VentureBeat

Cooliris, the startup that allows users to explore sites like YouTube and Google Images through a “fullscreen 3D” wall of media, continues to add features to its browser plugin, making it less a cool novelty and more a genuinely useful way to surf the web. The most important of the just-released additions is a “quick and easy” tool for enabling Cooliris on your website.

I’m already a fan, because the plugin (now also called Cooliris — it was previously dubbed PicLens, which was a little confusing) makes it easy and fun to fly around a large collection of images or videos. But until now, it only worked on a relatively limited number of sites, mostly big media-sharing and media-searching sites like Facebook and Flickr. There are plenty of other sites with galleries of images or other media that were basically left out of the picture — technically, Cooliris could already be enabled on any site with media RSS, but the company says the process took “hours” and required some heavy-lifting from Cooliris’ tech support.

Now that time has shrunk to minutes, and the process is ridiculously easy. You just give Cooliris the URL of your site’s galleries, then after a few tests you get some XML and links to add to your site, and that’s it — with just a click, visitors can explore your galleries in Cooliris. This could potentially take Cooliris well beyond the “hundreds” of sites that have already become Cooliris-enabled. Brett Gardner, who just joined Cooliris to oversee its user growth, says the company only recently developed a real strategy for site outreach, and that should push things forward, too.

Another limitation was the fact that when you found something interesting in Cooliris, it could be a pain to share it with your friends — you’d have to jump out of the Cooliris browser to the site where the media originated, then open your email and send the link to your friend. Now Cooliris has created a “share” feature that allows you to just drag media into a box, then send it off (see screenshot above). Right now, the feature is limited to email, but it would also be useful to share on social sites like Facebook and FriendFeed — in fact, Gardner says Cooliris has a Facebook-related announcement coming soon.

The last new feature is the addition of several international sources to Cooliris Discover, its tool for “channel-surfing” different news sources on the web. The added sources include French newspaper Le Monde, British newspapers the Guardian, Telegraph and Independent, plus several others.

I’m hoping to see a big increase in Cooliris-supported websites in the next few months. I’m also waiting for more detail on how the Palo Alto, Calif. company plans to make money. When YouTube’s head of monetization Shashi Seth joined Cooliris as its chief revenue officer in June, he outlined some possible business strategies, but it doesn’t look like any of them have been put into action yet. Sure, it’s still relatively early days, but that Kleiner Perkins money can’t last forever.

I can remember the first interview I did with Jen-Hsun Huang, chief executive of Nvidia, back when the company was coming out of stealth in 1995. Since 3-D games didn’t exist back then, Huang described his graphics chip as the ideal “Windows accelerator.” And if you remember those days, Windows needed a lot of help. Then came no less than 50 3-D graphics startups. They all came and went. Nvidia remains.

The company’s newest cell phone processors have more power than that PC graphics chip from 1995. And state of the art graphics processors can recreate a human head in uncanny detail, from the 5 o’clock shadow on a man’s face to the way light scatters underneath the skin and makes it glow.

Now the company is the big kahuna of graphics. It still faces Advanced Micro Devices, which bought ATI Technologies, and Intel is now moving into graphics chips. But now it’s Nvidia’s turn to encourage startups in the field of visual computing. Entrepreneurs are coming out of the woodwork to use the horsepower of the latest graphics chips to create rich applications from scientific computing to visual imagery from professional artists who are recognized by the nonprofit digital art group CG Society.

About 60 of those companies will talk about their plans at Nvidia’s Emerging Companies Summit, which takes place Aug. 26-27 in San Jose, during the Nvision 08 conference Aug. 25-27 at the San Jose Convention Center. Nvision 08 is Nvidia’s first major conference, featuring everything from a professional gaming tournament to a speech by Battlestar Galactica star Tricia Helfer.

