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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.

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)

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Source: TechCrunch
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Would you trust your postal mail with a company called Zumbox?

I ask, because startup Zumbox enters public beta today with a fairly interesting (but not entirely new) alternative to traditional snail mail. Here’s how it works: instead of sending bills, statements, advertisements, postcards and the likes to a street address, a business can now send those to a digitized street address, without the need for actual paper or stamps.

Let me try again: Zumbox basically created a digital mailbox for every street address in the US it could find (150 million), which can be used to receive mail that was sent to a physical location instead of an e-mail address. This approach is based on the fact that while not everyone has an e-mail address, everyone supposedly has a unique street address, and that businesses tend to have street addresses for their customers more often than they have e-mail addresses.

With Zumbox, these businesses as well as individuals can send documents and custom mailings to one’s physical street address, and by entering their address on Zumbox.com, recipients can consult what was sent. That’s an entirely different approach than Earth Class Mail, which scans all the postal mail it receives on a custom address created by a user, and then posts it to the customer’s digital account. Sending and receiving with Zumbox is free to consumers, and businesses are charged 2 cents postage per address.

I have a couple of observations. First of all, going back to my initial question: why would anyone trust their personal mail, which often includes sensitive information, with a young company they’ve never heard of? The company goes to greath lengths to explain the service is secure, and how they’re compliant with the security standards of the financial, healthcare, and banking industries, but that remains a significant hurdle.

I was also wondering if Zumbox doesn’t make it easier for companies to electronically spam people, but the startup gave me a number of reasons why this isn’t the case: it’s a closed system where Zumbox controls the entire flow of mail, the identities of senders and receivers are verified in advance, users get some control over the mail they receive, and finally the 2 cents charge should provide a barrier to senders with malicious intentions.

Another question that I had was how Zumbox notifies a user the first time he receives his mail to a digital account instead of his physical mailbox. Apparently, the startup has 3 ways of doing this: by getting consumers to sign up via e-mail, an iGoogle widget, or a desktop application (the latter two coming this January). Developers of third-party application are invited to use the company’s API to work on other ways too.

Not a flaw, but still noteworthy: the solution won’t help you a bit if you don’t have an internet connection. The number of people without internet access may be decreasing, but it’s nowhere close to zero just yet.

I’m still not sure whether I think this idea will stick or not, but for what it’s worth, Zumbox realizes it will take several years for postal mail to transition into a digital system. The company has raised $3 million in Series A funding in Q1 2008 from a number of private angel investors to finance the public beta release, but there’s no doubt they’ll need way more capital to provide a runway to success.

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Source: TechCrunch
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