Mike Stopforth and Dave Duarte just released the eighth edition of their podcast, Amplitude.
The guys gave some really decent airtime to Zoopy and the South African video sharing landscape in general. Dave was quite impressed with us “mashing up videos and photo sharing in one place”, where you can “put all your multimedia in one spot”. Great summary Dave! Much more in dev at the mo and some new features rolling out over the next few weeks, ranging from new ways to handle photos and videos through to profile improvements beyond the current Media Manager overview. And of course Zoopy V2 that’s 60% complete in our Top Secret lab in the middle of the Magaliesberg 
Mike raised two interesting points during the cast that we’d like to respond to.
The first: Mike wondered what the business model behind Zoopy is. I’m more than happy to answer it here. In a word - partnerships. We’re still cementing some of these but we can say that in the near future, sponsor partners will be contributing to the community in new, exciting and interactive ways. Ways that traditional media could never allow. And with opportunities for users that would otherwise never be as involving or interesting. What we’re working towards though is a big-picture plan that extends across all kinds of social media, with a much broader community all plugging into the same mindset and neighbourhood, wherever they are. And because we’re local, we’re going to have real-world, local, virtual-to-tangible impact as part of the overall package.
The second: Mike played devil’s advocate and asked whether we (and by ‘we’ he meant general South African online peeps) actually need local destinations and services, as opposed to just using international behemoths like ‘da Tube’ and ‘da Space’. We happen to strongly believe that there’s space for ‘da Zoopy’. Dave said that his personal opinion was that there is definitely a space for South African-specific content. Mike said he was definitely on the same page.
We agree completely. But that said, there is a difference between ‘South African content’ and ‘content that interests South Africans’. Zoopy is home to both. So just because every video or photo on the homepage doesn’t necessarily feature boerewors and rugby doesn’t mean that we aren’t hosting content that is essentially ‘South African’. If a user living in Springs wants to see and share Britney shaving her head, it’s just as interesting to us and other Zoopy users as a regte egte episode of Swart Kat or Riaan Cruywagen reading the news And anyway, if we had to impose the ‘South African’ label on everything and paint ourselves into that corner, who would ever be able to tell if a video of a black labrador running on a beach or a bunch of friends dancing to some music was recorded in Blaauwberg or Beverly Hills? 
100% South African and 100% South African interest. We welcome both ends of the spectrum, and everything in between, at Zoopy.
Zoopy is home-grown and we’re flipping proud to be doing what we’re doing as South Africans. But we’re never going to tell our users what they can and can’t post (within the realms of decency of course). At the end of the day, if you’ve found Zoopy and love what our users are doing, go ahead and upload things that matter to you. That’s what user-generated content is all about. The true spirit of Web 2.0 is to create the framework and then get out of the way, to let the users take over. And that’s what we’re going to be working to give as big a platform as possible to over the next few months and years. All from our home in beautiful Cape Town of course - and that’s never going to change
Bottom line: we guide whatever we do with an easy golden rule, “just have fun”. And everything else follows from there.
Good night!
