UPDATE: Other than viewing the new visualization at our booth #1210 at SXSW, you can also go to www.cooliris.com/sxsw to view the SXSW stream!

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Hi guys!

We will be at SXSW for the interactive festival this weekend from March 12-15. Our booth number is 1210, so please do come by and say hello, check out our cool demos (and get a first look at some new stuff!), and have some snacks and drinks with us during the block party on Sunday!

We’ll also be showing a cool, new visual experience streaming all SXSW photos as it happens. All you have to do to contribute your photos is upload your photos to a Flickr account and tag it with SXSW. Then, come by our booth 1210 to see the new 3D photo experience in person. We’ll also be hosting this on a website so check back later for the updated URL.

Don’t forget to follow us @Cooliris on Twitter during SXSW to find out where we are and contact us if you want to meet up!

Last, but definitely not least, if you’re looking to post your own SXSW photos on a personal website or blog, put it up on a Cooliris Wall with the super easy-to-use Cooliris Express! We’ll have a special SXSW theme in the background options for Cooliris Express (look for it on Friday).

Hope to see you there!

You may have noticed today on Cooliris.com that we have a completely new logo and website design! We hope you enjoy our new look and feel of the website and find navigation easier and more intuitive. This change in our appearance reflects our evolution as a company and the evolution of our products. Just four years ago, our initial team of 8 talented engineers and visionaries released our first product, CoolPreviews, followed by Piclens in the following year, which has evolved into what you now know as Cooliris. Today, our company of 40 employees offers a portfolio of 4 different products that all offer a unique value proposition to consumers, publishers, and website owners alike. These are: Cooliris for Desktop, Cooliris for Mobile, Cooliris Express, and CoolPreviews. We’ve had over 20 million downloads across products to date!

In the past couple of years, we’ve seen a number of premium Cooliris Wall partnerships around the web, like the Wall Street Journal’s 2008 Year in Photos (our very first premium embedded Wall collaboration!), TV.com, the official Taylor Swift website, and the Hindustan Times! The widespread adoption of Cooliris Walls around the web led us to develop Cooliris Express, the easy tool to embed your own Cooliris Wall onto any website or social network. Today, there have been over 10,000 Walls created with Cooliris Express, and 200 new Walls being created everyday!

In 2009, we also launched the Cooliris Publisher Network and one of our biggest ad campaigns to date with Infiniti/OMD.

Let’s not forget the very exciting Google partnership for the Nexus One superphone! Earlier this year, the Nexus One was launched with a supercool 3D Gallery application, which Google had tapped us to develop. Not too shabby!

Also on our new website is an early release of version 1.12 currently available exclusively on Cooliris.com. We’ll be adding additional functionality and putting out updates over the next couple of weeks, but if you want to get a sneak peek at version 1.12, check it out and send us feedback at feedback@cooliris.com!

We’ll also be rolling out a new SWF tonight with the new logo for those of you using the embedded Cooliris Wall. No action is required on your end, but you will eventually get the new logo on your Cooliris Wall.

With all of these changes, it’s only natural that our logo reflects our new identity as a company setting to revolutionize the web. Below we have a note from Robert Padbury, one of our previous visual designers as well as the creator of the new Cooliris logo, explaining the design philosophy of the logo.

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Since its inception, Cooliris has always used two rounded rectangles – one green, one blue – to stand as the identity of the company. The concept was that one square represented the web, and the other square represented the Cooliris context.

This notion of our logo is one of utility – what the product does, as opposed to identity – who the company is. This is why the company set out in the summer of 2008 to completely reinvent the Cooliris brand. We wanted to craft an identity, and not just convey what the product is.

Great logos tend to have five distinct qualities. They’re simple, memorable, timeless, versatile and appropriate. Many are visual interpretations of the name of the company, and with the name Cooliris, a concatenation of cool and iris, we have a fairly large visual library to work with.

For cool, there’s several meanings, including the cool half of the color spectrum, the temperature and the state of mind. From this it’s natural to choose blue, the coolest of the cool colors.

For ‘iris’, we can use the human eye, the ancient Greek goddess of rainbows, the flower and the component of the camera – the aperture.

