MENLO PARK, CA, May 2, 2008 - A little over two weeks ago, we launched on our site the first public release of PicLens 1.6.3 with 3D search for YouTube videos. In usual form, we got user feedback, made some tweaks, and just now put our latest and greatest on the Mozilla download site. Pick your flavor and grab your copy of PicLens there from our website now!

Oh, yeah, did I say our latest release is available for both Firefox 2.0 and 3.0 (and, of course, Internet Explorer, too)? You bet!

MENLO PARK, CA, April 15, 2008 - You thought the 3D wall was cool when it was filled with high-quality but (through no fault of their own) static images? What if you could browse videos seamlessly with that same interface? Oh, you can.

Our new PicLens v.1.6.3 release features YouTube video search. Check out our demo video below and see for yourself!

Once you’ve got PicLens open, simply browse YouTube using the search bar at the upper-right. Or if you’re using Firefox and happen to be visiting YouTube, click the PicLens button in your browser toolbar to be transported to an unending wall of your favorite videos.

The new release brings some other great improvements along for the ride. You can now see metadata – image title labels of Flickr photo captions, for instance – while flying through images and videos in PicLens. We know context is important, and we want to provide you with as much as we can without cluttering your interface.

We’ve also integrated a new UI, which further streamlines navigation with a more obvious Jump to Page button and an improved full-screen mode. Prior to this release, you couldn’t zoom an image to more than twice its size. We now offer true full-screen zoom for both images and video alike.

So what are you waiting for? Head on over and download the new Piclens v1.6.3 update.

Grab your popcorn kids. The previews are over, and it’s time for the main feature.

PicLens 1.6.3 is available for Firefox 2.0, Firefox 3b5, and Internet Explorer on Windows Vista, XP, and Mac OSX, and can be downloaded for free right here on our website at www.piclens.com.

Fans are so smitten with PicLens that the YouTube videos keep streaming in. From demos to reviews, and even just music video galleries compiled by users who want an awesome new way to share their albums, the number of PicLens videos has shot well past 100.

Giovanni Antico discovered the power of PicLens when navigating his Flickr albums. Giovanni writes, “I was so excited to see my photos as if they were in a boundless gallery that I recorded a video of such experience. PicLens gave me a whole new way to browse images, combining spectacular navigation with ease of use.” The album video he created is a staff favorite. Check it out!

Cool, huh? Did seeing that just spark your creative side? There are a lot of neat themes for a Piclens video. Maybe you’d like a new way to commemorate your family vacation. Maybe you’ve been wanting to make a music video on YouTube for a while but just haven’t found the right medium. Or maybe you’ve got an artist’s eye and can use our 3D wall to form a moving pointillist piece out of hundreds of disparate tiny images! (Or maybe, just maybe, I watched Ferris Bueller recently and have Seurat on the noggin.) Whatever you want to share with us, put it up on YouTube and drop us a line about it, and you may just end up on our blog!

PRESS RELEASE

REDMOND, WA, March 11, 2008. Microsoft’s Windows Marketplace has selected PicLens as this week’s featured download on its IE Add-Ons webpage.

Window’s Market Place is Microsoft’s primary portal for over 5,000 downloads from over 2,000 companies. Add-ons selected by Microsoft are carefully screened by Microsoft and rated by users to ensure they meet the quality standards demanded by users.

The feature placement of PicLens on Windows Marketplace starts today and will run for one week. Thereafter, PicLens can be downloaded from the product detail page of IE Add-Ons or our own website at www.piclens.com.

Hitting the newspaper stands today is an article in the New York Times that describes our popular PicLens product as an example of new generation technology for Web navigation. You can grab a copy of the article “Coming Soon: Nothing Between You and Your Machine” in the Business Section of the paper or at nytimes.com, which released the online version yesterday.

Journalist John Markoff cites Nintendo Wii, the Apple iPhone, and PicLens as technologies that bring computer screens to life in new, immersive ways. Markoff goes on to highlight PicLens and its unique immersive features.

Austin Shoemaker, our very own chief technology officer at Cooliris, Inc., is quoted in the article.

The New York Times is the largest 7-day paper in the United States, with home delivery in over 340 markets and a net audience of 22 million for its print and online publications. The publisher joins other media leaders, such as CNET, Macworld, and the BBC, who see PicLens at the forefront of emerging technologies that transform the Web experience.

PRESS RELEASE

MENLO PARK, CA, March 6, 2008 – Cooliris, Inc. (www.cooliris.com), maker of the popular 3D photo viewer PicLens, has just teamed up with free website provider Freewebs (www.freewebs.com) to make the PicLens experience available to all Freewebs users and visitors. Freewebs has had over 20 million websites created by members using its intuitive, user-friendly tools, to date.

