Cooliris loses its chief revenue officer to AOL
Cooliris, the startup that developed a 3-D wall for users to explore images and other online media, lost one of its most notable hires today, when chief revenue officer Shashi Seth joined AOL.
Seth came to Cooliris in June 2008 from Google, where he was in charge of monetizing YouTube. At the time, Seth told GigaOm that the search engine had gotten “a little big.” Now he’s part of a wave of ex-Googlers jumping aboard at… Continue Reading
Westly Group closes $120M fund for cleantech
The Westly Group, the firm founded and managed by former California state controller and financial officer Steve Westly, just closed a $120 million fund to fuel revenue-generating cleantech companies. With 13 companies already in the Menlo Park, Calif. firm’s portfolio — including crown jewel investment Tesla Motors — it will be interesting to see which ideas it chooses to back.
Electric vehicles will continue to be an area of emphasis for the firm, which also plans… Continue Reading
Solicit feedback, not funding
There’s an old saying: Ask for advice, you get money. Ask for money, you get advice. The team at Cooliris actually found this to be true. Rather than relying on a single pitch meeting, the founding team met regularly with a variety of companies to determine how their tech could enhance the Internet landscape. Product manager Josh Schwarzapel and CEO Soujanya Bhumkar tell their story in a talk given at Stanford University’s Technology Venture Program… Continue Reading
Cooliris’ revenue chief: Ad market tanking? Not for us
I’ve spent a lot of time writing about how a startup called Cooliris continues to build a fun experience for exploring video and other media with its 3D wall, but I’ve heard a lot less about the business side. Recently Shashi Seth, the Palo Alto, Calif., company’s chief revenue officer (formerly head of monetization at YouTube), told me that despite the broader downturn in online ads, Cooliris’ advertising remains very much in-demand, with inventory completely… Continue Reading
Cooliris raises $15M for (improved) 3D wall
Updated
Cooliris is launching a new version of its 3D wall today, one that makes it easier to explore images and other media on the web, on social networking sites, and now, even on your computer desktop. The Palo Alto, Calif. company is also announcing a $15 million second round of venture funding from previous backer Kleiner Perkins Caufield and Byers and others.
I saw a demo of the Cooliris version 1.10 a couple of weeks ago,… Continue Reading
Shop and play games within Cooliris’ 3D wall
Cooliris, which lets you browse media as a three-dimensional wall, announced two additions to its “Discover” feature today: Shopping channels and the ability to play Flash games.
You can use Cooliris to browse a number of websites, including YouTube and Facebook. Through Discover, the company also allows you to surf different channels of media pulled from around the web. The games channel is probably the flashier of the two new ones. Now you can actually play… Continue Reading
Cooliris’ 3D wall gets a little more personal
Cooliris, the Kleiner Perkins-backed startup that creates a three-dimensional wall for exploring images and other media, has become more personalized with the latest release of its browser extension. This is another smart step that moves Cooliris closer to becoming a real alternative to the traditional browsing experience and away from being just a cool toy.
The biggest improvement is the addition of a “favorites” function, which does exactly what it sounds like — lets you save… Continue Reading
Mozilla wants to bring add-ons to a mainstream audience
With the launch of a new site called Fashion Your Firefox, Mozilla is pushing to make normal users more aware of the add-ons available for its Firefox web browser.
There are already plenty of ways to find new add-ons (software you install to add features to your browser, such as a mini map sidebar or a space to get twitter updates). There’s a semi-comprehensive listing of add-ons on the Mozilla web site, as well as a… Continue Reading
Roundup: Yahoo, Apple pre-earnings reports, Akamai’s new ads, and more
Here’s the latest action:
Earnings: Yahoo may shortly be cutting employee compensation – This may be instead of or in addition to planned job cuts.
Earnings: Apple lowballs projections, as usual — Fortune’s Apple 2.0 blog has a closer look at this historical trend.
Akamai launches ad targeting service — The content delivery network company has bought ad-targeting company Acerno for $95 million, as part of this new focus.
Research in Motion joins Blackberry cross-device application testing service — The service, DeviceAnywhere,… Continue Reading
Embeddable wall brings Cooliris to any website
I’ve been hearing a lot of positive things about Cooliris, the Kleiner Perkins-backed startup that allows users to explore media through a “fullscreen 3D” wall. Last week, the team shared some numbers that back up the positive buzz — the browser plugin currently has around 2.4 million active users per month, and it’s downloaded 30,000 to 50,000 times per day. Also, the plugin serves 8 to 9 billion pieces of content every month, and Cooliris… Continue Reading
Cooliris makes it easier to view its 3D wall on any website
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 —… Continue Reading
Nvidia encourages new generation of visual computing startups
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… Continue Reading
New version of PicLens lets you channel surf the web
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,… Continue Reading
YouTube business exec joins startup Cooliris
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… Continue Reading
PicLens offers a new way to search YouTube
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… Continue Reading
Cooliris introduces easier browsing with “previews” and “stacks”
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… Continue Reading
PicLens, the full-screen slideshow
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… Continue Reading