Official Zooomr Blog : Let Zooomr take you into the Era of Real-Time Experiences

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Let Zooomr take you into the Era of Real-Time Experiences

by Kristopher Tate | 28 October 2007 | Adventures, Announcements, Development, General, Video Blog | No Comments

Hey friends! It’s been awhile since I’ve been able to sit-down to talk to you about the latest exciting news over at Zooomr & Company — lots to talk about!

First order of business? We’ve grown. We’ve partnered closely with Cross Borders Japan and now have office space in Harajuku & Suidobashi along with a complete staff of over 10 people. A warm welcome to our new teammates! Yay!

As we move further along, you will notice that Zooomr is investing heavily in the Japanese Market. Japan holds the Second Largest GDP in the World behind the United States and its opportunities when it comes to Web growth on Mobile and Browser are phenomenal — More on that soon.

Okay, strong focus on Japan and the World, new team of bright faces. Who is going to lead operations? Introducing Hiroshi Asaeda and Toru Murakami:

Hiroshi Asaeda (Japanese: 浅枝大志)

One of the youngest and successful entrepreneurs in Japan, Hiroshi is already an author of three books, including one on Second Life and Real-Time Experiences — all at the incredible age of 24. Hiroshi is fluent in both English & Japanese and will become the CEO & President of Zooomr Japan.

Toru Murakami (Japanese: 村上亮)

Friend, Mentor and Future Investor, Murakami-san has been a force in the Japanese Web industry since the early days working as an Executive VP and Founding Member at IMJ in Japan and Korea. Today, Murakami-san is a professor at Digital Hollywood, Japan’s first College designed for digital content authoring. Murakami-san’s influence has certainly helped sculpt Zooomr into a strong player for the Japanese Market. His understanding for talent and ideas goes much further than his deep qualifications; Murakami-san is a welcome addition to our advisory board.

We’re very excited to be working such talented and experienced individuals such as Mr. Asaeda and Mr. Murakami — Welcome aboard you guys!

Ah, but today is not a normal day! This is just the beginning in our bevy of exciting news to share.

Today we’re adding a new service to the Zooomr Family: Zooomr Mobile (Zooomr ShareLife in Japan).

Zooomr Mobile is ripe for Real-Time Experiences

Is something going on around you right now? Now you can share it with your friends and well over 100,000 users strong from the comfort of your Mobile Phone — This is the message we’re sharing with our friends in Japan starting Today.

While this service will be Japanese-Only to start, it is available in both English and Japanese languages.

To the over 50 million 3G+Mobile users in Japan on DoCoMo, au by KDDI and SoftBank, Zooomr is soon to make a welcome entrance into a market where Web 2.0 hasn’t quite yet dared.

This is new ground for us and many others, but we feel strongly about our value proposition. Here’s a quick round-up of the Mobile feature-set:

EZ Login (One-Click Login!)
Follow your Friends and Family on the incredibly addictive Zipline.
Seamless Camera Phone Capture-to-Share Integration on all three major Japanese carriers!
Works with Built in GPS, iArea and aGPS (More on this Below!)
Add, Edit and Remove Contacts
Post and Reply in Real-Time on both Photos and Text.
The easiest Location-Based Content Discovery system we’ve seen!
Thanks to Built-in GPS, users can search for near-by Restaurants, Movie Show Times, Friends and Photos.

Of special note, thanks to a API Partnership with Guru Navi, we can provide some of the best, up-to-date, restaurant information available in Japan.

QRCode To top it all off, inviting users is a snap with our unique QRCode Invitation System, that allows users to add each other by simply scanning a barcode. Super-Super-Viral — And easy!

In short: We’ve made Zooomr very accessible and super-addictive to the over 50 million 3G Mobile Phone Users in Japan. We’re opening up an area of communication that many Japanese people have not seen until today.

Zooomr API Gets Official

While we haven’t locked-down an exact launch date for our API, we’re excited to announce that we’re starting to issue API Keys to members of our new Zooomr Developer Google Group! The Google Group has documentation and other goodies available that make Developing on Zooomr a snap. We’ll have a more detailed post on the Zooomr Platform soon — please join our group and stay tuned.

Officially Introducing Zooomr Zipfox

What made your friends’ Real-Time Experiences on Zipline and placed them into an easy-to-view sidebar that updates every minute? Well my friend, with quick-launch buttons and minimalistic theme, this is exactly what Zooomr Zipfox is aimed at doing.

Real-Time Experiences are best when more people are in the loop. Thanks to Zipline’s smart-threads, you and your friends’ updates cluster together so that you can focus on communicating, instead of trying to figure out what was last said. Huge thanks to Gen Kanai over at Mozilla Japan who was a major influence in Zipfox’s production! And for you Flock users out there, Zipfox even works with the Social Web Browser, too.

HUGE Updates to Localizations

With all of this terrific work, you can expect that there’s more than just a few strings to change. Starting next week, we will be re-launching our Localization Google Group with the new files inviting our more than 80 volunteers to help us put Zooomr into More languages than ever imagined before. A big thanks to our Localization Members from all over the globe!

The Road Ahead: November Plans

With Zooomr Japan focused on Mobile, Worldwide Services will be working on keeping developers happy and plugging them into the wealth of tools that has made Zooomr into a rich Real-Time Experience Platform.

Over the last few months, I have worked very, very hard to bring you some of the most up-to-date fun experiences in the industry and throughout the month of November, there will be a significant amount of code clean-up and revisiting.

Our goal at Zooomr has always been about building the best way to experience the world around us as it happens. With Zipline, Zooomr Mobile and Zipfox, we are building tools that enable potential millions to communicate. The future is very strong here at Zooomr.

Very Special Mention and Thanks to Ron Conway, Timothy Van Loan & Co. at Sun Microsystems, Raju Vegesna and the ZOHO Crew for their continued support. Without these individuals and contributions from Users Like You, Zooomr would certainly not be here today! Thank-you.

With love and respect,

kristopher

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