The Markable 2017 Preview
If you’ve been following Markable since its founding in 2014 (as Instantag), you know how much the company has changed. If you’re new to the company, let this post serve as your abbreviated history of how we got here, and what you’re going to see from Markable in 2017.
2016 in Review
Rather than go way back to the beginning (we’ll save that for the historians) let’s cover Markable’s biggest year of change to date.
Coming out of December of 2015, I had just successfully pitched on the Chinese Shark Tank — I Am Unicorn — video here (sorry, no subtitles) and secured our Series A Round of financing. In late spring, Markable launched v2.0 of our app in the App Store, and immediately began work on our second application, “Markable VIP” to deliver a visual search and shopping experience customized for runway shows — in partnership with Style Fashion Week.
The real experiences and learning began after the launch of the VIP app in early September during New York Fashion Week. What we discovered was that most people love visual search and seamless image recognition technology; however, downloading a discreet, stand-alone application to use this technology was unappealing to lot of the consumers we spoke with. Moreover, nearly every potential business partner we met with said they wanted the technology on their own sites or in their own applications rather than selling their products on our app.
This left us with an interesting decision: Should we continue to pursue the B2C fashion retail path we were on, to fight for attention on our users’ phones against the already well-established players in the space (Spring, Reve, Moda Operandi, and Wish to name a few) or should we narrow our scope and focus on what the Markable applications were really delivering to our users — state of the art visual search technology?
On one hand, the consumer fashion industry is changing quickly right now, with huge disruption in the once traditional “seasonal” cycle which has dominated the industry for nearly a century falling in the face of fast fashion (thanks Generation Z) meaning we could find a way to establish Markable in the new fashion retail hierarchy.
On the other hand, Suren Kumar (PhD in Computer Vision and Robotics — SUNY, Buffalo, check his work here) joined the company as our Chief Science Officer in October after his fellowship at the University of Michigan, tipping the skillsets and experience of our company away from ecommerce and heavily towards Artificial Intelligence and building software platforms.
To us the decision was clear, and we made the decision to pivot away from our B2C model, refocusing our efforts to become a SaaS company providing the easiest to use, fastest and most accurate fashion visual search technology to anyone who wants to use it.
What to Expect in 2017
Of course the standards for building B2B SaaS products are substantially higher than those for building consumer apps, so for the past three months we’ve been planning, building, analyzing and rebuilding our software from the ground up. We’ve gotten a lot of interest from our enterprise customers, and have been building to meet their needs.
However, our enterprise customers represent a small segment of how visual search can be applied, so in late February we will be opening up beta access to the Lens platform and would love for any developer who wants to try out the tools to sign up for access.
We’ve capped this first group at 50 participants so we can give one-on-one integration support and get your direct feedback on the platform. If you’d like to be one of the select 50, click here to sign up. Once you’re signed up, you’ll get early access to the full specifications and capabilities of the Lens platform, as well as more detailed updates on when each feature will come online.
Even if you don’t join the beta, this blog will be the go-to place for news, updates, and new feature releases for both the Lens platform and the release of some of the computer vision tools we’re using in our development process, so if you’d like to keep up to date, be sure to subscribe.
