Cooliris, Inc. is a US

United States

The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...

 corporation

Corporation

A corporation is created under the laws of a state as a separate legal entity that has privileges and liabilities that are distinct from those of its members. There are many different forms of corporations, most of which are used to conduct business. Early corporations were established by charter...

. Headquartered in Palo Alto, CA, Cooliris develops products intended to enhance user experience of online media. As of 2011, the firm offers four freeware

Freeware

Freeware is computer software that is available for use at no cost or for an optional fee, but usually with one or more restricted usage rights. Freeware is in contrast to commercial software, which is typically sold for profit, but might be distributed for a business or commercial purpose in the...

 applications: LiveShare, Cooliris, CoolPreviews and Discover.

Products

Cooliris, formerly known as PicLens, is a web browser plugin that provides interactive full-screen slideshows of online images. The plugin is available for Safari, Firefox, Chrome, and Internet Explorer. At present, the software is compatible with Bing Images, Google Image Search

Google Image Search

Google Images is a search service created by Google that allows users to search the Web for image content. The feature was introduced in July 2001. The keywords for the image search are based on the filename of the image, the link text pointing to the image, and text adjacent to the image. When...

, Yahoo! Image Search

Yahoo!

Yahoo! Inc. is an American multinational internet corporation headquartered in Sunnyvale, California, United States. The company is perhaps best known for its web portal, search engine , Yahoo! Directory, Yahoo! Mail, Yahoo! News, Yahoo! Groups, Yahoo! Answers, advertising, online mapping ,...

, Ask.com Images

Ask.com

Ask is a Q&A focused search engine founded in 1996 by Garrett Gruener and David Warthen in Berkeley, California. The original software was implemented by Gary Chevsky from his own design. Warthen, Chevsky, Justin Grant, and others built the early AskJeeves.com website around that core engine...

, AOL Image Search

AOL

AOL Inc. is an American global Internet services and media company. AOL is headquartered at 770 Broadway in New York. Founded in 1983 as Control Video Corporation, it has franchised its services to companies in several nations around the world or set up international versions of its services...

, Flickr

Flickr

Flickr is an image hosting and video hosting website, web services suite, and online community that was created by Ludicorp in 2004 and acquired by Yahoo! in 2005. In addition to being a popular website for users to share and embed personal photographs, the service is widely used by bloggers to...

, Photobucket

Photobucket

Photobucket is an image hosting, video hosting, slideshow creation and photo sharing website. It was founded in 2003 by Alex Welch and Darren Crystal and received funding from Trinity Ventures. It was acquired by Fox Interactive Media in 2007....

, Corbis

Corbis

Corbis Corporation is an American company, based in Seattle, Washington, that licenses the rights to photographs, footage and other visual media...

, Picasa

Picasa

Picasa is an image organizer and image viewer for organizing and editing digital photos, plus an integrated photo-sharing website, originally created by Idealab in 2002 and owned by Google since 2004. "Picasa" is a blend of the name of Spanish painter Pablo Picasso, the phrase mi casa for "my...

, Fotki

Fotki

Fotki is a digital photo sharing, video sharing and media social network website and web service suite; it is one of the world's largest social networking sites...

, FotoTime, deviantART

DeviantArt

deviantART is an online community showcasing various forms of user-made artwork. It was first launched on August 7, 2000 by Scott Jarkoff, Matthew Stephens, Angelo Sotira and others. deviantArt, Inc...

, SmugMug

Smugmug

SmugMug is a paid digital photo sharing website.- History :Chris MacAskill and Don MacAskill started the original company to build a new video game-oriented web service in February 2002. By August 2002, though, their focus shifted...

, Facebook

Facebook

Facebook is a social networking service and website launched in February 2004, operated and privately owned by Facebook, Inc. , Facebook has more than 800 million active users. Users must register before using the site, after which they may create a personal profile, add other users as...

