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!

We hope you’ve been enjoying Cooliris version 1.11.5! If you haven’t yet gotten it, hurry and get it at cooliris.com, because the performance has been improved up to 30 percent on Windows machines, meaning a faster, slicker Cooliris!

In addition, we know you’ve been writing us about supporting Bing Image search and we’re super excited to announce that it is available now!  Simply click in our search toolbar and select Bing as your search engine, or launch Cooliris from any Bing Image search webpage. In light of Halloween coming up in four days, here’s a Wall of some funny Halloween comic strips!

We sincerely hope that you’ve been enjoying our recent performance and usability enhancements to the Cooliris product. In Michele Turner’s words (our very own Executive Vice President of Products), “Supporting platforms, devices, and sites that are important to our users will allow our unique user experience and superior browsing capabilities to spread beyond our immensely happy community. We are thrilled to continue our support of Microsoft’s platforms and innovations through our continued investment in improving their users’ experiences on IE, Windows, and Bing by providing the fastest, most visually compelling, interactive, content browsing experience available.”

Enjoy!

We’re excited for the new release of Cooliris version 1.11.5 that you can get now at cooliris.com! Windows users – this is the release for you! We’ve worked hard on making this version faster, smoother, and slicker, especially on Windows machines.

You may not notice any visible new features, but there are tons of changes backstage that will make performance better than ever.

The same Cooliris, but faster and better. Enjoy!

TGIF! We’re always aiming to bring you the hottest and most interesting content, so from now on we’ll have regular updates of the popular videos around the Web! Here are a few to get you started while you’re waiting for the weekend:

Today Show – Was it a Stunt? Balloon Boy’s Family Speaks Out
What do you think? Was this actually real or just a publicity stunt?

Today Show – Kids Do The Darndest Things
Unpredictable and mischievous kids, from “Balloon boy” Falcon Heene to a boy who stole his parents’ car!

Community – Pencil Mouth
A clip from the new comedy – don’t try this at home!

E! News Now – FOX Apologizes to Simpson For Slam
FOX publicly apologizes to Jessica Simpson for calling her big!

Tonight Show – Clinton Cracks Under Pressure
Is Secretary of State Hillary Clinton starting to crack?

The Late Show with David Letterman – Tina Fey: 24-Year Old Virgin
Who woulda thought it?

Enjoy, and let us know what kind of content you’d be most interested in seeing in Cooliris!

Quite naturally, we’re very focused on visuals here at Cooliris. But while I work, I usually have a soundtrack going, whether through my music video playlist on Cooliris or through Pandora Radio. What I like about both Cooliris and Pandora is their generative ability to start with the seed of an idea – a simple artist or show that I’m interested in, a genre or station that I enjoy – and bring me fresh new content that may be a few degrees to the left of what I was originally looking for. It’s one of those clichés about the internet: start surfing on Wikipedia to learn a little backstory about Rube Goldberg and next thing you know you’re reading about Mongol invasions.

So Cooliris’s new Channels page is meant to both help you navigate, and bring you fresh and unexpected content. Think of it as both homepage and portal. Check it out: you can jump into any Cooliris channel, and they’re stratified by Providers, Shows, and Categories, so you have plenty of options to choose from. While checking out a network channel might turn you onto some new shows, browsing LIFE will put a wealth of iconic photos from every era right at your fingertips. You can search for a tried-and-true show and wind up catching that episode you missed or revisit a clip of that hilarious and timely one-liner. Categories offers our broadest channels with the greatest possibility for unexpected and hidden gems: find out about the latest breakthroughs in Sci-Tech, or play some great new Flash games in our Games channel!

Have fun with the Channels page, and be sure to bookmark it. It’s an easy way to bring up an entire Wall of your favorite show or station! As we add new providers and content, it’ll be your one-stop Cooliris launchpad.