Archive for February, 2012|Monthly archive page
High speed downloads for all Zamzar subscribers
Filed under: Announcements, Features | Tags: cloudfront, download, high speed
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We’re excited to announce the launch of high speed downloads for converted files for all Zamzar subscribers.
If you signup, you can now download converted files from Zamzar up to 5 times quicker than previously. This applies to any newly converted file, and also any file you have already converted.
If you’re still a free Zamzar user, what are you waiting for ? Sign up today to experience this high-speed goodness !
What do you get ?
Benefits for our subscribers include:
- Super fast downloads – We use a Content Delivery Network (CDN) to give you high speed downloads
- More reliable downloads – No more annoying “download interrupted” messages
- Better safety for your data – Files are now backed up across multiple devices in multiple secure datacenters
Fast. Very Fast.
If we applied this speed increase to other areas of human endeavour:
- Running the 100 metres would take 1.9 seconds
- You could travel to the moon in half a day (Apollo 11 took 3 days 4hours)
- Formula One cars would travel at over 1000 miles per hour
If you’re already a Zamzar subscriber why not go convert a file now to try it out, or if you want to dig deeper read on to understand all the geeky details of how we did this …
The Geeky Details
Still with us ? Ok, so to achieve this speed increase our engineers have taken advantage of some technical wizardry from the folks at Amazon.com.
All converted files from Zamzar account holders are now stored in a highly secure Content Delivery Network provided by Amazon – This network (known as CloudFront) employs a network of edge locations that cache copies of files closer to wherever you guys are on the internet.
CloudFront then ensures that any download requests for those files are served by the closest edge location. As a result, requests travel shorter distances which means that file downloads get delivered to you far more quickly.
This means that if you happen to be located in a picturesque city such as Frankfurt instead of your computer having to send requests across the Atlantic to download a file from Zamzar:
… you now automatically get the file from a server nearby:
CloudFront has effectively given Zamzar edge locations all over the globe, from San Jose to Singapore, so no matter where you are you should see a significant boost in performance:
We hope you enjoy these improvements, all of which are available immediately.
Happy Converting (and downloading !)
The Zamzar Team.
Help Harry Help Others
Zamzar is excited to announce our support for the Help Harry Help Others campaign. The campaign is supported by the Cancer Research UK charity and was inspired by a young man named Harry Moseley.
Harry was diagnosed with an inoperable brain tumour at the age of 7. Sadly he died when he was 11, but not before he had raised £500,000 through his “Help Harry Help Others” campaign as part of his wish to rid the world of brain tumours. Zamzar is proud to support his campaign, having donated financially and helped to raise awareness of the cause, and we hope that some of you may wish to get involved too.
A group of 7 men and women are aiming to run all 430 miles of the London Underground in their pyjama bottoms to raise money and awareness for Harry’s campaign. They are running 25 half marathons every week and 4 marathons over the course of 6 months. So far they have raised over £7,000 but they are keen to raise more, and have issued an invitation for you to join them, wherever you are in the world !
International Tube Run for Harry Moseley
On Saturday March 10th Harry’s Tube Runners are organising the International Tube Run for Harry Moseley.
If you live within close proximity to a tube, subway or tram and can walk or run just one mile then they woud love for you to get involved.
Why not invite friends and family to join you, get your pyjama bottoms on, get sponsored and head down to your local tube / subway / tram stop and walk or run a mile ?
So far there are runners signed up from London, Delhi, Auckland, New York, Madrid, Sydney, Hong Kong, Chennai, Barcelona and Bangalore. The Zamzar staff will be getting their own PJ bottoms on and running part of the London Underground for the cause !
For more information visit the tube runner blog, drop them an email with photos of your efforts, or visit the donation page. We hope you can join us on 10th March in raising money and awareness for this incredible charity.
Convert files by email
Filed under: Announcements, Features | Tags: convert files email
Comments (2) 
We’re really excited to announce a brand new feature which allows you to convert files by email.
Instead of using the Zamzar website to convert files you can send files from your email account to:
format @zamzar.com
(e.g. pdf@zamzar.com, gif@zamzar.com etc)
… we’ll convert them in lightning quick speed and email back a link to your converted file.
So what’s the beef ?
Let’s look at what you can do:
- Email any file which is a supported “from” format on our conversion types page to the format you want it converted to – For example to convert a PDF into a Word Doc (.doc file) email your PDF file to doc@zamzar.com
- Forward email which has been sent by friends and colleagues to the email address of the format you want it converted to.
- Send multiple files in the same email message for conversion (as many as you want if they are within the size limits)
- Convert an email attachment into multiple different formats, by specifying multiple “to” addresses (e.g. jpg@zamzar.com, gif@zamzar.com).
- Convert files sent to your iPhone, iPad, Android or Blackberry directly from your mobile device using email.
- Convert videos into a format you can watch directly on your iPad or iPhone using our new streaming support.
You can read more about the details of this new service on our FAQ page.
Any limits ?
Most email clients only allow you to send attachments up to 25 MB in size, so limits for the size of file you can email us to convert are less than on the main Zamzar site. At the time of launch they are as follows (per file, not per message):
Free Service – up to 1 MB
Basic Plan – up to 5 MB
Pro Plan – up to 15 MB
Business Plan – up to 25 MB
Email and the dinosaurs
Email is old, maybe as old as the dinosaurs.
Even though many of us have a love / hate relationship with email, we all use it to stay connected. Here are some interesting statistics:
- If email was a country, its 1.4 billion users would make it the largest in the world. Bigger than China, bigger than the USA and EU combined.
- 247 billion emails are sent each day, or one every 0.00000035 seconds.
- In the time it takes you to read this sentence, some 20 million emails entered cyberspace.
Even if you send us just one email we’d be delighted. We’d also scan it for attachments and convert them.
We hope you like the new service 
Happy email converting !
The Zamzar Team.
Stream converted videos and audio to your iPhone, iPad and iPod
Filed under: Announcements, Features | Tags: mobile, stream convert video audio ipad iphone ipod
Comments (1) 
We’re excited to announce that you can now use Zamzar to stream converted video and audio files to your iPhone, iPad and iPod.
So if you get stuck in a hole with an odd format you need to view whilst you’re out and about you can just “Zamzar it” into a format which you can stream immediately.
We even offer optimised output formats for different devices – just select “iPhone”, “iPad” or “iPod” as the to format for your conversion and if it’s a video file we’ll make sure it looks great on screen for you:
Why not check it out ? Maybe you want to listen to a famous Winston Churchill speech or view a trailer about a rabbit with attitude.
As more people switch to using mobile devices to view and interact with their files we hope this is a useful addition to your toolkit.
We also have more exciting mobile announcements just around the corner – stay tuned !
Happy Converting,
The Zamzar Team.
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