Silicon Valley startup Cooliris demoed the next version of its social communication and media sharing app LiveShare to me earlier this week, and I was blown away by exactly how instant the sharing of photos, videos and whatnot has become.

The tool, which isn’t available yet, is shown in a demo video (embedded below).

Cooliris’ LiveShare lets you share photos, videos, maps, articles and more with others by the tap of a button or simply by dragging content to a stream or group of people.

As you can tell from the video below, the sharing itself is as real-time as real-time can get. And I can assure you there’s no trickery involved – it was just as fast when they demoed it to me from their offices in Palo Alto, California.

LiveShare to date has been described by the company as a group photo sharing service, but when this upgraded product gets polished up a little and hits the market, calling it that would almost be an insult. Expect it to become available in the next few weeks.

Question remains if speed is enough a factor to differentiate LiveShare from the thousands of other media sharing tools out there (and there are increasingly more).

Also read: Cooliris Gets $9.6 Million From Kleiner Perkins And Others (February 2011)

Multimedia browser plugin Cooliris, which lets you view photo and video content on the web in a more visually appealing manner (screencap above), has snagged $9.6 million in Series C financing from investors including Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Deutsche Telekom’s T-Venture, The Westly Group and DAG Ventures. The company has now raised a total of $27.6 million in funding.

Not surprisingly, the company plans on using the new financing to further strategic partnerships and product innovation.

In line with this, Cooliris is also releasing the newest version of its LiveShare group photo sharing app in conjunction with the funding announcement and the Mobile World Congress. LiveShare 1.2 allows users to discover and share content with their Facebook friends through the creation of shared group photo streams.

Entering the mobile photo arena with heavy hitting contenders Instagram, PicPlz and Path, what makes LiveShare 1.2  different is that users can now organize photos by event and adjust share levels. LiveShare users can also filter photos by  popularity, time, category and GPS location whether viewers are on web or mobile. And LiveShare 1.2 is available on the iPhone, Android and Windows Phone 7.

In the same sleek multimedia visualization space as Disrupt finalist Gunzoo, the Cooliris offerings run the gamut from the Cooliris browser plugin for the Desktop, to Cooliris for the iPhone, to Cooliris Express which enables publishers to easily embed the visually stunning Cooliris 3D walls, to its Discover application for the iPad and the Cooliris CoolPreviews browser add-on that allows for faster multimedia web search.

Cooliris CEO Soujanya Bhumkar holds that the Cooliris 3D wall plugin (which really is impressive once you try it) has had over 35 million downloads since its initial launch and that its Liveshare Gallery application for Android has had over 100K activations since the product was released a month ago.

Said Bhumkar about the company’s continued foray into the next media browsing frontier, “We’ve established a good beachhead in media browsing … [and now] the Cooliris team, which includes our investing partners, is poised to deliver the next-generation communication service for content discovery.”

Übercool media sharing technology company Cooliris is beefing up two of its core products, Cooliris Express and the embeddable Cooliris Wall.

The latter product is gaining more and more adoption, the company tells me, growing from an average of 100 new Walls created per day in December last year to more than 400 new Walls per day more recently.

In addition, more than 45,000 Walls with Cooliris Express were launched in the last four months alone, notably about half of them on Facebook.

Cooliris Walls allow customers like TV.com to display media like photos and videos in a visually appealing way, and lets users interact with that content regardless of which browser they use (provided they have Flash installed).

According to the startup, Walls can reduce page load for media-intensive pages by as much as 25%, and the upgraded product also makes for faster scrolling and smoother interactions.

New comScore and Google Analytics support in Cooliris Walls now gives publishers a way to track of the implementation has resulted in increased engagement (the company claims it’s seeing up to 6 times as much interaction on sites like that of singer Taylor Swift), which is helpful information for advertisers and media planners as it increases potential ad opportunities and revenue.

Cooliris worked together with comScore to ensure they are compliant with their current standards: each piece of content viewed via the Wall basically gets counted as a page view.

Also new in Cooliris Walls: new ways for people to share media via Facebook and Twitter.

Lacking because of its reliance on Flash: support for iPad, which would be really cool on there (the company says they’re looking at ways of bringing the experience to the platform). It works really well on the iPhone already, and Google has also tapped Cooliris for Nexus One support earlier this year.

Secondly, Cooliris Express – a free tool that lets anyone create digital experiences centered around their photo and video content – has gotten a revamp and a host of new features.

