"There are nearly 4 trillion images on the Internet and 200 million new ones being added each day," according to Chief Revenue Officer (CRO) of Luminate.
Luminate (formerly Pixazza) has the vision of making all those images interactive through image recognition algorithms and human-assisted crowdsourcing to identify objects and tag the images with content.
They "transform static images into interactive content," according to the Luminate website.
The way it works:
1) Icon--look for the Luminate icon image in the lower left corner of the image that means the image in interactive.
2) Mouse--mouse over the image to choose from the interactive image apps.
3) Click--click on the images in the photo to shop and buy it ("Get The Look"), share information (e.g. Facebook, Twitter, email), or navigate (click on contextual hyperlinks from Wikipedia and other sources).
According to Forbes (27 July 2011), Luminate already "has more than 4,000 publishers, 150 million unique visitors per month, and more than 20 million products catalogued."
The image-tagging platform provides context and information for consumers and revenue generating opportunities for producers--so it is a win-win for everyone in the marketplace!
By connecting end-user Internet images on the front-end with advertisers and commerce on the back-end, Luminate has found a way to integrate web-surfers and industry--no longer are advertisements on the web disconnected as pop-ups, banners, or lists from the Internet content itself.
Right now, there are apps for annotations, advertisements, commerce, and social media. Luminate plans to open up development to others to create their own for things such as apps for donations for disaster relief images or mapping and travel apps for images of places.
Luminate, as a photo-tagging and application service, is advancing our experience with the Internet by creating a richer experience, where a photo is not just a photo, but rather a potential gateway into everything in the photo itself.
In my view, this is a positive step toward a vision of a fully augmented reality, where we have a truly information-rich "tagged environment", where everything around us--that we see and experience--is identified and analyzed, and sourced, and where the images of the world are alive no matter how or from what angle we look at them.
Lastly, my gut tells me that Google is heavily salivating over where this company is going and future developments in this field.
(Source Photo: here)