Vodacom bullish on Social media, takes a controlling stake in Zoopy
Last year we reported that Vodacom, One of of South Africa’s leading mobile operators had invested in South African social media company Zoopy. My Sources tell me that Vodacom has recently increased their investment in Zoopy, taking up a controlling stake of 75%. To date i have not seen any press release so consider this a scoop.
Vodacom, who seem to be heavily investing in innovation and new services were recently presented with the New Telecommunications service award of the year for The grid.
Zoopy recently revamped their website, Have since then upgraded some of their core technologies. Such as the media players and audio players.
New features of the video player
- The control bar now blinds down out of sight when you move your mouse off the player.
- You can now embed the player with blue, green or red trackbars. To do this, simply add ‘pcolor=blue‘, ‘pcolor=green‘ or ‘pcolor=red‘ to flashvars in the video’s embed code. As always, you can get video embed code on all video viewing pages on Zoopy.
- When embedding a video, you can choose whether or not the video should start automatically, without the user pressing Play. To start the video automatically, add ‘autoStart=1‘ to flashvars in the video’s embed code.
- The video player can now be embedded at much smaller sizes (we’d recommend 200px wide as the minimum). To change the size, edit the video’s embed code and replace width and height with the desired values.
- Replaying videos is now much easier. There is a replay button in the control bar during play and on the related videos screen when a video finishes.
New features of the audio player
- A new, slimmed-down design
- The player now contracts and expands when stopped or playing respectively.
- Like our new video player, the colour of the trackbars can be controlled by adding ‘pcolor=red’, ‘pcolor=green’ or ‘pcolor=blue’ as an embed parameter
- When embedding, you can now control whether or not the audio clip starts playing automatically by adding ‘autoStart=1′ as an embed parameter
The increase does show some confidence by vodacom in social media and Zoopy and it seems that Vodacom is willing to invest in innovation. Though since the initial investment of 40%, last year, I have yet to see any direct benefits to vodacom in terms of technology from the investment. Other then increased usage on 3G/Edge usage. I wonder though, how will Zoopy be integrated into vodacom’s mobile service offerings if at all?
Popularity: 44% [?]
I’ve noticed that Zoopy is also now playing back videos in a much larger screen (YouTube seems to be doing the same these days). Does this affect quality when video-makers save/publish a video at the old size (450 x 370 pixels, I think it is)?
Love the special Valentine’s graphic theme at the top of your post Ismail
Thanks for sharing the news with your readers.
Our blog post here: http://blog.zoopy.com/?p=187
Hi Galen
At the moment, we display all user videos at 570px wide. The player height is then calculated based on the dimensions of the uploaded video to maintain the correct ratio.
If you upload a video that is less than 570px wide, we do zoom the video slightly so that it plays at 570px. The Flash module that does this works quite well, in the same way that you can happily watch most Zoopy and YouTube videos full-screen.
@jason lol, couldnt resist the little heart!
Keep on truckin!
lol, thanks for using some pics from my Zoopy debut
Nice Article.
Cheers
Startups like blueworld.co.za and zoopy.com will definitely lead the way for other web2.0 startups in other African countries.
I just read an article on why Nigerian startups don’t get funded
http://www.startupsnigeria.com/2008/11/why-are-nigerian-start-ups-left-out-of-vc-funding/
I think they need to look at what the SA startups are doing right and try and improve their services. Of course Social media is bullish in Africa due to growing number of Internet users in the content and also new and now affordable Internet connection and ICT services.