We recently opened a brand new Buzz page where you can check out the latest fan videos, feedback, and media highlights surrounding Cooliris! The Buzz page was the brainchild of Stanford student and Cooliris team member Nidhi Bhat. While communicating with PicLens’s biggest fans, she saw the need for a community “home base.” She envisioned the Buzz page as “a place for our fans to interact with other users and spread the PicLens love.”

The page will feature fans’ PicLens-enabled sites, which use it to showcase everything from art exhibitions to product listings. The Buzz page will also be home to weekly highlighted fan videos and quotes and feedback from avid PicLens users.

“We’ve seen some really creative work with PicLens,” Nidhi said. “We want to encourage that and share it! I’m hoping that the Buzz site will help shape the strong emerging PicLens fan community. Every step of progress we’ve made so far is thanks to the fans “ they should have a place to show their hard work too.”

PicLens fans should also continue to check the Buzz page for announcements and contests, where their creative skills will be put to the test “ with the chance to get some sweet prizes in return!

Firefox 3 has just arrived on the scene, offering new features and boasting a browser that is more user-friendly, secure, and customizable than ever before. The Cooliris Team is excited about the launch and is proud to say our ever-poplular addons PicLens (check out our brand new Piclens 1.7!) and Cooliris Previews sail smoothly with the Firefox upgrade.

Firefox is a tremendous success story, growing organically through the combined efforts of a small core Mozilla team and a massive volunteer community. Firefox users are enthusiastic early adopters of new Web technology, excited to both try out and develop new software.

It was this enthusiasm and sense of community that encouraged the Cooliris team to focus much of our efforts on the Firefox browser. Immediately after launching our “PicLens 3D Wall” interface in January, we received thousands of letters of praise, suggestions, and even performance reports from Firefox users and fellow developers. Some even sent us multi-page documents that canvassed every aspect of our interface and their user experience.

This kind of feedback, and the sense that we are part of a growing and evolving community, has been invaluable in advancing PicLens toward its full potential.

Our just launched PicLens 1.7 (read about it here), with new features such as Return to PicLens, Discover, and Shop Amazon, evolved much in thanks to the tremendous feedback we’ve received from fans.

Today, PicLens is one of Firefox’s most downloaded addons, and proudly the personal favorite of Mozilla CEO John Lilly.

Give Firefox 3 a try now and make sure you’re making the most of your Web experience. Mozilla’s community has been a great help in evolving PicLens, and newest version of Firefox gives all of us “ as both users and developers “ a lot more to play with. Way to go, Mozilla!

We are thrilled to announce today’s launch of PicLens Version 1.7 with three exciting additions:

Discover

MSNBC, ESPN, movie trailers . . . Now the latest news in sports, entertainment, and current events is all just one click away. Look for the “Discover” button in the top left corner of the PicLens screen, and click on it for a list of media channels. Select any category, and a collection of the latest relevant images and videos will be at your fingertips. This information is refreshed as often as every 15 minutes, so feel free to revisit it as often as you like. Is there a channel that you would like to see? Just e-mail us back at feedback@cooliris.com and we’ll look into it.

Shop Amazon

Call it virtual window shopping. The power of PicLens has been put to work with Amazon.com. Just type your query into the PicLens search box, and choose a Amazon product category in the pull-down menu to refine your search. Voila! Now you can browse products visually. Zooming in on an image will give you details and price information. Click on the globe icon in the information bar, and you will be taken to the product webpage on Amazon, where you can find additional summaries and reviews and even make your purchase.

Return to PicLens

We heard you! Now you can minimize PicLens to a corner of your screen and come back later right where you left off, with one click. Want to jump to the corresponding webpage of an image or video and then toggle right back into PicLens? Click!

We can’t wait to hear your feedback on these exciting new features.

–The Cooliris Team