We don’t talk about Cooliris nearly often enough. The Palo Alto-based company has done a fantastic job in pushing the limits of interactive photo and video browsing with its 3D Wall, a plug-in for Internet Explorer, Safari and Firefox that enables users to enjoy viewing their photos on Flickr or Facebook and their YouTube videos in a rich setting that drips of coolness. If you haven’t tried it and you’re using one of the supported browsers, give it a shot or check out the Flash-driven Cooliris Embed Wall below.
Today, the VC-backed startup is introducing what was always in the cards for them if they were ever going to make money off its innovative product: a Publisher Network that integrates non-intrusive interactive advertising units into embeddable 3D walls.
Firefox plugin PicLens from Cooliris provides full screen immersive picture browsing of Flickr and other web sites that support Media RSS.
To use PicLens, a user clicks a small translucent icon that appears atop the image of interest once the plugin is installed. The PicLens slideshow interface appears and the user can move from one photo to the next or press play and enjoy the show. A user can intuitively browse images within search results, photo albums, and Media RSS enabled websites.
Support is currently provided for Flickr, Facebook, Friendster, Picasa Web Album and image search results from Google and Yahoo. Site owners can add support to any site with photos by including Media RSS support.
The best way to describe PicLens is that it’s a like the slideshow feature in Picasa or a similar photo viewing tool, but applied to web pages. The full screen rendering does require a decent internet speed when displaying large photographs, but visually the results are stunning. This Firefox plugin is going to find a lot of fans very, very quickly.
Cooliris is a service that provides pop-up previews of the contents of a link when you hover over it. Previously only available for Firefox and Explorer, the company has now released a version for Safari.
While other services perform this function for Firefox and Google search results, the new Cooliris Safari plug-in offers previews of links in Google (Web, Images, News, Groups, Froogle), BBC News, CNN News, Craigslist, eBay, Del.icio.us and RSS feeds. The company’s primary competitor is Browster.
In other Mac friendly news, web messaging platform Meetro will launch a Mac version tonight as well. See also previous TechCrunch coverage of Meetro.
Cooliris is a Firefox plugin that duplicates the Browster search preview functionality, although only on Google. Once the plugin is installed, you hover your mouse over a Google search link or image and the underlying content is pulled up on screen before you click.
Browster CEO Scott Milener wrote about Cooliris and other competitors on the Browster blog, using it as an opportunity to announce that Browster still has a few tricks up its sleave. My previous posts on Browster are here.
We don’t talk about Cooliris nearly often enough. The Palo Alto-based company has done a fantastic job in pushing the limits of interactive photo and video browsing with its 3D Wall, a plug-in for Internet Explorer, Safari and Firefox that enables users to enjoy viewing their photos on Flickr or Facebook and their YouTube videos in a rich setting that drips of coolness. If you haven’t tried it and you’re using one of the supported browsers, give it a shot or check out the Flash-driven Cooliris Embed Wall below.
Firefox plugin 
