It’s a smart idea, best exemplified by the fashion image that invites viewers to click through the relevant clothing and cosmetics vendors (although Luminate, formerly Pixazza, has also demonstrated how this concept can go horribly wrong).

Now a new German startup called Roombeats is joining the fray. However, rather than offering something different to those rivals, it’s instead promising more focus.

Specifically, Roombeats, which launched in beta on Friday, will only be concerned with embedded advertising. As co-founder Markus Berger-de León put it to me, Roombeats is aiming to be the “AdSense for images”. To start it on that journey, the company has picked up a five-figure sum from angel investors including Digital Pioneers.

“The focus of [Luminate and ThingLink] is to make images interactive,” Berger-de León told me. “Our focus is on making money for publishers with images by putting ads in there. The technology behind it is somewhat the same, but the focus is different.”

But wait, we’ve heard this pitch before.

GumGum also deals only with advertising, ignoring the more frivolous applications of image interactivity. That said, GumGum tends to provide banner ads, which Berger-de León suggests are still a turn-off for many consumers.

It remains to be seen exactly what Roombeats will do to attract publishers and advertisers that has not been done before. The co-founder talks of “various ad models” that his team is experimenting with, but details are scarce for now.

Berger-de León, who used to be CEO of the once-mighty StudiVZ social network and artisan marketplace MyHammer, is keen to promote the international aspirations of the company as one differentiator, and he has a point there. Luminate may be the leader in this field for now, but it remains a U.S.-centric affair for now. Roombeats will be global from early on, and multilingual to boot.

As with so many German startups at the moment, internationalization may be the key to its success.

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We’ve covered Finland’s ThingLink a couple of times before. To recap, they (and, until today, Pixboom) provide a layer of interactivity for photos. Hovering over marked points on the image brings up links to whatever the tagger wants – websites, sounds and so on.

It’s a useful way for publishers to create infographics, for example. A number of big media sites are trialling ThingLink in this way, and there are also myriad opportunities for people to create original e-cards and the like. But fashion retail and blogging also provide an obvious use case, and one that Thinglink was missing out on.

But no longer. Sweden’s Pixboom, founded in 2008 by Jonas Sujkerbuik and Daniel Aspers, has given up on going it alone, and it’s brought a potentially lucrative Swedish fashion blogging scene with it.

“Jonas is a serial entrepreneur,” ThingLink CEO Ulla Engeström told me. “He called me one day and said, ‘it takes too much money to compete with you, let’s join forces.’ We didn’t really have expertise in fashion, and Pixboom has the best connections with the largest fashion brands in Sweden and good connections with the Swedish blogging platforms. I realise fashion tagging is probably the trickiest area — it’s about curation and you don’t want to disturb the experience.”

Here’s an example of the kind of thing we’re talking about here:

Sujkerbuik has now joined ThingLink’s advisory board, and Pixboom marketing chief Matilda Larsson is ThingLink’s new community manager. The financial terms of the deal have not been disclosed.

Defensive plays

ThingLink’s last big move was in February, when it created something called ThinkLink Tabs -– effectively a way for advertisers to embed ThingLink images in Facebook pages.

But the company is also working on a new feature, inspired by Facebook Connect and named, well, ThingLink Connect. It’s a way for third-party platforms to integrate ThingLink functionality, and it’s a damn smart defensive move.

“We believe that a lot of services that are image-intensive will offer interactive image tagging,” Engeström said, explaining that ThingLink would prefer not to see such services developing rival technologies. “We wanted to get a good start there and offer ThingLink Connect.”

The service is in developer preview mode right now, so it’s not ready yet, but Engeström claimed it would only take a platform a day to integrate ThingLink functionality into its music or photo-sharing service.

And ThingLink Connect would be free too, as long as the service using it is free. “If the third-party platform charges their users to tag images, then it would be an interesting revenue-sharing opportunity for us,” Engeström said.

So there are a couple of handy lessons in there. First, it’s great when a rival decides to add their niche to your arsenal. And second, if you’re not sure that someone out there won’t be able to make you redundant, come up with a flexible and attractive way to make yourself indispensable.

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ThingLink’s proposition is fairly straightforward: the idea is that pictures can be a platform, with a system that makes static images interactive by adding a layer hotspots that can show users videos, text, or link to other pages when they roll over it with their mouse.

Today the Helsinki-based company is publicly rolling out a service that lets marketers and advertisers (and anyone else) build these interactive images and use them on their Facebook pages.

