ReadWriteEnterprise

If you're a long-time reader of the many dozens of blogs out there, no doubt you've run into inline contextual ads - those double-underlined terms that bring up little video screens when your mouse passes over them, courtesy of such providers as Kontera and Vibrant Media. Advertisers generate campaigns around a handful of words, and whenever those words appear in the articles of participating sites, they instantly become ad triggers.

This morning, a new advertising platform called Stipple announced it has built a similar kind of platform around images, based not on text matching but image pattern matching. Stipple's platform examines images for similarities to pictures that advertisers provide, such as an article of clothing or a particular style of purse or a certain vehicle. Whenever the reader's mouse pointer passes over them in a picture, up pops a little screen, perhaps with a price tag and links to a vendor.