Tag Archive for 'Kindo'

Tips for landing a php job in London

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Gareth Knight
on 2008/6/30
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OK, so I’ve not got long so will be brief and to the point with this one, in the hope that it will help some of the people that read this blog, and maybe even some of the folks that are looking for devs to join their teams.

I’ve had to run through a lot of agencies and candidates in the last month or so, recruiting for Kindo, and these are some thoughts in no particular order:

As a candidate

DO:

  • accept there is lots of good competition; you have to stand out to be noticed
  • research on the company you’re interviewing at - it’s polite and will help you with 3, 4 and 5
  • send a cv that is relevant to the job spec - java experience won’t interest someone looking for a php person
  • learn how to sell yourself and articulate your experience - enough said
  • accept you’re going to have to send code to show what you can do - send your best relevant code
  • describe what your code is supposed to be doing to there is context - don’t just send a bunch of methods
  • comment more than you think you should - esp if you’re going to work in a team or be contracting
  • write documentation in the code for something like phpDocumentor - that makes people happy

As a general rule (unless you’re a superstar), your work environment, the people you work with, and the work you’ll be doing, should all supersede remuneration unless you have a specific reason (like a mortgage for example).

As someone recruiting

DO:
Read this first:
http://www.nickhalstead.com/2008/07/01/10-reasons-why-i-hate-recruitment-agents/

  • accept that it is going to take up a lot of your time
  • have a clear job spec and role description in place to send around
  • use your personal network first
  • get your agencies to send some cv’s to assess the kind of candidates they have
  • ask for source code if you like the cv - you’ll do less unnecessary face to face’s
  • expect them to do some filtering and work for you; if not, bin them
  • turn your phone off if you want quiet time to work
  • agree on terms first, or re-confirm them if circumstances change on your end

Hope that helps!! ;-)

Intruders.tv interview on Kindo (about scale/product/marketing/revenue)

Published
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Gareth Knight
on 2008/6/30
in Uncategorized
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Was at Open Coffee last week (looking for developers), and did this interview with Vincent and Eugene from Intruders.tv on Kindo. Talked about how we’ve tackled some of the usual web app issues like scaling our userbase, internationalisation, product dev, marketing tricks, revenue generation….
_ Intruders.tv interview on Kindo.com

Kindo.com is a “new take on the traditional family tree”. In this interview, we sit down with Gareth Knight to talk about Kindo and their user acquisition strategy. Gareth shares with us his experience of attracting users to the site and the effectiveness of strategies such as blogging, Google AdWords and PR.

If you’re building a webapp, could be useful ;-)

Kindo in the guardian.co.uk

Published
by
Gareth Knight
on 2008/6/23
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Brief summary of what Kindo is about in the Guardian:
_ Elevator Pitch: Kindo makes a play for the family network niche | PDA: The Digital Content Blog | guardian.co.uk
;-)

Thoughts from recruiting for php developers in London

Published
by
Gareth Knight
on 2008/6/4
in Uncategorized
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I’ve spent the last week or so busy with recruiting, and I’ve learnt some interesting things. So thought I’d post something small just before I take the tube home…. I’ll try not to be too sarcastic.

  1. Most recruitment agents seem to be early 20 something bottom feeders who don’t or can’t read, and have no industry experience
  2. Most of the agents don’t really know the difference between the various technologies or just do a search on language (instead of focus), so therefore send you crud which you still have to filter out - I received a Linux systems engineer CV for a php role
  3. Warning signals include:
    • “I called you earlier”
    • “so you’re hiring a developer, what’s he going to be doing day to day?”
    • “I’m sure he’s great for your social application, he’s got loads of enterprise Java experience”
    • and my personal favourite of today “an excellent web2 ASP Javasphere candidate” (*note, not knocking Java)
  4. There are some gems who know their stuff, who listen, and who actually have good candidates = these are gold
  5. Most developers don’t seem to know how to communicate why you should hire them, so learn to ask good questions that lead to what you want to find out
  6. Your ear is going to get warm, so get comfy
  7. Take water to phone call
  8. Update:Agents seem to get surprised when you contact previous employers to get feedback on candidates (surely this is something they should do??)

That’s it - hope that helps, and I’m wondering whether you’ve had any experiences with agents and recruiting? ;-)

Welcome to the Kindo Family, Denmark!

Published
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Gareth Knight
on 2008/5/20
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Kindo is now in 15 languages… ;-)
_ Gratis stamtræ på Kindo – Welcome to the Family, Denmark!

Kindo just launched in Danish! Our last name research pages for Denmark have been live for quite some time now, and finally we have launched Kindo in Danish! It should soon be available via http://kindo.dk as well.

Danish home pageThe new language was made possible by Aske and Brian who have translated the whole website voluntarily. Thanks a lot for your help guys! Especially Aske has worked incredibly hard on this; and amazingly fast as well.

The new Danish version takes our language toll to 15! The Kindo family is spreading the globe ;-)

Kindo one of top 3 in “UK’s Most Promising Internet Company 2008″

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Gareth Knight
on 2008/5/2
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So on Wednesday, Nils and I went to Internet World at Earls Court, to do a final pitch to the judges for the “UK’s Most Promising Internet Company 2008″… and we didn’t win, which is a bummer, but we did make it to the final 3 out of 150 companies, which is pretty cool in itself.

_ Kindo one of “UK’s Most Promising Internet Company 2008″ - Kindo Family Blog

Kindo was one of three companies, who made it to the Finals at the Internetworld 2008 fair, that is going on at Earl’s Court at the moment.