Jeff Herbst, vice president of business development at Nvidia, said his company has invested in a variety of applications companies that exploit Nvidia’s chips and its new CUDA programming environment. The companies that will talk at the conference all fit into the tracks of visual computing, gaming, lifestyle computing, and high-performance computing based on Nvidia’s CUDA programming language. Over the years, Nvidia has invested in companies that exploit graphics, such as Keyhole, the satellite imagery company that was acquired by Google, which turned the application into Google Earth. Emerging companies scheduled to participate include Acceleware, Cooliris, Elemental Technologies, Emergent Game Technologies, MotionDSP, NaturalMotion, and Right Hemisphere.

“We’ve come to realize that visual computing is a platform in its own right,” Herbst said. “Without this ecosystem, our hardware won’t get used the way it should be.”

Calisa Cole, vice president of corporate communications, says that the time has come for these twin conferences because startups are plentiful and the benefits of visual computing are all around us. Our cars are better designed, digital movies are easier to edit, baby ultrasounds are clearer than ever, and bone scan results come back quicker.

Nvidia’s chips (as well as AMD’s) are the foundation for the visual computing ecosystem, including game developers such as Epic Games, which makes games such as the upcoming “Gears of War 2” as well as engines for graphics that game startups use to get into the business. There are hardware and software companies with applications ranging from airplane design to medical research to special effects animation.

Company conferences are starting to supercede industry-wide events in the tech industry. In a way, Nvidia is taking a page from the playbook of its biggest rival, Intel, which holds a variety of “Intel Developer Forum” (Aug. 19-21 at Moscone Center West) events to encourage an ecosystem around Intel products. It’s interesting that Nvidia’s first big event comes under a shadow; Nvidia reported a lousy quarter, which included a $200 million write-off related to technical problems with how its graphics chips are affixed to notebook computers. But Nvidia hopes that this era of visual computing will begin to overshadow the era of the microprocessor. The battle between Nvidia and Intel is just starting to heat up.

Speakers at the conferences include luminaries such as Jeff Han, the pioneer of multi-touch displays who was named one of Time magazine’s 100-most-influential people last year. Conference titles include “How We Crammed a Black Hole, a Star Cluster, and Turbulent Plasma into a GPU (and Live to Tell About It).” And for entertainment, there is the pro-gaming tournament and an evening music concert and light show dubbed “Video Games Live.” An estimated 6,000 to 8,000 people are expected to attend Nvision 08, while several hundred are expected at the Emerging Companies Summit.

Cooliris has just launched the newest version of its browser plug-in PicLens, allowing you to use the plug-in’s “fullscreen 3D” interface to explore more of the web through the PicLens Discovery feature, as well as new compatibility with Amazon.

PicLens can already be used to explore photos and videos on sites like Flickr and YouTube, as well as social networks like Facebook and search engines like Google Images. Instead of just clicking through picture after picture, or page after page of search results, PicLens users see a giant wall of images, which they can fly around to find content that’s interesting. And with PicLens Discovery, the company is creating its own destination site, rather than just providing a way to experience other sites. The service pulls content from around the web into different channels focused on topics like entertainment, sports and U.S. news.

There’s nothing particularly unique about the content, but by allowing you to navigate it with PicLens, the company has created a fun way to explore new stuff as it comes online — judging from a quick demo, PicLens Discovery brings a “channel surfing” experience to RSS feeds. Right now, the content is arranged in reverse-chronological order, so that users see the newest pictures and videos first, but the team says it will be tweaking the service to provide more personalized content depending on the articles, pictures and videos a user appears to find most interesting. I’ll be using PicLens Discovery myself, but with caution — it could turn into a real black hole of procrastination.

PicLens is also moving into online shopping with its Amazon compatibility, which the team describes as a form of online window shopping. Flying around the plug-in’s wall of images may not be quite as good as inspecting each product while you’re in the store, and it won’t show you any information that you couldn’t find on the site already. But using PicLens to shop is a lot more fun than going through a bunch of product descriptions — and in some cases more useful, since you may spot, say, the shoes you’re looking for more quickly.

