Official Zooomr Blog

Zooomr 2008: Update on the Go in RealTime

by Kristopher Tate | 1 March 2008 | Announcements, Development, General, Video Blog

Zooomr 2008 is only mere days away! Check-out this video about Mobile and Custom Designs in the new release:

Zooomr 2008: Four More Days

by Kristopher Tate | 28 February 2008 | General

Just four more days until 3.3.2008.

Days Away to Zooomr 2k8

by Kristopher Tate | 27 February 2008 | General

March 3rd, 2008

Friends! We’re only days away from launching Zooomr 2008. We’re going to launch it on March 3rd, 2008. Check out the presentation and embeded live-stream below!

Updates, Updates, Updates!

by Kristopher Tate | 5 February 2008 | Adventures, Announcements, Development, General, System Notices

Hi Friends! Sorry for the lack of updates on the Zooomr Blog! After recently opening up the Knowledge Center, we’ve been keeping it chock-full of cool and useful information for our community. I highly recommend that you check it out!

Now then, some updates.

First, we’ve moved to a new Data Center in Japan! Our Japanese Data Centers are much faster than the old and as a result, you will find that uploads and general browsing will be faster. Big plus.

Second, we’re still waiting on some of our older equipment to be shipped. Unfortunately, we had a 25-day deadline (we only knew 26-days in advance! ) to move-out of our old data center in the US, and without me there to supervise, Thomas Hawk and two very cool Zooomr Users had to handle the operations. This was a big shock to us, but we managed to get a data center in Tokyo together!

Further, what this also meant was that we had 25-days to move 20TB of Photos! Unless you’re VC backed, this task is pretty impossible. With our small financial resources at the moment, we were only able to grab half of the data out of the data center. The other half is again on its way to Japan and will be activated within this month. We regret the situation this has posed to our users and ask for forgiveness. Users may track our progress in the Knowledge Center. Again, donating or going pro really helps us out, as well!

Third, Zooomr 2008 is well underway and once we get all of our hardware into Tokyo, Japan and things start to stabilize, we will push the new code out to the servers and show you what we’ve been working on for the last 6 months. It’s really exciting stuff and we’ll hope you’ll join us in its launch.

Lots of great things are planned inside of 2008 and we want to communicate that our focus for this year is to make Zooomr faster and more stable along with making improvements to core features we have today. We feel that our features are very strong, and if made more stable could do very well.

I also want to take a brief moment and thank all of the hard core users who IM and communicate with me and our crew here in Japan everyday! You guys are awesome and it shows 100 times over. Thank-you!

Let’s stay strong for 08!

kristopher

Pre-2008 Release Photowalk in Japan!

by Kristopher Tate | 12 January 2008 | Adventures, Announcements, General

Hey friends, tomorrow from about 10a we’re going to meet-up at Sendagi Station (Tokyo Metro) and start photowalking in Japan!

If you’d like to come along, please join this discussion on Zipline or send an email to kris.tate@gmail.com

Zooomr user Chidorian also put together an awesome Google Map that everyone can use to follow the adventure!

I’ve also gone ahead and put up a wiki page on our new Zooomr Knowledge Center so that you can track future Japan Photowalking events as they happen!

日本皆様、こんにちは！クリストファーです。明日の午前１０時から、是非にPhotowalkしよう！:)

Photowalking Schedule:

集合場所
10am　地下鉄千駄木駅集合

不忍池
12pm 不忍池で集合して昼食へ

秋葉原駅
3pm 秋葉原駅で解散

僕たちと会うのを思ってたら、ピトークまで連絡してくださいー。:)

Zooomr 2008 Release Schedule

by Kristopher Tate | 9 January 2008 | Adventures, Announcements, Development, General, System Notices

Hi Friends, we’re excited to be launching our 2008 Release here shortly! After working on several bugs and our well awaited mobile version, we’re excited to be delivering this special installment of Zooomr to everyone.

There will be some upload outages as marked above as we are moving some data to our Japanese Data Centers, but we plan to have both Web and Static photos online for your viewing pleasure.

Our team and myself have been working hard here for the last 5 months in Japan for everyone’s benefit. I’m glad that we’ve been able to save Zooomr from a money crisis that could have killed Zooomr for good — but, instead, we have found investments and are moving full speed ahead for you guys — our users.

We’ve also launched the Zooomr Knowledge Center where you can find more information about our upcoming release, as well as submit bugs. We’re trying our best to keep everyone in the loop.

Please be safe — we’re only 9 days into the year and moving strong!

kristopher

Pre-2008 Release Goodies Already?!

by Kristopher Tate | 5 January 2008 | Announcements, Development, General, Video Blog

Hey Friends, we’re off to a great start this year. We’ve been working on moving data to Japan and that has stopped us from posting most of the brand-new 2008 Release of Zooomr.

Yet, there are parts of the 2008 Release that can still be backported to the old version without messing up any of the transfer.

Today, I pushed major updates to Privacy and Licensing systems. The cool thing is that you can also now search for that data — so if you want all Creative Common’s licensed photos on Zooomr, just do a search for it!

Example: Most Recent CC Attribution Licensed Photos on Zooomr

More to report inside of 2008 — we’re only 5 days in!

kristopher

In Reply

by Kristopher Tate | 3 January 2008 | General

I have been blocked from “Zooomr Exodus”, a place where about 30 ex-Zooomr users who feel that they are more important than everyone else on our worldwide photo sharing community have chosen to remain.

