We’ve got some exciting news. Exciting for us, our existing users and the many new users who are still about to discover Zoopy.

Over to the official press release for the juicy bits:

South African media sharing site Zoopy.com has entered into an international partnership deal with leading online video distribution and analytics service, TubeMogul. Zoopy is the first African company to partner with the Silicon Valley company, alongside media heavyweights such as YouTube, Microsoft, and MySpace.

Brett Wilson, CEO and founder of TubeMogul, comments: “Zoopy provides advertisers and content creators a unique opportunity to reach the African continent, which is obviously exciting.”

Some coverage of the news out there:

• Distribution tracking added for Zoopy, Africa’s most popular video site - TubeMogul Blog
• Zoopy goes global - ITWeb
• Zoopy signs international deal - MyBroadband
• Zoopy inks international deal with TubeMogul - Bandwidth Blog
• Zoopy partners up with international TubeMogul - TechMasai

More

• My Digital Life
• Yudi Rambaran

Zoopy’s new Java application makes it even easier for you to share your videos, photos and audio clips from your mobile phone. The J2ME application, which is about 260KB in size, gives you access to your Zoopy profile on the move, allowing you to upload your own media, search other members’ media and browse the latest Zoopy TV episodes.

To download the app, you can do one of the following:

• Point your phone’s browser to http://m.zoopy.com/app.
• SMS mobile to 39626. You will be sent a link to a page on Zoopy’s mobi site, where you can download the application. There is a once-off charge of 50c for the SMS to be sent to you.

We’ve made the application super simple to use, with a fresh and friendly interface for you to enjoy anywhere, anytime:

As always, your feedback will help us improve the application. If you have any at all, please send an email to mobilefeedback@zoopy.com. As we continue to improve the application and release updates, your installation will ask if you’d like to upgrade to the latest version, and will assist you in doing so.

As we’ve grown and moulded Zoopy over the last two years, your constant feedback has helped us make more informed decisions about the environment you see and use when visiting Zoopy.

We’ve had loads of feedback regarding one of the media types at Zoopy and, after looking at this from all angles, we’ve decided to make a change to Zoopy that we’d like you to know about. If you’ve written a note at Zoopy before, you would have already heard from us about this over the last couple of weeks.

Until now you’ve been able to add media to your Zoopy profile in four ways: by uploading videos, photos and audio clips - or writing notes. If we look back at the purpose of notes, these were meant to be a way to add context to your other media. So for example, a holiday to Singapore may include a note about the trip as a whole, giving background and details on the 14 videos and 90 photos you uploaded from the holiday. In reality, almost all of our users are doing this via the descriptions that appear underneath their videos, photos and audio clips anyway, with the fourth media type not really being used for this purpose.

What has happened, if we look at the popularity of notes (both in creating them and viewing them), is that notes have become an easy way to add spam to the Zoopy community. Notes are also the only media type that couldn’t be embedded, whereas videos, photos and audio have constantly given action to the idea of media sharing that Zoopy is all about, by users embedding the other three media types in their blogs, on news sites, on corporate pages and brand micro sites.

Taking this all into account, we’ve decided to remove notes as a media type on Zoopy. If you’ve never used notes on Zoopy before, this won’t affect you at all. And if you were a fan of notes, you can still continue to upload videos, photos and audio and include any relevant text in the descriptions or comments.

This change will help add more focus to the Zoopy community as a whole, allowing us to concentrate on shareable and embeddable media types that (when compared to the majority of notes) contribute better quality content for visitors and other users to enjoy.

If you’d like to share your thoughts with us about this, please mail us at info@zoopy.com.

While video is just one of the media types that our users can upload, share and view on Zoopy, it’s obviously the one that takes the largest amount of our attention. There are endless dimensions to video, from formats and codecs, to distribution, viewing, advertising and analytics platforms. Recording, uploading, downloading, streaming, live, on demand, mobile, HD, IPTV, the list goes on - and what an exciting list it is!

As we continue to grow Zoopy and Zoopy TV, we’re constantly doing our best to stay ahead of the game in delivering a quality product across the board, imagining, thinking and rethinking as often as we can. This is why we’re following up our visit to Streaming Media West last year with the Streaming Media Europe conference in London this week. It promises to be an insightful examination of where the video industry is at right now and where it’s heading at the speed of light. Tally-ho!

I’m excited to introduce two new features which will enhance video viewing and sharing on Zoopy.

Pseudo streaming

Pseudo streaming allows you to jump ahead to a section of a video you’re watching that you have not yet downloaded or buffered. This technology saves you bandwidth and time, because you no longer have to wait for the video to download up to the point that you’re interested in viewing.

In the video below, I demonstrate how to skip ahead on the video timeline:

Time URLs

Making use of this technology, you are now able to send your friends to a particular point in a video when you send them a Zoopy link. To do this, all you need to know is the point in time you’d like to highlight. You can then use our enhanced Quick URL tool, which appears in the right column on all video viewing pages.

The video below demonstrates how to create a Time URL, and shows how a video will skip to the selected point if you paste the Time URL into your browser:

Please note that pseudo streaming and Time URLs are only available for videos uploaded on or after 8 July 2009. We are in the process of preparing all previously uploaded videos for this functionality.