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.

When I first met Cooliris, it was making 3D AdJitsu ads. These got noticed by the market, but the team began to realize that advertisers were fixating on the 3D tricks itself, the trees, rather than the forest of immersive ads Cooliris wants to build.

"We were talking immersive, but the market was hearing '3D,'" says CEO Soujanya Bhumkar. Aneesh Karve says the most common question they get about their product is, "Do I need 3D glasses?" But the 3D stuff was just an example. "This is the future of how you do display advertising."

"Whatever is available on the technology stack that we're deploying to, we're going to pull out the bag of tricks available to us and make something cool out of that."

The 3D ads use WebGL in browsers, and they run natively on iOS. This is a technology for which the market isn't quite ready. Phones will have blazing-fast graphics soon, but they don't yet. "3D is awesome, but right now 3D penetration on mobile is just at the crack of dawn," Karve says. "What we wanted to do was reach more people on today's technology."

High Interaction

Today, Cooliris has a demo that steps back from the 3D cliffs and canyons they've been showing around so far. It's a simple game with real physics. You tap the screen, and round pieces of candy appear. They roll down, in the direction of gravity, and they bounce off each other like real objects.

The engine was designed by a physicist. The existing software development kit contains the full physics engine, so they can reach more people whether or not they have WebGL.

Objects feel as real as possible. They're aware of each other, they respond naturally to the forces of the user's input. Gravity is dynamic to the accelerometer. Whichever way is down is the way the candy falls. Coming up next for AdJitsu is realistic momentum and friction. The point is not to make something loud and noticeable. It's to make an ad that you want to play with as though it's a real object.

When demoing high-interaction ads, a partner told the team, "My daughter would love this ad." That's a pretty good sign.

You Don't Have to Be A Physicist

AdJitsu ads can be built using PageKit, its own set of tools that allows developers to write ads in 3D and with real physics without having to know how. When approaching 3D ads, Cooliris knew they had to build something more democratic. Not everyone is an OpenGL graphics programmer. Karve says the goal of PageKit is to enable any artist with Photoshop, HTML and CSS skills to make something immersive and high-fidelity. "Now, you don't have to be a physicist to write a miniature game with real-life dynamics."

Since its a format any HTML developer will recognize, the ads also support normal rich media content like embedded video. The output supports browsers or the native iOS environment. Here's a video of Max, a 13 year-old up-and-coming programmer, demonstrating how PageKit works. Don't worry; he'll walk you through it.

Ads You Want To See

To Cooliris, the value of ads is not about impressions anymore. It's about time spent in the ad. These are ads you can go into and play with. But this isn't "gamification." It's not a gimmick to trick users into clicking more. It's just there, it feels real, and it piques your interest. You'll never remember the brand if you don't enjoy the ad experience. Cooliris thinks that experience is the most important part.

What do you think? Does this ad look fun? Would you stick around and play?

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.

When we first met Cooliris, it was introducing its new ad unit, AdJitsu, which had just launched its first interactive, touch-controlled, 3D mobile ads.

One of the campaigns was for the Samsung Galaxy S II. Instead of a boring banner ad, consumers saw a phone jiggling around inside the banner in response to the accelerometers of their iPhones and iPads. When they tapped the ad, it opened up into a sort of app, in which they could zoom in and out on the product, manipulating it with familiar touchscreen gestures, in order to check it out.

It was neat. But was it revolutionary? Would the ability to play with a virtual model of a phone really convert any viewers into customers? Cooliris enlisted the help of some neuromarketers to make the case that AdJitsu ads were at least more interesting than passive videos, but the brain scans left us with more questions than answers. Sure, these ads are stimulating, but does that make them effective?

The Next Level

Well, Cooliris has been working on making the product speak for itself. What they showed me this time is not just better; it is bigger. There's more to these new ads. You can explore them, experience them. You don't need your brain scanned to find them enjoyable.

And there's more AdJitsu news than just new ad campaigns. Before, AdJitsu was an in-house mobile ad unit. Now, it's a platform, and it goes beyond mobile devices. Using Web technology and developer-friendly tools, now any advertiser can make ads that don't suck.

Setting The Ad World On Fire

"Our goal was to take the world of display advertising and set it on fire," says AdJitsu product manager Aneesh Karve. He says that ads today don't take advantage of the capabilities of today's hardware. AdJitsu isn't even stopping there; it is building an ad platform for devices one or two years down the road using next-generation graphics library WebGL. When phones get WebGL support and smoking-fast GPUs, AdJitsu will be ready for them.

The 3D models come from a variety of places. Some advertisers, like video game makers, already have 3D models ready to go. Other manufacturing companies, whether they make cars or phones, have engineering models at the ready that AdJitsu can simplify and prepare for the Web. Other ads use commercially available models or data, and some advertisers even spring for custom models. To bring those models to life in an interactive ad, AdJitsu has built versatile tools and a powerful engine.

