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| Search company revels in state of the art 'deco' venture |
| Written by Ben Fountain | |
| Wednesday, 13 February 2008 | |
|
Cambridge technology is at the heart of an ambitious new venture from the founders of runaway success Lastminute.com which is seeking to drag the home furnishings and interior design market into the internet age.
Flax search software, developed by Lemur Consulting, is at the heart of mydeco.com, launched this month by Brent Hoberman and Martha Lane Fox. The new Web 2.0 portal is seeking to emulate the effect its celebrated cousin, sold to Travelocity for £577m in 2005, had on the travel and leisure market, but this time in the world of home design. mydeco applies Web 2.0 techniques such as social networking and tagging and lets users design a room online and then share it with other users, who in turn are able to rate it. Completing the project in “just a few months,” Cambridge-based Lemur Consulting has trained its Flax search software to cover ground that most engines might find it difficult to negotiate, dealing with concepts like colour and proximity as well as the more straightforward keywords and tags. Flax is used throughout the site for searching products – the most challenging aspect of the project according to Lemur, MD, Charlie Hull – discussion forums and user profiles. Search results are ranked in terms of relevance, calculated using Flax’s Bayesian probabilistic techniques. Other advanced features include faceted search and automatic suggestion of similar items. Paul Chudleigh, who after holding a number of key technical positions at Lastminute has become CTO at mydeco, said: “We chose Flax because it offered high performance and incredible accuracy, and because it was easy to integrate into our software architecture. “The software is also licensed under an open source model, which makes it easy to modify it and improve it, for example to add features such as geo-location allowing users to search in stores close by.” While e-commerce has permeated pretty much every nook and cranny of the consumer products market, it is yet to make any meaningful incursion into furnishings and furniture, principally because of the shortcomings of a web page as a means of matching a sofa with your curtains. mydeco aims to change purchasing habits through an innovative application of technology, winning a large chunk of what is a £1.4bn market in the process. Hull explained: “mydeco’s ‘Buy the Look’ feature is very impressive – it lets you use a slider control to adjust your total budget, and the list of items in the room you have designed then changes to reflect this budget, substituting items of lower cost for example. “The 3D room designer tools are also great fun - you can drag and drop items onto a floorplan, and then view the whole room in 3D. mydeco is also using ‘community’ features, such as tagging, blogs and forums, that haven’t been applied to this kind of market before.” Mydeco, which has already secured investment of £5m from Tom Teichman of SPARK Ventures and Lord Rothschild family interests among others, will offer products from more than 500 retailers – ranging from John Lewis to Terence Conran. It will earn a commission on referrals and will also get revenues from advertising. Lemur is a miniscule operation when compared to the big hitters of search, such as the company’s near-neighbour, Autonomy. However, Hull believes that the days of a proprietary closed-source model, very much like the one operated by Autonomy, are numbered. He said: “Most of the hard technical issues to do with search were worked out in the 1970s – so it’s pointless keeping the algorithms locked up and proprietary, especially when most search companies are using exactly the same methods. “Clients may also be concerned about just what the ‘black box’ is doing under the hood, and with open source you can just take a look! “Also, for rapid development, security and quick bugfixing you can’t beat the open source mode. “Just look at the growth of Mozilla Firefox over the last few years. There’s no reason that an open source search platform can’t compete directly with more established players, and what we’ve done with mydeco proves that.”
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