Mountain View, California — Modern day web users are accustomed to tagging photos on sites like Flickr and Facebook. But now Pixazza Inc., a new venture backed ad company, has released an innovative tool taps web images into clickable and purchasable content, similar to what Google’s AdSense did for Web pages. Google is participating in a $5.75 million investment round in Pixazza, which hopes to benefit by overlaying photos on the Web with links that let people buy the products in the images.
The Mountain View, Calif.-based company is now launching the technology to be commonly utilized by advertisers, Web publishers, and the network of self-appointed but screened specialists who distinguish the products in the photos, said Chief Executive Bob Lisbonne. The company is starting with the apparel industry but plans to expand to home design and furnishings, travel, electronics, and sports starting later this year, he said.
Similar to Google’s AdSense, which builds the text ads it displays on the content of a Web publisher’s site, Pixazza’s tool turns the content of Web images into clickable e-commerce links.
“Pixazza hopes to do for images what Google’s AdSense did for Web pages,” said Lisbonne.
Although the backend is a little complex, Pixazza’s user interface is intuitive. Once a web-master incorporate the tools into their publishing system, visitors to the site can merely roll their mouse over the images to reveal additional information about the products within a pop-up tab. Clicking on the text in the tab takes users to an individual product pages where they can collect even more info, or even purchase the item from one of Pixazza’s participating vendors.
Given the resemblance to AdSense, there is speculation that Google might employ the technology somehow at its site, or even eventually buy out Pixazza. But for now, Google has remained mum on any plans.
“Apart from saying that Google invested in Pixazza to support a promising and innovative new advertising technology, I do not have much information I can share,” Google spokesperson Andrew Pederson, said in a statement.
Right now, the Pixazza technology is being used at fashion and apparel sites, but Lisbonne asserts that the company is planning to expand to the travel, sports, electronics and home furnishing categories.
“It makes sense to begin with fashion, there is a very passionate audience and photos are key parts of those Web sites, so it is a good match,” Lisbonne said. “But our vision involves all the major e-commerce categories due course.”
He said installing the technology is “as simple as adding Google Analytics,” and involves copying and pasting a line of Java script on a Web page.
Here is how it functions: Pixazza uses its proprietary platform along-with a group of subject-matter experts to identify taggable items in photos and connect them to similar products carried by its network of merchants.
The procedure is thus dependent heavily on what industry insiders call “crowdsourcing,” enlisting the efforts of many people over the Internet, who each do a little work toward a common goal. This dependence on crowdsourced identification concept (versus a traditional alogrithm) is ultimately what sets Pixazza apart from traditional shopping destination sites like Shop.com and Like.com.
However, the real test lies in the strength of Pixazza’s stable of online merchants. In its current incarnation, the tool seems incredibly useful for exploring items within web photos, but it may prove problematic if shoppers are not able to get the best deal from Pixazza’s preferred merchants.
A recent Pixazza-infused image search on participating site Imnotobsessed revealed products from Overstock, Zappos, and Hot Topic. Although these are not the worst options, two-thirds of them are not sites that I would normally bother with (price-wise) during an ecommerce shopping spree.
And now, considering the similarity to the AdSense program, perhaps it does not comes as a surprise that the search giant responded when Pixazza sought funding. Google employees have been sighted with Google Ventures name tags, but it is unclear whether the Pixazza funding is part of that project. Google is cautious about Google Ventures: “This is a project we are working on, but we are not ready to share any details right now,” spokesman Andrew Pederson said.
Founded in 2008, Mountain View, Calif.-based Pixazza, whose $5.75 million financing round also included investments from August Capital and CMEA Capital. The round also included investments from angel investor Ron Conway, former eBay Chief Operating Officer Maynard Webb, and Facebook Chief Financial Officer Gideon Yu, the company said.
The company will use the funds for research and development and for sales and marketing, Lisbonne said.
Lisbonne and Chief Technology Officer James Everingham have deep Internet roots. Both worked at browser pioneer Netscape Communications, and Everingham recruited more from that background for the company’s technology team. Everingham also was CTO of LiveOps, a company that offered call center technology with a network of more than 20,000 independent remote operators handling the phone calls.