The AdJitsu Engine

Currently, Apple doesn't allow third-party advertisers to use WebGL, even though the mobile Safari browser supports it. The only ads allowed to use WebGL on iOS are Apple's own iAds. Apple claims that this is because of security holes. Karve notes that it also lets Apple get a head start in 3D advertising on its platform. Either way, AdJitsu ads still run natively on iOS devices, and you build them with AdJitsu's software development kit.

But for other devices, PCs, tablets and phones alike, the engine uses WebGL. The performance isn't quite there yet on most Android phones, but it runs, and Cooliris is thinking ahead to next year's phones, anyway. AdJitsu has built upon the Web and cutting-edge hardware to enable silky-smooth, immersive 3D ads that run anywhere, and that anyone can build.

The Tools: Do Your Own AdJitsu

AdJitsu's tool is called PageKit. Developers can write an ad once and run it everywhere. PageKit even makes it easier for developers used to writing 2D code. It bridges the gap to 3D for them, so they don't have to start over again and learn OpenGL, which Karve points out has a "pretty heady API." You write in PageKit's markup, and it all compiles down to the native iOS engine and the WebGL engine.

Need more perspective on that? Allow me to introduce Max. He's 13. In this less-than-three-minute video, you can watch him build an AdJitsu ad in "62 or so" lines of code. Don't worry, non-geeks; he explains the process amazingly well.

The Kicker: Better Analytics

For those still looking for a traditional "value-add" for these 3D ads, you don't have to scrutinize an inscrutable brain scan this time. Cooliris has gone with something more easily measured.

Since users interact so extensively with these 3D models, AdJitsu ads can record heatmaps of which parts of the experience are most interesting to consumers. That's valuable feedback for advertisers and product people, who can use it to figure out what kinds of features to emphasize. Can your average banner ad do that?

Ads That Don't Suck

Instead of racing to the bottom with garish display ads, Cooliris has posed a challenge to the advertising world. With all this potential at our disposal, why do ads suck so much? They don't have to. AdJitsu has proven they can be fascinating, beguiling, even beautiful.

What will we do when the ads are better than the stuff we're putting next to them? I know what I'll do: I'll try to make even better stuff. Thus far, Web ads have been a race to the bottom. Hats off to Cooliris for raising the bar for all Web experiences, not just for ads.

What do you think of these ads? Would you play with one?

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.

Quixey: New Dashboard for Developers to Aid with App Discovery

Discovering Great iPhone Apps: 5 Recommendation Services Compared

Decks for Apps produces flash card-like descriptions for the top 50 paid, free and grossing apps. It makes for an interesting way to peruse the App Store and see what your fellow digital denizens are using and playing with. Other app discovery tools include App Genius, Chorus, AppsFire, Yappler and Appolicious. The breadth of those services often beat out Decks but the user interface for Decks is a big draw.

At ReadWriteWeb we spend a lot of our time searching for the newest and most exciting apps and technologies. Sometimes that means though that pop-culture passes us by. Decks for Movies shows what is currently in theaters, coming soon to theaters and DVD and what are the top rentals in iTunes. Just like Decks for Apps, the movie version is attached to iTunes and has a "get movie" button that will bring you to the iTunes page where you can rent it or buy it.

Decks for Flickr is a slick way to peruse some of the coolest pictures on the Web. It is preloaded with an "interesting" deck of photos and also allows users to query Flickr. For instance, if you want to see some of the sites in Washington, D.C., a deck can be added to the stream that will surface 50 or so of the top current photos of the city.

Cooliris uses PageKit, a Web application framework, that allows them to render dynamic content at smaller download sizes. PageKit is simple and smart so it also allows Cooliris to develop applications like Decks fairly quickly. It first used the framework to create the original Decks, an application that assists with shopping from the tablet. Cooliris is the company that makes the Discover for iPad application which turns Wikipedia into an attractive magazine.

The first page users will see when opening the app features large images and links to Wikipedia's featured article and image of the day. From anywhere in the app, users can swipe down to bring up the search menu and swipe up to bring up their search history. In landscape mode, Cooliris generally uses the wider screen to display additional information like related articles or a more detailed list of your search history.

Articles are generally broken down by sections and currently come in three different layouts that the app chooses randomly. In later iterations, Cooliris hopes to offer more templates. The team behind the Discover app also told us that it hopes to get to the point where the app can choose themes that match the topic of a given article.

In order to focus on the reading experience, Cooliris decided to hide links. Instead of seeing underlined text, users can simply click on any word in the text. If the word isn't linked to another Wikipedia page, the app will bring up a dictionary definition and if the text was linked, users can choose to open up the respective Wikipedia article.

There are, of course, a few things that Cooliris could still do to improve the app. Currently, for example, you need to have an Internet connection as the app doesn't cache any content (pages are rendered on the fly). According to Cooliris, this is due to licensing issues. Also, while browsing articles, you can't quickly skip between sections. Instead of highlighting related articles, it would be more user-friendly to allow readers to see the different sections of an article. The app is also currently unable to render tables in Wikipedia articles, which is not a major problem in most cases, but becomes an issue when reading articles about highly technical subjects.

