Zoomorama Blog

Zoomorama raises €1M in round B

We are happy to confirm that we finalized our round B fundraising for €1M on a post-money valuation of €5.8M. The financing was provided by european and american business angels.

We are going to futher develop the ease of use and versatility of our ZoomCreator application, expand our server footprint with presence in the US, Vietnam, Japan, Russia, and Brazil, as well as promote our BtoB offering in the fall.

Thank you for all the investors that believe in the potential of zooming to change the experience of the web from personal photography albums to e-commerce ! You are great !

Click here for the press releases in English and French.

SFR SpeedStarting Up Presentation

Presentation this afternoon in front of 200 managers of SFR at their invitation only SpeedStartingUp event.  SFR is the second largest mobile operator in France. They are also fast becoming an important player in high-speed internet with their recent purchase of Neuf Telecom.

I will show how ZoomCreator is a fun remplacement for Powerpoint for presentations, but with easy video and viewing of details. And, of course, you can later upload your presentation.

I will also show how you can create widgets with SFR products that can be deployed anywhere.

Below is the embed of the presentation. Tip: zoom all the way under the "m" of Zoomorama for a surprise.

A "killer" piece of work !

I wanted to share with you my delight in discovering today the work of Daniel Gasienica called TANDEM.

Tandem is a way to view your entire collection of Flickr collection in a Zooming environment. It is so easy and fun to use that I was amazed and delighted. Much better than Piclens ! All in Flash, no download. Daniel you did a great job !

Here is our friend Juicy Carolina's pictures in Tandem: http://tandem.gasi.ch/#/photos/juicycarolina/

Here is Daniel's post on his blog: http://gasi.ch/blog/hello-tandem/#comment-1533

Try it for yourself.

Congratulations Daniel. This is beautiful ! We are proud to have you with us this summer to work on more great zooming concepts.

Launch Party for Zoomorama.com site in Beta

It has been a long wait, but we finaly launched our new, entirely redesigned, web site in Beta. Now you can share your zoomorama with all your friends, and see how other creative authors are using Zooming to publish their pictures and videos.

Our friends at Paris-Match magazine came to testify how they enjoy working with ZoomCreator. They said it was the first time they did not have to worry about the size of an image, or the format of a video (premium accounts, coming soon), and how easy it was to publish. It was wonderful to have them among us.

But ZoomCreator is much more than simply sharing pictures and video, we are truly becoming a rich media widget creation too. With your great feedback we are working on making ZoomCreator, and our web site, more open and more powerful.

It turns out ZoomCreator is also becoming a fun replacement for Powerpoint presentation ! We did not expect it, but why not. It's true that Powerpoint is not that great for creating free form layouts, and it cannot zoom ! So have fun with it on your computer. Simply go "preview" in the "view" menu, or press F7 ("ESC" to get out of preview mode).

Download the new ZoomCreator to experience the power of zooming, and widget creation.

Here is the video of the party, in 3 minutes (in French). You can see the team at half-way through the video. Thanks for some great work guys ! Missing were our partners in Vietnam, especially Hao, Wai, Long, Nam, and Nhut. We missed them ! They are doing great work and we love working with them. Thanks guys !

Launch in Beta of Zoomorama.com and ZoomCreator

We are proud to announce the Beta version launch of the Zoomorama Web site and ZoomCreator Authoring tool.

The new web site will allow you to better manage your zoomoramas, and to share with the community your creations. Users can subscribe to your page to be alerted by email of any new zoomorama, you can subscribe yourself to a profile, select your favorite profile or zoomorama, send zoomomails to other members, etc...

As for ZoomCreator we have redesigned it and made it even more functional. You can now import your pictures from Flickr directly, align images automatically, rotate videos as easily as pictures, and as always update your zoomorama online with differential updates. You can now also place links inside the page (in the Text box menu you will find the link tool).

