This Tuesday, Washington, DC will host a record-breaking crowd of millions for the Presidential Inauguration of Barack Obama. But it doesn’t matter where you are “ you can still get a front row seat to history in the making, with Cooliris’s Inauguration Channel!

We’ll be streaming Fox’s coverage of Obama’s Inaugural Address live in Cooliris, courtesy of Hulu, beginning Tuesday, Jan 20^th, at 7 AM PST. The Presidential Inauguration Channel also features the last 23 presidential inaugural speeches and Obama’s weekly addresses from December and January, as well as a range of inauguration content from the New York Times and others!

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!

Fans are so smitten with PicLens that the YouTube videos keep streaming in. From demos to reviews, and even just music video galleries compiled by users who want an awesome new way to share their albums, the number of PicLens videos has shot well past 100.

Giovanni Antico discovered the power of PicLens when navigating his Flickr albums. Giovanni writes, “I was so excited to see my photos as if they were in a boundless gallery that I recorded a video of such experience. PicLens gave me a whole new way to browse images, combining spectacular navigation with ease of use.” The album video he created is a staff favorite. Check it out!

Cool, huh? Did seeing that just spark your creative side? There are a lot of neat themes for a Piclens video. Maybe you’d like a new way to commemorate your family vacation. Maybe you’ve been wanting to make a music video on YouTube for a while but just haven’t found the right medium. Or maybe you’ve got an artist’s eye and can use our 3D wall to form a moving pointillist piece out of hundreds of disparate tiny images! (Or maybe, just maybe, I watched Ferris Bueller recently and have Seurat on the noggin.) Whatever you want to share with us, put it up on YouTube and drop us a line about it, and you may just end up on our blog!

PRESS RELEASE

REDMOND, WA, March 11, 2008. Microsoft’s Windows Marketplace has selected PicLens as this week’s featured download on its IE Add-Ons webpage.

Window’s Market Place is Microsoft’s primary portal for over 5,000 downloads from over 2,000 companies. Add-ons selected by Microsoft are carefully screened by Microsoft and rated by users to ensure they meet the quality standards demanded by users.

The feature placement of PicLens on Windows Marketplace starts today and will run for one week. Thereafter, PicLens can be downloaded from the product detail page of IE Add-Ons or our own website at www.piclens.com.

Hitting the newspaper stands today is an article in the New York Times that describes our popular PicLens product as an example of new generation technology for Web navigation. You can grab a copy of the article Coming Soon: Nothing Between You and Your Machine in the Business Section of the paper or at nytimes.com, which released the online version yesterday.

Journalist John Markoff cites Nintendo Wii, the Apple iPhone, and PicLens as technologies that bring computer screens to life in new, immersive ways. Markoff goes on to highlight PicLens and its unique immersive features.

Austin Shoemaker, our very own chief technology officer at Cooliris, Inc., is quoted in the article.

The New York Times is the largest 7-day paper in the United States, with home delivery in over 340 markets and a net audience of 22 million for its print and online publications. The publisher joins other media leaders, such as CNET, Macworld, and the BBC, who see PicLens at the forefront of emerging technologies that transform the Web experience.