• BusinessWeek, Wednesday, March 25, 2009 11:15 AM

Pixazza, a startup founded by Netscape veterans, wants to turn Web photos into cash. "It might just work," says BusinessWeek's Rob Hof. On Wednesday, the company unveiled a service that lets publishers apply tiny yellow-and-blue price tags to photos on their sites. Mouse over one of the price tags and a box appears that lists the product, like a coat or a pair of shoes, along with the price and the retailers that offer the product. Click on the box and you head directly to the retailer's site.

Pixazza is basically an ad network, albeit a small one at present. But the idea, Hof says, is like an e-commerce version of Google's AdSense, which runs contextual text and display ads on content sites. Pixazza CEO Bob Lisbonne says the company's platform will help Web sites make money from a commission on product sales.

Incidentally, Google is one of the company's investors, along with venture capital firms August Capital and CMEA Capital and a series of individual investors, including Facebook CFO Gideon Yu. As Hof says, "Google may be as interested in the system behind Pixazza as much as in the similarity to AdSense," because the company uses a network of people to identify the products in photos, instead of an algorithm. These are not volunteers, mind you: Participants in Pixazza's people network share a piece of the product sale for matching products in photos to the nearly 2 million products in the Pixazza's retail database. This database includes products from Amazon.com, Zappos, Bluefly, Macys and many others.

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