Soon we will offer premium account that will enable you to upload your videos directly to zoomorama without having to place them on YouTube. Premium account will also have no limits on the size of each zoomorama, as well as 5Gb of storage instead of 2Gb for free account.

We hope to see you on www.Zoomorama.com soon. Let us know what you think of the new design.

Download ZoomCreator HERE

 

Customer Feedback - e-Commerce

Using Zooming to understand Death and Taxes is what Jess Bachman did with an extraordinary poster detailing graphically the US government budget. Never before have I delved into the intricacies of government budgeting with any pleasure, but here I did it with glee. See where you tax money goes thanks to Jess, and to Zooming.

See his page with an embedded zoomorama of his poster here: http://www.wallstats.com/deathandtaxes/

Here what Jess has to say about Zoomorama for his web site:

Franklin,

Thanks for the updated code, I think my web guy just missed a section of it or something.  It looks as it is intended now. I really do like Zoomoroma and plan to use it for all my other products and blog entries.  DeepZoom is great from a performance aspect but it requires SilverLight 2 Beta and for someone of my limited coding capabilities I am reduced to using the simple and standard photozoom uploaded which allows one image per "DeepZoom".  I am glad you guys chose to put a lot of focus on the client side development and broad it down to a novice level.  Even Zoomify required some annoying flash importing/exporting.  You guys have done a great job. 

Cheers,
Jess

RED HERRING WINNER, and Conference Links

We are proud to be selected among the top 100 most promising start up in Europe by Red Herring magazine. Here in Malta we will present Zoomorama to a prestigious assembly of other entrepreneurs and top-tier VCs.

Here are the links to my presentation showcase: (Reference for Network Speed: GoogleMaps)

1) Zoomorama Logo with Baby Pictures

2) Party Pictures with Video

3) Paris Match Magazine Underwater Photography 

4) Classified Advertising

5) Vuitton Wallets E_Catalogue

6) Advertising Integration in Editorial Content

7) Van Gogh Painting Collection

Here is a picture of me receiving the award from Alex Vieux, Chairman of Red Herring. The conference was really wonderful. We met a lot of dynamic and promising entrepreneurs, and good VC people. Access was easy, and Malta was more beautiful than expected (see here the zoomorama)

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Paris-Match Magazine's beautiful Underwater Photography

Paris Match published this morning, Thursday, a beautiful zoomorama of underwater photography. In the magazine the article is 12 pages. It relates the research of a French scientist studying the impact of global warming on the coral reef of New Caledonia.

Read the article here: http://www.parismatch.com/parismatch/dans-l-oeil-de-match/reportages/recifs-coralliens

See the zoomorama below

Zoomorama is Red Herring 100 Europe Finalist

Zoomorama is honored to be selected one of the 200 finalists for the prestigious Red Herring 100 Europe 2008. The final announcement will be done from Malta on April 14th 2008. Stay tuned !

Red Herring is THE magazine of the high-tech community in the US. Every year they select the 100 most promising companies from the US, Europe, and Asia. Past winners were Google, eBay, Skype, YouTube, and DailyMotion.

The Zoomorama Team is working hard to be worthy of this honor and of your patronage. We will soon announce our new web site, with more sharing functionalities, as well as our new ZoomCreator authoring tool. That will be for another post (soon).

Thank you for using Zoomorama ! Cross your fingers for us to be winner in Malta on the 14th.

Paris Match Magazine innovates with Zoomorama

Today Paris Match publishes on the web a news story using Zoomorama as a publishing platform. Using the Zooming technology they were able to create entirely free layout with high-definition images, videos and text. The whole process, from layout to publishing, was done by the Art Director himself.

"The ZoomCreator freed me from technical consideration. I could simply focus on the creative process. This technology will change the face of publishing on the web. With Zooming we can better tell the story behind the news, and that's what Paris Match loves about this technology." said Michel Maïquez, Paris Match Art Director.

Here is the result of his work, don't forget to go full screen for a better experience: CLICK HERE