Zooming in on Innovation

Innovation is what the industry is all about, and I am always amazed at the creative people I meet. Last November I spoke to Amazon Camp in Toronto, and after the presentation one developer stuck around for a few minutes. Id like to show you a site that I built. He proceeded to show me a beta version of www.zoomii.com, which was simply amazing.

Zoomii just launched! Check it out for yourself: especially the user interface. Zoom in and out, pan around, and try clicking on the arrows in the headers of each book shelf. Chris Thiessen wrote this to resemble a physical book store, and even displays book images in a manner that shows their size in relation to the books next to them.

All this thanks to the power of Web Services: imagine trying to accomplish this in the bad old days of JavaScript feeds. Chris told me I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t even have tried to build Zoomii without Amazon EC2 and Amazon S3; it would have looked too expensive, too daunting. And, of course, Zoomii couldn’t exist without access to a dataset like that. It looks like Amazon is growing a good business with its web services, but it’s providing far more value than it captures–you changed the equation for a lot startups and other projects.

Thanks Chris! Im certain that others will find your site as engaging as I do.

You can read more about Zoomii in detail in Chriss blog at blog.zoomii.com.

— Mike

Modified 6/2/2022 – In an effort to ensure a great experience, non-working links and images in this post have been updated or removed from the original post.