Internal email from Soujanya Bhumkar, Cooliris Co-Founder and CEO:

Dear Team,

I want to share with you the most exciting product breakthrough that the LiveShare team has made: Austin and gang developed the latest version of the personal messaging dashboard aka next gen LiveShare and it will totally blow you away with it’s really real-time experience. And when I say real-time, I mean really, really real-time – absolutely no delay at all. No uploading, no progress bar, no spinning hourglass – kiss all of these icons in your life goodbye.

Our users including you guys have been asking about going beyond photos to videos and articles. Now you get that too. Sharing photos/videos/articles/maps etc. is insanely simple.  Just drag and drop to the stream or group that you like.  What’s super cool is that this will up-level the way the market has been describing LiveShare – which has been limited to the photo sharing space.  With this we actually demo what we mean by visual communication…

For the first time, you can capture moments and share them with friends and family with absolutely no delay at all – the instant your finger taps the camera icon your photo or video instantly appears in your personal stream on your phone, iPad and the Web even before the content is fully uploaded.  No waiting, no uploading – there is nothing out there in this space that delivers such instant gratification. The development time to achieve this breakthrough has been totally worth it as the team has created the first genuinely real-time app with their incredible work on data flow.

I’ve heard some folks ask : “Why is instant so important? Isn’t close to real-time good enough?” If you want to share a moment or info with those close to you, you absolutely want to share it as it happens so they experience it: waiting for a photo to upload or a video to compress kills spontaneity and creates a time-lapse experience that’s as frustrating as bad lip-syncing from a lazy bollywood singer. And that’s precisely the problem with a lot of current apps.  They’re almost real-time, they’re almost live and we don’t believe consumers want ‘almost experiences’.  Users want to share, interact and communicate as things happen. That’s why I’m so excited about this breakthrough – I really, really believe that we have created the first really real-time social app. All others are lagging behind…

The backend technology is on the verge of getting ready for production although the UI is for the prototype only and this UI will get more delightful before we release this to the market.

Enjoy the demo and I am looking forward to bringing this to our millions of users worldwide.

Regards,
Soujanya

As a company, we think we know a thing or two about visual communications. Cooliris introduced better ways to browse media with products like Coolpreviews, Cooliris (formerly known as Piclens) for the desktop, and more recently the Android Gallery (the media app for all Android devices – shipped over 300k daily), Discover for iPad (#1 across the app store for multiple weeks across multiple countries) and now Decks. With over 40M downloads, 25M monthly page views and more than 8M monthly active users, we think we’ve done well and will continue to push the edge on media browsing.

So where do we go from here – what is the future of communication?

What we are seeing is this:
In browsing through photos, videos and other rich media, our user base wants to share that content, but they also want control over how they share it – both at a broadcast level (all friends on Facebook or all followers on Twitter) and narrowcast level (targeted people that would care specifically about the content shared with them). Enter LiveShare.

LiveShare enables conversation around context. Users can communicate and share with content they have created (using the camera or text on their phone or laptops), or chat about existing content (using the public section in LiveShare that brings in relevant, interesting content based on location and global interests around the world).

LiveShare does two subtle things differently from existing services (a) it does not assume context – the service doesn’t presume that you want to broadcast or narrowcast, it enables you to do either one based on what’s important to you as a user; and (b) it doesn’t draw a line between content and communication. Navigating to Parishilton.com and reading an article or seeing pictures there is akin to reading an email or seeing photos received from a friend. In either case, users want to be able to consume relevant content and communicate around that.

The four contexts around which LiveShare is looking to enable communication and sharing are space, time, interests, and relationships (internally referred to as the STIR framework). Instead of silo-ing the users or having them switch apps and services every time (which gets expensive b/c each service requires learning different interfaces, comes with a different social graph etc.), users can communicate flexibly around what’s important to them at the moment. Some of the use cases we wanted to highlight include:

Bachelor(ette) party – Definitely not a broadcast scenario (unless you’re Charlie Sheen). If you go out with five friends, of whom you know three, LiveShare allows you to set up a quick group based on the fact that all the users are at the same time, space, and have a temporal (elastic) relationship in context of the party. Once you add the three friends you know, they can add the other two (much like a real world scenario) and you immediately have a group that you are in full control of. You don’t have to be life-long friends or followers of any of these folks unless you want to.

