We’d like to craft our Discover feature into the best source for information and entertainment that it can be. One of the key emerging aspects of Discover that we really want to get right is Localization “ allowing Cooliris to bring you local news and content that stays relevant to you.

To that end, we’re recruiting beta testers from the following countries and regions:

US
Canada
Europe
Asia
South Pacific
South America and Central America

As a beta tester, you’d help shape the direction that Discover grows and provide us with valuable feedback on performance, content, and ease of use. We’ll check in with you once every 1-2 weeks. You’ll have a platform to share your own innovative ideas about what you think would be cool new additions to the feature. These ideas will be shared with the rest of the Cooliris community, giving you a voice at the forefront of the development process! We’ll also compensate you with some very cool gear.

If you’re interested, just contact feedback@cooliris.com with your name, email address, browser OS/type, and country. We’re looking forward to teaming up with you!

As bloggers ourselves, we’re always interested in new ways to play with the medium. Seesmic offers an innovative new way to post your latest updates by video blogging, either directly onto the site, from a prerecorded file on your computer, or even through a mobile phone upload. Seesmic video conversations can interface with other social networking sites like Twitter, and its social desktop client, twhirl, accounts for 5% of Twitter messsages being sent.

Now Seesmic has Cooliris-enabled their new site, allowing users to view the most recently posted videos and record their own videos while inside of Cooliris! To launch, look for the Cooliris icon located above the Public Timeline at new.seesmic.com.

Once you’re in, simply hit the reply button, create a Seesmic account, and record all of your latest musings and witty comebacks. Cooliris integration grants video bloggers a more fluid interface that makes it easy to find friends’ posts and put your own thoughts out there. In an increasingly media-rich internet, the potential for web users to easily transition their thoughts from the printed word to sound and motion is an encouraging forward step – and one we hope to see progress with time!

You may have noticed a few new channels on our Discover feature lately. If so, you might have also noticed yourself spending a lot more time on Cooliris!

The Games channel showcases Cooliris’s ever-increasing content support, allowing users to conveniently browse and play tons of the hottest Flash games directly on the 3D wall. Now it’s literally a breeze to move from one diversion to the next and find exciting new games on the fly! And don’t forget that you can add any games you like to your Favorites and play them anytime by simply visiting your Favorites Wall. So there’s no need to hunt around twice for your latest lunch break pasttime!

A few favorites we’ve found around the office:

Sudoku- the classic number puzzle game, straight from your morning paper to your Cooliris wall!

Boomshine, a visually and musically attractive strategy game where players try and catch as many of the colorful balls crossing the screen as possible in an expansive chain reaction.

Warfare 1917, a strategy game wherein you lead the British or German army through the trenches of the First World War.

In addition to Flash games, the Games channel brings you trailers of the hottest new PC and console games as well as televised clips of the latest gamer news.

Finally, we wanted to give you a head’s up to a new way of shopping with Cooliris: Discover-based featured Shopping channels. This frees users from search-based shopping and allows them to browse categorical channels as well. The Best-Selling Electronics channel is the first of these channels and lets users browse a great range of the most popular items at the best prices!

So have fun: play some games and find your favorite new gadget all on Cooliris!

On Friday night, the awards ceremony for The 2008 Crunchies, an annual event celebrating the year’s notable startups, internet, and tech innovations, took place at the elegant Herbst Theater in San Francisco.

Co-hosted by GigaOM, VentureBeat, Silicon Alley Insider, and TechCrunch, the event collected the votes of more than 350,000 people to select the winners in categories from “Best Startup CEO” to “Most Likely to Make the World a Better Place.”

Cooliris took home the trophy for Best Design. And we couldn’t have done it without the support of our enthusiastic users. So, a gracious thanks to all of you!

The Best Design Crunchie joins a number of other accolades for Cooliris last year:

ReadWriteWeb:
Top 100 Products of 2008
Top 10 Consumer Web Apps of 2008
Top 10 Alternative Search Engines of 2008

Macworld:
“Our Favorite iPhone Apps: Top Productivity Tools”
Best Search Organizer

Mashable:
“Top 30 iPhone Apps for Organization and Productivity”
Search category

The Guardian:
“100 top sites for the year ahead”
Search category

Thanks for supporting us in 2008!

We’ve got some exciting news to start off the new year! Cooliris just got nominated as a finalist for the well-regarded Crunchies 2008 Award for best user-interface design.

Please support us and vote by clicking here! You can vote once a day until Wednesday, January 7th midnight PST, so please vote today and tomorrow! Many thanks for your support!

The Crunchies celebrates some of the most compelling startups and innovations of the year and is co-hosted by GigaOm, VentureBeat, Silicon Alley Insider, and TechCrunch.