One of the things I’ve always wanted out of technology is the ability to point my phone at something or take a screenshot, and have it say, here’s what that..
One of the things I’ve always wanted from technology is the ability to point my phone at something or take a screenshot, and have it say, here’s what that thing is and here’s where you can buy it. Well, my lavish consumerist dream is starting to come true, and Grokstyle is one company working to make it so — in this case, automatically identifying furniture and home decor from just about any picture or angle.
The basic idea is this: you open an app or web interface, and upload or take a picture of, say, a chair or lamp you like. Any angle, any style. The Grokstyle service immediately returns the closest matches, either including the object itself or ones very like it.
That would of course be very handy for any interior decorator, but ordinary shoppers can make it work, too. See a cool lamp at Restoration Hardware but can’t see yourself spending $500 on it? Maybe CB2 has something similar — Grokstyle would have hooks into individual stores’ inventories so you could check that sort of thing, or sort by price range.
At heart it’s all about computer vision and machine learning, of course: figuring out what the picture is of, then the contours of the piece, the dimensions, colors, and so on, and matching that info to a library of millions the company has collected.
“The company started from research at Cornell,” said co-founder and CEO Sean Bell. “We were focused on the question ‘what is it?’ And we developed the best tech for that problem.”
It isn’t easy: lighting, occlusion, weird angles — not to mention the intentions of the user. Did they mean to shoot the table or the chair next to it? And is that walnut or cherry?
Easy or not, they made it work, and the resulting system is so fast it almost looks fake (it isn’t). Watch a prototype in action here:
Co-founder Kavita Bala led the lab that Bell joined as a grad student, and they presented the foundation for Grokstyle’s tech at SIGGRAPH in 2015. As it showed so much promise, they decided to spin the project off as its own company, something Cornell clearly approved of.
“Entrepreneurship at Cornell has become a big deal over the last few years,” Bala said. “We’re very plugged in, they want us to succeed.”
Part of that was, of course, getting hooked up with the people who have the money. Grokstyle started with a grant from the National Science Foundation for $225K, and have parleyed that into a total of $2 million from a variety of firms and angels. I don’t want to leave anyone out so I’m just going to quote Sean’s summary:
CB Insights liked them enough to include them in the AI 100 list — no small feat, considering the number of AI startups these days. The plan right now is to push hard in the furniture space, but that’s by no means the end of the story.
“We think the algorithm is generalizable,” said Bala. “Multiple people have talked about TV as a use case — if you had the right partners for that…”
Not to mention how this type of tech can be applied in fashion, tourism, and any other highly visual market. Furniture, while there’s a great variety of it, is at least stationary and relatively rigid. You don’t have to worry about an ottoman flapping in the wind, or whether a bar stool’s chairs will be in the same place second by second. Shoes and handbags, however, might act as a stepping-off point for the company in that space.
For now the company is working on getting partnerships up and running (what they were, I couldn’t get them to tell me), and further expanding the algorithm’s accuracy and flexibility by hiring “a huge pile of engineers.”
You can learn more about Grokstyle’s systems and what they’re up to (or see about getting API access) over at the company’s website.

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Yelp this morning announced it has paid $20 million in cash to acquire the Wi-Fi marketing company, Turnstyle Analytics, which offers a service that allows..
Yelp this morning announced it has paid $20 million in cash to acquire the Wi-Fi marketing company, Turnstyle Analytics , which offers a service that allows businesses to connect with their customers over a freely provided Wi-fi network. The move, Yelp explains, is aimed at expanding the types of business marketing services Yelp already offers beyond those that are focused on customer acquisition, to also include those that help businesses with customer retention and loyalty.
Toronto-based Turnstyle was founded in 2012 that today supports nearly 3,500 businesses, primarily across the U. S. and Canada. According to the logos on its website, these customers include Back Alley Burger, Burger King, Broncos Slider Bar, Subway, and others.
Turnstyle is a paid service for its business customers, based on scale, that offers insights into customer behavior, visits and more, gained from the free guest Wi-Fi logins.
Customers who agree to use the free Wi-Fi provide their email address, which then allows the business to build out a target customer contact lists. The businesses can also take advantage of analytics tools that provide additional insight into visits – tracking things like frequency, to identify their most loyal customers, and duration, among other factors.
Yelp explains that the average consumer today spend more than five hours per day online, but still makes approximately 93 percent of their purchases offline. With Turnstyle, Yelp aims to give its small-to-medium sized business customers a means of connecting with those offline customers.
In addition, it points out that free Wi-Fi has been shown to increase foot traffic and sales figures. 62 percent of customers spend more time in places that provide free Wi-Fi and 50 percent of those customers spend more money on services and products as a result of the extra time spend in the establishment, Yelp noted , pointing to a Small Biz Trends survey .
Businesses using Turnstyle are able to send out emails to customers, as well as offer them other incentives and rewards to encourage their repeat visits. It lets businesses automate their marketing, as well, doing things like scheduling message delivery for days, weeks, or months in advance, or sending out digital coupons in email or SMS campaigns.
Those campaigns can be customized, by changing the incentives to meet various metrics. For example, it can trigger offers when customers enter or exit the venue, after they’ve visited a certain number of times, or it can reach those who haven’t visited in a certain period of time, offer incentives to first-time customers, send out birthday rewards, and more.
The product is currently used by a number of clients, including restaurants, cafes, retail stores, auto dealers, spas, salons and others – basically, anywhere a consumer may be spending time and lingering around, and expects there to be free Wi-Fi.
Turnstyle’s clients will continue to be supported, and won’t have any change in either their service offering or pricing as the company begins its integration with Yelp.
Meanwhile, the 30 employees located at Turnstyle’s headquarters in Toronto will also be joining Yelp. No layoffs are expected, Yelp says. The brand name “Turnstyle” will remain for the time being, though that could change in time.
Yelp says that although Turnstyle is supported outside the U. S. and Canada, its focus with the product will be on the North American market.
“We’re excited to expand our product offering for local businesses through this acquisition. Turnstyle helps connect businesses to consumers through free public Wi-Fi, and is an effective retention and loyalty program that helps businesses be more successful,” said Jeremy Stoppelman, Yelp co-founder and chief executive officer, in a statement about the acquisition.
The company will share more information about the Turnstyle revenue model during its Q2 earnings call, but declined today to speak about its financial information, like revenue and growth rate. However, it says that it’s not adjusting guidance as a result of the acquisition.

