ProjectX Blog

As spotted on this years Where 2.0 2007 site

We’ve added a couple of cool features to zoomin.co.nz:

Private Places – now you can set a place that you created to be private, which means that only you will be able to see it.
Or you can set the place to be visible only to a certain group.

To do this, go to a place that you have created (or create a new place), and look on the right hand side of the page. You can alter the privacy settings under the ‘Privacy Settings’ heading.

Video Embedding – now you can embed Youtube and Google Video videos in your comments and place descriptions.

To insert a youtube video:

• find the video in youtube
• copy the URL of the page, it should be something like

• paste it into your comment text, between some youtube square brackets, like this:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=46LQd9dXFRU[/youtube]

You can do the same thing with google videos, by adding something like this to your comments:

[google]http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=4147604860974111184[/google]

You can see an example of an embedded video at http://zoomin.co.nz/nz/wellington/rongotai/-wellington+airport/

We just added a tag cloud to zoomIn.co.nz. Now you can see all the tags we have.

One cool feature if hover over the tag you’ll get a tool tip of how many places feature that tag.

Enjoy!

I wanted to have a look at drilling into some of the stats of popular places on the site. Here are a few of the various popularity stats from zoomIn.co.nz.

1) Top 25 users of all time ranked by popularity of places that have created.

1. projectx
2. fourcorners
3. viewauckland
4. capital_soccer
5. buses_wgtn
6. benn
7. dineout
8. wotzon
9. willisst
10. tomek
11. tagg
12. dayout
13. wellingtonnz
14. tom
15. travelwise
16. cubast
17. divemaster
18. jac
19. jamespole
20. chart
21. seanduggan
22. nik
23. nzcoffee
24. shell
25. soccer2

2) Top 25 users of all time ranked by relative popularity of places. (ie the popularity of the places / number of places – minimum of 5 user places created to qualify)

1. tomek ( 1165 hits per place )
2. capital_soccer ( 565 hits per place )
3. staticnz ( 506 hits per place )
4. sminnee ( 466 hits per place )
5. willisst ( 364 hits per place )
6. milton ( 350 hits per place )
7. tom ( 320 hits per place )
8. hadinnerjoy ( 280 hits per place )
9. suzette ( 263 hits per place )
10. dubh ( 252 hits per place )
11. hindins ( 241 hits per place )
12. rosslin ( 226 hits per place )
13. barnaclebarnes ( 221 hits per place )
14. nedbedrock ( 219 hits per place )
15. grokbeer ( 218 hits per place )
16. ptorrsmith ( 209 hits per place )
17. dayout ( 193 hits per place )
18. wellingtonnz ( 191 hits per place )
19. nik ( 186 hits per place )
20. surreal ( 186 hits per place )
21. cubast ( 185 hits per place )
22. dingobill ( 181 hits per place )
23. threeta ( 169 hits per place )
24. businessdynamics ( 162 hits per place )
25. nzssra ( 162 hits per place )

3) Top 25 tags ranked by place popularity of tags used.

1. bay
2. food
3. park
4. restaurant
5. island
6. lake
7. cafe
8. bus
9. accomodation
10. bar
11. metlink
12. track
13. school
14. education
15. lodge
16. bed
17. breakfast
18. wine
19. motels
20. beach
21. station
22. house
23. sports
24. arts
25. nature

<center></center>

We’ve just added the latest postcodes to all the street addresses on Smaps. Now, you’ll be able to keep the postie happy when sending your trade me loot around NZ.

Rod Drury is profiled in the latest idealog. Plugs for Welly, PlanHQ and Well-Railed rails user group. Awesome!

Reuben Swartz has written a piece on ZoomIn in this weeks Infotech Zooming in on Investment after re-jig.

Thanks for the article Reuben.

The new ZoomIn is the news. Peter Griffin of NZ Herald has written a piece on the ZoomIn v2.0 – ZoomIn puts dynamic mapping on the map.

Thanks to Peter for the article.

<center></center>

Sometimes you need to take a minute to catch your breath. Its nice to stop and think about what we’ve actually acheived. It’s great to get some recognition from the industry for the hard work we’ve put in for the last 14 months. Score one for the little guys!

I want to dedicate the awards to my team. You are truly world class and it’s been my pleasure and honor to work with you.

Tomek (The Rock) Piatek – Your attention to detail and dedication to ZoomIn have been an inspiration.
Nick (Local Search) Chapman – The brains behind our search engine. Thanks for sticking with rails and making ZoomIn fast !
Ross (Map Master) Lin – Your map fu is superior! Thanks for making ZoomIn maps the best looking maps in NZ!
Ben (Javascript Master) Nolan – You took the idea of ZoomIn and made it real ! People are finally starting to get it!

Thanks for doing the hard yards guys and thanks for making it FUN!

Also thanks to all support from everyone in and around Creative HQ.

Finally, a big thank you to Lulu – my partner. Thank you for the support and putting up with all the long hours, the weekends, and the endless ranting about ZoomIn and ProjectX.

Its been a big night – Thank you and Good Night ! – Go ZoomIn !

The 2nd batch of students started at Creative HQ today. We now have 8 students working for various companies.

We are planning a number of seminars for the students over the summer.

<font color=”blue”>Stephen Cheng</font> <font color=”red”>Trade Me</font> <font color=”gold”>Start-up culture</font> <font color=”green”>ProjectX</font> <font color=”blue”>Rod Drury</font> <font color=”red”>Ruby on Rails</font> <font color=”blue”>Hayden Vink</font> <font color=”green”>High end websites</font> <font color=”blue”>Tomek Piatek</font> <font color=”green”>Weta Digital</font> <font color=”gold”>Writing better resumes</font>
<font color=”blue”>Paul Gold</font> <font color=”red”>Code Management</font>
<font color=”blue”>Milton Ngan</font> <font color=”gold”>Incubators</font>
<font color=”red”>Hansel</font>
<font color=”green”>Entrepreneurship</font> <font color=”blue”>Nat Torkington</font>
<font color=”gold”>Distributed systems</font>
<font color=”blue”>Rowan Simpson</font>
<font color=”green”>Innaworks</font>
<font color=”red”>High volume databases</font>
<font color=”blue”>John Clegg</font>
<font color=”red”>Creative HQ</font>
<font color=”gold”>Interaction design</font>
<font color=”blue”>Michael Koziarski</font>
<font color=”red”>Mobile Development</font>
<font color=”blue”>Mark Robotham</font>
<font color=”green”>O’Reilly Media</font>

Its going to be a lot of fun. I’ll keep you posted.