Official Zooomr Blog

Well good news guys. We’ve been down here at the Palo Alto Apple store for the iPhone launch broadcasting live for about 24 hours now. We’ve had a great time and met a lot of super people. We will be here until 6pm when Apple opens up the store for the official iPhone launch.

uStream has been very helpful in helping us pull this production off. They arranged our power, fed us, and made sure that we stayed live as much as possible.

What’s made this launch so remarkable of course has been that we are livestreaming it on ZooomrTV through uStream. I’m sitting down here with Johnny from uStream right now who has said that uStream has decided to *give away* an iPhone tonight at 7pm on their homepage.

In order to be eligible to win the free iPhone from uStream, all you need to do is sign up for a uStream account before 6pm and enter the promo code iPhone when you sign up. One winner will be randomly selected by uStream.

Signing up for uStream is easy and free. And tell your friends because someone out there is going to end up with a new iPhone at 7pm tonight.

They will also be giving a second iPhone away in the next two weeks. For the second iPhone giveaway they will be using the signups after 6pm tonight made during the next two weeks.

And be sure to continue watching ZooomrTV live from the Palo Alto store iPhone Launch!

Live at the iPhone launch on ZooomrTV

Come chat with us in the chat room or check out the official iPhone Zooomr features launch group thread.

Well, Kristopher Tate and I will be joining Robert Scoble later this afternoon down in Palo Alto to start a 24 hour Live iPhone launch watch on ZooomrTV. Now before you say that sounds like more fun than work, we’re are also pleased to say that we will also be launching a few new (in some cases returning) features to Zooomr *live* from the iPhone launch. The beautiful thing about Zooomr is that it can be developed anywhere. Much of Zooomr has been built at Kristopher’s house and my house and a lot of it at Massimo Cafe on Market Street.

But the next 24 hours you are going to be able to see Zooomr being developed live, as it happens, from the big iPhone waiting line. Although this is kind of like playing it will also most certainly be working. And it just wouldn’t be an iPhone launch without a corresponding Zooomr new feature launch seeing how Zooomr’s been built on Macs and all.

If you are in the Palo Alto area come on down and hang out with us. We’ll have Zooomr stickers to hand out and would love to have you come join us on ZooomrTV.

We also have started the official Zooomr/iPhone launch thread in Zooomr’s Epicenter group. We are keeping the comments on this post closed today because we want to make sure that everyone inside of Zooomr has a chance to participate. Come on in and join us here to continue the official iPhone/Zooomr surprise feature launch party. And we will also be chatting live on ZooomrTV as well. See you this afternoon!

One of the things that we take pride in at Zooomr is that you all, the photographers on Zooomr, really are truly a global bunch. As the most localized photo sharing site in the world today, Zooomr continues to strive to make the site globally accessible and photographers are uploading an amazing amount of international photos from all corners of the earth.

I thought I’d share a geo map overlay representing a breakdown of Zooomr’s traffic thus far for the month of June. As you can see, at present Zooomr’s traffic is pretty evenly divided between the Americas, Asia and Europe. Top regional locations / cities include Taiwan and Beijing, London, San Francisco, Los Angeles and most recently the Petah Tikva district of Central Israel (last week Zooomr received a very positive review and tied for the top 4.5 star rating amongst photo sharing sites in Israel’s largest newspaper).

In addition to some of the major cities of Europe, Asia and the Americas, there is also smaller amounts of Zooomr activity going on in Africa, Australia and other places around the globe.

All of the translation work on Zooomr has been done by volunteers. To learn more about how you can help translate Zooomr into additional languages you can check out this Google Group on localization for Zooomr here.

So where in the world are you zoooming from today?

Last night Kristopher rolled out our paid Pro accounts. Pro accounts are $19.95 per year on Zooomr. By upgrading to Pro you help ensure that we can keep Zooomr going, keep developing, and keep innovating in this great new world of online photography. We have a lot of great plans for Zooomr in the weeks and months ahead, but we can’t do it without you the community and we can’t do it without your financial support.

As you all know, Zooomr at the basic level is free. We will always have a free version of Zooomr. We think it’s important that everybody in the world be able to participate regardless of their ability to pay for Zooomr or not. But… we do need to make at least a little money to survive. The community has stepped up and helped us in the most generous of ways and we are hoping that all of you who find Zooomr meaningful will also consider helping us out by turning Pro.

To upgrade to Pro you can go to your main Zooomr welcome page here. (You have to be logged into the site).

Some of you are already Pro and some of you even Pro4Life (we will have these designations back shortly). We do still appreciate any donations that you might want to send our way and have a link on your Zooomr home page if you feel so inclined. To those who have already donated. Thank you. You mean the world to us.