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According to a new study involving more than 120,000 job offers transacted on Hired, a jobs marketplace for tech workers, the average female candidate is..
According to a new study involving more than 120,000 job offers transacted on Hired , a jobs marketplace for tech workers, the average female candidate is still making less than her male peers for the same work, and sometimes far less.
Hired’s data shows that 63 percent of the time women receive lower salary offers than men for the same job at the same company, with white women offered 4 percent less on average, and women more broadly offered up to 50 percent less in the most extreme examples. Along the same vein, for one out of every 10 job openings that Hired analyzed, companies offered white men salaries that were at least 20 percent higher than those offered to women.
It’s both terrible yet unsurprising. According to the American Association of University Women, it might take another 136 years for the pay gap to disappear entirely.
Perhaps more illuminating in this new report is what happens to women’s salaries over time, and who is receiving the lowest pay of all for the same jobs at the same companies: Latina and black women.
Indeed, unlike its inaugural study last year, Hired has segmented job applicants more narrowly this time, including by age and ethnicity. It found that white women with four years or less of experience actually ask for more money than their male counterparts — possibly because they’re armed with information about what the market is paying for more entry-level jobs.
A gap in the other direction begins to appear in candidates with six or more years of experience, however, with white women in tech both asking for less than their white male counterparts and receiving it. Indeed, over time and across the country, white women in tech earn an average of.90 cents for every dollar made by their male peers for the same work.
Less transparency into what their peers are making is one possible driver, suggests Hired’s lead data scientist, Jessica Kirkpatrick. “Women at the outset might have a better idea of what appropriate salary expectations are for an entry-level job, but as they have fewer peers to compare themselves with against [as their careers evolve], it may be less clear what they should be paid.”
A raft of other factors are likely at play, too, says Kirkpatrick, citing unconscious bias during the interview process and the motherhood penalty that sometimes impacts women who take time away from their careers to rear children.
Either way, far worse is the pay gap facing Latina and black women, suggests Hired. According to its calculations, black women earn 79 cents on the dollar to white men — twice as large as the gap between white men and white women. Hispanic women fare only slightly better, earning 83 cents for every dollar made by their white male counterparts.
Kirkpatrick says she hopes Hired’s study “helps raise awareness so that individuals can adjust what they are asking for, and clients and companies can recognize that this is a systematic issue and adjust their practices to be more equitable.”
In the meantime, she adds, the company’s data “does shows that if you are an underrepresented racial minority, bias compounds to become doubly discriminatory.”
You can scan its findings here .

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HP’s latest high-end commercial laptop includes a 360-degree hinge, pen support, and a number of business-centric features like HP SureStart. Here’s our unboxing and first impressions.
Alongside a new version of the Spectre x360, HP announced the EliteBook x360 G2 at CES 2017. Like all of the company’s products with the ‘Elite’ brand, it’s made for businesses; however, unlike the Elite x3 Windows phone , this probably wouldn’t be something that you’d buy as a consumer product.
The convertible laptop is offered with a Core i7 vPro chip, and choices of either a 1080p or 4K display. There’s also an option of a Sure View display, which reduces 95% of visual light from the display if you’re viewing it from more than 35 degrees from the center. The Sure View laptops aren’t out yet, and they won’t be available in the 4K models, but you can see some images of one in the gallery below.
Aside from a privacy display, there are a number of other security features that are built into the EliteBook x360. SureStart checks the BIOS against a master copy, and if it’s been corrupted, it replaces it. There are two separate options for Windows Hello as well: fingerprint scanning and facial recognition.
Moreover, there’s an app called HP WorkWise, which will allow your PC to lock when you move your phone a predetermined distance away from it. It can also give you alerts if someone tampers with the device, notify you when your PC is overheating, and even install printer devices. The app is only available for iOS and Android, so don’t plan on installing it on your Elite x3.
Check out our unboxing and first impressions in the video below:
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