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.
