Amobee is launching a new initiative, incorporating technology from Cooliris’ new standalone immersive 3D ads business unit called AdJitsu. The partnership will allow brands to create 3D display ads that actually rotate and move as a user tilts their mobile device. Users can then tap on the and interact with 3D models of products, spinning them around and seeing them from all angles.

Cooliris first launched the 3D rendering technology in mobile ads with advertising network InMobi in June ,and is now expanding to more mobile advertising companies. The technology is a good fit with Amobee’s big brand customers, who are looking for a way to get into mobile.

Amobee CEO Trevor Healy, the former Chief Innovation Officer of Telefónica, said that creating ads that are more akin to interactive visual artwork is the future of mobile advertising. That, he said, keeps consumers interested and allows brands to drive their message home.

“These ad are much more educational and more immersive,” he said. “You don’t feel you’re being advertised to, it feels like someone sharing information with you.”

Rich media mobile ads are indeed some of the most promising tools for marketers, especially when they use some of the sensors unique to mobile devices. Healy said Amobee has built its own graphics engine to accelerate and improve the graphics, which he said outshines products from competitors like Apple’s iAd.

For Healy, the former CEO of Jajah, the launch of 3D ads is his first big step since taking the helm at Amobee last month. Healy said many people asked him why he left a huge carrier like Telefonica to join a start-up. He said it’s because he sees huge potential in mobile advertising and replicating the success of online ads in mobile. In ten years, Healy expects mobile advertising to eclipse the revenues of online ads.

“I think you’re seeing an inflection point,” said Healy. “We’re like in 2003, when the big brands came online and you saw big online acceleration. That time in mobile is now. It really has only taken off in the last 4-5 months.”

Mobile advertising is small compared to online ads, but is expected to grow from $491 million in 2009 to $2.9 billion in 2014, according to BIA/Kelsey, a 43 percent compound annual growth rate. But if rich media ads like Amobee’s start to click and really bring in big name advertisers, that growth rate could be much higher.

Take a look at an ad by Samsung using Cooliris’ technology.

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Seth is going to work on AOL’s advertising platform business and will be responsible for the company’s monetization as it tries to become a major force in display advertising. Seth is a well-regarded and well-connected ad-industry insider, and from that perspective, this is a solid, smart move by AOL. His departure is bad news for Cooliris, one of my favorite startups (thanks to its awesome plug-in). While it’s unlikely that Seth’s exit is going to mortally wound Cooliris, which has been adding many senior executives to its roster and building up its bench, I am quite certain the fledgling company is going to experience some hiccups and miss his advertising industry connections.

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iPhoto is perfectly capable of displaying your photos as a slideshow or one at a time. But you’re limited to a flat display that doesn’t exactly “wow” anyone. With one simple download, you can view your iPhoto collection on a visually stunning 3D wall, right in your web browser.

Cooliris is a browser plugin available for Safari and Firefox that allows you to view photos and videos in a beautiful full-screen, 3D-wall format. You can scroll across the panoramic wall with your mouse, clicking on photos to enlarge them. At its core, the plugin allows you to view images on web sites such as Flickr, Facebook, and Google Images, as well as search through news outlets and movie trailer sites.

But one of the great features of Cooliris — that few people even notice — is the ability to quickly view photos located in folders on your hard drive or inside your iPhoto library.

Viewing images with Cooliris

First you’ll have to install the Cooliris plugin for either Safari or Firefox and restart your browser. Once installed, you simply activate it with the button in your browser toolbar. You will enter Cooliris in Full-Screen mode, and start out in Discover mode — which will show off a images from a variety of sources. Navigate to the upper left corner and click the My Computer tab from the source column. The tab will expand to allow you to select folders on your hard drive, as well as choose your iPhoto library, and any albums you currently have available.

Choose your iPhoto library, or the album you want to view, and the magic begins. All the images appear on a wall against a dark background. You can use the futuristic scroll bar at the bottom of the screen, or a mouse with side-scrolling capability (such as Apple’s Mighty Mouse) to navigate. Scrolling left or right speeds you along the wall of images until you get to an image you want to view. If the image sizes aren’t to your liking, you can scroll up or down to enlarge the images on the wall. Once you’ve found an image, you simply click to enlarge it. Your image enlarges and a frame includes more information about it, such as the file name, camera settings and more. As an added bonus, you can click a button to reveal the iPhoto image in the Finder, saving you a trip into iPhoto to drag it out manually.