As part of a larger initiative launched last week to enhance their online photo sharing product, Freewebs has added support for the PicLens browser extension, and present PicLens Lite (www.piclens.com/lite) as the default slideshow option on its webpage creation platform.

“At Freewebs we are constantly looking to improve our user experience,” said Haroon Mokhtarzada, Co-Founder and CEO of Freewebs. “We have seen a huge increase in the use of digital photography on our sites over the years and are excited about the opportunity to enable our members a new state-of-the-art way to display photos on their sites. PicLens and PicLens Lite offer beautiful and unique viewing experiences that we know it will be hugely popular with our millions of members.”

PicLens Lite gives those creating websites on Freewebs the power to create immersive, full-screen slideshows on their sites. Site visitors simply click a customizable “start slideshow” button to view photos on the site as a sleek slideshow presentation, complete with user controls. From there, users can play or pause the slideshow, or better yet dive into a full-screen cinematic experience that goes beyond the confines of the browser window.

Viewers of PicLens Lite on Freewebs will have the option to enhance their cinematic experience by installing the free, full-versioned PicLens plugin on their browser. Available at www.piclens.com, the popular PicLens plugin sports many additional features, including the “PicLens Wall”, a stunning and magical 3D world where users can effortlessly drag, click, and zoom around thousands of images in a full-screen environment.

With PicLens’ innovative technology and Freewebs’ versatile publishing platform, creating and enjoying websites with rich media will never be the same again.

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About Cooliris
Cooliris, Inc. is a privately held company headquartered in Menlo Park, CA. Founded in January 2006 with a simple mantra “Think beyond the browser,” Cooliris creates products that make discovering and enjoying the Web more exciting, efficient, and personal. Cooliris, Inc. has had over 5 million downloads of its core products PicLens and Cooliris Previews.

About Freewebs.com
Freewebs offers the web’s leading entry-level personal publishing platform, dedicated to ensuring everyone in the world can create a quality multimedia website. To date, Freewebs members have created more than 20 million comprehensive websites including blogs, photos, videos, music, e-commerce and more. Founded in 2001, Freewebs is privately held and based in Silver Spring, MD.

Have you voted yet? We just found out that PicLens, our ever-popular online 3D viewer, has been selected as a finalist in the 2008 Webware 100 Awards by the editors of CNET Webware.com. PicLens enthusiasts can cast their vote for PicLens by visiting the CNET Webware website.

Voting for this year’s awards will run until March 31. Winners will be announced on April 21, the day before the opening of Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco, a CNET co-sponsored event.

This year, users of CNET Webware.com nominated over 5,000 eligible entries, from which the editors honed down to a shortlist of the top 300. “For the most part we think we found the most important webware products,” says Rafe Needleman, an editor for CNET, who helped pick PicLens as a finalist in the browsing category.

We want to give special thanks to our users worldwide and to CNET for so enthusiastically embracing PicLens. We know we could not have made it this far without your support!

If you haven’t had a chance yet, please take 10 seconds to vote!

The past 31 days has been an exhilarating time for the Cooliris Team. Here’s a rundown of some of the happenings:

• We unveiled PicLens 1.6 for Firefox and Internet Explorer, our revolutionary online image viewer that lets you effortlessly drag, search, zoom, and zip around thousands of images in a magical full-screen 3D environment

• We got to hang out with Former Secretary of State Colin Powell, who dropped by Cooliris to check out PicLens 1.6 and the “3D Wall” — no kidding, check out the photo below!
  

• We optimized PicLens Lite, which allows webmasters to enable full-screen slideshow on their own websites and WordPress blogs.

• We responded to nearly 3,000+ emails from euphoric users hailing the new “3D Wall” of PicLens. Users described the PicLens experiences as “exquisite”, “stunning”, and even “religious”

• We got featured on 70+ YouTube videos by fans of PicLens

• We launched Cooliris Previews 2.6, featuring a basic slideshow viewer for Google Images and Yahoo Images.

• We danced the night away at our first mega Bhangra party, featuring Rishi (one of our very own team members) and the Stanford University Bhangra Dance Team
  

• We received tasty reviews from CNET, Wired, Downloadsquad, ReadWriteWeb, and hundreds of other blogs and news sources

• We welcomed a handful of new team members: Meg, Krishna, Alex, Jess, Rick, Ryan, Jason, Sarah, Nidhi, Truebe, Paul, Xandra, Noah, Jonah, Rishi, Rohan, Evan, Juan, and two Chris’s.

• We drank lots of coffee and got about 4.9 hours of sleep per night

• We launched this blog!

Needless to say, we’ve all been working tirelessly, but loving it! It’s a great time to be at Cooliris.