Zooomr has launched its latest version, Zooomr Mark III today with over 250 additional features, enhancements and upgrades. The photo sharing company headed by the just turned 19 Kristopher Tate provides a range of appealing features including unlimited storage. Previous TechCrunch coverage here. 9 months in the making, we can’t possibly list all the changes, but we can focus on the big ones. Zooomr Zipline The new Zooomr sees the photo sharing site embrace social media. New feature Zooomr Zipline can only be described as a multimedia version of Twitter, complete with SMS and Widget support. More than TXT, Zipline naturally supports photo sharing as well. It’s surprising to see a photo sharing site looking to compete with Twitter. The combination of photos and IM don’t immediately seem like a natural combination, but then again many people never thought services like Twitter would take off either. Zooomr Groups Zooomr Groups will allow users to play games and share photos. Groups can be password protected to restrict access and can be user defined to allow access to non-registered users. Upgrades/ Changes The new version of Zooomr will support what Zooomr calls “Infowidgets” that allows users to interact with tags in a visual way. An example is the marketplace slider in the screenshot below, instead of typing a price and saving it, users can slide their price from $1 to $1000. Zooomr also adds its own login/ account functionality for the first time. Whilst running to date on OpenID, user feedback indicated that a significant number of people would prefer a site specific login. The new login does not come in place OpenID, both types of logins will be supported. People Tags have been upgraded and now allow people who are not Zooomr account holders to be tagged. Tags will be tied to email addresses and are fully searchable. Non-users are emailed by Zooomr informing them of their inclusion in photo(s) on the site. Zooomr API support will now be available to the public. Aesthetics have also been improved with a new cleaner interface Coming Soon: Zooomr Marketplace Zooomr Marketplace will allow users to make money from the photos they shoot. Prices can be set to between $1 to $1000 and will be indexed in the marketplace for others to purchase. Photos will be offered for sale royalty-free and can not depict a copyrighted image, slogan or face. Revenue from sales will → Read More
As of tonight, upstart photo sharing site Zooomr has increased its monthly photo upload limits for free and pro accounts. Free account holders will be allowed 100 MB of photo uploads per month and pro accounts 4 GB per month. The company emphasizes that this means Zooomr is offering 5 times as much upload for free accounts as Flickr does and is doubling Flickr’s pro account size. Pro accounts at Zooomr have been free for bloggers since July. We’ve covered Zooomr since launch but I personally have just recently come to appreciate what they are doing. They offer manual and automatic geotagging, picture in picture zooming, and audio narration attached to files, among other things. The Zooomr interface is localized in 18 different languages – that’s a big deal. They are doing a great job of innovating rapidly, extending themselves into the world, offering really good value and an engaging user experience. The company is made up of its 18 year old founder Kristopher Tate and long time photographer Thomas Hawk. I met the two of them when we were among a small group of new media members who visited the offices of Getty Images last week – see Thomas Hawk’s lengthy coverage of the event. I couldn’t help but worry that the giant photo company wanted to grind up the soul of this innovative little startup. For now at least, they are continuing to make gutsy moves like doubling the upload limits of the most high profile innovator in their space and coming out with new features at a pace that any company would be envious of. → Read More
The acquisition rumor train is running at full steam. We’ve got the really small deals going through ebay (see our post yesterday rounding up the recent ones), and lots of chatter about the largest independent web sites looking for $1 – $2 billion (see Facebook and YouTube). Even Napster, a public company with $100 million in the bank, is looking for love. But there are lots of other deals being whispered about as well. Here’s a smattering of the rumors we’ve been hearing lately: Zooomr: Founder Kristopher Tate has been saying for weeks that Zooomr is on the verge of a sale. Kodak may be the interested party. Estimated deal size? Less than $5 million. TechCrunch coverage here. DoveTail: A new video sharing startup that has had some good coverage in the Wall Street Journal and GigaOm. Word on the street is that a deal is imminent, if not signed already. Hopefully we’ll have a chance to write a profile before the news hits. Xuqa: Multiple sources are saying a sale of Xuqa, a social network that claims to be profitable, might be coming in the $30 million range. Sounds like the company has at least one firm offer and a couple of other bidders. More on these if and when they develop. → Read More