Finally, the Cooliris team has made a small but crucial improvement to the user interface, making it possible for users to easily jump back-and-forth between PicLens and webpages without having to restart your PicLens search each time. This is an important feature, because it makes PicLens a more practical browsing tool, rather than just a cool toy.

Cooliris got some headlines last week when it snagged Shashi Seth, YouTube’s head of monetization, to be its chief revenue officer. Seth says this new release is a step forward for Cooliris’ business plan, too. The Amazon feature will bring in money for Cooliris as an Amazon affiliate; more importantly, it will help the startup gather data that it can use to launch other online shopping services. Cooliris is also ready to start experimenting with the advertising that Seth hinted at last week.

Cooliris raised a $3 million first round from Kleiner Perkins in 2007.

YouTube’s head of monetization Shashi Seth has left YouTube-owner Google to become the chief revenue officer at a Menlo Park, Calif. startup called Cooliris. Seth is just the latest in a series of Google executives to join the startup world, a group that also includes former Google vice president and current Facebook Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg.

Seth was appointed to his position at YouTube in January 2007. It probably wasn’t the easiest job in the world, since Google has been struggling to make money from the incredibly popular video site. He told GigaOM, which first broke the news of Seth’s departure, that the search giant has become “a little big” for him.

I spoke to Seth this afternoon to find out more about his move. He says he first heard about Cooliris from Randy Komisar, a partner at Kleiner Perkins, which funded Cooliris’ $3 million first round. The startup’s browser plugin PicLens allows users to browse YouTube videos and other media in a three-dimensional array of images, and Seth says its potential significance is much larger — it could create a new paradigm of web browsing.

Cooliris is already “headed in the right direction,” he says, and one of the most promising future applications would be a product search feature on sites like Nordstrom.com. A shopper could look up a particular type of shoe at the shopping site, and rather than clicking through page after page of search results, they could explore those results more fluidly with PicLens. From a revenue standpoint, there’s a lot of opportunity, Seth says, because a richer browsing experience also provides a platform for richer advertising. And that could tempt companies — like Gucci and Guess, for example — that haven’t found an online equivalent of multi-page magazine ads.

Seth will help Cooliris develop its business model, but he says one reason he was excited about the company is that its executives are considering these issues already, so that the revenue side and the product side are marching in “lockstep.”

“It’s good that they’re thinking about these kinds of things now, rather than getting a lot of users and then saying, ‘Now let’s figure out how to make money,’” Seth says.

Hmm, I wonder what company he could be referring to …

Cooliris, a startup that’s been developing dynamic and immersive new ways to browse the web, continues rolling out new features for its PicLens browser plug-in. Most promising of the news features is the search capability for video site YouTube.

When PicLens launched last June, we were already excited by its ability to create full-screen slideshows to browse photo sites like Flickr. Since then, it looks like the service has gotten a lot more sophisticated, creating an image browsing interface that The New York Times describes as “a three-dimensional space that feels like an unending hallway of images.” Basically, your browser disappears and you fly around in front of a wall of content.

The interface moves PicLens beyond competing with slideshow companies like Slide and Rockyou and into a more generally useful service. And with the launch of PicLens’ YouTube compatibility — which seems to be the first of what the Times says will be a number of new multimedia search features — the plugin is really starting to live up to that promise.

PicLens’ 3D YouTube search can be accessed direct from the video site, as well as via the PicLens button in your browser toolbar. Here’s a video demo:

The plug-in’s latest release includes other new features like Firefox 3.0 support, an improved user interface that lets you zoom in much further than before and optimized media RSS support. More info here and here.

Silicon Valley start-up Cooliris has released an improved version of a feature that lets you preview pages being linked to.

The idea behind it is to save you from having to click through.

There were drawbacks to Cooliris’ initial version, released last year: First, the preview pop-ups were too small. This time, they are much larger and you can do more with them.

