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Hi guys!

We will be at SXSW for the interactive festival this weekend from March 12-15. Our booth number is 1210, so please do come by and say hello, check out our cool demos (and get a first look at some new stuff!), and have some snacks and drinks with us during the block party on Sunday!

We’ll also be showing a cool, new visual experience streaming all SXSW photos as it happens. All you have to do to contribute your photos is upload your photos to a Flickr account and tag it with SXSW. Then, come by our booth 1210 to see the new 3D photo experience in person. We’ll also be hosting this on a website so check back later for the updated URL.

Don’t forget to follow us @Cooliris on Twitter during SXSW to find out where we are and contact us if you want to meet up!

Last, but definitely not least, if you’re looking to post your own SXSW photos on a personal website or blog, put it up on a Cooliris Wall with the super easy-to-use Cooliris Express! We’ll have a special SXSW theme in the background options for Cooliris Express (look for it on Friday).

Hope to see you there!

You can customize which Cooliris shortcuts you want on to appear on this toolbar by using the Toolbar Options menu. To access the Preferences menu, click on the arrow next to the Cooliris logo to get the drop-down menu and select toolbar options. From there, you can add the Favorites button to access your saved Favorites from the toolbar or add the My Computer shortcut to get to your local photos fast.

The Cooliris toolbar is optimized for US residents. International users can still download the toolbar, but the channel drop-down links will not work for them (this is due to channel content restrictions in different countries). However, if you’re an international user, you can customize the toolbar and take out any of the channel-specific shortcuts so that only the available features that work for you show up. The features that work for international users are the Home, Featured, Favorites, and My Computer shortcuts, as well as the Cooliris search bar.

This toolbar is available for Firefox, Safari, and Internet Explorer, but is not yet available for Chrome.

We hope the new Cooliris toolbar makes your browsing experience faster and more enjoyable! Get it here now!

Launch Cooliris and check out the new Oscars 2010 channel to find out the latest news on the 82nd Academy Awards. Unlike previous years, this time there are 10 movies nominated in the Best Motion picture category. Up, the animated feature from Pixar, is contending shoulder to shoulder with blockbusters like Avatar and Inglorious Bastards. This is also the first time that a woman, Hurt Locker’s Kathryn Bigelow, has been nominated for best director.

The ceremony will be this Sunday at 8 pm ET/5 pm PT. Cooliris will be providing you with the red carpet coverage as well as up-to-the-minute updates on the winners.

You may have noticed today on Cooliris.com that we have a completely new logo and website design! We hope you enjoy our new look and feel of the website and find navigation easier and more intuitive. This change in our appearance reflects our evolution as a company and the evolution of our products. Just four years ago, our initial team of 8 talented engineers and visionaries released our first product, CoolPreviews, followed by Piclens in the following year, which has evolved into what you now know as Cooliris. Today, our company of 40 employees offers a portfolio of 4 different products that all offer a unique value proposition to consumers, publishers, and website owners alike. These are: Cooliris for Desktop, Cooliris for Mobile, Cooliris Express, and CoolPreviews. We’ve had over 20 million downloads across products to date!

In the past couple of years, we’ve seen a number of premium Cooliris Wall partnerships around the web, like the Wall Street Journal’s 2008 Year in Photos (our very first premium embedded Wall collaboration!), TV.com, the official Taylor Swift website, and the Hindustan Times! The widespread adoption of Cooliris Walls around the web led us to develop Cooliris Express, the easy tool to embed your own Cooliris Wall onto any website or social network. Today, there have been over 10,000 Walls created with Cooliris Express, and 200 new Walls being created everyday!

In 2009, we also launched the Cooliris Publisher Network and one of our biggest ad campaigns to date with Infiniti/OMD.

Let’s not forget the very exciting Google partnership for the Nexus One superphone! Earlier this year, the Nexus One was launched with a supercool 3D Gallery application, which Google had tapped us to develop. Not too shabby!

Also on our new website is an early release of version 1.12 currently available exclusively on Cooliris.com. We’ll be adding additional functionality and putting out updates over the next couple of weeks, but if you want to get a sneak peek at version 1.12, check it out and send us feedback at feedback@cooliris.com!

We’ll also be rolling out a new SWF tonight with the new logo for those of you using the embedded Cooliris Wall. No action is required on your end, but you will eventually get the new logo on your Cooliris Wall.

With all of these changes, it’s only natural that our logo reflects our new identity as a company setting to revolutionize the web. Below we have a note from Robert Padbury, one of our previous visual designers as well as the creator of the new Cooliris logo, explaining the design philosophy of the logo.

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Since its inception, Cooliris has always used two rounded rectangles – one green, one blue – to stand as the identity of the company. The concept was that one square represented the web, and the other square represented the Cooliris context.

This notion of our logo is one of utility – what the product does, as opposed to identity – who the company is. This is why the company set out in the summer of 2008 to completely reinvent the Cooliris brand. We wanted to craft an identity, and not just convey what the product is.

