A while back Jim and Stephanie wrote about the amazing browser plug-in called PicLens. If you’ve never used it, it’s probably the fastest way to find images on the Internet. It allows you to quickly search for images using popular tools like Google Images, Flickr, Yahoo, Amazon and YouTube (yes, it does video too) and it displays all of your results in a 3D flyby environment that makes quickly evaluating results incredibly easy.

This morning, while booting up Firefox, I noticed that the plug-in had an update and when the update finished it had a new name: Cooliris. In addition to the usual features, they now have figured out how to make money using this free tool by adding advertising to the stream of images and video they show you. The implementation was great, totally context sensitive (the ads made sense for the content on screen) and wasn’t intrusive at all. It’s great to see a company like this able to make money while providing a fantastic free service.

Got the update? What do you think?