TechWinter

Ever since I spoke to Kristopher last month, I have believed that they could be in trouble and rather unsurprisingly trouble followed within a couple weeks. Now in fairness to the now famous ‘two-man’ team over at Zooomr the mistakes that forced them into that situation were probably less their fault and rather more circumstantial but that is neither here nor there what matters is how it affected their business.

Since the debacle Zooomr has regained its footing and received rather generous offers from Sun Microsystems, Dell, and most importantly Zoho whom continue to prop up the service as we speak. A big thank you to Zoho for their kindness.

So their business from a hardware and data provisioning perspective is finally ‘ok’ and likely to remain that way over the near-term, however there are still some other major problems with the biggest one being Kristopher himself. Kris is undoubtedly amazing and a great developer but he is only developer. So consider this:

When you invest in a company one of the key areas you look at in a knowledge sector is ‘human’ resourcing as without them you have well pretty much nothing. So ask yourself what happens if Kris can’t perform his work for any reason, what happens to Zooomr?

Lastly I want to point to the title and say the reason for it is this last bit. Looking at Zooomr’s recent traffic which was up 16% in the last month during which their site was largely unavailable for half of it, one has to wonder if the marketing impact of their drama may have given Zooomr increased visibility. No?

Okay well maybe traffic isn’t a strong enough indicator how about the fact that when you compare February 2007’s number of blog posts about Zooomr to their last 30 days you will find they garnered a 100% increase. Interesting no?

Maybe some are thinking, well Roger, their Brand must be in dire straits no? Not according to Tony Hung, he points out and articulates exactly what I was thinking regarding their Brand and how they used social media to save it and their company.

For my own curiousity I will be watching Zooomr for a long time curious about how they will do and how they are doing. If Zooomr performs really well and that is still possible maybe they will make a great case study on how social media can save you or your company from the ‘deadpool’ if handled correctly.

Zooomr Homepage
Zooomr Blog

PS. If you are an amateur photographer you probably want to check out Zooomr as their new features directly target you. If you are like me and you take pictures that you generally want to put on the web then Zooomr may be a good option and worth a look.