The proportion between the inner circle and the outer circle is that of a normally dilated human iris, the three sections are inspired from the geometry of the flower, and the sections are cut in the shape of a camera’s iris.

Joining the new logo is a bold new typeface called Gotham. Gotham is a beautiful and timeless typeface developed by the New York type foundry Hoefler & Frere-Jones. It was inspired by the signage found in New York before there was ever a graphic-design profession. It has a bold timeless quality and it was also used as the typeface for the Obama ‘08 Presidential campaign.

The dots on the “i” character were rounded to both echo the logo and to also improve legibility of the logo at smaller sizes.

This is a bold new look for a bold new company.

Robert Padbury is now a freelance designer working in San Francisco. You can learn more by visiting his website at http://www.padbury.net.

We have just launched a Haiti Relief channel to bring you the latest developments from the tragedy in Haiti. As rescue work is still under way and relief efforts are just taking off, many dramatic images and heartbreaking stories are unfolding in front of the world media.

Also, whenever you launch Cooliris from Facebook or visit the Haiti Relief channel, you’ll see ads for Partners in Health’s Stand with Haiti campaign. Please consider donating to Partners in Health – a non-profit who has been working on the ground in Haiti for the past 20 years and is participating in the current relief efforts, and help those affected by the devastating earthquake!

Google’s highly anticipated Nexus One smartphone is here! And it’s packaged with an innovative new way to browse media: Gallery, a smooth and intuitive application for photo and video navigation developed by Cooliris.

Managing your media on a mobile phone can be a drag – we’re accustomed to frequently taking photos and videos on the go, but finding those hallmark moments again can be a time-consuming process. The Gallery reinvents mobile media with the streamlined and visually stunning media interface that you’ve come to expect from Cooliris.

As the first native mobile application to simplify browsing, sharing, and editing media, Gallery is designed for quick and easy photo and video scanning. Check out our video below to see features like these:

• You can sort your media into digital stacks by date, time, and even location (if geotagging is enabled), making it easy to find photos by when and where you took them.
• Scroll quickly by date, view your photos in automated slideshows, and zoom into any photo.
• Edit photos right on the Nexus One.
• Share photos by text message, Bluetooth, Gmail, or Picasa.
• The Gallery can sync with Picasa albums, allowing users to dynamically download existing albums from their desktops or Picasa, or upload new material to Picasa albums from their Nexus One.

The Gallery is native to (and currently exclusive to) the Nexus One, but its development gave our engineers an exciting look into the extensive capabilities of the Android platform’s new 2.1 OS. “Cooliris delivers products and experiences that make the web more exciting, cool and useful for consumers,” said Andy Rubin, Google’s Vice President. “The Gallery, developed by Cooliris, is a perfect example of how the Android platform can be leveraged to create differentiated experiences on smartphones and other devices.”

Cooliris became a member of the Open Handset Alliance during development of the Gallery, joining other major technology and mobile companies who aim to offer consumers a richer and minimally expensive experience on the Android platform.

For those of you at CES, the Consumer Electronics Show in Vegas this week, we’ll be there from the 6^th to the 9^th. If you’d like to set up a meeting with us, feel free to email jenny@cooliris.com.

Get ready for a whole new mobile media experience: it’s never been easier to share and manage your photos and videos than it is on the brand new Nexus One. www.cooliris.com/androidgallery

Press Release

Happy (day before) Halloween! I’ve begun the festivities early – I’m dressed up today at the office as a mafia member, and have been distracted all day by the Halloween clips and scary videos on our Halloween channel.

The entire team also took part in a little costume contest – ranging from #Balloon Boy (yes, as a trending topic!) to Jack from Jack-in-the-Box .  Here is some of our very colorful team… All the mess on the floor is candy from our piñata event for the upcoming birthdays!

From popular vote, the winner was a tie between Dima the barbarian and Gosia the fortuneteller:

On the other hand, the worst looking costume was decided to be Niels, the Dutch version of our CEO (all in good humor, of course):

What better way to start off the Halloween weekend? Hope you guys have a blast as well!