Great logos tend to have five distinct qualities. They’re simple, memorable, timeless, versatile and appropriate. Many are visual interpretations of the name of the company, and with the name Cooliris, a concatenation of cool and iris, we have a fairly large visual library to work with.

For cool, there’s several meanings, including the cool half of the color spectrum, the temperature and the state of mind. From this it’s natural to choose blue, the coolest of the cool colors.

For ‘iris’, we can use the human eye, the ancient Greek goddess of rainbows, the flower and the component of the camera – the aperture.

The proportion between the inner circle and the outer circle is that of a normally dilated human iris, the three sections are inspired from the geometry of the flower, and the sections are cut in the shape of a camera’s iris.

Joining the new logo is a bold new typeface called Gotham. Gotham is a beautiful and timeless typeface developed by the New York type foundry Hoefler & Frere-Jones. It was inspired by the signage found in New York before there was ever a graphic-design profession. It has a bold timeless quality and it was also used as the typeface for the Obama ‘08 Presidential campaign.

The dots on the “i” character were rounded to both echo the logo and to also improve legibility of the logo at smaller sizes.

This is a bold new look for a bold new company.

Robert Padbury is now a freelance designer working in San Francisco. You can learn more by visiting his website at http://www.padbury.net.

New features in 1.12 include the ability to Favorite entire feeds as well as improved filtering for faster content navigation.

We would like to invite you to install Cooliris 1.12 and give us your feedback. Download here: http://www.cooliris.com/beta

Once you have installed and used the product, we would love to hear your feedback: http://www.cooliris.com/beta/feedback/

Thank you in advance for keeping the quality level of Cooliris at its highest. We really couldn’t do this without you.

Clue 1: The WSJ was one of the first to embed a COOLIRIS wall, capturing the 2008 YEAR IN PHOTOS

Answer: Wall Street Journal; 2008 Year in Photos

The Wall Street Journal was the first to put up a customized Cooliris wall on their site.  Each year the WSJ puts up pictures from the preceeding year that have to do with major international events, politics, athletics, travel etc.  In 2009, Cooliris teamed up with WSJ to make the photos from 2008 into a Wall where users could view the photos in our cool 3D interface.  Additionally, the WSJ used the Cooliris Wall the following year for the ‘House of the Day’ photos.  Check it out: http://online.wsj.com/public/resources/documents/house-of-the-day.html!

Clue 2: “Romeo take me somewhere we can be alone” Check out the Gallery on this star’s OFFICIAL SITE

Answer: Official Taylor Swift Website–Videos or Gallery

You would be hard pressed to find someone who had never heard the name ‘Taylor Swift’.  This 18 year old singer/songwriter made quite an impression in the music world.  She won best female video of 2009 for “You Belong With Me” and the 2010 People’s Choice Award for Favorite Female Artist.  In 2010, with all the buzz about talented Taylor Swift and tons of new fans visiting her website, the Taylor Swift website teamed up with Cooliris in order to present her pictures and videos in a Cooliris Wall.  The pictures and videos can be seen or streamed right on the wall and with one swipe of the mouse, hundreds of new photos and videos are available!

Clue 3: Cooliris teamed up with a charitable organization for the WALL AGAINST HUNGER -  find URL of this Cooliris Wall.

Answer: World Food Programme; Wall Against Hunger

It is always great for people to donate to a great cause, but it is even better when those who donate get recognition for their generosity.  In November 2008, The World Food Programme (WFP) used Cooliris to create a Wall called “The Wall Against Hunger” to recognize those who donated.  People can go to the WFP site, donate a certain amount of money, and post a picture on the Wall with a blurb about why they are donating or who they are donating on behalf of.  The Wall is still up and donations are going towards Haiti Relief following the 2010 earthquake.  Check out the Wall and make a difference!

Clue 4: Post a link to your favorite embedded Cooliris Wall.

Answer: You got to choose this one!! My personal favorite is…WSJ; House of the Day!

Clue 5: After a hard day of blogging, head to the COOLIRIS WATER COOLER for more NEXUS news

Answer: The Water Cooler (Cooliris Blog); Welcome to the Gallery

The Cooliris blog is updated daily with new information surrounding Cooliris.  When the Google Nexus One came out with the Gallery application created by Cooliris, we made a tutorial on how to use the Gallery app.  The Gallery allows users to view, navigate, edit and share their photos.  The photos can be sorted by date and place (if geo tagging is available), viewed in a panoramic landscape view by holding the phone on its side, and the photos have a cool 3D effect when tilting the phone side to side.  Stay tuned to the Cooliris blog for more Cooliris applications and versions!

Clue 6: Go to www.cooliris.com/express and make your own Cooliris Wall! Share the link of your Wall to Twitter or Facebook. For Facebook, you’ll need to share it to Facebook, then click on the link and paste the Cooliris-hosted URL of your Wall to our Facebook fan page.