To enjoy a slideshow of your photos, click the Full Screen button in the lower left corner of the Cooliris interface. This will zoom your image to fill your screen, as well as provide a horizontal frame-by-frame preview of your images.

Cooliris is absolutely free, requires OS X 10.4.11 or later, and is available for Safari 3 and Safari 4 Beta, as well as Firefox versions 2, 3 and the 3.5 Beta. To install the browser plugin, simply visit the Cooliris home page, and the proper version of the plugin download link will appear at the top of the page.

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Cooliris

These easy-to-use cameras have made us all shutterbugs — and many of us are often uploading photos directly to Facebook, currently the largest photo repository on the web. Recognizing that, the new version of the plug-in has added support for Facebook, as well.

There are some under-the-hood improvements, too: it collects and displays more metadata, which increases the overall performance of the plug-in. We here at GigaOM are big fans of many such 3-D Internet technologies, because both Stacey and I think that the explosion of information online screams for new kinds of user experiences, especially for visual objects.

Last week, Austin Shoemaker, co-founder and CTO, and Chief Revenue Officer Shashi Seth stopped by our offices to demo the new version of their browser plug-in, and I was suitably impressed. I’m not the only one, either:

• It has been downloaded about 10 million times, and there are 3 million daily active users.
• The iPhone version of the software has been download 800,000 times and boasts 300,000 daily active users.
• The web version of the software is downloaded nearly 50,000 times a day.

When I met with the company last year, it had about 2.3 million active users with 30,000 to 50,000 downloads per day. At the time, the company had started dabbling in creating special shopping channels, experimenting with Amazon. It has since added more retail partners, which pay a 5-8 percent referral fee to Cooliris. I bet that comes in handy in these days of advertising recession.

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12seconds.tv is a boot-strapped startup that has been a labor of love for the three founders, Sol Lipman, Jacob Knobel, and David Beach. A host of other characters have helped along the way, influenced by promises of burritos, but the small group hasn’t taken any outside money.

The project was conceived in January, launched in July, and now has an iPhone app ready just in time for the holidays. They got some attention from a write-up on TechCrunch in July and have built a loyal and passionate community of over 10,000 users.

I had a chance to talk briefly with Sol Lipman the other day about the launch of 12seconds for the iPhone and ask about the path they took to get to this moment. It’s clear that 12seconds.tv was built with a lot of passion from both the founders, their friends and colleagues that helped out, and the growing community of users.

TAB: Why did you pick video?

Sol: Video is a great medium. There’s something about seeing someone and hearing someone… You can say something on Twitter, but one thing I’ve noticed about 12 seconds… seeing your dirty closet, seeing your kid on your lap… I feel like I know you. Video is the type of medium where you just get more human cues and that helps you get more involved in their story.

TAB: Why 12 seconds?

Sol: It’s just the right amount.

TAB: OK. So why an iPhone app?

Sol: We all have iPhones ourselves and we wanted to be able to bring 12seconds.tv to our own phones. We were capable of jailbreaking our own phones to use Qik or flixwagon, but our friends didn’t want to have to jailbreak their iPhone to get 12seconds running. We thought, “We have to do this.”

TAB: Those other apps require jailbreaking because the iPhone SDK doesn’t allow video recording, right?

Sol: Yeah. The mass market doesn’t want to jailbreak their iPhone and we wanted to appeal to a bigger audience. It just makes sense, short-form video lends itself to the iPhone. We just had to find a way to do it. We believe in the quality of the app store, we believe in Apple. And we can reach more people this way. It’s an obvious choice.

TAB: So how did you reach the idea of 3 pictures?

Sol: This was something that we thought would work. We started on the app, but we hadn’t talked to Apple about it yet. You know, It was a big risk for us to take with limited resources and devote so much time and energy to a project that might get denied by Apple. Our biggest worry was that Apple would reject it. It does output video at the end of the day. But they were great to work with. Apple Q&A’d the hell out of our app, and it was a great experience overall.

TAB: Did Apple ask you to make any changes?

