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Facebook Uses LiveShare Gallery for Father’s Day Greetings

They’ve always been there for us – wiped our tears, taught us how to throw a football, helped us with homework, provided us with unconditional support and along the way spoiled us rotten. We owe the world to our fathers! This Father’s Day, Facebook teamed up with LiveShare for an extremely special way to thank fathers everywhere.

For their Father’s Day promotion, Facebook asked their user base to submit photos honoring their dads, and we’re excited that Facebook trusted Cooliris products to beautifully display all the submissions on their own Facebook Fan page, which boasts 46 million fans. You might think something this beautiful took weeks to produce, but because of the powerful platform we’ve built with LiveShare, coupled with Facebook’s social plugins, turn-around was a matter of minutes.


…or, click here to view on Facebook


Increasingly, marketing campaigns are based around user-generated content. Brands and organizations have found that allowing users to contribute content gives them the chance to connect with the material on a deeper personal and more meaningful level. Facebook especially has shown that they understand this phenomena by consistently setting the standard for new and innovative ways to engage their massive user base. The response to this particular campaign was overwhelming – thousands of pictures from all around the world were sent in. Together with Facebook, we were able to pay homage to our fathers.

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  • Partnership with StarHub brings LiveShare to Singapore!

    We’ve partnered up with StarHub, Singapore’s fully-integrated info-communication company, to debut LiveShare in Singapore!

    The first promoted LiveShare experience will take place on June 5, 2001 at ScreenSingapore, an international cinema event. It will be the first media and film trade event to use LiveShare. Users will be able to share live photos from the red carpet and film premieres, and viewers all over the world (us included!) can explore and comment on these pics either in the mobile app or at liveshare.com. The photos are also going to be displayed on large projector screens at The Grand Cathay and Shaw Theatres Lido on June 6 and June 11 respectively, as well as on the StarHub ScreenSingapore website and the StarHub Facebook page.

    In addition, StarHub will be rewarding a few lucky users with an exclusive experience of attending the Larry Crowne Gala Premiere on the closing night. To participate, just upload your photos of the ScreenSingapore Opening Night at GV VivaCity on June 5th and get the most number of friends to “like” your photos.

    We’re super excited to work with one of the top innovative carriers in the world to bring the LiveShare experience to Singaporeans. Singapore fans, let us know how you LiveShare!

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  • Going beyond Facebook – LiveShare’s new identity service

    We think Liveshare is what modern communication should be, flexible, visual and instant.  We are quickly converging toward our next-gen UI  and interim are taking steps to substantially improve our current sign-up, sign-in, and invite flows.  As part of this effort, we are stoked to reveal our spanking new Identity Service with the upcoming release of Liveshare across our mobile and web clients.

    The new Identity Service will enable our millions of users to do two things:  one, log in to Liveshare independent of Facebook connect (a constant barrier because of the lack of trust users have with new applications and also because of the lack of user request which makes successful invitations hard to achieve), and move beyond just their social graph for inviting friends to include their phone and email graph as well.

    While an Identity Service is not a novel feature or an engineering marvel unto itself, our implementation, seamless invite flow, and fluid log in process is what we’re proud to be releasing soon.

    In designing the invite flow, we wanted to present the user with a comprehensive list of contact information from which to choose and auto-complete their friend’s email and phone information.  For Android’s implementation we took advantage of the Android Contacts Manager as it syncs with the user’s GMail account and gives access to a detailed contact list to present to the user.  To separate out the phone contacts, there is a column provided called HAS_PHONE_NUMBER.  A typical query to retrieve all contact IDs might look like the following:

    // Get list of Contact IDs.

    final String[] contactProjection = new String[] { Contacts._ID, Contacts.DISPLAY_NAME, Contacts.HAS_PHONE_NUMBER };

    final Cursor contactsCursor = cr.query(Contacts.CONTENT_URI, contactProjection, null, null, null);

    while (contactsCursor.moveToNext()) {

    // We separate out those contacts with a phone number.

    if (!contactsCursor.getString(HAS_PHONE_NUMBER_COLUMN).equals(”0″)) {

    // Do work.  #1

    }

    }

    One approach would be to query for the phone number value for each contact ID as we cycle through them in the above snippet (#1).  However, depending on the size of the contact list, this simplistic approach may result in hundreds of queries and prove inefficient in retrieving phone numbers.  We found a better approach is to form a comma separated string of contact IDs and query for phone numbers for IDs that fall into that set using the SQL IN operator.  The following snippet of code uses a String that contains a set of contact IDs for the query.

    // String ids = “(a,b,c,g,j,l,…)”, a list of all Contact IDs.

    final String[] PHONE_PROJECTION = new String[] { Phone.CONTACT_ID, Phone.NUMBER };

    Cursor phoneCursor = cr.query( Phone.CONTENT_URI,

    PHONE_PROJECTION,

    Phone.CONTACT_ID + ” IN ” + ids,

    null,

    null);

    The results are stored in phoneCursor which is a mapping of Contact IDs to phone numbers.  We also used a similar approach for retrieving email addresses.

    Unlike other platforms, Android gives us a head start in developing and deploying a feature-rich application through many examples such as the one above.  Providing our users with the right contact graph from the get-go is invaluable for increased chances of success in an invite-based viral loop.  We look forward to our users’ feedback and hope they love the simplified UI, the killer (Cooliris-developed) Gallery experience in Liveshare, and of course the powerful use-cases Liveshare enables.

    While we are proud of this release and the easy ‘getting started’ flow, our subsequent releases will do even better as we try and bridge the login gap between the user and their content further.

    Thanks!

    *The new version is not yet live, but follow us on Twitter or Facebook to get the update when it becomes available.

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  • MAKING MEDIA SHARING A REALLY REAL-TIME SOCIAL EXPERIENCE

    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

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  • Happy Aprils Fools’ Day!

    Appyhay prilsay oolsfay ayday!

    Here are some of the best pranks we found around the web; we were basically dying of laughter yesterday while we were looking these up. Check out the first David Beckham prank on the Ellen Show – priceless!

    Also don’t forget to check out the April Fools’ Day stream in LiveShare! Add your prank photos to the stream either by hitting the “Upload” button on the webpage or by using the mobile app. I’m pretty sure we will be adding more photos from the office as the day progresses – I personally do not trust ANYONE today, and will be checking my seat every time I sit down at my desk.

    Happy pranking!

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