A lot of people ask what the difference between a Pro account and a Free account is. At the basic level Pro accounts won’t see advertisements while free accounts will see advertisements. We haven’t had any ads on Zooomr Mark III yet but will be implementing some in the near future to help pay the bills. By upgrading you assure yourself that when you browse Zooomr that you won’t see these ads.

But more than ads vs. no ads, Kristopher is developing some cool and interesting ways that Pros will be able to access Zooomr. An enhanced version of Discover. Zooomr Analytics where you can much better track the activity on your photostream. And many other cool new features.

We are still working hard on restoring the functionality for a lot of our free services that we had in Zooomr V2. Recent Activity is coming back. As are SmartSets, your favorites, and lots of other stuff — with a lot of improvements as well. But we do need your help to do all of this and we are hoping that you will find Zooomr a worthwhile enough service to help us out.

Hey friends, ever wanted to go to a meeting with us? Well, thanks to Tajee, now you can! Check it out below:

[bliptv Tajee-VisitingOrganicWithZooomr602]

Tajee had this to say about the above video:

Organic invited Zooomr and me to join their workshop for thier programers and creative people.
I had already interviewed Kristopher, CTO of Zooomr, but it was very interesting to share
what they do with Organic people. I had a great time sharing thoughts about Web2.0 things!
After that, we joined “Photo Walking” in Haight Ashbury. I thought seeing in person was such a great way to communicate even in Web2.0 era:)

オーガニックという広告、PRの会社がサンフランシスコにあるのだけど、その勉強会にZooomrの２人と一緒に招待されたので行って来たよ！クリストファーにはすでに前回インタビューしていたけれど、改めて話を聞くのは面白かった！オーガニックのオフィスはおしゃれだし、人も好奇心旺盛で素敵だったなぁ。
その後フォトウォーキングといって写真大好き人間が集まる会にもいきおいで参加。ウェブと言っても、ひとありき。オフ会の魅力を再認識しました！

Zooomr Power. Share the sticker love. Photo by Randyman!

Well here at Zooomr this morning we were pleased to find a nice review on Zooomr appearing in Yediot Aharonot, Israel’s largest newspaper. The review gave Zooomr 4.5 stars and we tied for the top rated photo sharing service.

With that in mind we decided to go ahead and launch our Hebrew version of Zooomr today. If you’d like to switch to Hebrew you can do so at the bottom of any page on Zooomr. Thank you very much to Mor Griv who did the Hebrew translation work for us.

Now one thing to keep in mind about translations on Zooomr is that all of them are done by volunteers. It’s you, the community, who choose to spend your time and energy making Zooomr more accessible to various parts of the globe and world. So with this in mind there will undoubtedly be errors in translations from time to time. By releasing beta versions of translations though publicly, it is our hope that the native communities can help us fix any translation errors and make Zooomr a more proper translated site as we go on.

If you’d like to participate and help translate Zooomr into even more languages please see this group here. You can learn more here and here.

With regards to our Hebrew version there are likely some bugs in it. Hebrew is a little more difficult than most translations for us because Hebrew reads right to left and so our templates might be slightly off. Please bear with any imperfections in our Hebrew version and we’ll get it fixed as we can. Please feel free to send any feedback on our Hebrew or other versions to zfeedback@bbridgetech.com. If Hebrew is not working well enough for you you can always switch to another language that might be working better.

Also it’s important for people to note that it is relatively little work for Kristopher to put new translations online. He is not working on translations at the expense of bringing us all back the features from Zooomr 2 that we all are so very much looking forward to. As mentioned, this translation work is being done by you, volunteers in the Zooomr Community. SmartSets, Faves, Recent Activity, Avatars and Profile pages, Uploading Fixes, RSS. Kristopher is working on all of these fixes and a lot more and is doing so very diligently. We are of course only a one developer team though and so this stuff takes some time. But please know that he is working hard. We also plan on many improvements and enhancements to Zipline, Groups, Marketplace and Analytics. All of these great things are coming to Zooomr. It’s just a matter of time.

Thanks again for all of your support! The above photo is of Rabbi Yosef Langer and was taken by me the year before last at a Chanakuh lighting at Union Square in San Francisco.

We are currently experiencing some technical difficulty with our uploading engine so you may have trouble with uploading. Kristopher is working on these problems and we hope to have them resolved and debugged shortly. Will give you an update back when we get it fixed.

Tom

Update: 10:17a.m. Ok guys, I think we have it mostly resolved now. Please let us know if you are still experiencing any uploading problems. If you are experiencing uploading problems still please also let us know what browser and OS you are using.

Wow friends, I’m pretty speechless over here. First it was our C|NET Webware Award and now the arrival of over 100k stickers (of 500k!) from Zooomr user RandyMan. Please comment on his photos and send a lot of love his way — he did this totally out of the kindness of his heart. This of course means a lot to Thomas and myself.

RandyMan has a PayPal donation link, as well — send a few dollars his way at: http://www.randymanpix.com/Home.html

With love,

kristopher