CairoZoom 3.0

When our sister site CairoZoom launched just over three years ago, the Cairo Scene was in shock. Previous event imagery was exclusive to rich old business men and their other rich old businessmen friends, standing like terracotta warriors on the front-line of a white collar war. If you looked closely, you might just be able to see a faint lipstick stain on the corner of one of their white collars, in a magazine that just so happened to be lying around six months after an event. Shock! Is he having an affair? Is that from his wife? No, wait, it's just a pixelated picture. On the other end of the scale, Facebook was inundated with blurry nightlife pictures from cheap digital cameras that made everyone look like they were partying it up in a war-stricken Kosovan tranny bar.

So CairoZoom snapped up some of the country's best nightlife photographers, trained them in a top secret location, as they went through vigorous tests to make them the ultimate nightlife ninjas. When the pictures went up on to the world wide interwebz after the first event (Vendome @ Buddha-Bar), eyes were agape and mouths were as open wide as the legs on show: girls were straddling guys, guys were straddling other guys, DJs were straddling Buddhas... It was beautiful chaos and, for the first time in Egypt, it depicted what was really going on behind the guest list.

The album went up, but then the phone calls started coming in from young kids with curfews and big kids with wives... "Leh 7atet sourty 3al net! Eh daa... Law sama7t, sheel sorty delwa2ty...Meraty hatshoof!" Ironically, they were all posing for the cameras. By the time the next week came and another debauched album went live, the phones started ringing again. We buried our heads thoroughly in our hands and were about to pull the plug. Maybe Egypt's social scene wasn't ready to have a mirror held up to them just yet? Then something strange happened: "Alo, leh sourty mish 3al net?"

And just like that CairoZoom.com blew up, everyone wanted to be caught by one of our ninja photographers, and everyone wanted a shiny new CairoZoom profile picture.

CairoZoom has developed a lot since then. The quality of the pictures make it some of the best nightlife photography in the world. It's developed a sense of culture, capturing high-brow cultural events, as well as low-brow shenanigans. They’ve added tagging and profiles. The CZ cameras have caught some pretty phenomenal moments over the years, from secret lion fights to Kylie Minogue at the Pyramids and the largest quantity of DJs ever pictured on one site. There must be a Guinness Record for that.

The site had some problems though. It got old and a bit wrinkly. It lagged and made it too slow for people to indulge in the lightening-speed voyeurism Egypt demanded, because you'd feel like a bit of a creep spending half an hour trying to look at strangers drunk, on a beach. As such, and as always, CairoZoom adapted.