Making visual search a fashionable way to look for products

HER World, Cosmopolitan and Style may not be typical reading material for a middle-aged man, but they are for 47-year-old Oliver Tan. The chief executive officer and co-founder of ViSenze probably knows more about fashion than the average woman. Halter dresses, shift skirts, open tiptoes, wedges - Mr Tan knows them all.

And he has to, because he is running a company specialising in visual search and image recognition, a technology that ViSenze started out applying in fashion e-commerce. A three-year-old spin-off from the National University of Singapore, ViSenze's visual technology was "a solution looking for a problem", said Mr Tan.

The problem did not arise until the scientists, also co-founders, met up with Mr Tan and Roger Yuen, chairman and co-founder. Mr Yuen is also chief executive officer and founder of fashion social network Clozette. "We're the problem guys," said Mr Tan. And by that he means that they knew how to make use of the technology.