, MySpace

MySpace

Myspace is a social networking service owned by Specific Media LLC and pop star Justin Timberlake. Myspace launched in August 2003 and is headquartered in Beverly Hills, California. In August 2011, Myspace had 33.1 million unique U.S. visitors....

, Bebo

Bebo

Bebo is a social networking website launched in July 2005. It is currently owned and operated by Criterion Capital Partners after taking over from AOL in June 2010....

, hi5

Hi5 (website)

hi5 is a social networking website based in San Francisco, California. The company was founded in 2003 by Ramu Yalamanchi. By 2008, comScore reported that hi5 had become the third most popular social networking site in terms of monthly unique visitors....

, Friendster

Friendster

Friendster is a social gaming site that is based in Malaysia, KL. The company now operates mainly from the three Asian countries namely in the Philippines, Malaysia and Singapore....

, YouTube

YouTube

YouTube is a video-sharing website, created by three former PayPal employees in February 2005, on which users can upload, view and share videos....

 (for videos), Gallery

Gallery Project

Gallery is an open source project enabling management and publication of digital photographs and other media through a PHP-enabled web server. Photo manipulation includes automatic thumbnails, resizing, rotation, and flipping, among other things...

, Craigslist

Craigslist

Craigslist is a centralized network of online communities featuring free online classified advertisements, with sections devoted to jobs, housing, personals, for sale, services, community, gigs, résumés, and discussion forums....

, Amazon.com

Amazon.com

Amazon.com, Inc. is a multinational electronic commerce company headquartered in Seattle, Washington, United States. It is the world's largest online retailer. Amazon has separate websites for the following countries: United States, Canada, United Kingdom, Germany, France, Italy, Spain, Japan, and...

, and any web site that implements mediaRSS  tags in their HTML pages. The software places a small icon in the corner of an image thumbnail when the mouse moves over it, which launches into a full-screen photo viewer when clicked.

Cooliris also develops apps for Apple iPhone

IPhone

The iPhone is a line of Internet and multimedia-enabled smartphones marketed by Apple Inc. The first iPhone was unveiled by Steve Jobs, then CEO of Apple, on January 9, 2007, and released on June 29, 2007...

, and more recently, for Google Android devices. Google tapped Cooliris to develop the official media app for Google's Nexus One

Nexus One

The Nexus One was Google's flagship smartphone manufactured by Taiwan's HTC Corporation. It became available on January 5, 2010 and uses the Android open source mobile operating system...

 smartphone, launched January 5, 2010.

CoolPreviews, formerly known as Cooliris Previews, is a web browser

Web browser

A web browser is a software application for retrieving, presenting, and traversing information resources on the World Wide Web. An information resource is identified by a Uniform Resource Identifier and may be a web page, image, video, or other piece of content...

 plugin for Mozilla

Mozilla

Mozilla is a term used in a number of ways in relation to the Mozilla.org project and the Mozilla Foundation, their defunct commercial predecessor Netscape Communications Corporation, and their related application software....

 Firefox, Internet Explorer

Internet Explorer

Windows Internet Explorer is a series of graphical web browsers developed by Microsoft and included as part of the Microsoft Windows line of operating systems, starting in 1995. It was first released as part of the add-on package Plus! for Windows 95 that year...

, Safari

Safari (web browser)

Safari is a web browser developed by Apple Inc. and included with the Mac OS X and iOS operating systems. First released as a public beta on January 7, 2003 on the company's Mac OS X operating system, it became Apple's default browser beginning with Mac OS X v10.3 "Panther". Safari is also the...

, and Flock

Flock (web browser)

Flock was a web browser that specialized in providing social networking and Web 2.0 facilities built into its user interface.Earlier versions of Flock used the Gecko HTML rendering engine by Mozilla....

 that opens a preview of the underlying content of a web link when the mouse hovers over the link. The stated goal of the software is to optimize browsing by allowing review of multiple links while preserving the context of the originating page. For example, one could preview a list of news headlines before deciding which article to read in depth.