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 Benefits of Cooliris in a Tab

However, as much as we loved soaring around through the visually stunning Cooliris application, one of its main drawbacks was the way it took over the desktop's screen upon launch. This sometimes even became an annoyance, like, for example, when an accidental click on the Cooliris button in Flickr had us sucked into the app's full screen mode when we really meant to go to the photo page.

Now all that's going to change because the new default setting is for Cooliris to launch in a new tab. Since all the supported browsers offer tabbed browsing, there was no issue in making this sort of adjustment. (Cooliris supports Safari, IE, and Firefox but tells us they're working on supporting more browsers in the future.) However, full screen mode is still possible, if that's your preference, via a button at the bottom of the screen.

Since Cooliris now launches in a tab, it's given a specific and unique URL. This, in turn, delivers more features to the application. Because it's just a URL, it can now be registered in your browser's history, can be saved as a browser bookmark, and can be shared with friends via social networking sites like Facebook or Twitter. Of course, anyone clicking on the URL will need Cooliris installed to see what you're sharing, but those that don't will be delivered to a landing page informing them of this.

A Couple of Other Changes

Although the change in Cooliris's launch behavior is the biggest news coming out of this update, there are a couple of other features worth noting as well. To begin, Cooliris now includes metadata for Flickr photos, just like how they had added metadata for YouTube videos, Facebook photos, and Amazon products during their last update. After Flickr, the team plans to keep adding in metadata for all their supported services over the course of future releases.

The metadata isn't just text information, either. A lot of it is hyperlinked. For instance, in the Flickr metadata, you can click on a username or date to be immediately taken to all the photos from that user or time frame. Also new today is a right-side column that lets you browse all the photosets from that user.

If you already have Cooliris installed, just update your extension. New users can download Cooliris from here. This update currently works on Firefox and IE only. A Safari version is coming soon.

Cooliris version 1.11: The 3D Wall in your browser tab from Cooliris on Vimeo.

First and foremost, the biggest news regarding the latest release is definitely the added support for Linux operating systems. In order for Cooliris to work on Linux, you need to run a recent Linux distribution (e.g. Ubuntu 8.04, Fedora 10, OpenSuse 11). You'll also need hardware-accelerated graphics, Flash 10+, and Firefox 3.

Another new feature is the software's ability to now view files that are saved on your own computer. At the moment, this local media support is limited to photos only, but the company is working on adding video support in a later release. In a way, this makes the browser plugin behave somewhat like desktop software as it blurs the line between what's online and what's not. Just as you can browse through Flickr, Facebook, Picasa, and Google Images, you can now click on an item that reads "My Computer" to gain access to your local media store, too.

Finally, the software has been upgraded to include additional metadata about the content you're viewing. This may seem like an inconsequential upgrade, but it actually may be the most useful of them all. Instead of simply browsing through the photos or videos, you can now see additional information like ratings, view counts, title, resolution, etc. If you're flipping through the Facebook photos, you can easily move from one friend's photos to another's by clicking the names of the people tagged in the photo, accessible from the metadata section at the bottom of the image. This upgrade also applies to items in the "Shopping" section of the plugin where you can virtually window shop at Amazon.com.

Glorious Metadata!

Coming Soon: A New Cooliris for iPhone

Cooliris is also releasing an upgrade for their iPhone application, too, which will include some of the same features as the browser plugin. One notable exception, however, is that it won't have the ability to browse through the photos stored locally on the device itself. This is because Apple prevents the application from tapping into that local store, explains Shashi Seth, the company's Chief Revenue Officer. That said, the new iPhone app will display metadata, which should make it a more useful way to surf through your online media, go shopping, or catch up on the news.

Cooliris Raises $15.5 M

The company also announced that it has completed $15.5 million in Series B funding from a group of investors including Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, DAG Ventures, The Westly Group and the T-Mobile Venture Fund.

The software, originally launched in January 2008, has been downloaded over 10 million times and is seeing 50,000 new downloads per day. The iPhone app has reached 800,000 downloads.

That's where CoolFlick comes in handy.

To begin searching for photos with CoolFlick, you can either go directly to the CoolFlick site to enter your query or you can string it into a URL like http://www.coolflick.org/index.php?q=portland. That's it. Using the search terms, CoolFlick loads up a series of matching photos. Then you can begin panning side-to-side and zooming in for more detail just like you would with Cooliris.

But here's something even better: You can take that view with you and share it with your friends. CoolFlick provides an embed code that allows you to add Cooliris viewing functionality to any site you'd like.

