[UPDATE] The Scavenger Hunt has officially started! Here are the clues:

Clue 1: The WSJ was one of the first to embed a COOLIRIS wall, capturing the 2008 YEAR IN PHOTOS
Hint: Search for the newspaper website that used the Cooliris wall to show the year of 2008 in photos and post the URL of the page containing the Wall.

Clue 2: “Romeo take me somewhere we can be alone” Check out the Gallery on this star’s OFFICIAL SITE
Hint: Find for the Cooliris Wall displayed on this artist’s website and post the URL (there are two, post either one).

*General Hint: If you are having a difficult time finding the answer to the clues, try searching the capitalized words into Google.

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Starting on Monday, February 8, 2010, we are hosting a Cooliris online scavenger hunt! Participants will be led on a 5-day hunt around the web to find Cooliris-related content. Need incentive to participate? The grand prize winner will receive a free, unlocked NEXUS ONE Google phone!

Clues will be posted twice a day at 9am PST and 1pm PST until Friday, February 12 here on our blog, our Facebook Fan Page, Twitter account and Flickr group. Answer all 9 clues correctly and you will be entered in a raffle to win a Nexus One! Here’s how to submit your answers:

For Twitter:
1. Follow @Cooliris: twitter.com/Cooliris
2. For each clue: Tweet @Cooliris, your answer (hyperlink), followed by #IWantANexusOne
*If the hyperlink answer is too long, use a URL shortener service like bit.ly or TinyURL.

For Facebook Users:
1. Become a fan of Cooliris: www.facebook.com/Cooliris
2. For each clue: Post the answer (URL) in your status and tag Cooliris by typing ‘@Cooliris’
*If you don’t tag Cooliris in your status then we will not be able to record your answers.

For Flickr Users:
1. Clues must be submitted through Facebook or Twitter (see above).
2. If you do not have a Facebook or Twitter account, you can sign up free of charge at www.facebook.com or www.twitter.com.

Additional hints will be posted the blog every time a new clue is released.

Check back to this blog post for the first clue on Monday at 9am PST, or follow us now on Facebook or Twitter so you’ll automatically get the daily clue updates. Happy Hunting!

For those of you who watch the Super Bowl not for the football action, but for the famous ads, we’ll also be putting up a Super Bowl Ads channel in the next couple of days, so keep an eye out for it! We’ll have all the best ads from the previous years, and starting Sunday, we’ll be posting up the new Super Bowl ads that air on Sunday!

He’s the most famous groundhog of all, Punxsutawney Phil, and he’s drawn as many as 40,000 people to his hometown every year (and been a star on the silver screen across from Bill Murray). After all, he has his own holiday. Well, he shares it with a few cousins: other towns have Sir Walter Wally, French Creek Freddie, Woodstock Willie, and Queen Charlotte!

So today, get into the spirit of Groundhog Day with a Cooliris Wall full of the festive little guys! And whatever Phil says – get ready for Spring!

In addition to the 200 new Walls created everyday, we have some exciting new premium sites adopting the embeddable flash version of the Cooliris Wall. Check out the Walls on the Taylor Swift website gallery page and video page and the Wall on the front page of the Hindustan Times, one of the largest newspapers in India.

Go ahead and create your very own Wall here – it’s a quick-and-easy 3-step process to get any Flickr, Picasa, YouTube, or even Facebook content into a customizable Wall, and post it directly to your Facebook, Twitter, Wordpress blog, and a whole list of other sites. You could, for example, post a Wall of a your new Flickr album onto your Facebook page to share it with your Facebook friends, or share a Wall of the most popular YouTube videos of the day on your blog, like below.

Let us know how YOU are using Cooliris Express to share great content with your friends!

Also, whenever you launch Cooliris from Facebook or visit the Haiti Relief channel, you’ll see ads for Partners in Health’s Stand with Haiti campaign. Please consider donating to Partners in Health – a non-profit who has been working on the ground in Haiti for the past 20 years and is participating in the current relief efforts, and help those affected by the devastating earthquake!

To understand how it all works, let’s first do a quick recap on CoolPreviews. With over 9 million downloads to date, this sweet little addon is all about browsing faster. You can preview links on just about any website, including Google, all without leaving your current page or tab. Simply mouseover a link, and a separate preview window appears to show the content.

Pretty slick, eh? No surprise CoolPreviews is a five-star favorite on the Mozilla Addons site.

Now, about that Cooliris Wall mashup . . .

Say, you want to search the Web to see everything about Avatar, the new James Cameron movie. You query “avatar” in Google web search as usual. You then use CoolPreviews to browse the official Avatar movie site, without even leaving your Google results page. To see what Wikipedia says about Avatar, you just mouseover that link, too.

