During the past nine months, the name Stipple has been cropping up again and again.  Back in November, Mashable said that the startup’s ability to gain a $2 million seed round of financing “points to a growing industry fascination with object discovery in photos.”  The same day, The Next Web liked what they saw and told us to “expect big things from Stipple.”  Then in May of this year, TechCrunch stated: “This platform has the potential to be massive, and to make a lot of people a lot of money.”

Knowing that the fashion and beauty industries especially love photos, we felt it was time to investigate this company and find out how they are taking photo tagging to the next level.

Stipple’s products include:

Stipple Lens, for photo rights holders – creates new revenue streams for photographers and photo agencies around their editorial image content. Lens currently licenses more than 100,000 editorial images per month from top photo agencies, including Abaca USA, Admedia, Buzz Foto, PictureGroup, Sipa, Starmax, Startraks and Zuma.

Stipple Pipeline, for brands – the first online image commerce system designed specifically for brands. More than 50 brands including AAFA’s 2011 Brand of the Year William Rast, Vivitar, Local Celebrity, Swag Like Us, Silly Bandz, Signorelli, Hazel, Jaloux, Radii, Domino and Teruo Artistry are already using Stipple.

Stipple Network, for publishers – Network syndicates search and shopping information to nationally distributed editorial images gives publishers the ability to label the people, places, and things contained in their custom images. More than 1,300 publishers are a part of the Stipple Network.

Stipple Want, for consumers — enables audiences to shop and ‘want list’ the products contained in editorial images throughout the web. Additionally, shoppers are able to bookmark specific products within an image. Stipple Want is a user-initiated experience and is activated only when consumers mouse-over products inside images.

With Stipple, a picture may be worth more than a thousand words. We love the way this company is making photography digitally engaging online.  We can’t wait to see how photographers, brands, publishers and consumers put this technology to use!

You can fan Stipple on Facebook and follow @stippleit on Twitter.  For more information, visit their FAQ section.