Zoom23 Launched!

In October of this year I joined a very interesting project that I've been contributing all of my free time to. The project is called Zoom23 and can be found at www.zoom23.com.

The basic idea is very simple: "Reinvent online shopping".

These days you can buy almost anything online, if not everything. But the online shopping experience is far from shopping in brick and mortar stores. This is especially true if all you want is just to browse products, hoping that something will catch your eye. It is no fun to be clicking through pages of products and being flooded with lots of text that you don't really care for, when all you want is to have a look. Zoom23 displays all items in a slide show format, which is a pretty exceptional approach to displaying products online.

The second new experience that Zoom23 brings are social networking features that enhances the shopping experience. No longer will you be alone when shopping online. Zoom23 will enable you to share your favorite items and give recommendations to other through voting on items and sharing personal slide shows.

Do you often shop online at Amazon, Ebay or Yahoo? Then you can enjoy all the benefits of these stores while having unified access to all the products displayed in a unique way. This is because all of the products on Zoom23 come from these three popular online stores, with more stores to come in the future.

There is still a lot of work to be done especially in adding more social networking features, higher data quality and tighter integration with the original online store, but already now you can go to www.zoom23.com and easily shop for Christmas presents for your family and friends.

I'll come back to this project in the future and will write a little about all the Java, Ruby on Rails, PHP and Ajax that we used to put the site together.