Today we launch the world’s first LIVE Immersive 3D Ad campaign in partnership with InMobi, the world’s largest independent mobile advertising network! We’ve been talking about Cooliris Immersive Ads for a while now, and we’re super excited to work with Starcom Mediavest Group, who brokered the deal, to bring cutting edge ads to mobile platforms around the world. The ad campaign, which you can see in the video below, will run on iPads in the UK until July 31, 2011. Read more about the development of Cooliris Immersive Ads after the video.

We created Immersive Ads to empower advertisers to deliver engaging, rich-media ads to mobile devices. By adding interactive 3D to the images, video and animation found in many ads, we take rich media to a new level. Like Big Game Spots (the commercials that air during the Super Bowl), consumers will enjoy and interact with Cooliris Immersive Ads without needing prior brand affinity. Our one-of-a-kind “parallax banners” immediately capture the consumer’s attention. Parallax banners feature 3D models that smoothly animate as viewers tilt their mobile devices. Unlike video or print ads, Immersive Ads let consumers drive the experience. At every turn, the consumer chooses what to explore as they tilt, pinch, swipe and zoom virtual 3D products.

With our 3D technology, consumers can select their own vantage point, interact with the scene, and view it from all angles. This enables the products to really come alive – you can actually see the shine on the glass of a phone, how the fabric of a garment hangs, and so forth. Cooliris Ads break down the barrier between viewing a product in print or online and physically evaluating the product from all sensory angles in a store. This is particularly significant for products where it’s important for the consumer to hold and feel the product – such as electronics, clothing, jewelry, etc.

Here at Cooliris, we’re all about SPEED. Cooliris Immersive Ads offer native, hardware-accelerated performance that cannot be matched by modern HTML technology, such as iAd. For example, when you tap on an iAd banner, the first thing you see is a progress bar on a black background. The progress bar hangs around for as long as it takes the ad to load, which could be 15 seconds or more on a 3G connection. But who wants to wait? How many advertisers are okay with losing customers to a slow banner? For these very reasons, banners in our ads expand instantaneously into rich 3D environments. And, once you’re in an Immersive Ad, you’ll experience instantaneous interactivity that cannot be matched by today’s HTML ads. This is how we believe ads should be – fast, seamless, and entertaining.

Today, we’re announcing three new offerings of Decks, the iPad experience that let you seamlessly flip through digital catalogues as intuitive decks of cards that update continuously.

We believe content discovery should be a fun and immersive experience. So we’ve taken Decks and applied it to present some of your favorite things – iPad apps, movies, and photos.

Now with Decks for Apps, Decks for Movies, and Decks for Flickr, you can find your next favorite app, pick a movie or DVD to watch, and discover your favorite Flickr shots without the standard (and clunky!) browser experience.

Here’s the breakdown:

Decks for Apps – Keep up to date on the top 50 free, paid and grossing apps, as if flipping through a digital mail-order catalogue. So much faster and easier.

Decks for Movies – Get trailers for the top movies and see what’s new in theaters, on DVD or Blu-ray, and buy tickets or movies from Fandango, Amazon or iTunes.

Decks for Flickr – Explore and follow photos matching your interests from Flickr by creating albums based on user name, tags, and key words.

What’s also cool about Decks is that it’s powered by the same technology that brought you Discover for iPad – PageKit™. PageKit™ allows us to render dynamic content with a fast and fluid experience on iOS at significantly smaller download sizes, which means more space for the stuff that matters to you.

Plus, this technology makes it possible for us to develop very rapidly – as you can tell by the fact that we were able to launch these three new Decks apps within only two months of our original Decks app release!

Download the new Decks apps in the iTunes App Store or at www.decksapp.com (hit the download button to choose which Decks app you want).

Today, we’re announcing the launch of Decks, a new shopping experience created for iPad that turns discovery of your favorite products, brands, and services into a fun and relaxing coffee-table experience.

The Decks app is available for free in the iTunes App Store, and a simple deck editor is available at www.decksapp.com.

Your brand new buying experience

We all know that browsing and purchasing across multiple websites or apps on iPad can ruin the shopping experience. Decks solves this problem in a unique and elegant way: create and enjoy a personalized collection of shopping catalogs as decks of cards that update continuously. It’s fun, intuitive, and fast.