Answer: Make your own wall at http://www.cooliris.com/express/! Take a look at mine!

Clue 7: Nexus fans got CRUNCHes in at this TECH blog and read the breaking Cooliris Gallery news

Answer: TechCrunch; Google Taps Cooliris To Enable Media Browsing On Nexus One

One of the biggest technology gadgets to hit the market at the start of the new year was the Google Nexus One phone.  There was a ton of anticipation as to what the phone would look like, what new features it would contain, and how it would differ from other touch screen phones that were already on the market.  On January 5, 2010, TechCrunch wrote about the new Gallery application on the Nexus One, which was created by Cooliris, and how it has enhanced the the photo viewing experience on the phone.  As TechCrunch put it, “the [Cooliris] Gallery is designed to scan quickly through thumbnails of media and loads the high-resolution versions on selection, making it easy for users to quickly browse their photos and videos”.

Clue 8: “Girl Next Door” Holly Madison shows off her PICS with Cooliris on her OFFICIAL WEBSITE

Answer: Official Holly Madision Website: Pics or Vids

In 2001, Holly Madison became famous for being one of Hugh Hefner’s seven girlfriends.  She lived in the Playboy mansion and eventually got her own show called “Girls Next Door” which documented the lives of Hugh and his girls.  The Holly Madison website recently used Cooliris to create an interactive Wall of her photos and videos.  Site visitors can panoramically scroll through the Cooliris Wall on Holly’s site to view all of her pictures from around the world, her talk show appearances, her interviews and much more!

Clue 9: Take and submit a picture holding the Cooliris wordmark logo [Regular] http://bit.ly/ciwm1 [Reverse] http://bit.ly/ciwm2

Answer: Take a look at Megan, one of our interns…Say cheese!

Hope you enjoyed the Scavenger Hunt and finding out a little more about Cooliris’ presence around the web. Let us know if you ever see us in the wild!

The Cooliris Scavenger Hunt officially concluded Sunday night and it was a huge success. Thank you to all those that participated! We hope that it was as fun for all of you as it was for the Scavenger Hunt Team here at the office.

On Monday afternoon, we had our random drawing for the grand prize winner. Participants who completed all 9 clues correctly were placed in a hat.

And the new owner of a brand new Nexus One is *drum roll please*… HEESUN LHO from San Francisco, California!

We also selected 10 additional runner-ups who will also receive a small prize. Congratulations to:

Chris Baumann
Amit Verma
Katie Gera
Brandon Cheng
Mohittihom
Pepperonijack
Andy Guo
PedjaDj
Ciaron
Harikrish

Check out all of our finalists (people who completed all 9 clues correctly) in the Cooliris Wall below!

Thank you all for participating and for helping to spread Cooliris. We appreciate any feedback and welcome any ideas for future contests!

[UPDATE] The Scavenger Hunt has officially started! Here are all 9 clues – deadline for submission is this Sunday, Feb. 14!

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).

Clue 3: Head over to this AllTop page to find the clue details - http://my.alltop.com/ – Thanks to Guy Kawasaki for hosting!

Clue 4: Post a link to your favorite embedded Cooliris Wall.
Hint: Post the URL of the Wall on either Twitter or Facebook.

Clue 5: After a hard day of blogging, head to the COOLIRIS WATER COOLER for more NEXUS news
Hint: Find the most recent post that contains a certain video and post the URL.

Clue 6: Go to www.cooliris.com/express and make your own Cooliris Wall! Share the link of your Wall to Twitter or Facebook. For Facebook, you’ll need to share it to Facebook, then click on the link and paste the Cooliris-hosted URL of your Wall to our Facebook fan page.
Hint: Post the URL of your wall as your Facebook status or as a tweet. *Note your photos must be made public in order to be displayed.

Clue 7: Nexus fans got CRUNCHes in at this TECH blog and read the breaking Cooliris Gallery news
Hint: Search for the online technology website that blogged about Cooliris and the Nexus One. Post the URL of the article.

Clue 8: “Girl Next Door” Holly Madison shows off her PICS with Cooliris on her OFFICIAL WEBSITE
Hint: Search for the Cooliris Wall on this person’s website and post the URL. (There are two, post either one)

LAST CLUE – Clue 9: Take and submit a picture holding the Cooliris wordmark logo [Regular] http://bit.ly/ciwm1 [Reverse] http://bit.ly/ciwm2
Hint: Post your picture on Twitter using TwitPic or on Facebook. Make sure to include the URL of your uploaded photo. If you’re using a webcam, you’ll want to take it with the reverse image so it shows up in the picture correctly!

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

*Note: If you are participating via Facebook, in addition to posting the answer as your status please make sure to post your answer on our fan page wall so that we can be sure to keep track of your answer.

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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’ AND post your answer to the Facebook fan page wall.
*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