About a year and a half ago, the team at Like.com was wondering how to create a better experience when shopping for fashion online. To solve this dilemma Google launched Boutiques.com. Boutiques.com is a personalized shopping website that lets you discover fashion goods and lets you create your own boutique through a collection of boutiques promoted by celebrities, fashion bloggers, stylists, etc.

In 2005, Google almost acquired Riya.com, a consumer-oriented image recognition company. Riya had the ability to recognize clothes, watches, earrings, etc. from an image and show you similar items through online retail channels. Google decided to walk away from Riya. Riya re-emerged as a company called Like.com shortly after.

Like.com has some of the most interesting photo recognition technology embedded within their portfolio of websites.  One of Like.com’s most recent creations is Couturious.com.  Couturious allows you to pick a model from a variety of races and body types.  After that you can decorate the model with boots, lingerie, dresses, shirts, etc.  This way consumers can learn how an outfit would look on them without having to physically change.  Like.com launched in 2006 and raised $32 million in funding.  The company is currently valuated at about $100 million and is run by Like.com CEO and founder Munjal Shah. [TechCrunch]

Like.com has acquired Weardrobe.com. Weardrobe is a website that allows visitors to upload pictures of themselves and follow other users whose wardrobes they like. Like.com will be rolling their technology into Weardrobe. Weardrobe started as one of the eighteen companies from the Facebook incubator program this past summer. This is the first of those eighteen companies to have made an exit. Overall Like.com raised $54 million in funding.

Riya.com is a facial recognition service that was able to find similar images around the web.  Riya founder Munjal Shah wrote an e-mail to their users this morning saying that they are shutting down the service on August 21st.

The service launched about four years ago and almost sold themselves to Google but the deal fell through.  After the deal did not clear, Shah and his team decided to focus on a new service called Like.com.  Like.com can detect accessories that people are wearing and find similar accessories (if not the same) for sale across the web.

Below is the full e-mail that was sent out.

[via TechCrunch]

Pixazza.com is service that connects advertising to images.  The company released a press statement about their $5.75 million in funding earlier this week.  Investors include Google Inc., August Capital, and CMEA Capital.

Let’s say that you find a picture of a celebrity, Pixazza places a price tag icon on the apparel that they are wearing.  Putting your mouse over the price tag reveals an ad that tells you where you can find that product online.

Like.com has a very similar feature where you upload a picture and it e-mails you the place that you can find similar products.  Like.com used to be called Riya and it was rumored that Google wanted to acquire that company a couple of years ago.

“Pixazza hopes to do for images what Google’s AdSense did for web pages,” stated Bob Lisbonne, CEO of Pixazza. “We are excited about the potential our technology holds for delivering an engaging user experience that creates incremental revenue for web publishers.”

Pixazza’s angel investors consist of Ron Conway, former eBay COO Maynard Webb, and Facebook CFO Gideon Yu.  The company was started by James Everingham.  He brought together a team of people that worked on Netscape in the 1990′s to put together Pixazza.  The company is based in Mountain View, Calif.

Like.com, the visual search engine started by Munjal Shah, Burak Gokturk, and Azhar Khan has raised a substantial round of funding.  Like.com raised $32 million in Series C from Menlo Ventures, Crosslink Capital, BlueRun Ventures, and Leapfrog Ventures.  Through this round of funding, Prazan Vazirani from Menlo Ventures joined the Like.com Board of Directors.

Through this round of funding, Like.com is believed to be above a $100 million valuation.  Employees that have shares in the company also had the opportunity to sell shares through the funding process as well.  Like.com launched in November 2006 and their strongest service is matching goods that are displayed in a picture.

Like.com made about $1 million in revenue in about one year.  Now they are making about $20 million.  And they are planning to launch a UK version of the site.  The company also created an iPhone application called LikeThis that allows phone users to take a picture of an item and find similar items for sale.

A few months ago, Like.com started placing ads on Facebook that matched fashion products that linked to a user’s profile picture.  For example, if I was wearing Oakley sunglasses on my profile picture, the ad will appear alongside with sunglasses that look very similar.

LikeThis is also available on the Like.com website for testing.  To test it out, I uploaded a picture from Entourage.  Then I highlighted the shoes of the guy in the green shirt (center).  After uploading, Like.com will ask you which attributes are most important to you between Color, Shape, Pattern, or all three equally.  I selected all three are equally important to me.  Like.com asked for my e-mail to let me know when they are done analyzing the photo.

Once I get an e-mail back, I’ll let you know how accurate the results are.  Look for an update on this post.

Update: Below are the results

Like.com is a visual search engine with a focus on shopping and consumption.  According to VentureBeat founder, Matt Marshall, Like.com will be preparing to raise double digit funding within the next two weeks.  The round of funding, provided by Menlo Ventures, will complement Like’s revenue success.

Like.com allows users to search for consumer products by specific details, colors, and find goods worn by celebrities.  Like is working on a technology that allows users to upload photos and find similar goods.  When consumers click through the goods on the search engine and buys it from retailers, Like.com shares the revenue.  Like.com’s revenue is rumored to be close to $20 million.

To date, Like.com’s total funding is roughly $19.5 million, provided by Bay Partners, BlueRun Ventures and Leapfrog Ventures.  Like.com is a spin-off from Riya.com.  Riya.com was founded by Munjal Shah in 2004.  Riya was rumored to be courted for an acquisition by Google 3 years ago for roughly $40 mill [GigaOM].

Related Links:
1. Like.com
2. Riya.com