Pretty cool news in today – U2 (the band, of course) is using Cooliris on their Facebook page! Check out how they used Cooliris to showcase their merchandise. Great use case and great example of the different ways Cooliris can be used display content. Rock on!
One of the most distinct and exciting cities in the United States, San Francisco has earned a reputation as a great cultural center. Plenty of the Cooliris team resides in San Francisco, including myself (I moved here a few months ago). So we’ve put together a list of our favorite San Francisco landmarks, restaurants and more. This list is not at all intended to be all-inclusive, but to give just a taste of what the city has to offer.
Whether night, day, dawn or dusk our favorite park in the city is Alamo Square which features one of the best views of San Francisco’s phenomenal skyline. This Halloween the Castro is the place to be as usual with its annual Halloween party. There is great coffee, none more hip than the local favorite Four Barrel Coffee in the Mission. Japantown boasts one of the city’s best theaters Sundance Kabuki which has incredible reclining seats.
No trip to San Francisco would be complete in my opinion without a trolley car ride and dinner and a show at Yoshi’s Jazz club. Lombard street is known for being the crookedest street in the world but is just as interesting at its straight points which run through the heart of the Marina neighborhood. If you are 21 and older and in the city on Thursday night then California Academy of Science’s weekly Nightlife event is the place to be. If you’re going to be in town soon make sure you check out a genuine San Francisco event like LoveFest (Sep. 29- Oct 3) or see a Giants game who are making an exciting push for the playoffs!
Today our CTO, Austin Shoemaker, is speaking at the NVIDIA GPU Technology Conference Emerging Companies Summit about how Cooliris is addressing the issues of user experience across web and mobile platforms.
UX development is a bit of a battle zone right now. There’s HTML5 vs. Adobe Flash on the web; iOS vs Android and Flash on mobile. Underlying all this are increasingly powerful open source projects that are gaining strong developer and corporate adoption which will definitively impact the future of web and mobile development.
When we built the original Cooliris browser plug-in two and a half years ago, we wrote a lot of native code in order to optimize performance of the Cooliris Wall across platforms and browsers. As a result of the complex low-level implementation, it was painful to iteratively improve and add new features to our current browser extension. Our product cycles slowed to six months, making it challenging to execute on our vision of delivering awesomeness to our users. When we started our efforts, the web platform simply did not support the level of presentation quality and performance that we desired. That’s all changing.
About a year ago we started working on a new platform that would enable us to create more compelling user experiences while also being able to iterate at web speed. If you know Cooliris, you know that we are passionate about pushing the limits of technology to create amazing consumer experiences, and our new platform had to be cutting edge to facilitate that level of development. Using open web technologies as our base, including Chromium and SQLite, and adding significant new capabilities in the areas of 3D rendering, user interaction and data synchronization, we’re starting to see our efforts pay off. We now have a beta version of Cooliris running on Windows and Mac OS on our new platform, and we will have a beta version of the new rendering engine running on iOS. We’re also working on how we can use the rendering engine to enhance the applications that are being built on Android.
At the Emerging Companies Summit, Austin will be talking about the problems that we and other companies are facing today, and will give an overview of our new platform. We’re excited about what we’ve created (naturally!) and moreover, we’re excited about the interest we’ve had from third party partners in working with us to take our technology to other platforms, and being part of the effort to make it significantly easier to create great experiences that span the desktop, web and mobile devices. If you’re at the NVIDIA event, be sure to stop by Booth 37 and say hello, and you can get a preview of the very exciting products coming next from Cooliris.
Attention: Fashionistas! While NYC Fashion Week comes to a close, our new feature channel provides a recap of some of the most exciting and strange Spring 2011 collections.
I noticed that most of the designers stuck with a neutral palette from white, slightly off-white, and completely off-white to beige and brown. There were pops of bright colors including reds, yellows and turquoise sprinkled in here and there, the most predominant of them being orange. Orange is my favorite color so I’m already way ahead of the trend.
I adored this dress by Preen, but simultaneously felt pretty awful for the models on the runway who had fake, and not-so-subtle bangs clipped onto their foreheads.
The Tommy Hilfiger collection was fabulous! Clean, sharp and classy. No wonder his front row was packed with celebs like Jennifer Lopez, Ed Westwick, Lenny Kravitz, Bradley Cooper, Neil Patrick Harris and more!
Surprisingly, the Lacoste collection had me grinning from ear to ear. When I think Lacoste, I usually think of snobbery, but the Spring 2011 Lacoste runway show was a breath of fresh air. All the models were smiling as they strutted down the catwalk, rather than the typical depressed and angry look that is common to NYFW. I realized at this moment that I would prefer a Lacoste man to a Lanvin man or a Yves Saint Laurent why-is-he-in-a-skirt-man. The only thing better than a Lacoste man in my NYFW books would be an Hermès man. True Love. Sigh.
In the last 24 hours some of our users may have experienced connectivity issues with our iPad application – Discover. The reason for the issue was a change in Wikipedia’s APIs (the data source for Discover) due to API overload on Wikipedia’s site.
The result for Discover users during this time was lack of internet connectivity in Discover – users were greeted by a “You are not connected to the internet” prompt.
Fortunately, this issue has been resolved, and everything should be back to normal.
If you experienced issues during this time, we apologize for the inconvenience. If you are still experiencing issues, try exiting and re-opening the application, or even uninstalling and reinstalling the application. If you continue to experience issues beyond these troubleshooting tips, please email bugs@cooliris.com.
Thank you for your support of Cooliris!
