ReadWriteWeb

Today, ads are something we skip. They coat everything we watch, read and listen to like a sticky film, blinking and shouting and shocking us into paying attention. Their value is measured in "impressions," how many people's eyeballs scan past them, and on the Web, a click on an ad is the holy grail. That's what passes for "engagement."

Have you ever seen an ad that made you say, "My daughter would love this ad!" Cooliris builds ad technology that elicits that response. "Our vision is to make every single pixel in the ad interactive and living," says Aneesh Karve, product manager of Cooliris' ad technology, AdJitsu. So far, it has pushed mobile and desktop ads into three dimensions, creating ads you can go into and look around. Today, it's offering a first look at "high-interaction" ads, which unlock the laws of physics in touch-controlled ads.

Ads are as much a part of the Web as all that other stuff next to them, such as blog posts. We've gotten used to getting much (or all) of our online content for free, so we pay with our eyeballs instead. Advertisers pay publishers for little fragments of our attention on the off-chance that some of us will notice, be intrigued, click and hopefully buy something.

It's a generalization to say that the realities of this market have driven the quality of Web experiences into the ground. But surely, you've noticed lots of annoying, flashing, animated ads bothering you to do something. Well, remember Cooliris? In October, we covered its first forays into 3D ads. Cooliris has a feeling we Web users would rather be delighted by ads than harassed. Sound too good to be true? Read on and see for yourself.

Application and content discovery on the iPad can be a daunting task, especially for new users. Users often get a feeling of "I know this is a cool piece of technology, but I don't know what to do with it." Sometimes it takes a tech geek friend to show you some of the cool apps to really feel like you have taken a step into the future.

App maker Cooliris has released three new discovery apps called Decks that can help consumers find new apps, movies and photos (on Flickr). Decks for Apps is the most useful of the bunch. It is integrated with the App Store to show off the top applications and make them easy to research and download. It is like perusing a shelf at a retail store from consumer days of yore, instead you are sitting on your couch.

Wikipedia is one of the most popular sites on the Internet, but the sparse design of the service isn't likely to win awards. On the iPad, on the other hand, we are now seeing a trend towards beautiful apps like Flipboard, which combines design and functionality. With Discover, Cooliris is now launching a free Wikipedia app with a magazine-like interface that allows users to browse and search Wikipedia on the iPad in a whole new way.

Cooliris, the browser extension that launches a 3D visual search interface to the web, has just updated their application with what at first seems to be just a minor upgrade. But don't be fooled, this small change to the Cooliris add-on is actually going to have a major impact on the product's usability.

So, what's different? As of today, Cooliris will no longer launch into a full-screen 3D browser when activated. Instead, Cooliris will launch into a separate browser tab. This change was heavily requested by Cooliris users, a multi-tasking bunch of folks who wanted to be able to quickly switch back and forth between Cooliris's 3D web and all the other open tabs and applications running on their computers.

The Cooliris browser add-on was just updated to a new version that now offers something many users have been clamoring for: Linux support. With the 1.10 release of this 3D photo and video viewing plugin, Linux users running Firefox 3 can now also take advantage of this visually impressive software program for surfing through rich media on the web. In addition, the new version of Cooliris includes improvements to their Facebook support, the ability to browse local files on your computer, and the addition of metadata to the content you're viewing.

Cooliris is one of the best ways to flip through photos, enabling you to scroll through hundreds of photos effortlessly. Flickr is one of the best sites to search for photos. Combine the two and you've got CoolFlick, a service that lays Cooliris' thumbnail scrolling on top of Flickr - all from within the browser window.