We first started testing CoolFlick with an eye toward browsing for photos. But there are some drawbacks to using the service that way. First and most obvious, you can only get photos ranked by relevance, not by other parameters. Second, there is no advanced search. The team here is always on the lookout for compelling photos licensed under Creative Commons. There's no way to discern that with CoolFlick. Finally, CoolFlick only provides a limited set of photos.

It would be great to see the service improve to include some of these features - or to implement other features offered through the Flickr API.

For now, we can overlook those flaws in favor of using the service to embed Cooliris views of content we find. Think of the applications: gathering event shots, sharing trip photos, compiling images by subject, displaying only images with the "coolflick" tag... the list goes on and on.

We're sure you can come up with some creative applications of this technology. To give it a try, visit CoolFlick and enter some search terms. To embed the view of the images you've found, click on the little "".

One of these evolutions started quietly in 2008. We are witnessing the rise of a new kind of web: contextual. You might not have heard or thought about it much yet, but you are already using it today. Search remains the killer app on the web, but context is quickly become a viable contender. Why? Because context is what happens instead of search.

Until recently on the web, most sites have not been software - only data, a bunch of flat HTML pages. The software that you used to look at them was, of course, the web browser. The problem was that the browser had no idea what the pages contained, and it did not know what you were doing. Because the browser could not infer your context, it could not help you explore related and relevant information.

The contextual web experience is fundamentally different because there is an understanding of what the user is doing. The combination of the information on the page and the user's behavior creates the context. Once you understand the user's context, you can be more helpful. So, contextual technologies have the potential to bite into the pie that today belongs to search, because it is able to bypass search.

Consider the difference between looking at the IBM home page and a movie page on Netflix. The context is very different, and so likely is the user's intention. The user may be looking at IBM because she is looking for a job or researching IBM products. When the user is looking up a movie, it is because she is thinking about renting it.

The Key Properties of The Contextual Web

The Contextual web will happen when browsers and websites evolve to recognize what users are trying to do. It is the web with less choice and more meaning, where instead of Googling all the time, we Google once and then the rest of the information is available to us automatically, based on our current context.

Here are the key properties of the contextual web experience:

• Relevancy: understanding the user's context better drives content relevancy.
• Shortcuts: contextual shortcuts reduce the need for raw search.
• Personalization: context is based on user intentions and history.
• Remixing: relevant information from around the web is instantly available.

What are some specific examples of contextual technologies that are improving our web experience right now?

Markup Technologies

One of the keys to inferring user context is understanding the underlying information that the user is looking at. This is why the contextual web is related to -- and, to be more precise, is powered by -- semantic web. We have written a lot here on ReadWriteWeb about semantic technologies. Notably, we discussed the difference between the top-down and bottom-up approaches to semantic web, both of which are important for understanding the contextual web.

The bottom-up approach to context is about annotating pages. For example, all modern browsers can detect if the page you are looking at contains an RSS feed. This happens because the browser looks for a tag in the head of the page, which declares type . The fact that the page offers an RSS feed creates an obvious context: subscription. So, the browser then invites you to subscribe using your favorite RSS reader.

Another form of markup that has been discussed recently is microformats, which offer an XHTML-compliant way of embedding metadata about people, places, events, and reviews in existing web pages. Even though microformats are not ubiquitous today, there are clear benefits to using them. The image below is from an excellent post by Mozilla UI lead Alex Faaborg about leveraging microformats in the browser.

Building on the hAtom microformat are Web Slices, introduced by Microsoft in Internet Explorer 8. Web Slices enable publishers to notify users when the information in their web pages changes. For example, Weather.com can create a Web Slice that tells the user when a local weather update is available. eBay can deliver a Web Slice that notifies the user when the price of an auction changes. Similar in concept to RSS, Web Slices focus on updates in part of the web page, enabling publishers and users to communicate directly via the browser.

There are other markup formats that help provide context. For example, popular add-on Cooliris offers a markup format for signaling that a site contains images. By placing a bit of XML code in their home directory, site owners enable users to experience their images using the stunning 3D visualization developed by Cooliris. Another markup format, developed by AdaptiveBlue [disclosure: this is the company I founded], is called ABMeta. This format allows publishers to annotate pages that contain information about books, music, movies, wine, restaurants, stocks, and other everyday things.

All of these markup-based approaches face the same issue: publishers have to do the work of actually annotating the pages. And while the semantic web community has been very vocal about the benefits of annotation, the majority of the web is still flat HTML.

Page 2: Widgets

Widgets

In the meantime, we are seeing a surge in applications that deploy a top-down approach to inferring user context and being helpful. Instead of relying on markup in pages, these applications use heuristics and APIs to recognize the information that the user is interacting with. Based on their recognition, these smart tools then offer contextual shortcuts to the relevant bits of information. Speaking broadly, today there are two primary categories of top-down contextual applications: blog plugins and browser add-ons.

