We’re lifting the lid on some functionality that we’ve been working for a while to make it easier to browse content on ZoomIn. For the first release (currently in “Garage Mode”) we’re focusing on browsing photos. So now you can look at all of the photos around any location, as you zoom and pan around the photos will constantly update.

To get the browse photos explorer either click on  explore photos on the home page or search for any address or place and expand the results box to reveal the Explore photos link.

We have two modes of browsing Photo bar and Thumbnails.

Photo Bar style

Browse the photos via the photo bar.

Thumbnail style

View all of the photos on the map.

Explore Photos is in Garage mode, which means we’ll be tinkering and improving over the next few weeks.

We appreciate your suggestions and feedback, so let us know what you think.

How cool is this ????

Here’s a look at some ZoomIn traffic from last Sunday. The video was based on the realtime visualisation of ZoomIn using the glTrail tool by fudgie.org. (They also make the awesome gltail tool)

Who knew ZoomIn would build its own deathstar !

The team from ActionThis have created a new product called Runtime Page Optimizer that will dynamically optimise your webpages at runtime. It looks like a fantastic product to solve a lot of the problems highlight by the NZ Homepage hall of shame.

Runtime Page Optimiser features:

• Combines all javascript and css on the fly
• Generates CSS sprites on the fly
• No code modifications required!
• Runs on ASP.net 2 and and IIS 6/7
• Compatible with IE6/7 , Firefox 2/3, Safari 3

The product is currently in Beta and from the demos it already looking really great.

Well done guys, I look forward to seeing this product hit 1.0!

In the latest in the speeding up NZ Internet series, I’ve just finished retesting the web performance of top 75 NZ homepages. I’m in the processing of processing all of the results and generating the tables.

I’ve capture more data to include DSL download time, caching stats of the pages and total number of HTTP requests.

One month on here are the key stats:

Averages:

• 305.1K for the Homepage size (Up from 304.9K)
• 50 secs for estimated download time for dialup.
• 6.81 secs for download time on DSL
• 56 HTTP requests / files per page
• 20% of the homepage in size is cached. (Indicating bad caching)
• 76% of HTTP request are rechecked against cache (Indicating bad caching)
• 53.8 Yslow score

Other stats:

• 49% of websites use no web compression
• Only two sites have homepages over 1000K
• Top YSlow site has rating of 85
• Worst YSlow has a rating of 29

I’ll post the complete findings shortly.

New iPhone 3G features

• 3g - Cool
• GPS - Awesome
• App store - Fantastic
• Price - Brilliant
• Available in NZ - Can’t wait

So what’s wrong with this picture ????

5 hours of talk time from 10 hours

I had an interesting chat with Jason Roks over the weekend, who was here for the Xmedia labs.

He made this comment that stuck with me.

The only people who benefit financially from torrenting is the telecom’s companies.

ie. The content provider doesn’t get anything from torrents, only the comms companies get money for usage of bandwidth.

It makes you think…

When you have ‘cost per Gb’ charging system, its hard for companies to make money for offering downloadable content.

Om Malik has just wrote a post about broadband usage in London. In London there are a numer of providers and they have quality services for WI-FI, Broadband and 3G. Here’s the full report from Ofcom .

In London:

* 40 percent of people watch TV or video content online.
* 20 percent make VoIP calls.
* 32 percent are using their mobile phones to access the Internet.
* 19 percent listen to audio content on their mobiles.

The evidence is mounting better broadband and mobile services will result in more usage and more opportunities for companies / content providers to create new revenue streams. Let’s hope things will change for the better this decade!