【difference between eroticism and intimacy】

Most online shopping sites are difference between eroticism and intimacygreat at suggesting items similar to the ones you've previously purchased. But until now, none have quite mastered how to use that data to actually predict what you will be interested in next.

That's the premise of Propulse, a new Montreal-based startup that uses machine learning and image recognition software to attempt to understand a shopper's tastes and recommend new products accordingly.

The e-commerce platform, which officially launched Thursday, is billed as a sort of online retail analog to Netflix's video recommendation engine. Its algorithm analyzes nearly 40,000 attributes of product images or listings in order to suss out a customer's personal style and match it to known shopping patterns.

It can also check inventories in real-time and make notes on which items a given online store might consider stocking based on its customers' preferences.

While the technology seems like an intuitive step for data-rich online retailers, Propulse founder and CEO Eric Brassard claims the artificial intelligence capabilities to handle such a system haven't been advanced enough until now.

"When you look at companies currently trying to customize online shopping experiences, you can’t help but notice a massive gap has emerged between 'personalization' and 'recommendation,'" said Brassard, a former Saks Fifth Avenue executive. “Recommendation tools today fall flat because it’s not a true reflection of consumer shopping habits."

The service is licensed out as a back-end technology for online retailers, and its inaugural partners include men's fashion brand Frank+Oak.

Brassard says he hopes the platform will be a valuable way for smaller e-commerce companies to better compete with the data power of online shopping behemoth Amazon, which dominates the market by a wide margin.

While the majority of Americans still prefer brick-and-mortar retailers to online shopping in many respects, the latter is growing at a increasingly rapid clip. E-commerce has grown from 6 to 8 percent of the total retail market in the last two years alone, according the U.S. Commerce Department.

That rise is driven in part by e-commerce's ability to better personalize the shopping experience based on vast troves of data.

Bassard said Propulse's goal is to be the best of both of those worlds in a way — to combine the analytic capacity of the online world with the more nuanced understanding of tastes you might get from a store employee.

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