Blog plugins offering a contextual experience have been around for some time, starting with preview technologies. One of the first recent unsuccessful attempts at a preview technology was delivered by Browster. Despite its failure, its successors, CoolPreviews, SnapShots, and Apture, have done much better. While CoolPreviews literally focuses on a preview of the page, SnapShots and Apture deliver a compact summary of the information behind the link. The basic premise behind the previews is sound: if the user is not interested in what is behind the link, the preview can save the user an unnecessary click. Because the user context (in this case, the link) is known, relevant information can be brought to the surface and delivered to the user instantly.

Closely related to previews are widgets that offer contextual shortcuts. Like previews, these widgets work by being anchored to links. Examples of this technology include Yahoo! Shortcuts and SmartLinks from my company AdaptiveBlue. Instead of providing a preview of the underlying content, these technologies offer links to related content around the web. The example below shows a SmartLink on a New York Times movie page, which invites the user, for example, to buy the movie on Amazon or rent it on Netflix.

Our last example of contextual widget technology comes from Colorado-based Lijit. Lijit has developed a search technology that focuses on the individual. You claim your presence around the web, on blogs, Twitter, Flickr, etc., and then others can search your pages on specific topics. Say you are on someone's blog and want to do a search on that person; it makes the most sense to search through this person's pages first; after all, you are in this person's context.

Remarkably, Lijit offers another contextual nugget, called Re-search. It is simple, but a great example of the power of context. If you search for a term on Google and end up on a blog that has a Lijit widget, a header appears with additional results and a prompt to search for more. Lijit automatically infers your context, does a search, and offers additional helpful shortcuts.

Page 3: Browser Add-Ons and Conclusion

Browser Add-Ons

Widgets and markup technologies are making inroads into the contextual web, but an even bigger inroad is being made by browser add-ons. Since Firefox introduced its platform for delivering additional features to the browser, many thousands of browser extensions have been developed. A lot of these extension focus on enhancing the browsing experience by leveraging context. Probably the granddaddy of them all is Greasemonkey, an extension that allows users to install bits of JavaScript that alter the look and content of web pages they visit. We wrote an introduction to this popular add-on and recently followed up with a post on 7 New Greasemonkey Tweaks.

While Greasemonkey scripts are mainly regarded as experimental tools for power users, quite a few other extensions are aimed at building a business around contextual enhancements to the browser. One example is a company called WebMynd, which focuses on enhancing Google search results. WebMynd's extension automatically pushes down Google ads (clever!) to insert its contexual gadget. It allows users to simultaneously search posts on Twitter, book matches on Amazon, video matches on YouTube, and many other sources. An example of what shows up when searching for "semantic web" using the gadget is shown below.

We have mentioned Cooliris several times already. The most popular Cooliris product is the browser add-on that shows stunning 3D views of photos and videos around the web. Cooliris works contextually by automatically recognizing popular photo sites like Flickr, Google Images and Photobucket. Another contextual add-on that works by recognizing content on pages is Glue. This add-on shows you friends and other users who have visited the same book, music, movie, restaurant, wine, and other pages around the web. The context here crosses the content you are viewing with your social graph. Unlike lifestreaming applications that deliver you information about your friends out of context, Glue only brings to the surface information that is relevant to your current context.

A very different example of a contextual web add-on comes from Slovenia-based Zemanta. Its add-on makes it easy for publishers to add contextually relevant links, photos, and video to their posts. Zemanta works by applying its semantic engine to the body of the post and automatically recommending related content. Using Zemanta, bloggers are able to instantly add relevant content to their blog posts, in turn creating a relevant web experience for their users.

Our last two examples of contextual add-ons are Zentact and App Discover, both recently launched. Zentact -- developed by the folks who brought us another contextual phenomenon, MyBlogLog -- aims to solve a problem of staying in touch with people who matter to you. First, you import and tag your email contacts with different tags that reflect their interests. Then, as you browse, Zentact pops up a reminder to contact a person if it deems the page relevant based on the tags. It is a simple yet powerful example of the contextual web.

App Discover works by recommending related applications to the sites that you are visiting. Today, it requires publishers to add markup to their sites, but one can easily imagine how this technology could work top-down. The example below shows App Discover recommending TweetDeck when the user navigates to Twitter.

Browsers

Without a doubt, web browsers are in the best position to deliver the user's contextual web experience. While add-ons are taken in a variety of directions, the two dominant browsers, Internet Explorer and Firefox, have already incorporated the basic contextual experience: shortcuts. Internet Explorer 8 features technology called Accelerators.

According to Microsoft, Accelerators give you ready access to the online services you use everyday, from any page you visit. Accelerators are defined as little chunks of XML based on pre-defined variables and defined by the browser. Some examples of variables available to Accelerator are the active URL, the active domain, and selected text. The most common action that Accelerators do is perform contextual search based on the user's selection. Another common Accelerator function is the in-place lookup, such as looking up a map based on a given address.

