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 tha…