Month: September 2007

2008 SXSW Interactive Panel Picker

Standard

Update:

The voting process for the 2008 Panel Picker closes at 11:59 pm Central Standard Time on Friday evening, September 21.
If you’re going to SxSW next year, and you think the panel I proposed is a good one, then please vote for me ;-)

___________

Check it out:
_ 2008 SXSW Interactive Panel Picker – Building a Startup You Love is Hard

After being a part of five startups over the last eight years (currently working on the sixth, which is venture funded and the most exciting but not the biggest), I’ve learned many hard lessons. I’d really like to leave people with some concrete implementable ideas on what to do, and what not to do, in order to succeed, and love what you do in the process.

Hope to see you there!!

What’s next for the Kindo Family?

Standard

Over the last month or so, our number one priority has been to release Kindo to friends, family, and early adopters (these were our Alpha and Beta releases) so that we could get as much feedback as possible to make Kindo into something people love to you use.

So far we’ve received great feedback, but there’s still loads to do!

At the moment we’re tying up some bugfixes and user interface improvements for another interim release (thanks to everyone for their feedback!), whilst working on some major new additions to Kindo, which will bring:

  1. pruning to your tree (to simplify you will only see blood relatives – think pruning a rosebush ;-)
  2. a full profile page for each family member
  3. the ability to invite your whole family from one page, or to remind family members to join Kindo!

Once we’ve done that, there are some really cool features in the pipeline which we’re not gonna talk too much about now ;-)

In the meantime, we’d love to hear more from you:

  1. What do you want to see on Kindo?
  2. What is missing from Kindo?
  3. What improvements could be made with the interface?

More soon… ;-)

Shalk Burger is so tuff…

Standard

For you rugby fans out there:

When Schalk Burger does a pushup, he isn’t lifting himself up; he’s pushing the Earth down.
When Schalk Burger goes swimming he doesn’t get wet, the water gets Schalk Burgered.
When the Tokoloshe goes to sleep every night, he checks under his bed for Schalk Burger.
Schalk Burger counted to infinity – twice.
Schalk Burger invented every colour. Except pink. Percy Montgomery invented pink.
Schalk Burger’s hand is the only hand that can beat a Royal Flush.
Schalk Burger gave Mona Lisa that smile.
Schalk Burger can slam a revolving door.
Some kids p*ss their name in the snow. Schalk Burger can p*ss his name into concrete.
Schalk Burger’s calendar goes straight from March 31st to April 2nd; No-one fools Schalk Burger .
Schalk Burger can speak Braille.
Schalk Burger’s tears cure cancer. Too bad he has never cried. Ever.
Superman owns a pair of Schalk Burger pyjamas.
Schalk Burger owns the greatest Poker Face of all-time. It helped him win the 1993 World Series of Poker despite him holding just a Joker, a Get out of Jail Free Monopoly card, a 2 of clubs, 7 of spades and a green #4 card from the game Uno.
Schalk Burger sleeps with a night light. Not because Schalk Burger is afraid of the dark, but the dark is afraid of Schalk Burger .
Once a cobra bit Schalk Burger’s leg. After five days of excruciating pain, the cobra died.
Schalk Burger divides by zero.
When Schalk Burger exercises, the machine gets stronger.
Schalk Burger doesn’t use pickup lines, he simply says, “Now”.
Schalk Burger sold his soul to the devil for his rugged good looks and unparalleled rugby ability. Shortly after the transaction was finalised, Schalk Burger spear-tackled the devil and took his soul back. The devil, who appreciates irony, couldn’t stay mad and admitted he should have seen it coming. They now play poker every second Wednesday of the month.
Schalk Burger can kill two stones with one bird.
Schalk Burger once devoured a whole wheel-barrow full of clay to prove to a friend that the expression “Sh**ing bricks” wasn’t just a figure of speech.
The only time Schalk Burger was wrong was when he thought he had made a mistake
;-)

Go Bokke!!!

Some positive feedback so far from the Kindo Family….

Standard

One of the problems of doing something as complex as Kindo is that you get so caught up in the bugs, issues and things you want to do but can’t for whatever reason, so you forget what’s going right and what works well….

So, as a reminder to myself more than anything (cathartic blogs are great), I’m posting some good feedback that has come in so far, and also asking if anyone has any other good feedback for us?

So here we go:
” – it looks just great. The design works beautifully”

“It’s a pretty cool website. I started in the alpha release on my tree, and put in as many as I could think of. I only invited two people – my fiance and my mom. One day after I invited my mom (in the beta), I logged back in, and she had filled out a HUGE portion of my family tree that I had no idea about! It was pretty neat to see all the links – I would love to see it grow further & further, and see who I’m related to that I don’t know about. My mom also corrected a few things that I’d got wrong in the distant family that lives in the States – shows how little I know! I imagine it would be really cool when two huge “trees” get linked up through a common point, by email address, I imagine. All of a sudden your tree can double in size!!

Functionality-wise – it’s pretty easy to use too. I wish it could be a bit faster, but that’s more an issue of being in SA. I’m sure the UI could be tweaked to be a bit cooler – and I’m sure that will come in later releases.
”

“looks v cool mate; pretty addictive usability”

“congrats!

it looks beautiful – love the design.
ageless/genderless and cute as well…

the afrikaans sounds ok, one or two spelling mistakes and I am not used to using Afrikaans on the web so would possibly rather use the site in english…
seems to be easy to use…

really nice!”

And that’s it for now ;-)

Getting a 9 language Beta out the door so people can use it…

Standard

It feels kinda strange ‘cos we’ve just deployed another version of Kindo which does some good under the hood stuff, so in a cathartic sense it feels good to write about it now, and on the other hand it’s good to let people know where are.

Kindo is in private beta right now, which means that it’s not open for everyone (if you want the lowdown, please sign up at http://www.kindo.com and we’ll add you to the whitelist)

Kindo is where families get together, build their tree and grow. It’s about staying in touch with your loved ones, and finding out what they’re up to. Right now you can build your own family tree, decorate your profile with personal details, and invite your family members to join in – but there’s much more to come.

Improvements we’ve made so far:
You should experience faster page loading.
Kindo is in 9 languages, and we’re working on another 4.

Problems we’ve experienced:
Sending email in 9 languages isn’t as easy as it may seem – this is mainly due to accented characters in languages like Spanish and Swedish.

If you’d like to know more about what we’re up to, these blog posts may be interesting:
http://blog.kindo.com/whats-kindo/
http://blog.kindo.com/2007/09/13/update-to-kindo-beta/
http://blog.kindo.com/whats-kindo/en/

Cool – many more miles to go, but it feels good to have done the first 1.5 ;-)