Decks launches with support for Groupon, Zappos, The New York Times Best Sellers™ list, top movies, the most popular iPad apps, as well as a new way to experience Flickr photos. More merchants and product categories will be added in the weeks to come. With real-time updates, you’ll always have access to the latest products and daily promotions. With a tap, you can even share your favorites with family, friends and followers via email, Facebook, and Twitter.

For businesses and consumers alike

For businesses looking to give their customers a unique iPad buying experience, Decks provides a publishing platform to create these game-changing decks that are visually stunning, continuously updating and easy to create. Decks displays your products front and foremost, only one tap away from a purchase directly from your company’s webpage.

Contact us at business@decksapp.com for more information on how you can use Decks on iPad to beautifully display your content for your business.

What’s behind Decks?
Decks builds on Discover, our award-winning iPad app that turns Wikipedia into a beautiful magazine experience. Discover is now approaching 1 million downloads and was the #1 free iPad app in the App Store across six countries for seven consecutive days.

Like Discover, Decks leverages the PageKit™ technology built by Cooliris, which renders dynamic content as a fast and fluid experience on iPhone or iPad with significantly smaller download sizes.

In tandem with the launch of the iPad app today, we’re also releasing the specifications on how to write and distribute premium content for Decks along with the documentation for the PageKit™ syntax. To help designers and creators to get started, we’re providing several high-quality example decks on github.com and even a real-time deck editing feature inside the Decks app. Visit developer.decksapp.com to learn more.

Try out the free Decks app, and enjoy your new buying experience!

We’re very excited to announce that we have submitted our first iPad app, Discover, to the iTunes App Store! Discover for iPad is the most elegant and effortless way to explore, search, and enjoy information from Wikipedia in a beautiful magazine-style interface.

Creating innovative, better ways to navigate content is our specialty, and this is no exception. With Discover for iPad, we’re making our first foray into information and textual navigation, using stunning graphics, an intuitive user interface, and seamless page-by-page navigation. Check out this demo:

Discover for iPad has been submitted to the iTunes App Store, but is not yet available to the public. To get notified when the app is available, please sign up here.

So here’s something new: We have teamed up with Hitachi Global Storage Technologies (Hitachi GST) to boldly redefine the storage user experience with the introduction of the LifeStudio™ external hard drive family.

LifeStudio provides a brand new external storage solution that seamlessly protects and pulls all of your photos together with online social content and entertainment into the Cooliris 3D Wall. Using our 3D Wall technology as the foundation of the LifeStudio user interface, Hitachi has added additional features and functionality, such as automatic organization of content, integration of online and cloud backup in one solution, and the ability to pull in content from disparate sources, taking the hard drive to new levels.

Highlights of LifeStudio powered by Cooliris include:

MyLife
Quickly find photos, videos, music, and documents stored on your LifeStudio external drive or desktop, and filter by date or keyword.

MySocial
Easily share, view and comment on photos from Facebook, Flickr or Picasa Albums.

Cooliris 3D Wall (of course!)
Navigate and consume multimedia in the beautiful 3D interface you’ve come to know from Cooliris.

We are super excited about being a part of the LifeStudio experience! The LifeStudio drive will be in stores on Friday July 9. Hitachi is also doing a LifeStudio giveaway, so if you want to try to win one of your own, follow them on Twitter! Also, you can get involved with the experience at their Facebook page.

To learn more, see our press release for more details or visit the Hitachi LifeStudio website.

————-
About Hitachi Global Storage Technologies

Hitachi Global Storage Technologies (Hitachi GST) develops advanced hard disk drives, enterprise-class solid state drives, and innovative external storage solutions and services used to store, preserve and manage the world’s most valued data. Founded by the pioneers of hard drives, Hitachi GST provides high- value storage for a broad range of market segments, including Enterprise, Desktop, Mobile Computing, Consumer Electronics and Personal Storage. Hitachi GST was established in 2003 and maintains its U.S. headquarters in San Jose, California. For more information, please visit the company’s website at http://www.hitachigst.com.