We presented today in the Startup competition at LeWeb3 conference. Demo effect jinked us a little, but we were able to Zoom somewhat until the Wifi went out in the middle of the demo. Well, the demo ghosts live on ! Anyone knows what kind of offerings work to appease them ? Share your wisdow pls.
Here is the presentation, with the links inserted. It was a short demo, so we had to go to the essential. A good excercise.
LeWeb3 Presentation
December 11 2007
The number one use of the Internet today is sending email.
The number two use of the Internet today is online sharing or emailing pictures. On Facebook alone 14 million pictures are uploaded every day, and 3 billion pictures are served to users every day.
I’m Franklin Servan-Schreiber, President of Zoomorama, and over there is Anne-Celine, our Editorial Director.
Sharing photos is a huge part of the Internet experience, but it’s an experience that is disappointingly like sharing snapshots out of a shoe box, and in low resolution at that. Instead we think it should be like telling a story, sharing the emotions, and also enjoying your 5 to 10 mega pixels to the max. In the case of digital photography the Internet is lagging behind the advances of cameras.
We aim to offer a platform for visual blogging, mixing full-resolution photos, videos, and text of course. To do that we have the Zooming technology, a new interface metaphor that replaces HTML (Hyper Text) with ZML (Zooming Markup Language). We are convinced we have a 10 times better solution for sharing images online, and we have a way to monetize that solution.
Our audience is anyone with an Internet access and a digital camera, since the dominant photography media is no longer paper but the Internet.
First, let us show you a little Zooming action.
Zoomorama Logo Demo.
And here, all the way down, you can see the shadow of the proud father in the eyes of my little Mathew.
Baby Matthew Demo
Most people tell me, “that’s nice, It’s like Google Maps, or it’s like Zoomify” to which I reply the subtle difference is that Google Maps and Zoomify do a great job of Zooming on a single large image, whereas we allow you to Zoom on a collection of unrelated objects. It’s the metaphor of the wall on which you place several pictures rather than one large poster.
In fact, there lies the true value of Zooming: by dramatically reducing the cost of getting to details, it frees us to enjoy the overall view. Thereby our name, Zoomorama, inspired by Panorama – the wide open space.
Notice that you don’t need to open a new web page to view more details of any of the pictures or enlarge the video.
You retain a sense of context because Zooming offers the smooth transitions that our human perception is comfortable with. Notice also that your correspondents will love you for not clogging their email boxes with Megabytes of photos. I can tell you that my friends have been grateful for Zoomorama over the last few months!
Let us show you how easy it is to create a Zoomorama, and share it with others.
You download a free authoring tool. It is based on Firefox technology, namely XUL, and it integrates a zooming image conversion module. Our Viewer itself is in Flash.
Zooming allows you to place so many megabytes of pictures in an album that uploading prior to creating would be distracting. We prefer to create first, wherever and whenever, and upload later.
Here Anne-Celine has grabbed a few 5M pixels images of the Eiffel Tower. Notice how they immediately place themselves into a grid, that’s the default layout. We are not manipulating thumbnails of the images, but the full resolution images themselves.
You can manipulate them as you wish, place them where you please, resize them, write captions, you have complete control of the scenography. We are no longer in the shoebox metaphor, but in the true Photo Album metaphor.
When finished you upload to your account. You can choose whether to make your pictures downloadable or not, make your album private or not.
All your zoomoramas are also kept locally, accessible with the authoring application whenever you wish. You can later add more pictures, delete some, add more scenes, whatever. You’ll only upload the differential.
Once uploaded you can share the URL by email, or embed into a blog or social network.
So who is our competition? Well, we admire Slide for the way they implemented inside Social Networks, we admire eSnips for the way they create multimedia communities, and an e-commerce environment, we admire Picasa for their photo management and web-album creation, and of course we admire Flickr for inventing photo sharing beyond email. But none of them have Zooming, so they all are in the Shoebox metaphor.
Microsoft has an impressive Zooming technology, but they are applying it to complex 3D modelling. Their viewer only works with windows.
As a competitive advantage we also hold important IP, both our own and some from third parties under exclusive license.
Catalogue Demo
Let me tell you briefly how we are going to make money. Two ways: B2B license and advertising supported visual blogging.
First, we are going to license our technology, and make our severs and bandwidth available to anyone who wishes to integrate Zooming into their site. Sort of the Akamai of high-resolution Imaging.
Targets are Media sites, Luxury goods makers, and in general catalogue and e-commerce sites. It is also great for newsletters. Imaging having your whole catalogue in a single page. It’s much like walking into the store itself, where they don’t usually welcome you with a bunch of text!
Product launch Q2 2008.
Advertising demo
Second, for our Visual Blogging Platform, we are going to copy the magazine advertising model which has proven very successful and respectful of readers. We will integrate advertising as separate pages in the personal zooming albums.
Critics have told me that advertising does not work in personal content because advertisers don’t like being out of control. But notice here how the ads are fully separated from the personal content, like in a magazine: editorial then advertising. Not on the same page, advertisers are in control!
Notice also how we turn the Web advertising on its head: instead of bringing the reader to the advertiser’s web site, we bring the web site to the reader. It also works when embedded.
For anyone wanting to share Holiday pictures, we are happy to announce here, at LeWeb3, the launch of our Visual Blogging Platform. You can open your free account today.
We plan to insert advertising by Q3 2008.
Van Gogh Paintings
Thank you for the opportunity of presenting you Zoomorama. We hope to SEE you on the site soon!
