ZoomIn…joins the already crowded photo sharing & printing space

Zoom.in is a pretty slick webservice for photosharing & printing that has recently launched out of the US. Targeted at Indians (residents & NRIs), it’s model is best described as ‘Flickr meets Shutterfly’. The webapp has a brilliant GUI design and you can upload photos (or import them from Flickr or Picassa), create albums, share with friends, order prints and have them couriered them across to any address in the US or India. In terms of core functionality, it is similar to other Indian photosharing websites (iTasveer, MeraSnap, Picsquare, Printo, Fotokraze etc); one small difference I noticed is its greater focus on viral propagation of the albums- to blogs, websites, by email etc. Their pricing is almost identical to what other services are charging. Future plans include a broad array of printed gift items and forging alliances with social networks to provide photo printing and fulfillment services to their members.

This space already has lots of players, but that hasn’t deterred ZoomIn’s founder-CEO Sunny Balijepalli in trying to make this his Next Big Thing (he earlier co-founder of Half.com, which sold to eBay for $350 million in 2000). ZoomIn believes that with that success behind them, they know how to build world-class Internet services.

The photosharing & printing space in India looks more cluttered than ever before, now with a successful US based serial entrepreneur throwing in his hat in the ring. Perceived differences amongst the various players are low; value additions (to the core service) are likely to decide which ones will stand out the most.