Lately they have caused quite a lot of commotion on Zooomr, so I wanted to give them a respectful reply on what is going on over here at Zooomr HQ, but they have instead blocked me before I could do just that. I feel that this is in large part very disrespectful to all of the hard work we at Zooomr have put into the community.

Below is the full body reply of the message I was blocked from posting:

Thank-you for all of the time that you have spent writing your replies and also if you’ve ever used Zooomr, thanks for that as well.

I’m still reading through the breadth of these replies, but I wanted present you with what has really been going on.

5 months ago, Zoho wrote to us that they weren’t going to be able to host Zooomr in 2008. This is not their fault, as they have been very courteous to me and our community.

With the bandwidth and costs that it takes to run a site like Zooomr, we started to look for options to keep the community alive.

Because of the similarities between Flickr and Zooomr, we had already been looking for ways in 2006 to differentiate: Zipline was one of these, and unfortunately with the slow launch of Mark III, we weren’t able to get it out before the Twitter phenomenon took off.

Though, because of the standing similarities of Zooomr and Flickr, investors would not invest in our community inside of the states — this is why I am here in Japan — to save Zooomr. It has nothing to do with a “Fascination” with Japan. This is about saving Zooomr for everyone.

In order to appease Japanese investors, a mobile version had to be built. This is what we had been working on for the past 3 months. Lately, all attention has shifted back to Web because that’s where our roots are.

Thankfully, because I’m now here in Japan, we will be able to move Zooomr and make sure that its community will be able to stay alive.

To those who continue to bully me and our users, I’m glad flickr exists for you. Yet, to not take in account of the hard work that I give our users on Zooomr from all of the business to programming work (and every little thing in between) is simply absurd and shameful.

I’m sorry that Zooomr had to take a brief detour to save everything we’ve had up until now, though 2008 will be an even stronger year for Zooomr and its community — on Web and on Mobile alike.

There is no alternate motive but to serve our users as well as we can. Obviously, we are a business as well and must make money to survive for the better of the community.

Japan has given us the security that we so needed. Some respect to our Japanese investment board and Japanese employees would be nice.

Either way, we’re in the midst of our move to Japan. We will continue to fight for our users. This is the oath that I took when I decided to build the first photo sharing website for the entire world.

After the data move, we will activate Zooomr 2008 and you can see the breadth of my hard work then.

Life is a handful of delight and sorrow — You learn that with every bit of sorrow, there remains a bit of delight.

kristopher

Happy Holidays from Zooomr

by Kristopher Tate | 24 December 2007 | Adventures, Announcements, Development, General

Friends, it’s been an amazing year. One that, together, has taken us to bigger and bolder heights.

In this year we launched an entirely new platform, moved server farms, launched our global blogging platform and have also seen the success of Zipline and how it has raised community awareness — All thanks to your support.

Up until now, Zooomr was completely manufactured, coded, maintenanced and administrated by myself. Doing this by myself has been a truly humbling and insightful experience — but what I will remember the most is how touching it has been for me to be able to share my life with all of you — our community.

Believe it or not, for the last two years, I have worked every living moment of my life for this Web site: For Zooomr and for its community. (And, if that is hard to believe, please look at my vimeo stream or the thousands of photos that I have uploaded on my photo stream in this year alone.)

So, in a few words: It has been an honor to have put everything, including my blood and sweat, into zooomr for this community.

And even now, I have traveled over 5,000+ miles away from America to Japan to not only find financing for Zooomr to keep its community alive, but also to open what we all know and love about Zooomr up to new markets, as well.

This is also the first holiday season that I will not be spending with my family — and oh how I miss my Mother, Father and younger brother Ryan. No doubt, they probably miss me too.

This post isn’t about me, though — it’s about all of us. It’s about Zooomr, the community and what we have all put into it to keep it going for the better of everyone included.

When I was sitting in my 5×5 foot (!) sublet room in Silicon Valley, CA first creating Zooomr, I only imagined what it could become. I wanted to create a place where everyone could share their experiences in life with the rest of the world in as many locations and languages as possible. Today, we’re still finding more ways to connect people globally and being an active part of other people’s lives is what keeps me attached to this project day in and out.

And while I have over 15,000+ hours into making Zooomr, I’m still going strong out here in Japan working hard to make Zooomr stronger, more reliable and ready for the next wave of challenges and advancements in photo sharing and communication that we can provide.

After three months of solid work here in Japan, we’ve got a new Web build ready that fixes much of the bugs and issues with Zooomr today. And, thanks to on-going Japanese investments, I can say that we’re working to make Zooomr stronger than ever by increasing man-power and also moving data from the US to Japan so that we can continue to build up Zooomr’s infrastructure and make Zooomr faster for everyone around the world. (This new build will be launched soon after the move is complete.)

As I leave this post and get back to working on Zooomr, I want to just take a moment to thank all of our users and all of the companies and individuals who have given to this project in order to make it better for everyone.

This is a time for giving and remembrance; I want everyone to know that even though I may not be in front of a warm fire with close friends and family, I am instead filled with a different, special kind of warmth — the warmth of community and togetherness.

From me to you, thank-you and happy holidays.

kristopher