This is good for power surfers: Clicking through can be a waste of time, because if it’s a page you don’t want, you have to click the back arrow to get back to where you were, or close the window when you’re done.

The company says nearly two million people downloaded the original browser plug-in, even if it didn’t get much buzz. Keep in mind, this is a concept still in trial: Browster, a venture-backed company that offered something similar, recently folded. Meanwhile, Snap came along and offered a feature that did very well. Snap doesn’t require you to download anything. Rather, Web site owners integrate it into their site, and it provides an automatic pop up for readers. It has become extremely popular.

Snap’s popularity is somewhat perplexing, however. Readers don’t see much in its tiny pop-up images. We ascribe its widespread adoption to the “eye-candy” effect: It livens up a site, offering no practical use. Like cuff-links on a shirt, or ties.

See the image below of a side-by-side comparison of Cooliris’ preview and Snap’s.

Once Cooliris’ previews are open (you simply mouse over a blue icon next to a link), you can share it with friends. You rightclick, select “share” and Cooliris lets you email it.

It offers other features. With image thumbnails, you mouse over an image, and it pops up.

More significantly, Cooliris lets you stack away the previews on the right side of your screen for later reading. You do this by right-clicking and selecting “add to stacks” See image below. This is useful for researchers like ourselves, who do lots of surfing and don’t always want to drill down immediately by clicking. Having a place to put pages temporarily also gives you time to decide how to bookmark pages. Cooliris plans to introduce more management features for the stacks, such as letting you share them too.

The Firefox version of the plug-in is more advanced than the Safari and IE versions.

Finally, you can change settings for things like the preview’s window size, where on your screen the preview opens, and for locking previews open even when you mouse away.

Cooliris is the Palo Alto company that released the PicLens feature for full-screen image viewing, something we first wrote about two weeks ago. It has no venture backing.

Chief exec Soujanya Bhumkar said that, like PicLens, the goal is to maximize distribution of Previews/Stacks, before trying to make money.

The video below provides a demo (this is Flash, so RSS readers will have to go the VentureBeat site to see this)

Piclens is a new plug-in for your Firefox Internet browser that lets you launch into a full-screen into a slideshow while browsing photos.

After you download PicLens, here’s how it works.

First, let’s say you want to look at all the pictures on Flickr taken by your friend while she traveled New Zealand.

You can then see a slideshow of them on your desktop by clicking on PicLens’ icon within any of the images on her album (you have to mouse over the image to see the icon, as shown below). Once you click, your screen changes into a full-screen slide show.

The image you clicked on blows up to fill your screen, and a strip of thumbnails below shows the other images next in line. You click on a play button, and PicLens scrolls through each of the pictures — blowing each image up to their full size on your screen. It does the same for images on Google and Yahoo, and Facebook photo album images. It will do this for any site that supports the Media RSS format.

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Media RSS is a format created by Yahoo, but which is now an open standard and free for others to use. Web site owners can make their sites compatible with PicLens by pasting some code within their site, which specifies the content displayed. Emily’s Photo Site is an example site that supports Media RSS. See the code below for what this looks like.

Search for “flowers” on Google images, for example, and you can then see a slideshow of Google’s entire inventory of flower images by clicking on PicLens’ icon within any of the images.

To our knowledge this isn’t offered by anyone else. Slide and Rockyou offer slideshows, but to view them you have to store images on their site, or have them embedded in a widget. PicLens brings the experience to your desktop.

The company doesn’t have any plans to monetize this yet. They want to distribute the product and worry about that later.
There’s a raunchier use for this, of course: Use PicLens while searching Google images for “Alessandra,” or any other female name for that matter, and you’ll quickly grasp how a good portion of Piclens’ users are likely to use this product. Let your mind wander from there. Even then, we’re not certain how money is to be made.

It is the latest product offered by Cooliris, a Palo Alto start-up launched last year. Piclens was first released last year for Safari browsers only.

Here is the RSS Media code: