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.

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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.

Attention website owners and developers! For those of you using the Cooliris Wall on your websites, we’ve released a new version with performance and animation improvements, which means that scrolling is faster and interactions are smoother. This does not require any action on your part, but we will be rolling out the new SWF to your Walls incrementally from our end.

We’ve also taken your feedback and feature requests and released a new version of Cooliris Express that you can start using today. Besides the new, slicker interface, here are some of the cool new things that you can expect with Cooliris Express version 1.5:

My Cooliris Walls Manager

Cooliris Express now includes a personal webpage that allows you to view, manage, and edit all of your Cooliris Walls in a centralized hub, so that you can easily keep track of all of your Walls on your blog, Facebook or wherever. This manager also allows you to dynamically edit the content or appearance of an existing Wall in real-time without having to create a new one from scratch. All you have to do is click “Login” at the upper right of the the Cooliris Express builder website and login with your Facebook or Google username to access your personal Wall manager.

comScore and Google Analytics Support

Now, you can measure the success of your Cooliris Walls with stats support from comScore and Google Analytics. With these stats, you can find out useful information like how many times a visitor clicks on each photo or video. So far, many of the publishers using Cooliris Walls have seen a five to six time increase in engagement on their web pages!

Better ways to share individual photos and videos in the Wall

Previously, you could only share entire Walls, but now you can actually share individual photos and videos in the Wall. So, if someone visits your site and sees something cool on your Cooliris Wall, he/she can one-click share that photo or video to Facebook or Twitter, driving more viral distribution of your content for further exposure and traffic.

Hope you enjoy the upgrades in Cooliris Express, and please send us feedback!

For some cool implementations of Cooliris Walls around the web, check out these sites:

CBS’s TV.com
Taylor Swift Official Website
Skechers
Hindustan Times
Stanford Technology Ventures Entrepreneurship Corner

Press releases:
Cooliris Express Product News
Cooliris Express Adoption News

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

We have some very exciting news for those who are looking for a brand new way to get the Cooliris Wall with custom content onto pretty much any website, social network or blog, with no technical skills needed!

Cooliris Express, formerly known as the Cooliris Embed Wall, is now easier than ever with a step-by-step wizard that allows you to easily pull any content from Flickr, Picasa, YouTube, or media RSS feed and post it to your social networks and websites. Here’s our Holiday Wall, created with Cooliris Express!

Get a Cooliris Wall of your own onto your favorite website with three simple steps:

1. Choose your content – you can choose a user stream or search from Flickr, Picasa, or YouTube, or enter any Media RSS feed.
2. Customize the appearance of your Wall – choose from our custom backgrounds (including a festive theme for the holidays), customize the number of rows, and choose the menu options you want to appear on your Wall.
3. Post it to a social network or website! With the integration of Gigya, you can post to a variety of sites with just one click, including Facebook, Twitter, Blogger, Yahoo, and more. For more flexibility, you can copy and paste the provided embed code of your custom Wall onto any other website.

With Cooliris Express, you can share a personal Flickr stream of your holiday pictures and post it to your blog. Alternatively, you could choose a favorite stream, like a YouTube keyword search for “fail moments”, and post it to Twitter. Or, simply choose “standard feed” from the YouTube video source list and select “Most popular” to get a dynamic feed of the popular YouTube videos of the day.

Another cool feature is that if the content feeds that you chose are updated, your Wall will dynamically update with the new content. So during the holidays, you can continue to add more photos that you take to your Flickr album and see it immediately update on your Cooliris Wall. Or, if your Wall is displaying the “Recently featured” YouTube videos, your Wall will be constantly updating with fresh and new videos.

There are tons of different ways you can use the new Cooliris Express. Leave a comment with how you’re going to use it!