Well done to the Zoopla! guys, I reckon they’re onto a winner ;-)

During “The Award Final” at the Keynote Theatre yesterday the three selected start-ups were pitching in front of the jury and – this time – to the “internetworld” as well. Though finally the property site Zoopla took home the prize, it was a great opportunity to present Kindo to a internet-savvy crowd, and all that only about 10 Minutes from our Kindo headquarters in Putney Bridge.

2 comments about internet world:
1. more people than last time overall…
2. … and, way more honeys than the last time I was there ;-)

Kindo releases Spanish last names - Estadísticas familiares en España

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Gareth Knight
on 2008/5/1
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Kindo release Spanish last names ;-) Nice work guys!
_ Estadísticas familiares en España - Kindo

Aprende más sobre tus apellidos. Descubre cuánta gente comparte alguno de tus apellidos, y cómo son de populares comparados con otros apellidos.

Being emotionally tied to your app makes for a good days work!

Published
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Gareth Knight
on 2008/4/3
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Today’s been one of those days where I’ve focussed on one thing only, for the whole day, so that we could release a major new feature in 14 languages. So that literally means just doing one thing. OK, so I deleted some emails, and answered one or two, but by and large apart from lunch, it’s been nose to the grindstone to get this done. Same for the rest of the team.

And you know what, it’s been one of the more satisfying days in a long while I think for two reasons:
1) we tried something new and got everyone involved in some way
2) we decided this morning we were gonna do it, and we’ve all stuck together today to do it - and I don’t think we would have done if we weren’t all tied to Kindo the way we are.

It really is a baby for us all. Bottom line - Being emotionally tied to your app makes for a good days work! In the days when doing client work was bread and butter, it was a hard ask to get this involved, ‘cos it was always something transitory - this is a totally different feeling.

So we’re done now, and it’s a satisfying feeling - I’m off for a curry with my brother!! ;-)

PS. stay tuned for the update!

SxSW Day 4 - Final day thoughts and wrap up

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Gareth Knight
on 2008/3/31
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So it’s a few weeks after SxSW now and I’ve been meaning to write this post for ages but haven’t had the time or energy to do so for a while now… so here it is ;-)

The last day for me was primarily about catching up with work, then preparing for the core conversation I did at 5pm, but inbetween that I did manage to take in “Considerations for Scalable Web Ventures” which for me was probably one of the most interesting and relevant panels of the conference.

I found the panel knowledgeable and happy to give away hard earned secrets and useful wisdom, which was cool. My humble recommendation is that if you have the opportunity to go see any of them speak, then do - you’ll walk away richer for it ;-)

I’ve promised that I’m going to send the content of the core conversation I did to the people that attended, so in the spirit of sharing I’m gonna upload it here as soon as it’s in a form that I’m happy with. More on that soon though.

As for the conference itself, I’m super happy I went. This time around the jet lag hasn’t been as bad, and having had the experience of the last time (cabs, locations, where to go, food to eat, when to sleep when to work when to panel) I enjoyed this time around more. I think that because it’s a huge melting pot of really cool people in the industry, where everyone’s interested in learning from each other, discussing stuff in the halls, and socialising (where all the cool conversations happen of course). London’s probably not the best place for a web startup for a number of reasons, so it’s a real inspirational change to be in the same place as loads of other people that are all in one way or another in a similiar situation to yourself… so it was good. Another humble recommendation - if you get the opportunity to go in the future, go! ;-)

Kindo.com is a site to watch

Published
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Gareth Knight
on 2008/3/18
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You know you’re doing something right when your parents tell you about an article they read in a real newspaper on something you’re involved with… I spose it lends credibility to this online malarkey and engenders your efforts within your own immediate family… So I was pleasantly surprised when my dad emailed me last week to say that he’d seen an article on Kindo in a newspaper in South Africa… So blimey, I jumped online to see whether I could find it, and here it is:

_ The Citizen: kindo.com is a site to watch

Many years ago I attended an extramural special-interest course at Schmerenbeck school in Johannesburg, where we were taught how to build, maintain and document our family trees (or to use the more scientific term, our genealogy).
I loved it.

Thanks Mike ;-)

Kindo releases photo’s today

Published
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Gareth Knight
on 2008/3/12
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I’m sitting in the airport at Chicago and am just about to get on a plane back to London. Feeling more tired and whacked out than in a long time; probably the last SxSw…

Anyways, if you’re reading this and you like Kindo, give it a another look today - we’ve just added photo’s.

So, give it a whirl y’all and lemme know if you have any feedback - always appreciated!! ;-)

More soon.

Kindo’s day in the sun; moving past Verwandt and Geni…

Published
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Gareth Knight
on 2008/2/15
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If you’ve been following this blog or Kindo recently you’ll know we launched on October 22nd 2007, which puts us at about 15 weeks live so far, which means we really are just babies…

So it’s kinda nice to start getting into the same playing field of the competition… Saul says it nicely ;-)

_ localglo.be: Kindo’s day in the sun

This has been a great few weeks for Kindo. Last week they announced seed funding from the technology founders of Skype, me and Robin at TAG and Stefan Glaenzer from Last.fm. Now this week Kindo has sneaked past Geni and Verwandt on Alexa.

The Four Harmonious Friends of Kindo

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Gareth Knight
on 2008/2/15
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_ Four Harmonious Friends
I wonder who the elephant is?? ;-)

web 2.0 Genealogy and Kindo on MetaFilter

Published
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Gareth Knight
on 2008/2/11
in Uncategorized
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Nice discussion going on at Metafilter about Kindo…
_ web 2.0 Genealogy | MetaFilter