The problem with Accelerators is that they are not really based on a selection; that is, they lack semantics. When you highlight an address, you still have to decide which Accelerator to use. If you have dozens of Accelerators installed, this quickly becomes hard to manage. Firefox has recognized the issue with the menu-driven approach and instead offers its contextual technology via text. Called Ubiquity, this contextual technology is still only available as an add-on today but is likely to be a part of Firefox core soon.

Marketed as user-generated mashups, Ubiquity is actually a contextual technology based on language. As with Accelerators, the user is able to select a piece of text and then invoke Ubiquity and type a command. In the screenshot above, Ubiquity is used to insert a map into an email. Hundreds of Ubiquity commands have been implemented to date. ReadWriteWeb has already written about Ubiquity commands.

Will Context be the Future of the Web?

So where is all of this heading? Are these technologies signal or noise? We believe we are witnessing the birth of a fundamentally new kind of web, a smarter one, a contextual one. Unlike the old web we are used to, this one understands what we are doing and helps us. It is a web in which we search less and find relevant content faster. This new contextual web is still very young and unevenly distributed, but it is definitely here.

The fact that these contextual technologies are springing up is not accidental. The Contextual web is made possible by our push into semantic web and the rise of web services/API culture. The combination of basic semantics and API is fueling all of these contextual applications. Bit by bit, the web is getting smarter, friendlier, and more enjoyable.

Web browsers are in the best position to deliver these new contextual experiences to users because of their wide reach. The fact that Microsoft made Accelerators its flagship feature for Internet Explorer 8 and that Mozilla is putting much effort into Ubiquity tells us that contexual browsing is a priority. This is really good news, because these technologies bring great benefits to the user.

It is great to see that in these tough economic times, evolution is brewing. The tremendous effort that all of these companies are making with contextual technologies is beginning to come to fruition. It may be that we are seeing glimpses of what the next generation of the web will be like.

And now, as usual, let's turn the tables. Tell us examples of your favorite contextual browsing technologies. Do you think context will be play significant part in the next evolution of the web?

In terms of user experience, the gap between the major search engines and their alternatives continues to widen -- a lot. Google has been compared to a luxury liner that turns around very, very slowly, whereas the startups are speedboats that can turn (or innovate) on a dime. I guarantee that if you try any of these top 10 alternative search engines of 2008, you won't come away saying, "Hey, that was just like Google."

As evidence of just how much the landscape is changing, three of our top 10 products require one-time downloads: once thought to be the kiss of death when Google sits in wait. But AltSearchEngines thinks that 2009 will be the tipping point when the rewards outweigh the "risks," at least for power users. For everyone else: 2010. Faroo, KallOut, and Surf Canyon (and, again, Tazti) are all well worth leaving your comfort zone for.

How many of these 10 search tools had you used, seen, or even heard of before today? The latest data from Hitwise shows that the four major search engines get over 98% of all US search traffic; the rest, combined, get less than 2%. These wonderful inventions need and deserve more exposure, so do your part and take the time to try out each one! On that note, let's begin.

This is the ninth in ReadWriteWeb's series of top products of 2008:

• Top 10 Semantic Web Products of 2008
• Top 10 International Products of 2008
• Top 10 Consumer Web Apps of 2008
• Top 10 RSS and Syndication Products of 2008
• Top 10 Mobile Web Products of 2008
• Top 10 Enterprise Web Products of 2008
• Top 10 Real World Web Apps of 2008
• Top 10 Digital Lifestyle Products of 2008

Note: these 10 search engines are listed alphabetically.

1. ChaCha

ChaCha, as a search tool, is human-powered, general, and mobile. There is no website, no search box, and no page witih a list of ten links. To use ChaCha, simply call 1-800-2ChaCha (1-800-224-2242) in the US, or send a text to 242242. When you call, leave your query just as you would any other voice-mail message, and hang up. Within 2 to 5 minutes, a human guide will have researched and texted you the answer. I used ChaCha with only my cheap cell phone when I was lost in New York City at midnight. And that's an important point: you can call ChaCha at any time with any question for any reason on any phone -- as long as that phone can receive text messages. And, aside from your carrier's incoming text fees, ChaCha is free. We recently reported on ChaCha over at AltSearchEngines.

2. Cooliris

2008 was the year when search visualization met the iPhone. Cooliris has already won one ReadWriteWeb award, making it onto the list of the Top 10 Consumer Apps of 2008. RWW wrote in that post, "Visual browsing is still coming into its own, but Cooliris is leading the charge in a way that consumers will embrace." We at ASE have been following Cooliris since its PicLens days. Following right behind are SearchMe and Viewzi. Each of these three visual search engines displays your search results beautifully and fluidly on your iPhone, but with different styles, so you might as well download all three and experiment. There is a demo video on each site.

3. Faroo

Alternative search engines need at least one thing that differentiates them from the major search engines. Faroo, for its part, turns your conception of search around 180 degrees. Instead of one giant company (say, Google) storing billions of web pages on thousands of servers at a cost of millions of dollars, Faroo, now in public beta, relies on the P2P (peer-to-peer) network, which connects Faroo members with each other through their PCs. The result is an organic-looking web that can grow as the Internet grows, but without the need for massive server farms. So, check out Faroo by downloading it here.

