It's my sad duty to announce that Zoomorama is currently filling for Chapter 11 (Franklin did post already on the corporate blog).

Paying customers that have not yet got in touch with me are urged to do so ASAP (olivierg AT zoomorama DOT com). FYI, the full service will be maintained for some time, and we are currently looking into case by case solutions.

The last months have been harsh, after two incredible years, but I'm grateful I had the opportunity to be a part of that journey (credit goes to my friend David Marteau for initially recommending me, and to Franklin Servan-Schreiber for not only making his dreams true but as well feed ours), and I'm grateful I had the chance to work with that handful of incredible people, who had the vision and the guts to wrap-up such a crazy tech beast: a freakin' full-blown browser able to render ZML (an ad-hoc mix of HTML5/SVG/XUL), complete with a css style-engine (yeah, css-transitions inside) and javascript seamless integration, a freakin' CDN app (now known as CirruxCache) along with highly scalable web-services, and a mind-blowing WYSIWYG editor, known as Zoomcreator 2.

In order of appearance, the technical cast was:

  • Chief Architect: David Marteau a.k.a. "The XUL Master", responsible for writing large chunks of the browser code, Zoomcreator 2, and all imaging technologies related stuff
  • Designer: Daniel de Fuenmayor a.k.a. "El Esthetician", for all the great drawings and other fun stuff with colors
  • CTO: Olivier Gambier a.k.a. "Coach, Coach!" - well, that's me - I wrote the other half of the browser, the early version of the webservices, and was responsible for global design and technical lead of the project, along with managing clients, projects, team, the BS table, angry girlfriends, world, dog
  • Do-it-all-whatever-it-is-it-must-be-fun: Paul Chavard a.k.a. "Le Chavardeur", first extraordinary user of whatever we developed, inventor of incredible and unexpected ways to (mis)use things, and best-friday-night-trolling-performance for six months in a row
  • Network Engineer: Samuel Alba a.k.a. "Gamin", responsible for master-minding world class web-services and content delivery architecture, along with providing invaluable advises on everything network related
  • Web Developer/Marketing: Emmanuel Tabard a.k.a. "El Selector", all-web thingies, and crazy-SQL-queries consultant
  • XUL Developer: Laurent Jouanneau a.k.a. "Le Rageux", for ripping out Gecko's guts, and best-male-ranting-vocalizer-desktop-smashing revelation

And I think I should mention as well Anne-Céline Jeanneau (and obviously Franklin), who, while obviously not part of the "technical" staff, are the persons without whom there would never have been a technical team in the first place... 

What will happen now?

Samuel has been hired by Akamai (surprise!), and Paul by FeedBooks.

The others have great projects in mind (more on that later), and there is a huge pool of talent in that team.

So, if you consider building a startup, have challenging job propositions, are looking for technical advices or contracting development, or simply connecting, drop me a note.

EOZ

*shrugs*