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In the spirit of last night’s MWC keynote by Google big wig Eric Schmidt, here is a little photo sharing application and online service that organizes your photos into cloud-based streams to be shared with as many or as few people as you’d like. Cooliris LiveShare 1.2 was released earlier this week, providing users of Android and other smartphones the ability to share photos with a slight twist. Instead of being organized by user or random albums around the web, LiveShare organizes your photos by event and you pick and choose who and how much people can access. The stream updates in real time as photos are captured. The cool thing here is that the service isn’t necessarily restricted to one person contributing per album. You can add family and friends and create one giant, social stream of a sight-seeing trip, a friend’s wedding, or a night out on the town.
Eric Schmidt must not be the only guy in a position of influence to think unique cloud access is the next big area for mobile. Cooliris has recently raised a round of $9.6M from investors. We’re not sure LiveShare could be the next Flickr or Picasa, and in many ways Facebook does similar things in terms of organization and sharing, but with new money coming in we are excited about the innovation it could spur.
LIVESHARE BY COOLIRIS DELIVERS NEW HYPER-PERSONAL GROUP SHARING FOR PHOTOS
Cooliris raises $9.6M from investors including Kleiner Perkins and T-Venture
PALO ALTO, CA – February 14, 2011: Cooliris (www.cooliris.com) today announced the launch of LiveShare 1.2, a new and hyper-personal way to communicate with friends across mobile and web through live, shared group photo streams. LiveShare lets you create streams on the fly, make them as private or public as you want, and see the stream update in real time with the photos from all the people in the group. Whether it’s seeing what your best friends are doing right now, capturing a day at the park with the kids, or a bachelor party that needs to stay in Vegas, LiveShare gives you one photo stream for each event, rather than multiple albums in different places for different people. LiveShare is now available free on iPhone, Android, and Windows Phone 7, as well as at www.liveshare.com.
Cooliris also announced that it has raised $9.6 million in Series C funding from existing investors, which include Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Deutsche Telekom’s T-Venture, DAG Ventures, and The Westly Group. The company will use these new funds, and strategic partnerships, to further scale its monetizable user base and revenues.
“With over 35 million downloads of our iconic Cooliris 3D Wall, we’ve established a good beachhead in media browsing, and now with our newest release of LiveShare we are transforming the group media sharing experience,” commented Soujanya Bhumkar, Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer. “The Cooliris team, which includes our investing partners, is poised to deliver the next-generation communication service for content discovery.”
“With the market for multi-touch devices exploding, consumers are now expecting rich and immersive experiences in applications beyond games. Cooliris is positioned to leverage its immersive media platform with LiveShare to enable awesome media sharing across devices and the web,” said Frank Gibeau, Cooliris Board member and President, EA Games Label, Electronic Arts Inc.
LiveShare 1.2 is the simple solution to the frustrating and time consuming problem of trying to find and share photos from an event that was attended with family and friends, eliminating the need for emailing and messaging people and trying to pull their photos from various sites. With LiveShare, users can create a new group stream anytime, anywhere, and invite friends who would be interested in sharing or viewing the photos with them. Only people invited to that stream can co-create by adding photos, which can be viewed and saved by everyone who is part of the stream. LiveShare does this by layering a contextual element on top of the social graph, increasing relevancy by allowing users to share in flexible combinations of location, time, tags and relationships.
LiveShare also brings new capability to the Android Gallery. Originally developed by Cooliris for Android 2.1, the Gallery can now take advantage of LiveShare’s service to enable simple, relevant sharing. Users can easily get the photos from their Android phone out to selected groups of friends, share them seamlessly by creating new streams, or add their photos into existing streams.
Screenshots of LiveShare 1.2 can be found at: www.cooliris.com/company/press/mediakit
About Cooliris:
Cooliris turns digital content into immersive visual experiences.With over 35 million downloads of its popular Cooliris 3D Wall, to creating the Gallery application for Android with over 100K daily activations, Cooliris is pioneering visual browsing. Extending this innovation further, Cooliris has transformed Wikipedia into a coffee-table magazine with its award-winning Discover for iPad, and is now making real-time group sharing hyper-personal with LiveShare.
Cooliris is a venture-backed company with investors that include: Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, DAG Ventures, The Westly Group, and Deutsche Telekom’s T-Venture. Cooliris is headquartered in Palo Alto, California, with offices in Tokyo and Singapore.
Interesting, ill check it out