Pixazza rebrands as Luminate and expands platform

The new platform takes interactive images to a whole new level

Everybody needs a good shakeup every now and then—a haircut, a new color for the living room walls, a new routine…whatever.  And it looks like Pixazza needed a little change, too.  The company announced Wednesday that it’s getting a new name and a new platform.  As of today, Pixazza is now Luminate, and it’s expanding its platform to make images interactive on a whole new level—no longer just for eCommerce.

CEO Bob Lisbonne walked me through some of the new features that Luminate now offers.  As he explained it, just like how phones now have apps that open you up to new levels of connectivity, so, too, should images.  So Luminate now integrates images with full-blown applications.

For example, let’s say you pull up a picture of a celebrity who’s wearing super cute shoes.  You can still pull up the shopping option if you want to, but now the image will come with a suite of other options, including the option to share the image via Twitter or Facebook—which goes beyond sharing and actually lets you focus in on one specific part of the picture.  So let’s say you love the shoes and want to highlight them.  You can click on the tweet button, which provides you with a highlight box to place over the part of the picture you want to highlight.  Then you can add your text and tweet, and when your followers click on your link and go to the picture, they’ll see the image with your text. 

Other image apps that the company is pushing out today include those for eCommerce, social (such as the tweeting app that I just mentioned), organization, information, geolocation, advertising, presentation, and even public service.

Those terms are all pretty vague, so to provide a little more texture, let’s use another example.  Let’s say you’re checking out a picture of the Arc du Triomph in Paris, but you want more information.  You can click on the information app, which will pull up stats and facts on the famous site.  Or maybe you plan on going to Paris soon and you want to see what part of Paris it’s in.  Clicking on the geolocation app will pull up a map of the area and show you where the site is. 

I think my personal favorite, though, is the public service app, which hasn’t yet been deployed, but promises to be a big game-changer when it comes to fundraising or recruiting volunteers.  An image of the devastation in Japan following the tsunami might include a public service app, which could allow you to donate money right there on the spot.

In short, the new changes aren’t so much a shift from Luminate’s original platform, but rather an expansion.

“The name-change came about because it captures the full breadth of the company image.  ‘Pixazza’ referred to the Italian ‘piazza,’ the center of commerce, but that didn’t reflect everything that we wanted to do,” Bob Lisbonne explained.

The new platform and rebranding announcement comes just weeks after the company announced its new partnership with Hearst Digital Media to bring interactive ads to Redbookmag.com and Housebeautiful.com, among other Hearst publications.

Luminate currently works with over 4000 publishers, 3000 of which are live with the new applications now.  The company now reaches over 150 million unique monthly visitors and gets over 30 billion image views each year.