ProjectX Blog

I just thought I provide a quick summary of various features on ZoomIn.

• Find an address or a place
• Explore nearby places

<!—li>
Email a place to a friend
</li–>

• Make a comment about a place [members only]
• Send a private message to a friend [members only]
• Upload a photo to a place [members only]
• Create a new place [members only]

• Join a group [members only]

• Create a new group [members only]
• Add a place to a group [members only]

• Upload a photo of yourself [members only]

Big news today that New Zealand’s telco – Telecom has been forced by Govt to unbundle the local loop. The move has already taken $800m off their share price in Australia.

Finally, we might be able to get affordable high speed broadband in NZ.

A big thank you to the government for making the first move. But, what about Mobile phone pricing ??

As an entrepreneur, I have lots of ideas to create businesses using mobile technology. Unfortunately, the carriers are charging fat margins on their services. As a result, there is no incentive for me to build on any ideas. We only have a few value add services on the phones at the moment like text banking. I’m sorry, but in India 5 years ago we had text banking, sms chat, live feeds from the major portals, loan approvals and more. We’re falling behind the rest of the world!

That’s enough ranting from me.

John

We’ve added another new feature – Place counts.

Now you can see how popular various places are on the site.

e.g.

<font size=”+2″>Akaroa Rental Homes</font>

Added 03/05/2006 by Nobsie. This page had 2 visits today.

As always we appreciate your feedback. Drop us an email if you have any comments or suggestions.

John-Daniel Trask has just written a post on Zoomin. John-Daniel was asking about some information to help budding entrepreneuers. I thought I’d offer some suggestions to help get kickstart people into starting a new business.

If you’re thinking of starting a business there is plenty of organisations in Wellington that can assist. Here are a few links to get you started.

• Business incubators to help you turn ideas to reality: Creative HQ, Fashion HQ, T-up
• Business Help: Biz Wellington, Positively Wellington Business, Business Mentors
• VC Funding – The money: Movac, No 8. Ventures
• Govt Grants – Put your tax dollars to work: Foundation for Research Science and Technology, NZ Trade and Enterprise
• Networking – Connect with other businesses: Unlimited Potential, Wellington Chamber of commerce

That’ll get you started.

Remember to talk to lots of people, networking and relationships are the key.

Come on Wellington get started, become the next Trade Me !

Hi Everybody,

I just wanted to tell you all that now you can send private messages to any member of the ZoomIn community. Simply locate the profile of the person you want to talk to and click on “Mail this person” action.

To read your own messages click on the little envelope icon located in the top right corner along your sign-in status. If the envelope has a number next to it then you’ve got that many new messages waiting for you.

You can also access your inbox and sent messages from your profile page.

cheers,
tomek

Woo Hoo!

We passed 1000 users on Sunday morning – The 1000th user was fodd.

The site is growing fast, we passed 1200 users today, looks like we’ll hit 2000 users by the end of the week!

A big thanks to all our users!

We’ve just been included in Max Newman’s cool sites of the week.

A big Thank You to Max for the inclusion.

A warm welcome to our new xtra users.

We really appreciate your feedback, so let us konw if you have any comments or suggestions.

We’re closing in the 1000th user to join ZoomIn.
You’ll need to sign to be able to add places, photos and comments.

Go New Zealand!

A special thanks goes out to all our users for their support and encouragement.
We’re working hard at building the best maps site for New Zealand.

Team ZoomIn

Do you have a bunch of addresses on your site that you’d like to have maps for? Put a link on your site to zoomin.

See the Zoomin Developer Documentation.

Tom Beard’s has been cooking some Mash – My first mashup – <a href=
“http://wellurban.org.nz/maps/flickr_mashup_v0.5.html”>Tom’s Flickr mashup

For all you developers thinking about cooking some mash, here’s some ideas:

What about:

• Show region news articles
• Show all the school fairs / garage sales
• Show sports cancellations by sports field / parks
• Show historical journeys or trails
• Build a treasure hunt or obstacle course