be curated for the young, thin and trendy. The fashiony boutiques are great (who doesn’t need an easy place to find Harem Inspired clothing?), but the people at Google would do well to include more practical and accessible collections for specific body types, ages or professions.

The filters themselves work pretty well. If you tell it you hate latex stilettos, you won’t end up with a ton of stripper heels in your boutique. However, you still get a lot of shoes you don’t like. Hopefully with time and more interaction with the site, it will get better at recommending flats you like and not just any old ugly flats. Whether people have the patience to teach a program a thing they already know remains to be seen. At this point, Boutiques.com is more entertaining than practical, but it’s a good start.

Someday, maybe we’ll have online shopping technology that makes it possible to buy a pair of pants without trying them on first. Now, that would be revolutionary.

You’d Be Hard Pressed to Find a Better Cord-Free Iron

When it comes to keeping a tidy living space, there isn’t much I won’t do. Taking out the garbage? Washing the dishes? Vacuuming? All fine by me. But ironing? Now there’s a wrinkle in my psyche that just can’t ever get pressed out. The tedium, the constant steaming, the ever-challenging cordplay as you navigate your rumpled garments. You pull out an iron, and I run.

That is, until I laid my wrinkle-wary hands on Panasonic’s NI-WL600, a cordless model that not only provides better, faster ironing than my years-old $20 Target purchase, but also the freedom of 360-degree motion that has me reconsidering my longtime aversion to the sight of a standup ironing board.

The NI-WL600 relies on a docking station that leaves a minimal footprint, even if you prefer to leave it sitting on the far end of your board. Three heat levels and three steam preferences are easily accessible atop the iron and provide for quick preference-changing for moving between cottons (high), wools (medium) and acrylics (low). And carrying the operation from your closet to the board is easy, thanks to the handled, snap-top lid that hooks to the underside of the docking station.

Aside from the accessibility that it allows, the NI-WL600 is excellent for all your basic, ironing needs. Straightening my cotton shirts was never easier. Denim jeans were a dream. The way the football-shaped head of the iron moves around and into the tiniest corners made removing wrinkles from a load of shirts — dare I say? — fun. That I could plow through my batch faster and without needing the kind of slight-of-hand skills that’d make Ricky Jay blush was a joy.

Still, these results don’t come that easy. I had to liberally and constantly press the steam button in order to get the kind of vaporization that smooths out the most stubborn of wrinkles.

This, in turn, means I had to refill (several times) the diminutive water tank, which requires a forceful snap-on in order to reconnect to the iron. If you want to change the heat setting, you have to reconnect it back to the dock first, but you won’t go too long without doing that anyway, since wireless connectivity means heat immediately starts lowering from the moment you remove the iron from its plugged-in base.

The water tank also has a few shortcomings. First, it’s got a tiny hole on top that makes refilling from the faucet nearly impossible, lest you prefer soaking the entire tank in the process. And since you’re focusing entirely on pouring into the water-bottle straw-size hole, you can’t keep your eye on the tank itself to know if you’ve filled it past the maximum level.

But these are relatively small quibbles compared to the freedom I experienced without having to play cat’s cradle with my old model’s always-in-the-way cord. And for only $100, it’s worth it to pony up for this rather than plunk down a lone Andrew Jackson for some rinky-dink brand. Once I got myself past the minor hindrances and imperfections, I had a wrinkle-free wardrobe of pristine pressed shirts and pants.

Never did I think ironing could be more than a boring chore, but the NI-WL600 has sure set me straight.

WIRED 360-degree functionality allows for increased range of motion. Steaming and wrinkle removal is top-notch.

TIRED Steam button needs to be constantly pressed during operation. Water tank is small and needs frequent refilling.

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For Google’s Notebook, the Internet Isn’t Everything — It’s the Only Thing

Are you ready to embrace the cloud? Gird your loins, for Google’s Cr-48 (or Chrome OS Notebook, laptop prototype or whatever else you want to call it) is itching to drag you kicking and screaming up to the cloud and into it.

Google’s Cr-48 is, as many Google projects are, a brazen experiment in laptoppery that’s so crazy it just might work. Might not, either. For the Cr-48 — or whatever it ends up being called -– is really a notebook only in the sense that it has a keyboard and a hinge which lets it fold in half.

The sell here is that the Cr-48 runs Google’s new and long-anticipated Chrome OS. Based on a skeletal Linux build, it is virtually instant-on and instant-off, and its simplicity is hard to overstate. That’s because Chrome OS really is almost nothing but the Chrome web browser.

When you turn on the Cr-48, it drops you right into the Chrome browser, with a handful of icons which are really shortcuts to web pages. Anything you can do on the web -– with Chrome on Linux, anyway -– you can do on the Cr-48. Flash, JavaScript, whatever, it’s all possible, but of course, Google would prefer you stick to Gmail, YouTube, Picasa and the like. Google’s services are tightly integrated with the Cr-48, to the point where you’re asked for your Google ID when you turn on the machine for the first time.

And be assured: None of this will work if you’re not online. The Cr-48 supports every kind of Wi-Fi, and it packs a Verizon WWAN system with a killer hook: Users get 100 MB of free bandwidth every month. That’s not much, but it can get you through the dead zone between Starbuckses. (Additional bandwidth costs up to $50 for 5 GB a month.) It won’t, however, do you any good on an airplane without Gogo: You can open a few cached web pages on the Cr-48, but mostly it’s a 3.6-pound brick when you’re offline.

Under the hood the Cr-48 has netbook guts: a 1.66-GHz Atom CPU, 2 GB of RAM and integrated graphics, all powering a 12.1-inch, 1280 x 800 screen. Battery life is impressive: at least 8 hours with the wireless on (because you’d never turn it off). You also get a sole USB port (for input peripherals mainly) and VGA output. And there’s a grainy webcam.

Sure looks like a laptop. But is it really? Consider the evidence: The 16-GB SSD drive is not user-accessible, and you can’t store any files on the machine. Want to type a letter? You’ll need to go to Google Docs (which, oddly, is not a default icon). Want to write an e-mail? You’ll have to visit Gmail. Want to view a picture or video on your camera’s SD card? Well, er, you’ll have to upload it to the web from someone else’s real computer: The Cr-48’s SD slot is nonfunctional. Remember: You are not allowed to access local files, period!

Hackers are surely going to start finding a way to mod these things to overcome their limitations –- I tricked the machine into downloading a Firefox setup file, but had no way to open it — but for now the Cr-48 is really more of a tablet masquerading as a laptop. It even has its own app store, already full of the usual suspects. Weatherbug FTW!

WIRED Caps-lock key re-imagined as a search button. Nifty instant-on capabilities. Beautiful, bright display. Epic battery life.

TIRED Useless without wireless connection; only moderately useful with one. Requires massive buy-in to the Googleverse. Printing via cloud connection to another PC is erratic at best. Touchpad — “it’s all one big button” — requires lots of retraining. Keyboard feels clammy.

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