Discover is an iPad

IPad

The iPad is a line of tablet computers designed, developed and marketed by Apple Inc., primarily as a platform for audio-visual media including books, periodicals, movies, music, games, and web content. The iPad was introduced on January 27, 2010 by Apple's then-CEO Steve Jobs. Its size and...

 application that allows users to explore Wikipedia in a magazine-style interface. The application pulls from the Wikipedia featured article and the featured picture to create a magazine cover that updates daily.

Liveshare is a mobile and web application used to share photos from many people at an event in real-time to one live photostream. The photostream is accessed via Facebook

Facebook

Facebook is a social networking service and website launched in February 2004, operated and privately owned by Facebook, Inc. , Facebook has more than 800 million active users. Users must register before using the site, after which they may create a personal profile, add other users as...

, the web or mobile devices.

Decks is an iPad

IPad

The iPad is a line of tablet computers designed, developed and marketed by Apple Inc., primarily as a platform for audio-visual media including books, periodicals, movies, music, games, and web content. The iPad was introduced on January 27, 2010 by Apple's then-CEO Steve Jobs. Its size and...

 application that lets users create a personalized set of shopping catalogs as decks of cards that update continuously.

History

Cooliris, Inc. was founded in January, 2006, and later launched Cooliris Previews (later renamed CoolPreviews) for Firefox, followed by versions for Internet Explorer and Safari. In May, 2006, the company released Coolringer, and introduced PicLens (later renamed Cooliris) in October, 2006.

Early versions of Cooliris Previews displayed the contents of a link in image form, which limited the user's ability to explore the contents of the page. The product was subsequently updated to make the preview fully interactive, improving performance and usability.

Cooliris, Inc. received funding from Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers in July 2007.

Server side vs. client side

CoolPreviews software is client-side

Client-side

Client-side refers to operations that are performed by the client in a client–server relationship in a computer network.Typically, a client is a computer application, such as a web browser, that runs on a user's local computer or workstation and connects to a server as necessary...

, whereas some other products, e.g. Snap, are server-side

Server-side

Server-side refers to operations that are performed by the server in a client–server relationship in computer networking.Typically, a server is a software program, such as a web server, that runs on a remote server, reachable from a user's local computer or workstation...

. There are advantages and disadvantages of each approach. Client-side software must first be downloaded, and must be developed specifically for each browser platform; however, once installed, it can offer functionality beyond HTML

HTML

HyperText Markup Language is the predominant markup language for web pages. HTML elements are the basic building-blocks of webpages....

, JavaScript

JavaScript

JavaScript is a prototype-based scripting language that is dynamic, weakly typed and has first-class functions. It is a multi-paradigm language, supporting object-oriented, imperative, and functional programming styles....

, and CSS

CSS

-Computing:*Cascading Style Sheets, a language used to describe the style of document presentations in web development*Central Structure Store in the PHIGS 3D API*Closed source software, software that is not distributed with source code...

. In contrast, server-side software can be deployed by web site administrators without user intervention, removing a barrier to adoption and the security risks involved in client side software. However, each site owner must implement it individually.

Recognition

• In 2008, Cooliris won The Crunchies 2008 Best Design award by TechCrunch
  TechCrunch
  TechCrunch is a web publication that offers technology news and analysis, as well as profiling of startup companies, products, and websites. It was founded by Michael Arrington in 2005, and was first published on June 11, 2005....
  
  .
• In 2009, Cooliris was listed in the The Guardian
  The Guardian
  The Guardian, formerly known as The Manchester Guardian , is a British national daily newspaper in the Berliner format...
  
  's list of the "100 top sites for the year ahead".
• In 2010, Cooliris received 2010 SPIFFY Award for Engineering Excellence.
• In 2010, Cooliris was recognized as one of the "Hottest Silicon Valley Companies" by Lead411.