But what if you want to see a lot more related images and videos of Avatar? No problem. Simply click the “Cooliris” button in the built-in search bar of CoolPreviews. Literally thousands of multimedia results will then display on the infinite Cooliris Wall within the CoolPreviews frame. (Press F8 on PC or Alt+Esc on Mac to hide the Cooliris chrome for a bigger picture.)

So things go smoothly, you’ll need the latest versions of both Firefox addons: That’s version 3.0+ for CoolPreviews and 1.11.6+ for Cooliris.

With Cooliris integrated, CoolPreviews is the fastest and ultimate way to browse.

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

Cooliris version 1.11.6 has been released for Internet Explorer and Safari users. Support for Firefox 3.6 beta is coming soon!

Also, on an even more exciting note, Cooliris Express now includes Facebook as one of the content sources, meaning you can put up your Facebook photos on a Cooliris Wall! Go ahead and try making a Wall of your Facebook photos and post them to Facebook for a cool way of showing off a new album, or post it to your blog or Twitter. It’s super easy and literally takes only seconds!

Hope you enjoy these new enhancements!

Use our sample holiday photo set to send a festive card to your friends and family. These photos display on default when you access the Holiday Card Maker. You can still customize your photo set by entering your Flickr or Picasa username, if you have one.

Also, the National Breast Cancer Foundation is a recent addition to the Cooliris Holiday Card. Select their theme to support this cause and encourage donations to the NBCF this holiday season!

Happy Holidays!

Only Windows users of Chrome can take advantage of this new beta release. Chrome extensions for Mac are not yet available, but it sounds like it will be coming soon!

Hurry and download the Cooliris beta for Chrome and and help us become one of the most popular Chrome extensions! Please send any feedback about this beta version to beta@cooliris.com and don’t forget to give us a rating!

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!

Users are reporting that certain programs are identifying Cooliris as providing information that contains a “Recognition pattern of the HTML/Infected.WebPage.Gen HTML script virus”.

We want to assure you that Cooliris has not been infected with a script virus, nor have we changed our program to trigger this type of notification.

We are working with the anti virus software companies to work on this issue – it is likely that a change was made to their code that incorrectly started identifying Cooliris as a potential threat.

If you happen to receive this message, you may simply choose to “Allow” Cooliris the access that your anti virus program is attempting to block. Nothing has changed about the Cooliris that you know and love that would make choosing this option harmful in the least.

Thank you for your understanding, and for keeping us aware of issues like these.

As many of you may have noticed, Cooliris performance on Google Image search and Facebook has been broken recently. Our sincerest apologies for the inconvenience. This is certainly not a “Feature” upgrade. Our goal is to provide you with a streamlined media viewing experience, which includes showing you all of the results you deserve.

The issues:

• Facebook: Users are seeing an “Infinite load” screen when attempting to launch Cooliris from Facebook.
• Google Images: Users are only seeing approximately 20 images on the Cooliris Wall, rather than the normal “Infinite Wall”.

We are currently rolling out the fixes to these bugs on our servers, and so the issue should be resolved for you very soon.

You should not have to make any updates on your end to see the bug fix – it should happen automatically. If you think that you are still having issues after the fix has been pushed out to everyone, try clearing your browser cache and restarting your browser. Instructions can be found here.

Thank you again for your patience and for your use of Cooliris!

In the spirit of the season, we’d like to help you share this year’s memories with friends and family with a free Cooliris Holiday Card. We make it easy to pull pictures directly from your Flickr and Picasa albums, and you can email it individually to your friends and family, or share with your online communities. Here’s how:

1. Visit our Holiday Card Maker.
2. Pick your photos. As many as you like from Flickr and Picasa, just enter your Flickr or Picasa username! We recommend you have at least 10 photos to fill up your Wall. To have a specific photo set for your card, we recommend that you create a separate holiday album/set in Picasa or Flickr that contains just the photos that you want to share.
3. Pick a card theme or background. You can even support a charity like the Global Health Corps this holiday season by picking their theme: a donation link will appear on the finished card.
4. Write your season’s greetings – whatever springs to mind!
5. Enter the email addresses of your recipients and send! After you hit send, a drop-down menu will enable you to post the card to your Facebook or Twitter, and give you the option to copy and paste the link to the card onto your blog, website or other social networking sites.

You can literally watch the holidays unfold! The photos in the Cooliris Holiday Card will update continuously as you add photos that you take over the holidays to the Flickr set or Picasa Web Album that you specify for your card.

The possibilities are endless: family photos for loved ones, company photos for colleagues, a holiday showcase for artists and photographers to share their work, or a picturesque mailing to thank past clients and customers for their business. You can send multiple cards for every one of your friends with different photos, messages, and backgrounds for each.

Here is our holiday card to you! We truly appreciate all of the support that you have given us this year.

It only takes a few minutes to remind people you’re thinking of them this holiday season. So send a card with Cooliris, and have a Happy Holiday!

Download the press release