New name and vision at the company formerly known as Pixazza
You don’t have to twist your tongue pronouncing Pixazza anymore. The Google Ventures-backed start-up has found a new name that rolls off the tongue with less difficulty: Luminate.
The re-christened company is also making some big product changes as it works towards its goal of adding interactive features to all the photos and images on the Web.
Luminate initially offered technology that displayed a pop-up “product carousel” window alongside online photographs. A picture of a celebrity at the Oscars, for instance, could feature a pop-up window showcasing the shoes, purse and other items worn by the celebrity, along with links to various retailers selling the goods.
Now Luminate is preparing to introduce a variety of new interactive pop-up applications for online images. One such app could allow a websurfer to click an image of a famous person, such as a politician and quickly read biographical information from Wikipedia or other sources; a travel-focused app could place a picture of a landmark, like a cathedral, on a pop-up map, making it easier for visitors to find.
And an advertising app analyzes a photograph, such as a picture of a car, and automatically connects to an advertising exchange to find a related ad that can be overlaid on the bottom of the photo.
Luminate says it will introduce dozens of such applications in the future, and also plans to open up its technology platform so that other software developers can create their own applications for Web images.
The company, which has raised $17.75 million in funding from Google Ventures, August Capital and other VC firms since it was founded in 2008, may seek to raise another round later this year, said CEO Bob Lisbonne.
Google and AOL venture arms fund tool to track retail price changes
Most people wouldn’t be too pleased if they learned that the price of a digital camera suddenly dropped by $50 a few hours after they purchased it from the same online retailer.
Yet according to the creators of a new shopping tool called Shopobot, such price swings happen every week, sometimes every day, as retailers adopt more sophisticated techniques to test out different price points.
“The volatility is really being driven by these algorithmic approaches to pricing,” says Shopobot co-founder and CEO Julius Schorzman. “You have these automated systems that are trying to maximize revenue for retailers online.”
Shopobot, which is being backed by Google Ventures and Aol Ventures, is designed to let consumers take advantage of these price fluctuations, rather than get stung by them.
The company takes a Google-like approach to the task and crawls retailer websites, monitoring thousands of product listings for the latest prices – Schorzman says that’s a better tactic than subscribing to data feeds provided by the retailers, which he says are not always reliable.
Consumers can “follow” certain products, receiving an alert when prices drop, or they can get recommendations of the best times to look for deals based on the company’s analysis of the pricing data it collects.
How retailers react to this kind of pricing transparency remains to be seen. Schorzman says he expects retailers will ultimately embrace it the way they have other shopping tools such as pricing comparison services.
Google buys into Zynga – report
Google has invested as much as $200 million in social gaming company Zynga, as it looks to bolster its presence in the world of online gaming, according to technology blog TechCrunch.
According to TechCrunch, the investment may have been in conjunction with Softbank Capital’s deal to purchase a stake in Zynga, which makes games for social networks including Facebook and MySpace and profits by selling virtual goods. In June, Nikkei reported that Softbank bought a stake in Zynga for about 13.5 billion yen ($147.4 million) through a private placement.
The site said that The investment was made by Google itself, not Google Ventures and that Zynga will be “the cornerstone of a new Google Games to launch later this year.” Zynga’s revenues for the first half of 2010 will be $350 million, half of which is operating profit, and is projecting at least $1.0 billion in revenue in 2011, according to the site.
Google funds photo advertising start-up
Google may not be buying companies as often as it once did, but that’s not stopping it from doling out funds to promising start-ups.
On Wednesday, Mountain View, California-based Pixazza, a developer of photo-based online ad technology, said Google was among the group of investors that plunked down $5.75 million in Series A funding. Pixazza’s technology lets Web surfers click on portions of online images to get more information, say the brand and price of the shoes that a celebrity is wearing in a photo.
“Google’s investment underscores the innovative and promising nature of Pixazza’s new advertising technology,” Pixazza said in a statement announcing the deal.
Google’s investment comes as the search giant has slowed its pace of outright acquisitions, and as the company prepares a new in-house venture capital division called Google Ventures.
Other investors in the funding round include August Capital and CMEA Capital. And Pixazza listed angel investor Ron Conway, former eBay COO Maynard Webb, and Facebook CFO Gideon Yu among its backers.
Pixzazza says its “distributed workforce of product experts” can match products in photos with its network of advertisers, and claims it will do for images what Google’s AdSense advertising network did for Web pages.
