Stipple, a technology that allows you to tag people, products, advertisements and more in images no matter where they reside on the web, is debuting a new product today—image licensing platform Stipple Marketplace. Instead of paying to license images and then running ads to hopefully offset the image’s cost, publishers can now license photos pre-loaded with revenue and interactive, searchable content.

For background, Stipple’s technology allows publishers to tag a person in a photo on the web, enter contextual information such as a Twitter name or Facebook name and then anyone can see their most recent social updates as overlays on that picture.

But Stipple also partners with e-commerce sites to provide a way for each photo to show exactly what piece of clothing the person in the photo is wearing — to show you who makes it, how much it costs, and where to buy it. And it allows you to “Want” it (save it to look at later) or “Shop” for it via two overlay buttons right on the picture itself. Stipple also gives brands a way to identify their photos and create advertising campaigns around the products they want to sell inside the photos.

Marketplace, which launches with more than 1 million images, allows publishers to search for and find real-time news, sport, celebrity, entertainment, and stock photos. Any semi-professional photographers can request access to connect their photos to the Stipple Cloud and make them discoverable by publishers in Marketplace.

Once an image is included in the cloud, the image owner retains permanent, real-time control of the content layer on their images. Then the image is tagged, and commerce, product credits, coupons, media, two-way information and advertising will all travel with Stipple images wherever they go online, generating engagement and real-time analytics. Photographers can then monetize the images through Stipple’s in-image ad format.

Stipple previously raised $2 million from Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Mike Maples’ FLOODGATE, Justin Timberlake, Naval Ravikant, Eghosa Omoigui, Global Brain Corporation, Quest Venture Partners, Parkview Ventures, John Ferber and Rick Marini.

Crunchbase

• STIPPLE

Company: Stipple

Website: stippleit.com

Launch Date: January 2010

Funding: $2M

Stipple is an in-picture labeling tool that allows publishers to label and share any person, place or thing in the photos on their site. By activating Stipple on a site, publishers offer their users a new layer of content, commerce and information on top of their photo content. Stipple lets publishers label and monetize the content inside the pictures on their sites. Stipple is a fast way to label the content of pictures on the web. Stipple combines these...

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