Photosharing upstart Zooomr launched a number of new features today, the most notable one called Portals. It’s a means of linking zoomable pictures inside of each other. It’s quite striking, as you can see from the video below. Zooomr also released annotation features today that include the ability to leave notes on images that are color coded by friend status and people notes, or notes that display Zooomr usernames of people hovered over. The way the Portals work is that just like text notes can be added to photos, Portals lets image publishers tie photos together with boxes that appear when the image is hovered over. Viewers can pan around inside the embedded picture or click to view the picture itself. Publishers can use Portals to give their images depth and detail. There’s no limit to the number of Portals that can be put in a single image and one Portal image can lead to another. Thus shots from a distance can have multiple close ups folded in; something that could be great for architecture, nature and group photos. → Read More
Rumors are circulating that controversial photo sharing site Zooomr, the creation of 18 year old Kristopher Tate, is in acquisition discussions with at least three possible acquirors, with discussions taking place in the $5 million range. I ran the rumor by one of the supposed bidders, who confirmed on the condition of anonymitity that they were in talks to acquire the company. They said the company’s asking price is sub $1 million, which makes this more of an “employment by acquisition” type deal. The company, which is still in beta, raised a small angel round from investor Ron Conway earlier this year, and Thomas Hawk joined them shortly afterwards. Version 2 of the beta launches today, Friday, at 5 pm PST. More on Zooomr here and here. → Read More
Flickr says that users own the the images and tags we enter into their system. Apparently that doesn’t mean they have to make it easy for us to take what we own elsewhere. When Kristopher Tate, the founder of the feature-rich startup photosharing site Zooomr (see prior coverage), asked Flickr earlier this month for access to their Commercial API, Flickr’s response by email was that “we choose not to support use of the API for sites that are a straight alternative to Flickr.” Flickr founder Stewart Butterfield posted to a Flickr forum on Wednesday saying that when it comes to direct competitors like Zooomr, “why should we burn bandwidth and CPU cycles sending stuff directly to their servers?” What’s at issue is the ability for innovative companies to build server-to-server import interfaces that make it far easier for non-technical users to try out a new service and take what they own with them. There are a number of third party tools available for Flickr users to download all their data to their computers. That data can then be uploaded into another system. Competitor Zooomr wants to make transitions like that easy to do, and Flickr apparently doesn’t want them to. Tate from Zooomr says that the exports are a cost of doing business, that Web 2.0 is where “the roach motel stops” and that Zooomr will always make it easy for their customers to take their data elsewhere. That’s easy to say when you’re the underdog, but the issue does lead to some questions about data portability and web services. Day one of the post-Gates era seems like a good time to consider such questions. Update: Comments below refer to the policy that Flickr says it is most likely to shift to. See this post in the Flickr forums for more details. Flickr founder Butterfield in particular says he’s had a change of heart. → Read More
Zooomr, the company launched by 17 year old Kristopher Tate (he’s now 18) in March, will be releasing a new beta version 2.0 sometime around the end of June. The biggest focus of the new release will be increased stability and speed – Zooomr was taken down repeatedly by massive traffic spikes around its launch. There’s a lot I like about Zooomr, but where they are really pushing the envelope is on photo metadata, particularly geotagging via a mashup with Google maps. Zooomr is also creating technology to help people understand when events are occuring, possibly via photos from users that don’t even know each other. When Zooomr sees photos being uploaded within a time window that are similarly geotagged, it assumes an event is occuring and groups those photos accordingly. The only difficult part of all of this is that it takes a lot of time for a user to associate location information with a photo…and that means many users won’t do it. Look out for smart sets in version 2.0 as well, giving users the ability to create dynamic albums on the fly based on tags, users and other information. I really like this feature in the new Yahoo Photos and expect it to be widely copied by all of the photo sites over time. Zooomr is also focused on creating localized version of the service in as many different languages as possible. In the 2.0 release they’ll add Romania and Norway to the sixteen other versions they currently support. For non English speakers, Zooomr may be the most compelling photosharing option. There are lots of other feature additions as well. I’ll update as the new version is released. Screen shots are here. → Read More
