Archive for July, 2008

ZoomIn Outage – Data Maintenance

Monday, July 7th, 2008

ZoomIn will be down from 6pm today (7th July 2008). We will be performing several data maintenance tasks, including updated addresses and suburbs. We apologise for any inconvenience caused.

The site should be back up within the night, after the tasks have been completed.

37 signals to drop IE 6 support

Friday, July 4th, 2008

It seems that 37 signals are dropping IE6 support. (I wish!)

Our usage on ZoomIn as follows:
IE6 24%
IE7 43%
Firefox 21%
Safari 4.5%

So we have a ways to go before IE6 support is dropped from ZoomIn !

The Google crawler is really fast!

Thursday, July 3rd, 2008



This morning I added Grow Wellington to ZoomIn and within 2 hours its has already crawled the page and added it the Google Index ! Wow thats fast. We’re used to Google indexing in about 24 hours .

Update: I’ve just noticed that Google has indexed a place Occhali Optical New Market in just over 30 minutes! Go Google Go !

Silicon Welly Represent !

Wednesday, July 2nd, 2008




Startup Magazine issue #2 is out on the stand.

Xlinks – 2 / 7 / 2008

Wednesday, July 2nd, 2008

Here are a selection of interesting links as discovered by the ProjectX team.

    Average age of TV viewer in US is 50 years old: Times they are a changing
    Added on 07/02/2008 at 02:00PM
    Visual thinking is 32000 years young
    Added on 07/02/2008 at 01:59PM

    Saying thanks in a conference presentation
    Added on 07/02/2008 at 01:51PM

    The merge of SaaS and Open source
    Added on 07/02/2008 at 01:43PM

    37 signals on the Bang and Olufsen design process
    Added on 07/02/2008 at 01:42PM

    Read Write Web on Collaborative filtering
    Added on 07/02/2008 at 01:41PM

    Extreme programming explained
    Added on 07/02/2008 at 01:40PM

    Top 10 hiring mistakes for startups
    Added on 07/02/2008 at 01:39PM

    10 brilliant social networks that you don’t know about
    Added on 07/02/2008 at 01:39PM

    37 signals – Features are a one-way street
    Added on 07/02/2008 at 01:38PM

    Working with developers in India Why whom and how
    Added on 07/02/2008 at 01:37PM

    Tech crunch – the crisis in Venture Captial
    Added on 07/02/2008 at 01:36PM

    100 vim commands every programmer should know: Ahh vi Editor of champions insane
    Added on 07/02/2008 at 01:35PM

    Parallel Computing – Why the future of computing is non algorithmic
    Added on 07/02/2008 at 01:34PM

    MooWheel and MooCirclepack for visualisations
    Added on 07/02/2008 at 01:32PM

    USC created TIE fighter hologram
    Added on 06/28/2008 at 11:25AM

    Bill Gates exit interview
    Added on 06/28/2008 at 11:23AM

    Paul Buchheit – The first thing you need to understand about humans
    Added on 06/27/2008 at 05:50PM

    Apple Oz to release downloads for Apple TV
    Added on 06/25/2008 at 09:46PM

    Virtual reality via your phone
    Added on 06/23/2008 at 11:18PM

Awesome slide deck on Image Optimisation

Wednesday, July 2nd, 2008

Here’s another awesome slide deck from the Velocity conference – Image Optimisation, 7 mistakes and how to correct them (PPT) by Stoyan Stefanov.

In his audit he has found 45.6% of the total page download size of the top 10 websites homepages are images. Here is the list of 7 tips for improving image optimisation from the slides.

  1. Use PNG’s over GIF’s – The big sites (Yahoo / Google /Blogger / MySpace / Live.com etc) could save 20% image size by using PNG’s over GIF’s.
  2. Not crushing PNG’s – Default PNG setting are not the most optimal. Using pngcrush can reduce the size of PNG’s even more.
  3. Not stripping JPEG meta data – Jpeg contain lots of meta data including in some cases thumbnails of the image and audio inside the EXIF information. (Remember thumbnails should be 3-4K in size)  Strip out all non critcial exif information using tools like jpegtrans
  4. Use Palette PNG’s instead of True colour PNGs.
  5. Avoid AlphaImageLoader, try PNG8 or at least _filter
  6. Crush generated images – GD and Imagemagick don’t always do the best job in optmising images.
  7. Use CSS sprites!

Finally Stoyan says if you optimise your images you can save 10-30% of the download size.

Bigger photos for single search results on ZoomIn

Wednesday, July 2nd, 2008




We’ve recently added bigger pictures to search results page when viewing a single place. Now you can see the pictures that have been added to ZoomIn. We’ve got over 5700 photos of different places.

Remember adding photos to your business or favourite place is good way of getting noticed.

Crime 10K – our submission to the Geo Spatial Mashup challenge

Wednesday, July 2nd, 2008


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Here is our entry to the GeoSpatial Mash-up competition.The purpose of the competition was to demostratewhat different visualisations could be achieved using maps and data from the Stats dept. like census data.


The theme for our mashup is that we chosen to show  the number of recorded offences for every 10,000 residents across New Zealand.The mashup show the number of crimes highlight by colour over the different Police regions across New Zealand.

The Mashup is built on top of Google Maps API and KML. Unfortunately it highlights some of the problems in visualising data using KML. Anytime we wanted to change the shading of the polygon we had to load another entire KMZ file. This is not the best approach in building a lean mapping application.

This highlights one of the problems with KML and provide an opportunity for us to introduce Tardis – our mapping visualiation tool. We’ve built Crime 10k Tardis version using flash, to highlight how much faster and interactive visualisation can be.


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