July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

Popular video-sharing service Vimeo has added a new video-editing tool called “Looks” that add smart effects to your videos to make them appear professionally made.

Vimeo has done a lot to position itself as the go-to place for creative professionals and video-makers. Last year it debuted a paywall option, a “tip jar” to make contributions to people’s work you like, and its cloud-based Enhancer adds licensed music tracks to video. Now it continues that march by adding Looks to Enhancer.

“We’ve had Enhancer for music, but this is the next evolution of the product,” Vimeo president Dae Mellencamp told VentureBeat. “We want to make the experience of adding effects fast and effortless. … We want to make these types of tools accessible to everyone.”

Looks is powered by GenArts’ Vivoom app, which was specifically built to make videos look better with effects and filters. Vimeo is Vivoom’s first partnership, but the service hopes to do more of these down the road.

There are more than 500 Looks that people can select inside the Enhancer to spice up or cool down scenes. Vimeo’s Enhancer actually can scan your video and recommend creative choices based on an analysis and social data. You also can get more control over a Look by adjusting the intensity of it from 0 to 100 percent and trimming it to apply to whatever part of the video you need. Previews of different Looks will be shown in standard definition, but will be applied in high-definition.

Looks will start as a web-only product, but Vimeo is evaluating the prospect of bringing it to mobile. That would make a lot sense because you might record a really great video and want to post it quickly to Vimeo with a certain Look.

Looks will be free to Vimeo’s registered users for the next 90 days. After that, using a Look in a video will cost some scratch. Pricing, however, hasn’t been finalized just yet.

Check out the GIF below to see an example of a Look:

Don’t have time to obsess over the latest fashion trends? Launching today, a new service called Ajent is bringing curated style options to busy professionals.

Most e-commerce sites focus on breadth and offer a massive database of fashion items, typically imported by the community or a developer scraping the web. Polyvore, for instance, is updated with over two million new items each month. 

But San Francisco-based Ajent feeds its users just one “look” per day. Sign up for free, and receive a daily email with trendy style suggestions, home decor options, and more.

Today’s look is “Emerald”; users can peruse a shortlist of affordable deep green shirts, a kimono, pants and shoes, and even plan a trip to the Emerald Isle.

Ajent’s founder Meghan Higney (pictured above) hit on the idea for the site when she was bedridden for several months after breaking her back. The former private equity professional said she felt “overwhelmed” by the clutter on the Web and yearned to have a personal style hunter to source the best deals, delivered straight to her inbox.

So Higney quit her day job to develop the site and daily newsletter. She tested the beta on 200 users — men and women — and brought on a team of five staff members, including a front-end designer and several fashion editors. Each day, Ajent’s human editors pore through magazines, street style blogs, arts and culture, and more for inspiration. 

Ajent is a bootstrapped effort, and the next step is to hire engineers to build an algorithm (inspired by Netflix or Pandora) to offer personalized style recommendations. This will differentiate it from sites like Stylefeed that help users curate fashion by searching for deals from their favorite designers.

“The really interesting piece will be when Ajent brings you items on a day-to-day basis that you have told us specifically to look for,” said Higney over coffee. Ajent will also be aware of users’ size, budget, and style preferences.

To make money, the team is also considering rolling out a concierge-style service. If you’re looking for a leather skirt for spring, an Ajent style hunter will source the best deal and style from the Web and offer suggestions for items that will complement the look. It’s a similar business model to Zirtual, a virtual assistant service that is growing quickly and recently raised funds from Zappos’ CEO Tony Hsieh, among others.

In the future, Ajent will also benefit from building its own buying and selling platform, so users won’t be redirected to an external site if they choose to make a purchase.

In a recent interview, Forerunner Ventures‘ founder and managing partner said the key for the next wave of e-commerce sites is to “focus on augmenting the traditional shopping experience.”