| Type | Private |
|---|---|
| Industry | Computer software Online media |
| Founded | California (January 2006) |
| Headquarters | Palo Alto, California, United States |
| Products | CoolPreviews, Cooliris |
| Website | www.cooliris.com |
Cooliris, Inc. is a US corporation. Headquartered in Palo Alto, CA, Cooliris develops products intended to enhance user experience of online media. As of 2011, the firm offers four freeware applications: LiveShare, Cooliris, CoolPreviews and Discover.
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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, Yahoo! Image Search, Ask.com Images, AOL Image Search, Flickr, Photobucket, Corbis, Picasa, Fotki, FotoTime, deviantART, SmugMug, Facebook, MySpace, Bebo, hi5, Friendster, YouTube (for videos), Gallery, Craigslist, Amazon.com, and any web site that implements mediaRSS <link> 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, and more recently, for Google Android devices. Google tapped Cooliris to develop the official media app for Google's Nexus One smartphone, launched January 5, 2010.
CoolPreviews, formerly known as Cooliris Previews, is a web browser plugin for Mozilla Firefox, Internet Explorer, Safari, and Flock 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 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, the web or mobile devices.
Decks is an iPad application that lets users create a personalized set of shopping catalogs as decks of cards that update continuously.
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[1] in July 2007.
CoolPreviews software is client-side, whereas some other products, e.g. Snap, are server-side. 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, JavaScript, and CSS. 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.