Luminate Image App Store with New Image Apps

Luminate, which makes digital images interactive, has unveiled an Image App Store to provide a central location for publishers to browse and choose the specific image apps they wish to leverage for their sites.

Luminate also released eleven new image apps designed for interacting with the images across the web. To advance its platform for image apps, Luminate also announced a $10.7 million Series C round of funding, led by Nokia Growth Partners with participation from existing investors. It was announced Thursday, Feb. 23.

“The most successful technologies ultimately evolve into platforms,” said Luminate CEO, Bob Lisbonne. “Luminate first introduced image apps, and today’s image app store represents the logical next step. In the future, we will open our platform to third-party developers, enabling their creativity to further enhance images and transform the end-user experience.”

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Through Luminate’s Image App Store, individual publishers and site syndications can discover the latest apps relevant to their sites, try image apps before installing them and manage image apps for one or multiple sites.

Unlike traditional image galleries where flat, static images are selected for their aesthetic value, Luminate’s Image App Store is a place that showcases apps developed for the unique capabilities of images. The Image App Store gives publishers a hands-on opportunity to see how images can transform content, says the company.

The Image App Store is live at http://www.luminate.com/publisher/app-store/. New image apps include:

Causes – Provides users the ability to donate to causes such as the American Red Cross, St. Jude, Toys for Tots as well as others, especially during times of crisis and need.

Editorial Search – Helps consumers discover information related to the images, based on Blekko’s community-driven search results.

Entertainment News – Helps audiences discover the latest news about the people featured in an image. This is a custom app built for Celebuzz.

Image Search – Enables users to view related images leveraging Bing’s image search capabilities.

Movie Trailers – Offers users the ability to view movie trailers that are relevant to the actor or actors within the image via YouTube.

Music Clips – Gives users the opportunity to purchase MP3 files from Amazon.com, which relate to the artist or artists in the image.

Netflix – Showcases movies or shows through Netflix.

Soccer Stats – A virtual sports trading card that leverages Wikipedia to provide information about the athlete or athletes featured in the image.

Share Apps – Offers the ability to share through content sharing site Reddit, in addition to Twitter Share, Facebook Share and Email Share.

Twitter Feed – Allows users to view all tweets about the person within the image.

Wikipedia – Lets consumers see Wikipedia entries related to the image.

Luminate’s Series C financing was led by Nokia Growth Partners, with existing investors August Capital, CMEA Capital, Google Ventures and Shasta Ventures also participating in the round.

Luminate plans to use this funding to advance its platform for image apps, expand its publisher network and broaden its relationships with leading brand advertisers. With this new round of financing, Nokia Growth Partners, managing partner Paul Asel will join Luminate’s Board of Directors.

Photo courtesy: Luminate