Users can now use Cooliris Express to publish and dynamically update photo galleries for social networks and blogs from one central location. To access and update Walls, Cooliris Express has enabled a single login that either leverages a Facebook or Google username. OpenID is not supported (yet), but users are free to create a unique account with the service, too.

Cooliris Express introduces editing capabilities that enables users to update and change the content on their Walls at any time. Before, users were supposed to create new Walls to showcase new content. Now users can add or delete photos/videos from their existing Walls. Finally, Cooliris simplified the navigation and created a new user interface for editing and uploading photos in Cooliris Express, all based on user input and suggestions, in an effort to make the process more intuitive for non-technical users.

Palo Alto, CA-based Cooliris is backed by about $18.5 million in VC funding.

Big news for Cooliris this morning as Google unveiled its Nexus One “Superphone.” You can read our review of the phone here. The search and technology giant has tapped the startup to enable media browsing on its shiny new phone. The startup has been pushing the limits of interactive photo and video browsing with its 3D Wall, a browser 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.

The new Gallery application, powered by Cooliris, for the Nexus One is a native app to enable browsing, organizing, sharing and editing media within one application. The Gallery is designed to scan quickly through thumbnails of media and loads the high-resolution versions on selection, making it easy for users to quickly browse their photos and videos. Using geolocation and tagging, users can sort their media into digital stacks by date, time and location, making it easier to find and organize photos and videos. Users can also pull existing albums from their desktops or access Picasa web albums. One interesting feature of Gallery is the two-way sync with Picasa albums, allowing users to update and access their Picasa media on-the-go. Users can also easily share their videos and images from within the app through email, MMS messaging, Picasa, or a Bluetooth connection.

Publishers a have been flocking to enable Cooliris’ nifty browser add-on. Most recently, CBS Interactive’s TV.com, one of the premier websites bringing episode guides, news, reviews, interviews, TV listings, and more to a primarily U.S. audience, started using Cooliris technology to enhance its ‘Shows’ section.

Backed with about $18.5 million in VC funding, Palo Alto, CA-based Cooliris has also debuted an compelling way to generate advertising revenue with its service.

The partnership is a big coup for Cooliris. Though there are no signs of an acquisition yet, but it wouldn’t be surprising considering Google’s phone’s deep integration with the startup’s technology.

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Publishers are starting to notice that too, and are increasingly turning to the startup to make some of their own imagery and video content more visually appealing and browsing it, well, downright sexy.

Latest premium publisher to join the fray: CBS Interactive’s TV.com, one of the premier websites bringing episode guides, news, reviews, interviews, TV listings, and more to a primarily U.S. audience, is now using Cooliris technology to enhance its ‘Shows’ section.

If you’re not familiar with Cooliris and the Flash-based Embed Wall product that TV.com is now using for its website, go check it out on there or head straight to the Cooliris website to learn more. My guess is you won’t be disappointed, neither as a user or as a publisher.

Backed with about $18.5 million in VC funding, Palo Alto, CA-based Cooliris has also debuted an interesting way to generate advertising revenue with its service.

And with deals like this one with TV.com parent company CBS Interactive, more and more people will grow familiar with Cooliris products, which in turn will make them more interesting for publishers to add, and advertisers to promote their wares on.

Can’t help but root for this one – although I also can’t help but think they’re a bit over-funded.

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.

You can already see the new advertising solution in action thanks to a partnership Cooliris has sealed with marketing agency OMD and one of its historical big clients, Infiniti. Basically, Cooliris will be integrating custom blocks for the Infiniti G Convertible ad campaign into streaming photo walls throughout its freshly launched publisher network, more specifically on popular websites like Yahoo! News, Golf.com, the New York Magazine and Style.com. See it in full effect at this section of the New York Magazine website or just have a look at the screenshot below to get an idea of where the company is going with this.

Personally, I’m a big fan of Cooliris and the way they are going about trying to generate revenue from its product. In the past, we’ve talked about other innovative advertising strategies we actually appreciate, and I think this is what should be drawing the attention of The Online Publishers Association. Maybe that way they will finally realize that just making display ads units bigger isn’t going to solve any of their members’ problems without annoying the heck out of their respective website visitors.

Cooliris on Yahoo! News Photos

Embedded 3D Wall (doesn’t work so well in Firefox for some reason)

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.


(thanks to Ouriel Ohayon for the tip)

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.

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.