I’m at SxSW in Austin, Texas and am wondering whether there are any other Africans here?
Ping me if you are, would love to hook up for a beverage or two 
Tag Archive for 'Design'
This morning we all got into the office and started the day as usual. Get in around 9, get the day started with review of actions (sharpen the saw) and meetings that need to happen, then the daily SCRUM (yesterday, today), then get to it… We knew there was an important press release going out today, but we didn’t know what was going to happen or how it would be reacted to.
Then in the space of a few minutes we’re on the front page of TechCrunch UK, US and France.
We’ve followed a deliberate and intentional strategy (which is obvious by us having 14 languages) of going local fast, which is also reflected in the many blog posts from Kindo friends around the world, so I guess I’m trying to say that whilst we’re not officially an English site (English is not the language with the most users for us), it sure feels good to get that kind of brute force exposure to tech people all over the world. You just have to look at the number of RSS readers that TechCrunch US has (659K), then add UK and FR, to wonder whether our servers will melt today…
On another note, Nils has written a really good post (IMHO) about where we are now, which I’m not going to try and re-produce in tone, but I will say that I’m going to do my best to make sure that when we’re a teenager we’re going to rock
Anyways, more soon - some factoids for you that might be relevant:
- Built with Segaull php framework, flash, jQuery and MySQL
- Been live for 15 weeks
- Languages include Arabic, Chinese (simplified and traditional) and Russian
- Users in around 150 countries
_ TechCrunch en français » [fr]
Kindo lance la version française de son service de généalogie nouvelle génération
Le moins que l’on puisse dire c’est que Geni, un service nouvelle génération pour créer un arbre généalogique a inspiré pas mal d’autres startups et de clones. La semaine dernière même TechCrunch US nous apprenait que la société allemande Verwandt.de faisait mieux que Geni en traffic et audience (il s’agit d’un clone en tout point)
Nice and rewarding Shows the benefit of being in 11 languages…
Some linkage and a good review from Webware
_ Build a fancy looking family tree with Kindo | Webware : Cool Web apps for everyone
Besides the very basic and simple implementation of the tree creation, there’s also an integrated social network for families who want to dig a little deeper. Each family member gets their own profile, which shows off any included personal information, along with a list of updates they or others have made on the service. There’s also a status update option a la Facebook and Twitter that lets you announce what you’re doing to your family members. More helpful, however, is the birthday and anniversary reminder tool, which will automatically let you know when there’s a family birthday coming up. While both these things can be had elsewhere, it’s a nice touch.
Thanks guys!!
We’ve been hard at work since we went live with Kindo, and yesterday did another major release which we’re really proud of…
Check it out, you should start to see the first signs of our social direction, which sets us apart from being “yet another genealogy application”… 11 Languages helps too…
_ Kindo - Some new features & improvements to kindo
The kindo team is very proud to announce that we have released a number of new features which we hope will improve our users’ experience.
Firstly, we have added 3 new languages, namely Russian, Turkish & Brazilian Portuguese, which now brings the tally to 11.
Our family
Secondly, we have added a brand new page called “Our familyâ€, where you can view the latest updates from all of your active family members. It also has a section with family statistics, so you will be able to see some interesting facts about your tree – the more data the better, so start updating those profiles
Pretty cool to know that we’re developing something that can do this, for people in 9 languages spread across 116 countries
_ Kindo - Profile in a kindo family tree dating back to 1702
We recently had a posting on our forum where one of our users, Rudolf Hager told us that he and his uncle had built a family tree dating back to 1702.
And we’ve got so much more coming!
Must have:
AJAX and JavaScript and a decent understanding of CSS and xHTML
Zend, jQuery, etc is essential.
Beneficial to have:
To apply:
E-mail cover letter and resume to hello AT kindo DOT com
Subject header must have KINDO FLASH
We are looking for people to join our team so no companies please.
Check it out, something nice to watch on Google Video:
_ http://video.google.com/
From:
http://blog.kindo.com/
Right now there are lots of proud moms and pops here at our Putney offices! Today we’ve just released our first public version of Kindo [www.kindo.com], along with some nice improvements to our baby:
- Pruning is better (and you can use your keyboard to move your family tree around)
- Invitations are smoother (and we’re playing nicer with Hotmail)
- Your profile page has more information for your family (more status updates, and a better calendar)
Since we’re no longer in “beta”, you can be sure that your tree and pages will work as expected. So continue to build your beautiful trees, and share it with your whole family. And tell your friends to start their own tree too!
We feel we’re far from the finished article - Kindo will grow up, evolve, and get bigger and better all the time. We’ve launched a new Kindo forum [http://forum.kindo.com] too, which is a good place to ask questions if you need any help. Please tell us what you do and don’t like about Kindo, and also tell us how you want it to grow too!
Bye for now!
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
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
This has been a long time coming, and it feels good to finally get there, albeit with a mountain still to climb!!!
Personal reflective blog post to follow soon…
A little while ago we released an Alpha to a small group of people, to gather valuable user feedback. Thanks to those great people, we’ve had our heads down improving Kindo, and as a result we’re releasing the Beta, and at the same time opening it up to a wider audience for more feedback.
We’ve made the following progress:
- Kindo is much faster now
- The Kindo tree is now much more stable and knowledgable
- You can invite family members to your tree
- Many more user interface improvements and enhancements
- *Note: we’re continually adding more, so please tell us about things you think should work better or be more obvious.
- The internet is global now, so we’re releasing in 7 languages:
- English, French, German, Spanish, Italian, Swedish, Afrikaans, Polish; with Russian, Turkish, Hindi, Hebrew and Arabic on the way.
Our mantra has become “Speed, Simple, Pleasure“, so in a nutshell that means we’re always trying to make Kindo faster for you, simpler, more intuitive and perhaps most importantly a pleasure to use.
Our new URL is http://beta.kindo.com/.
What can we do to make Kindo better?
If you dont like it – tell us why.
If you do like it – what are you missing?
Join the conversation on our blog, we’d love to hear your opinion.
Don’t worry – the same login details apply, and your data is all still there.
Have fun!
Babyfy goes through a second design iteration… I think it’s much better
_ Babyfy.com, the ultimate online resource for parents and parents to be