4. KallOut

KallOut was one of our favorite discoveries this year, as we noted in the ASE review. Once again, it's time to put away that image of a rectangular search box! It's 2008! With KallOut, you don't have to stop what you're doing and mess around with a toolbar, tab, or window. You simply drag your cursor over content with your mouse, and KallOut performs the search for you right there -- literally, right there. Download KallOut here, and then practice a bit until you get the hang of it. No, it's not a harder way to search; it's a more efficient way to search. You'll see.

5. Kosmix

Kosmix is, in a way, an evolution of the old meta search engines. Kosmix answers your query with a long tabloid-like page of results in every possible category you might want. There are multiple news sources; images from various sites; audio from SeeqPod; opinions from Omgili; video from Truveo; info from Mahalo and Snappyfingers; plus content from all of the major sources, such as eBay, YouTube, and Wikipedia. Just about everything! For every search query, you essentially get an on-the-fly multimedia encyclopedia laid out on one page. Kosmix recently came into a little money, too. (Disclosure: Kosmix is an AltSearchEngine sponsor.)

6. Mednar

We had no idea how many health search engines there really were until Hope Leman started covering them on AltSearchEngines. Mednar is one we're particularly fond of: "I am in jaw-dropping, stupefied awe at the general excellence of the products of his (CEO Abe Lederman's) firm. Anything that saves all of us time as we hunt for relevant data amidst overwhelming amounts of information on every conceivable aspect of disease day after day catches my attention, and it has been caught today by Mednar."

7. Quintura

When you search with Quintura, you'll see a two-dimensional tag cloud (i.e. not a list). The other words in the box are there to allow you to explore concepts related to your original query. See something you hadn't thought of? Click on it and the cloud re-orients itself around that new term. You can delete irrelevant terms as well. But don't worry, it also provides a traditional list for you, just in case. Quintura is now available in several language "flavors" as well! Content publishers should investigate Quintura for possible use on their sites. (Disclosure: Quintura is a sponsor of both AltSearchEngines and RWW.)

8. SeeqPod

Speaking with SeeqPod's CEO Kasian Franks, I was shocked, shocked, to learn that not everyone owns an iPhone! Apparently there are millions of people who have nice smart phones that run something called "Windows Mobile." Anyway, SeeqPod has been constantly improving its music search engine ever since we came across it. And now, it can be installed on millions of smart phones that use the Windows Mobile platform (v.6.0 or higher). This, as RWW noted the other day, "is a bold move from one of the most innovative companies in online music. The SeeqPod API is already one of the most popular for third parties to integrate streaming music into other apps, and the company seems to launch something unexpected every month. This has got to take the cake, though."

9. Surf Canyon

Can I say it again? Search, after ten years, is no longer that ubiquitous box in the middle of the web page. In 2008, it gave way to innovative search tools that integrate useful features in new ways. Surf Canyon is also a download. I wonder how many commenters will say that no one will download an app? (Sigh.) The reason it's worth the download is that it turbo charges your regular searches. Surf Canyon actually watches what you do -- and don't do -- and what you click on, and it instantly pulls search results from deeper pages (say, page 8) and brings them forward if it determines that they can save you time -- a lot of time. And if you're still hesitant about the download, watch the video.

10. Taggalaxy.de

What's this? A personal favorite? This write-up is just a sneak peek of Taggalaxy.de; the rest is up to you. Taggalaxy.de (in German) was created by a German graduate student for a class project. There are almost no instructions: I had to learn how to use it by clicking, double-clicking, dragging, and just playing around with it. But I can tell you this, once you've got the hang of it, find a dark room with a monster screen, and then perform a search. What you see will be not just an alternative search engine, but an alternative search galaxy!

So, there it is. In 2006, I began a mission to find every search engine, one by one. The resulting list of 100 Alternative Search Engines was published on ReadWriteWeb in January of 2007. Four months later, AltSearchEngines was launched by myself and Richard MacManus, with an index of 1,000 alternatives to the major engines. Since then, AltSearchEngines has published over 2,000 posts about, "the most wonderful search engines you've never seen." Having honed our search-engine-finding skills, I can tell you that this list of the top 10 alternative search engines for 2008 is as current as today's news. Want more? AltSearchEngines reports on important updates, features guest posts from search experts, and of course explores the as-yet-unseen search engines of 2009, every day. Come and join us!

Last night, Cooliris released a new set of features for its users. And while the functionality is interesting, the most compelling part of the release may the part they didn't mention: one of the new features may hold the key to a revenue stream for the company.

But for as simple as it sounds, it's the background image customization that holds the additional revenue potential for Cooliris - advertising revenue, but revenue nonetheless.

