Zoopy, South Africa’s first video and photo sharing website has partnered with the biggest telecomm company in the area, Vodacom.  Through investment and partnership, Vodacom now has roughly 40% stake in Zoopy.

“We couldn’t have asked for a more committed, encouraging or inspiring partner,” stated Jason Elk, founder of Zoopy. “Their investment will give us the resources we need to be able to bring our users more exciting, useful and innovative additions to Zoopy features and functionality.”

Zoopy launched in March 2007 and is based in Cape Town.  Users are able to upload photos, videos, podcasts, blog posts, etc.  The Zoopy and Vodacom partnership allows the telecommunications company to enter social media market.

“Zoopy.com has established itself as a key role-player in the online social media arena and has a growing community that will now be able to grow bigger, better and faster,” stated Tlhabeli C Ralebitso, a Managing Director at Vodacom Ventures.

Zoopy is available at: http://www.zoopy.com

Development for Zoopy began around August 2006 and is created by Full House Technologies.  Zoopy is the first South-African based video and photo sharing social network.  To become a user of the website, you don’t have to be from Cape Town, so I decided to give it a test.

Registration for the website is very simple.  Below is a screen shot of the registration form:

After you complete registration, you now have the ability to upload videos, create a profile, upload an avatar picture for your profile, send messages, add friends, join groups, and view comments for your shared multimedia.  All of this information is aggregated on your dashboard page [screen shot below]:

So how is the user base you ask?  While the site went into Live Beta within the last couple days, there are some very active users.  One of them that caught my attention has the username, Diva and is uploading some 70’s American music videos like Abba’s Dancing Queen:

The videos also have an add to favorites, video rating system, and a flagging feature similar to YouTube.  Photo sharing is similar to Flickr in the sense that users can rate each others pictures and all pictures belong to certain categories.  Some categories include Fashion and Style, Food and Drink, and Nightlife and Clubs.

The user interface for Zoopy is quite easy to navigate around.  I’d say that the only drawback for Zoopy is that it is difficult to find something that distinguishes itself from other photo and video social network conglomerates out there.