The result is that page owners can turn their Facebook presence into a sort of interactive landing page. There are a few experimental examples already out there, including the likes of Iggy Pop and British comedian Steve Coogan, who is using a ThingLink embed on the Facebook page of his latest book.

Anyone subscribing to one of ThingLink’s plans — priced at $5 or $20 — can embed linked images into Facebook, a move that the company’s Neil Vineberg said came after discussions with partner businesses.

“We’re listening to the market,” he told me. “As we started engaging with other publications, record labels and agencies we got feedback that they wanted better Facebook tools.”

Right now it has been trialled with a few publishers and record labels, but in the long term Vineberg says the idea is that the company can get more users of all stripes by being able to showcase its tools in front of Facebook’s millions of users.

“We actually think the Facebook application could be the first point of entry… and that will lead folks into using Thinglink across the Web.”

But will it work?

I can certainly see the appeal to advertisers: after all, it makes their pages look different from other people flogging similar ideas or products, and allows them to use existing artwork and photography to try and capture a bit of their audience’s attention.

Used well, it’s an exciting layer of interactivity… but when ThingLink doesn’t work, it tends to feel a bit strange, outdated and spammy — like an old-fashioned interactive poster, or a some kind of strange evolution of Flash, or a closed-down version of the Web.

And then there’s the question of how Facebook itself feels about services like this. The company, after all, is built to take money from advertisers — and ThingLink bypasses that business somewhat by allowing advertisers to build their own interactive billboards. Plus Facebook is bound to be looking for ways to extract more cash from marketers, given both the forthcoming IPO and the increasing evidence that one of its other big bets — Facebook storefronts — just doesn’t work.

Whatever the case, it could prove an important step forward for ThingLink, which has twisted and shifted its model significantly in an attempt to find success. What started out as a concept for giving every physical object an online identity — the original vision of founder Ulla Engeström — has now become something very different.

The first version of the current ThingLink was a sort of image annotation engine that could only contain text links to other pages, but it has been expanding its approach since last summer, when it extended its service so that images could contain videos, sound files and Twitter messages.

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With ThingLink’s new suite of what Engeström calls “rich media tags,” users can embed media from Facebook, YouTube, Spotify, SoundCloud, Twitter and more onto an image on their websites. It’s a significant improvement, because in the past tags could only contain links, which meant that users would get sent away from the host site.

Now it’s more pared down, providing an easy-to-use system that lets people add tags and hotspots to images. And as of today, the company is offering to embed not just text links to pictures but also audio, video, images and other material brought in directly from other sites.

“Now you don’t have to go away from the original image,” Engeström says. “You can discover all the things you need to know right there.” If you want to see what these rich media tags actually look like, here’s an example that incorporates all sorts of multimedia options:

Thinglink’s business is to help users build these images, let them tag and annotate them as they want, and then embed them on the users’ sites. The business so far has seen nearly 1 billion views of images created by around 3,000 publishers; the publishers are mostly individual bloggers but also include several large news organizations in Europe (business customers pay a fee for using the service, which gives them more support, access to data and the like).

For example the Berliner Morgenpost, a German newspaper, used Thinglink to enrich the haunting Situation Room image taken in the White House during the raid that ended with the death of Osama bin Laden.

Engeström says the range of services that connect to Thinglink will continue to expand over the coming months and that the company is in talks to have its tools built-in to a number of different platforms. The service is already being adopted by several surprise sectors, and she sees more opportunities for expansion in other areas, too.

“It’s for everyone who has a vested interest in explaining the details of what they do,” she says. “We were surprised by the music sector, by how enthusiastically they took to Thinglink, and there is a lot of potential for educational use because it makes images really rich, which can be a fantastic way to learn about things.”

It’s easy to dismiss a service like this as a toy or perhaps as a feature of a bigger product rather than a stand-alone system. But that would be ignoring the power of images — an area that is starting to be radically redefined online. After all, only yesterday Google gave a bravura display of how important images could be in the future of information, showing off the new search by image feature. There’s a lot of life in this area yet.

And true, there are competing services that want to embed data inside images, admits Engeström — companies like Pixazza. But they have their eyes on short-term goals, she says, while her heart is in providing tools that anybody can use — and that can ultimately feed back into that early dream of being able to call up online information about any object in the world.

“The difference between us and anyone else described as competitors is that most image-tagging companies see images as a platform for advertising, because that’s where the money is,” she says. “For us, that’s interesting, but it’s not the most interesting thing. We see images as a navigational surface that you can use to create a rich experience. We’re not merely a tagging tool; we’re a future browser.”

Photograph used under CC license courtesy of Flickr user Nadya

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