Sol: Well, there was one piece that ties into 12seconds.tv that wasn’t turned on at the web site. They found that and asked to make sure that everything was working on the web site. They really looked through the whole app to make sure everything worked, but they were OK with the core idea.

TAB: So let’s change gears here and let me ask you about the company. How did 12seconds.tv come together?

Sol: We came together in January, February and then launched in late July. There’s been other people in to help, but the three key founders are Jacob [Knobel], David Beach, and myself. This is a pure passion company. I always like to say that we’re more of a co-op than a corporation. We haven’t taken any VC money to date. We all have other jobs that help pay the bills and keep the lights on.

TAB: And how have you seen your product being adopted in that time? You have people using other devices now to get video?

Sol: It’s all about this amazing community. We really have a great group of core users that are passionate about the 12seconds.tv community. They help welcome new members, answer questions. It’s really been amazing. The cool thing is that while the largest percentage [of videos] come from web cams, a surprising number come from mobile devices. We have well over 10,000 members and 100′s of videos uploaded every day. And we really want that to continue to grow. We’ve been spending more time looking at conversation and have some ideas there.

TAB: Anything surprised you in these last 5-6 months since you launched?

Sol: The community and how people have responded has been great. It surprises you what people do that you didn’t anticipate. I think we have a different type, a different category of video on our site. Here’s a good example, the Roger Smith Hotel puts their daily lunch special on 12seconds.tv. Every day they do that. We didn’t anticipate someone doing that, but it’s cool. What we think we do well, is we want people to be able to share moments.

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What brought on this change of heart? A chance meeting with a senior executive at two-and-a-half-year-old Menlo Park, Calif.-based startup Cooliris, which has developed a software that can be added on to any popular browser on either Mac or Windows and essentially allows you to browse the web in 3-D. I have been using this plug-in for a few weeks now, and I have become a reluctant admirer, as it allows me to sift through copious amount of information — images and videos in particular — very quickly.

Cooliris (formerly known as PicLens) recently hired Shashi Seth, formerly chief of monetization at YouTube, as its chief revenue officer. Last week, he shared some interesting facts about the company. Among them:

• Since launching the software back in January — and without spending a dime — Cooliris now has 2.4 million monthly active users, and continues to add between 30,000 and 50,000 new users every day.
• An average active user spends at least 30 minutes using Cooliris to sift through information.
• There are 9 billion pieces of content that have been shared by their users, and nearly 270 million pieces have been “interacted” with.

Outstanding numbers aside, can Cooliris make money? Seth thinks they can. Indeed, the company recently ran a test advertising campaign that resulted in a clickthrough rate of over 5 percent, a very high number considering that most online ad campaigns get clickthrough rates of less than 1 percent.

The early results have attracted a few advertisers, each of whom are willing to wage a few thousand dollars on the plug-in. And Seth was even more enthusiastic about a new kind of shopping cart Cooliris has developed for Amazon, which in a test led to a total bill of around $32 per cart. As this could be a way for the company to generate commissions, Cooliris is now planning to launch an extended version of that shopping system that would include several other online retailers, including Apple’s iTunes Store and Wal-Mart.

Admittedly, these are early days for Cooliris. But its test stats were intriguing enough that I was inspired to more closely examine the other browser plug-ins are installed on my Firefox browser that I use most often, just to see if there were some with similar utility, usage and potential as Cooliris.

Apart from Cooliris, my short list includes Digg, Adaptive Blue’s Blue Organizer and FoxMarks. While Digg is hardly a browser-based company, those four browser plug-ins all do the following:

• They offer me something valuable as they try and make money off my surfing habits.
• With the exception of Digg, the other three mask complex technology behind what seem like simple browser add-ons. Take for instance Foxmarks, which is essentially a simple tool that allows you to sync your browser bookmarks across multiple computers. All this information when harnessed and processed can be used to build a “better recommendation service” for web-based information.
• Most importantly, they allow me to either save or organize information I gather on the web on a daily basis. And by doing so, they help me sift through tons of information very easily.

If browser plug-ins have these essential qualities, then maybe there’s a stand-alone business there after all. We’ll see.

Image courtesy of Cooliris.

This article also appeared on BusinessWeek.com.

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