ZoomIn.com was in attendance at the South Asians in Media & Marketing Association (SAMMA) Summit this weekend in New York City. What a fantastic event! The conference was sold out, and it’s easy to understand why. Hundreds of smart, well-connected South Asian professionals participating in knowledge-sharing and networking with incredible enthusiasm.

There were a number of interesting issues raised during the conference. Tariq Khan of Nationwide described how the dynamic of an American “melting pot” was evolving to resemble a “salad bowl” metaphor, where various groups “retain distinct identities”. He cited figures suggesting that 95% of the next 100 million in US population growth will be minority groups (Black, Hispanic, Asian, etc). Tariq also underscored the need for credible research to justify and validate corporate efforts to reach ethnic minorities in a targeted manner. Vivek Sharma of Rediff discussed how to make South Asian media more relevant to brand marketers by emphasizing a targeted marketing opportunity to reach a lucrative segment with superior spending power instead “an ‘Indian’ or ‘South Asian’ or ‘NRI’ segment” and benchmarking against mainstream, non-ethnic media.

ZoomIn.com co-founder and CEO Sunny Balijepalli was also on-hand to participate in a conference panel to discuss the phenomenon of Web 2.0. ZoomIn has an interesting story in that context. The ZoomIn.com web site was built as a platform to support internal and external APIs, and uses AJAX for a smoother interface, but the relevance of “web 2.0″ is not just about technology. It’s about forums and tools that empower users to create and share as they wish. To that end, ZoomIn.com provides slideshow widgets of various sizes so customers can share their public photo albums in their web pages and blogs. Further, ZoomIn is tapping into the social networking phenomenon by pursuing partnerships to provide printing services that complement the basic photo hosting services found on many social networks. ZoomIn wants to allow customers to print their photos from wherever they reside on the Internet.

You can find more info about the SAMMA conference on their website, and this post on ContentSutra.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 2nd, 2007 at 11:48 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.