Click on the Cooliris "Discover" option, select "Sci-Tech," and you'll be greeted by a number of interesting photos sitting on a backdrop that advertises "Gears of War 2." The ad is obvious and yet unobtrusive. Within the photo stream, you'll also find images from the game that are paid placement ads.

Will a new ad unit in a rapidly softening ad market be the key to survival? Not likely. But it's a step in the right direction. And one thing is for sure: some revenue is always better than no revenue. Plus, it's safe to assume that this is only one of many ideas that Shashi Seth - the former head of YouTube monetization who joined Cooliris as Chief Revenue Officer in June - has up his sleeve.

If you haven't seen Cooliris yet, it's definitely worth spending a few minutes to experience it. Its visual landscape truly changes the photo browsing experience. In fact, for some, Cooliris is so compelling that it's the first thing they show non-technical folks for "Wow!" factor. To see it for yourself, visit CoolIris.

On Windowshop.com, you can either use your mouse or the arrow keys (the keyboard works better) to scroll through a wall of Amazon.com content which includes both best-sellers and new releases in Books, Music, Video, and Games categories. After you zoom in on an item, a preview will play. For an album, that preview is just a snippet of a song; for an audiobook, it's a snippet of the narrator reading the content; for video content like movies, TV shows, and games, you'll see a video clip displayed instead.

The content is sorted into different scrollable columns with column labels at the top describing the items below. There are columns with both the best-sellers and new items for each category, but there are also Editor's Picks and "Best-Selling of All Time" categories, too. As new content is added to the site every Tuesday, the older content is moved to the right, which keeps the Windowshop.com product list in chronological order.

Cooliris Should Be Flattered

The Windowshop site is so much like a Cooliris-enabled web page, that it had us scanning for a "powered by Cooliris" logo somewhere on the site. The scrolling, zoomable wall of content is very similar to what the Cooliris plugin provides. It seems the entire site has been inspired by the technology if it doesn't, in fact, actually use it to power the virtual "windowshopping" itself.

It's interesting that this site was created only a few months after Amazon.com became Cooliris-enabled themselves, with their own Amazon category underneath the Discover/Shopping feature within the Cooliris browser. There, you can scroll through several other categories of content like Home & Garden, Baby, Electronics, the Kindle Store, and more. You can also sort the content displayed by price, popularity, or relevance. The Cooliris wall also has a nifty 3D effect when scrolled, where the Windowshop.com wall stays very much 2D.

Still, the Winodwshop site is another good alternative to visually browsing the best from Amazon.com, even if it is just a tribute to Cooliris's technology. You know what they say about imitation...

We've seen more of these types of visual browsing technologies pop-up this year, from ManagedQ's semantic Google-based search to Photo Stream's visual newsroom and, more recently, to new search engines like Viewzi and SearchMe. We wonder: will 2008 be remembered as the year visual search took off?

Cooliris has always been one of our favorite web browser plugins as it re-imagines the entire experience of browsing through the web. Designed with surfing media in mind, the browser plugin lets you surf through a 3D wall of content and then zoom in and out on the images and videos found. The plugin doesn't work on all web sites yet, but several big names are already supported like Flickr, YouTube, Kodack, Amazon, Photobucket, Picasa, DeviantArt, Smugmug, MySpace, Facebook, Bebo, Hi5, Friendster, Google Images, and more. You can also Cooliris-enable your own web site with only a bit of code.

The iPhone App

Now, with the Cooliris iPhone application (iTunes link), the 3D media surfing experience has been delivered to the mobile web, too. For those familiar with the Cooliris browser plugin, the iPhone experience will be very familiar. The only difference is that you no longer need to use a mouse to move through the wall of media - you only need your finger.

Search

You're able to do Google searches with the iPhone app, so, if nothing more, Cooliris offers a unique way to to visually search the web using a Google-powered search engine. However, the Cooliris app also allows for searching other sites, too, including Flickr, Yahoo, SmugMug, and DeviantArt.

Discover

With the Discover feature, the app uses the iPhone's built-in GPS to detect your location in order to deliver personalized feeds for your locale. For example, here in the U.S., one of the categories available is for the U.S. Elections. Other countries will have their own local news featured here instead. As you read through the news in the Cooliris app, you can easily pull up a related story by "clicking" on the associated metadata the app displays. This lets you visit related web content without having to leave the Cooliris app to view the parent web site back in Safari. In other words, in addition to being a visual search engine, Cooliris is an alternative browser too.

You Have To Try This!

If before you felt that the Cooliris web browser plugin was cool, but wondered if it was all that useful, you'll definitely want to see it in use on the iPhone now and think again. The marriage of the 3D technology and the mobile web is the perfect combination. Cooliris seems as if it was designed just for the touchscreen iPhone.

This app represents what is only the first release for Cooliris on the iPhone. Later on, the app will include more features ported over from the web client as well as new features designed specifically for the iPhone. The company won't hint what those may be, but we're definitely going to stay tuned.