Flickr wasn’t the first photo sharing site, and it isn’t the most popular. In fact, it isn’t even the most popular photo sharing site owned by Yahoo – this is. But Flickr caught our attention and, at least with the technology-savvy crowd, it has become synonymous with photo sharing. A whole new crop of services are gunning for flickr and the title of “coolest photo site”. I call these the “Flickr Gunners” and I’ve written about them often. Yahoo Photos and Webshots, two newly rejuvenated services, are also combining new and exciting features with their massive existing customer and photo base. Photo sharing sites are sticky by nature. Once you’ve gone to the trouble of uploading your photos, tagging them and creating albums, it’ll take something very special to get you to move. Flickr had this “specialness” – the social tagging and viewing features built a network effect that made flickr more valuable to a new user as it grew. But Flickr has weaknesses. First, as I said they are not the biggest photo site. Yahoo Photos, Webshots and others dwarf them both in terms of users and uploaded photos. These larger services can afford to wait and see what works best and then duplicate it (and Yahoo Photos is rolling out new stuff that isn’t available on Flickr. Second, flickr hasn’t done much in terms of new features lately. They missed the video boat entirely, and YouTube now has a big lead in that category. And third, there are a number of UI issues that could easily be fixed but remain unchanged, stubbornly: the need for sub albums, better batch editing features and the ability to view more photos on a page. Yes, flickr has been working hard on scalability issues, but that shouldn’t stop them from evolving the UI and feature set. And brand new or very young services are rolling out new features regularly. These small companies are hungry and obsessive and will do anything for market share. Here are three I’ve been tracking: BubbleShare I really like BubbleShare. As I’ve written before, it takes about 10 seconds from hitting the site for the first time to actually viewing pictures that you’ve uploaded. You don’t even need to create an account. BubbleShare has added new features often since launch. Recent upgrades include Audio Caption, BubbleBar (a way to bring photos right to your desktop, similar to Slide → Read More
Kristopher Tate walked Brian Oberkirch and me through a demo of his zooomr project at a meetro party last week (Kris, who’s 17, works full time at meetro and zooomr is a side project). He launched zooomr on March 1, 2006 after working on it for only three months or so. And what he’s built is a flickr on steroids. Zooomr has a similar interface as flickr but does a lot more. You can choose to create an account or just use one of five other credentials to set up an account (Level9, OpenID, LiveJournal, Google (Gmail) or Meetro. The functionality is the same. Zooomr also offers the site in 15 languages. The real benefit of zooomr is the wide variety of metadata that can be associated with a photo. Any photo can have an audio annotation, although recording functionality is not yet built into zooomr and so you must do this from your camera or an audio program and upload it separately. Zooomr has a built in flash player to listen to the annotation. You can also associate any person with a photo (something you can’t do on flickr, where you can only tag a photo with a person’s name if you like), and there is very tight integration with Google maps to allow geographic information to be included with a photo. If a lot of photos are geo tagged in a specific place at the same time, zooomr assumes they are part of an event even if the photos are all from different users. Finally, to see a blowup of any picture, just click on the lightbox in the photo and it instantly pops up in a larger size. For more details on features, view the zooomr “learn more” area. The site is free for up to 50 mb of photo uploading per month, and $20 per year for 2 GB per month (similar to flickr but $5 less). UPDATE: Ouriel (who writes TechCrunch France) just pointed me to Flickr’s new ZoneTag product that auto-geo tags pics uploaded from a phone. This is a great feature. → Read More
