Ditto Labs Wins Funds for Photo Analytics

Ditto Labs, which mines photos on social media sites to help brands understand target audiences, has raised $2.2m in new funding.

Boston-based Ditto Labs scours the more than five billion photos publicly shared on social media each week for brands and products, to enable marketers to identify and engage directly with consumers.

The company's proprietary visual search engine was built by a team of MIT-trained computer scientists, and adds structure to this data stream to help businesses target ads based on the products, brands, and categories consumers actually use. In addition, the system can be used to analyze seasonal, geographic and competitive trends, while also finding and engaging audiences based on the content of public photos.

CEO David Rose (pictured) comments: 'Our focus is to read the firehose of all public photos to discover how people use and interact with products and brands most important in them. Marketers at every consumer brand can benefit from this meta data. Marketers only relying on text, follows and likes are literally missing the pictures - which everyone knows are thousand times more valuable.'

New funding has been led by Cue Ball Capital, Stage 1 Ventures, and a number of media, technology and advertising investors.

Web site: www.ditto.us.com .