What’s up with Zooomr’s Mark III?
Save it
Stumble it
Digg it
Twitter itUpdated 10/29/2007: I’ve revised my opinion of Zooomr since I wrote this. See “Taking a break from Zooomr” for the details.
I’m sure we’re all waiting for Zooomr’s Mark III and wondering what’s going on with Kris. There have been a lot of questions floating in the air since Zooomr missed its scheduled launch date for their third release. What sorts of questions? Well, stuff like this:
- What happened?
- No, what really happened?
- Is it ever going to ship?
- Is it vaporware?
- Will it ship during my lifetime?
- Why was Kris in Japan?
Let me try to answer them.
We know from one of Kris’ video blogs that there was a major problem with the external storage services they were using. Basically, they were much too slow, and given the throughput rate Zooomr was getting when migrating their content to Mark III, it just wasn’t feasible to continue. After trying all sorts of things to make it work, they had to make the hard decision to pull the plug. That was a real disappointment, not only for the users like me, who’d been waiting with bated breath for the arrival of the new release, but for Kris and Tom as well. They’d poured their hearts and souls into the new release, and honestly hoped to ship it when they promised. Not only this, but Kris had architected Mark III based on the external storage service. Now he needed to re-architect the entire release to bring it all back in-house. Not cool. Not surprisingly, he was very frustrated and exhausted, and needed to unplug for a while. That’s why he went to Japan, to try and get away and clear his head.
That’s what really happened. Kris is now back, of course, and working on Mark III again. They’re going to do it all in-house now, and it’s going to be great, since they’ll be able to control every aspect of the user experience. Mark III isn’t vaporware. It’s a real product, and Kris really has been working for the past 6 months on it, 16 hour days. I chatted with him just this morning, and it was just 5:15 AM PST in SF. He’s up, putting in the long hours, and working hard to make sure Mark III ships soon. He won’t give a ship date, he says it’ll “ship when it ships”. But, it will ship soon. That I know. I can’t disclose anything beyond that, but it will ship sooner than people think. Just stay tuned.
I, um, “found” a screenshot from Mark III as well. Here it is:
Keep your hopes up, Zooomr users! Mark III will ship soon! 
And, let’s not forget, we’re using a limitless Mark II release right now. It’s easy to overlook this, but there are NO limits on any account, free or Pro alike. That means you can upload all you want and have it all archived for posterity. Where else can you get that?
Added 4/21/07: Kris has made public the projected re-launch date for Mark III in a recent live video stream, so I guess I can come clean as well and tell you what I already knew. He’s going to do his best to get Mark III out the door by May 1st, which is his birthday.
Updated 5/22/07: Though delayed, the transition to Mark III began yesterday around noon EDT. At the time of this update, the transition is still taking place. Kris and Tom have kept a live video feed going the whole time, answering questions as well. So far, it looks like Mark III is on track to launch today. Let’s hope everything goes according to plan. I blogged about this yesterday, just as the upgrade process got underway.
(No Ratings Yet)
Loading ...Related Posts
If you are new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed, or follow me on FriendFeed or Twitter.
Kristopher was in Japan?!
Oh, that guy!
Comment — April 17, 2007 @ 9:19 am
[...] Zoomr Mark III Answers 17 04 2007 Raoul over at ComeAcross has some answers regarding the release of Zooomr Mark III, and what problems were encountered during the previous aborted release. [...]
Pingback — April 17, 2007 @ 9:53 am
Nice “find” Raoul. This is a really good scoop.
Comment — April 17, 2007 @ 10:03 am
Thanks Chris!
Comment — April 17, 2007 @ 10:06 am
I’ve seen a couple of screen shots too …
I can’t wait … this is going to be a great great product when released. Zooomr is most certainly on to something here.
Comment — April 17, 2007 @ 10:26 am
Raoul. You’re cool. And way to go on pressing Kris. He’s a hard nut to crack.
Comment — April 17, 2007 @ 10:45 am
Interesting to know
And yes, I ‘found’ that screenshot too earlier!
Comment — April 17, 2007 @ 10:51 am
@Trevor: Kris is a really nice guy. He’s just really busy, that’s all.
Comment — April 17, 2007 @ 12:18 pm
“Zooomr’s Mark III inside info
ComeAccross dishes the inside news on the release of Zooomr Mark III.”
Comment — April 17, 2007 @ 1:08 pm
eewww, your breath is baited?
Comment — April 17, 2007 @ 1:32 pm
@froof: LOL!
Sorry, messed up on the spelling there. Will fix it right now.
Comment — April 17, 2007 @ 1:37 pm
Thanks for the inside news. I’m eagerly waiting for Mark III. Congrats, the digg crowd is rushing here.
Comment — April 17, 2007 @ 6:30 pm
[...] Zooomr’s Mark III inside info Filed under: Uncategorized — recar @ 11:16 pm Zooomr’s Mark III inside info ComeAccross dishes the inside news on the release of Zooomr Mark III.[news] [programming] [technology] [...]
Pingback — April 17, 2007 @ 7:19 pm
[...] Want to know the best part? FeedBurner’s Site Stats provides almost instant feedback on what’s going on with your site. Yesterday, one of my posts about Zooomr got dugg, and made it to Digg’s front page. It was already more than three hours since it had been dugg, yet Google Analytics provided me with no data to indicate the Digg traffic. FeedBurner was right on top of it. I’d been getting data almost instantly and could monitor the traffic very nicely. This has been the case all along. I’ve been using Google Analytics since May of 2006, and I knew there was a significant lag, so I couldn’t use it to monitor my live traffic — I could only tell what happened to my site afterwards. [...]
Pingback — April 18, 2007 @ 7:50 am
[...] Eigentlich war der Release vor einigen Wochen geplant. Doch die externen Datenspeicher waren zu langsam. Das Problem scheint umfangreicher zu sein, wie aus diesem Post zu entnehmen ist. Doch es gibt Hoffnung: [...]
Pingback — April 20, 2007 @ 11:22 am
[...] This morning, Zooomr passed right over the 1,000,000 photo mark and kept on going. Sweet stuff! Kris, Tom, congratulations! Here’s the 1 millionth photo. This is a nice surprise that paves the way to the re-launch of Zooomr’s third release, Mark III, around May 1st. [...]
Pingback — April 22, 2007 @ 10:28 am
Is ship really appropriate for a web app? Anyway I hope this becomes finalized soon.
Comment — April 27, 2007 @ 8:43 pm
[...] Find out more here… [...]
Pingback — May 23, 2007 @ 8:27 pm
[...] What’s up with Zooomr’s Mark III? (this one made the front page at Digg) [...]
Pingback — June 8, 2007 @ 8:01 pm
[...] The pages on the site were viewed over 73,000 times, and if you’ll look below, you’ll see that my most-read pages to date are the index (as expected), the one about Zooomr’s Mark III release, the review of the HP laptops, my caveat emptor post about Davison Inventegration, and my post about our Betta fish. I’m truly amazed that I still get traffic to the Betta fish post. It was originally an article at Amalgamy, and I ported it over in 2006. I wrote it back in 2004, and we don’t even have Betta fish any more. [...]
Pingback — July 2, 2007 @ 7:01 pm
[...] dishes the inside news on the release of Zooomr Mark III.read more | digg [...]
Pingback — September 19, 2007 @ 4:43 pm