Instagram. Tumblr. Pinterest. The web in 2012 is a tremendously visual place, and yet, “visual media still as dumb today as it was 20 years ago,” says Todd Carter, founder and CEO of Tagasauris.

It doesn’t have to be that way, and Tagasauris has put its money on changing the state of things.

Why is dumb visual media a problem, especially at the enterprise-level? Visual media, in its highly un-optimized state, hasn’t been thought of in the same way that companies think about how making other forms of data more meaningful and reasonable can impact their business processes. A computer’s ability to assess image color, pattern and texture isn’t highly useful in the marketplace, and as a result visual media has “just been outside the realm of normal publishing processes, normal workflow processes,” Carter says. Therefore, what so many organizations – big media companies, photo agencies, and so on –  would rightly acknowledge to be their treasure troves of images don’t yield anywhere near the economic value that they can.

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David Myer of GigaOm reports that Instagram rival EyeEm is working on a few developments of its own. Myer writes, “It may not have Instagram’s user numbers, but what EyeEm does now have is wider platform reach. On Wednesday the Berlin firm’s Windows Phone app came out, through a close tie-in with both Microsoft and Nokia. The release means EyeEm is now available on iOS, Android, Windows Phone and the web, which makes for two more platforms than its biggest rival can manage for now.” Read more

The news of Facebook’s acquisition of mobile photo-sharing service Instagram for $1 billion this week may be fueling the dreams of tech start-ups of every stripe, including those in the semantic tech community. In fact, they may have even greater reason to be inspired: A recent  report has it that Instagram has been slowly rolling out an Open Graph integration for the app accomplished in collaboration with Facebook for seamlessly publishing photos to users’ Timelines in what may be the first of similar partner-deals down the road.

Other startups infused with semantic tech smarts may be on high lookout for funding opportunities as an important part of making those dreams come true. Thomson Reuters and The National Venture Capital Association this week released funding stats for the first quarter of 2012 that could put a bit of a damper on things: It found a 35 percent decrease by dollar commitments and a 9 percent decline by number of funds, compared to the first quarter of 2011. But, according to a statement by Mark Heesen, president of the NVCA, venture firms “appear to be more optimistic about the fundraising environment in 2012.”

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According to a recent article, “Online influence determiner Klout has doubled the number of its services adding Blogger, Flickr, Instagram, Last.fm and Tumblr to its scoring system, reported TechCrunch. Joe Fernandez, Klout CEO told Mashable, ‘The networks we launched today were chosen to give the Klout score a more holistic view of influence. By adding blogging, photos and music to the interactions that we are already measuring we are moving closer to our goal of providing a complete picture of your influence.’ On the basis of the ways you drive actions among your online friends, followers or subscribers Klout will calculate your influence on these newly included networks.” Read more