U2 concert – A thousand fans rocking to awesome music. Being able to connect with fans around you (all fans in the same space and time with a shared interest and a temporary relationship) is easy through LiveShare. Simply navigate to public, find the concert/event/topic you’re looking for and start posting photos. LiveShare automatically pools all the photos together based on the shared context. Again, you don’t have to be life-long friends or followers of any of these folks unless you want to.

There are several more scenarios that we’ve begun to see cropping up in this nascent space and service and we will continue to push the boundaries of enabling contextual conversations easily.

More to come – stay tuned.

LiveShare for Android with commenting is now available, so go download it from the Android Marketplace! With commenting, you can now have great spontaneous conversations around all the fun photos with your friends. Every time anyone comments, the group members will receive a push notification so you’ll always be in the moment.

Another change is that now your private streams and your public streams are separated into tabs, so you can find the stream you’re looking for more easily. You can always favorite a public stream that you’re interested in and add it to “My Streams” for easier access.

You will also have better performance, stability, and battery life with the new version, so get it now!

For the past month or so Cooliris has transformed into a cricket crazy office space. Although we are a couple continents and a few time zones apart, many of us here are at work are huge Indian cricket fans- to put it mildly. With the Cricket World Cup in session, we have been spreading our message of how incredible cricket is to anyone who’ll listen, even to those who may find cricket um dull. We stepped up our trash-talking, checked on stats/injury reports every 5 minutes, started impromptu games of cricket in our hallway, prepped ourselves mentally and physically for this momentous occasion!

For the quarter-final match we played Australia, the team that has dominated world cricket for more than a decade. We attempted to watch the game on numerous different links and websites and we finally got one to work. We had to stay up till 2am for the live feed to begin and then remain awake for the duration of the match. Since cricket can be a 9 hour game, this was no easy feat. By the time the India-Australia match was nearing its nerve-wracking conclusion it was around 10am and everyone else at work had begun to file in. I am proud to report we definitely managed to convert a couple of our less enthusiastic co-workers into cricket fans. India pulled through that match with a close victory. In-fact a couple of our coworkers Leslie and Mayank who pulled the all-nighter, had to interview with Robert Scoble that afternoon; which they still did marvelously well! (Watch them here in Scoble’s piece- Cooliris: in-depth tour of innovative Silicon Valley company)

Next up was fierce political rivals Pakistan and then in the finals we played our neighbors Sri Lanka. For the semis and finals a similar pattern repeated itself- we once again huddled together around a television at 2am and cheered and chanted and laughed and cried our way to two more too-close-for-comfort victories and finally the coveted World Championship. Not to sound over dramatic, but we may now be the happiest work place in the country!!

Winning Moment!! I promise we were more excited than we appear here!

To review World Cup action and relive the best moments visit ESPN cricinfo’s World Cup page. Also check out exclusive behind the scenes fan footage of the World Cup in this exciting LiveShare stream!!

Sharing your photos with LiveShare is now more fun than ever with the new commenting feature! Have great, spontaneous conversations around all the funny and memorable moments with your friends by simply adding comments to the pictures in your streams. Every time that a new comment is added by you or your friends, all group members get notified.

The LiveShare version with commenting is also available on Windows Phone 7, and will soon be available on Android. Follow @GoLiveShare on Twitter to get up-to-the-minute updates.

So far, we’ve seen great adoption of LiveShare in the weeks that it’s been launched. People have been creating private shared groups to keep in touch with friends and loved ones in their daily lives, share photos that may be too risque for their entire social graphs, or get everyone’s photos from the group vacation all in one place.

How are you using LiveShare? We’d love to hear your stories and comments anytime – find us on Twitter, Facebook, and liveshare@cooliris.com.

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