I think I can, I think can, I think I can… I know I can, I know I can, I know I can…
You all know how passionate I am about photography and community. Zooomr has both, and incredible potential. Beyond that, I have a fondness for anyone who steps out and takes a risk despite overwhelming odds. Zooomr is two people: Kristopher Tate and Thomas Hawk. Kristopher is the boy wonder (although he’s probably aged 20 years in the past week or so ) who created Zooomr on his own and has been working day and night to push the Mark III launch out the door and onto the Internet. I’ve been catching their UStream feed whenever I can.
Mark III launched last night after many harried nights of moving the entire database and tweaking everything so that all of the existing data was intact at launch. From all accounts, it was a thing of beauty and a joy to behold. (I missed it, because I was at Sticks’ final concert). Thomas wrote this:
About an hour ago we finally launched Zooomr Mark III. It was a glorious 10 minute stretch of time. People had stayed up all night with us after a week of anticipation and everything was going great. Our first photos were being uploaded. People were writing exciting updates on the Zipline and then our database crashed.
It was a pretty painful moment. And then Kristopher turned to me and said, you know what, we’ll get this thing back up. This will work. We are the little engine that could.
From the Zooomr blog, Kristopher updates with this:
Hey Friends, I’ve been here for about 2 hours or so now — the database box is completely done-for. Luckily, we do keep database snapshots/backups! We will come out of this stronger than before, together — Zooomr is the world’s photosharing website.
In the comments to Thomas’ post, Robert Scoble says Zooomr needs a server with more than 10 terrabytes and money to pay bills — you might recall that their investor withdrew funding about a month or so ago.
One of the most interesting and potentially profitable aspects of Mark III is the way they’ve structured the site to be a stock photo site where photographers can make a market for their photos. It’s a great business model with the potential to make Zooomr unique in the already-crowded photo sharing market. Flickr hasn’t done it yet, despite having the weight of Yahoo! behind it. Mark III has all the pieces in place — a great platform for display and marketing, ability for photographers to set their own price for photos, and a nice built-in revenue sharing model to turn the site to profit.
I see Zooomr’s needs as an opportunity for online photographers to come together as a community and support an endeavor that already has international reach and recognition. It’s an opportunity for angel investors, too. Is it risky? Yes it is. But consider that it’s a finalist for the Webware 100, contending with other sites that have 100 times the resources.
Behind every success there is sweat, blood and someone’s genius. Web 2.0, if you want to call it that, is not just about free stuff that’s cool. It’s about innovators like Kristopher and Thomas creating something that brings together community, creativity and for some photographers, a way to receive recognition (and yes, profit) for their work. If that’s something that appeals to you, then I encourage you to visit Zooomr and donate whatever you can via their Paypal link.
I love optimists. I love people who don’t give up, who persevere. I believe Zooomr can. I hope you do, too. Here’s one more snippet from the Zooomr blog:
Zooomr Mark III will launch. And it will be a fantastic site. We will have bugs that our one man engineering staff will need to fix and we’ll use ZooomrTV with you guys so that we can together find them and fix them. But Zooomr Mark III will launch. I’ve had the good fortune of seeing Zooomr Mark III as it’s been developed and it is awesome. Zipline is awesome. Discover is Awesome. Search is Awesome. Zooomr Mark III is faster, lighter, better designed. It finally has true community tools. Groups for you to build and hang out in. And with ZooomrTV you will daily have direct access to the team building the site.
Related:
- Robert Scoble: An evangelism opportunity
- Trevor Carpenter: Help Zooomr Not Die!
- Digg it here – Note: The Diggers are characteristically cynical, mostly because they don’t see anything in it for them. As usual, they buried it because they have no vesting in the topic or the site. Yet, if someone hadn’t funded Kevin Rose, they could’ve been riding in the same boat. Think on it, Diggers.
- ZooomrHits: Zooomr Mark 3 Launches, then Goes Down
Technorati Tags: Zooomr, Mark 3, Thomas Hawk, Kristopher Tate, startups, web2.0
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