This week the news surfaced that ThingLink hired Neil Vineberg as their Chief Marketing Officer. Neil is a PR guru with previous work experiences from leading communication firms like Middleberg Euro and Golin/Harris. Neil previously worked with two other start-ups from Finland: Applifier and Jaiku, which is where the connection probably comes from. At ThingLink he would not only oversee the company's marketing and PR but would be responsible for the start-up's busines development in the US. ThingLink will soon open offices in San Francisco and New York.

With such an impressive hire, ThingLink is bound to make an agressive expansion to US in the near future. As Ulla-Maaria Engeström, founder and CEO, commented: 'Neil’s vast experience in and out of the tech sphere makes him the ideal person to introduce ThingLink to a wide range of prospective partners and brands across the US'.

Neil himself stated: 'By turning images into a platform for rich media, ThingLink is innovating a new paradigm in consumer engagement'. Indeed, links and tags inside images are something that other companies are exploring too. For instance, Kiosked from Finland (still in stealth mode) is linking images with online stores, Merchii from Sweden (also in stealth mode) is promising to do the same, as does Speaking_Image from Madrid (in beta-testing), though the latter seems to be developing more complicated and cumbersome software.

Tagging itself is no news but the kind of content available today can turn simple tags into powerful tools for promotion, information-gathering and e-commerce. ThingLink launched rich media tags earlier in the summer, enabling their users to link not only with e-commerce websites and other portals but with social media as well as sound and video platforms like SoundCloud, YouTube, Spotify and Vimeo.

ThingLink do not disclose their business model though one can deduct that part of their revenue comes from affiliate sales from linked advertisers and retailers. The US launch will take the start-up to a whole new development phase. If their service gains popularity on the other side of the Pacific, we can expect it to connect with more media and spread exponentially.

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Hendrik Morkel August 04, 2011

I really like ThingLink, it does add significant value to photos, and a lot of my fellow UL outdoor bloggers are slowly adopting it after they saw it on my blog. Great tech, and all the best to the team to their expansion overseas!

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"If their service gains popularity on the other side of the Pacific, ..."

Pacific = should probably be Atlantic. At least that's the sea body between Europe and the American continent ;)

grimen August 11, 2011

For the less tech-savvy - like my father: Yes we do image tagging and enables e-commerce in *any* website within minutes, and you don't need to know how it works at all.

For the tech-savvy - like me: Merchii is more of a decentralized e-commerce framework than only image tagging - which is just one of the way products can be presented using our Merchii Widgets (which we believe is far more flexible than any competitors backends we have seen so far).