Marketing

Web based marketing

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

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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 ;-)

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

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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!

Brace yourself Sheila, Kindo is on TechCrunch

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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

;-)

Kindo coverage around the world….

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We’ve been working pretty hard the last few weeks to get Kindo to a Public release, so this week we started telling people around the world about Kindo, and asking for their feedback.

The result has been that we’ve now got people from literally all over the world (73 countries now) using Kindo, with the exception of a few countries/areas (Greenland, most of Africa, some of the Middle East, Mongolia, and two South American countries I don’t want to name here ;-) So it’s pretty exciting stuff! To react to this we’re going to be rolling out some more languages soon, and focussing on making the application as consistent as possible across all languauges (not easy given differing string lengths…).

Anyways, onto the blog posts and reviews that I want to say thanks for! (In no particular order at all)

Spanish:

Italian:

German:

Swedish:

English:

Welcome to the Kindo Beta release!

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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:

  1. Kindo is much faster now
  2. The Kindo tree is now much more stable and knowledgable
  3. You can invite family members to your tree
  4. 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.
  5. 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!

Senior Web/UI Designer/Front End Developer at Technovated

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Location: London, UK
URL: www.technovated.com

Description
Do you believe in user focused, web standard design and development, driven by simplicity?

Technovated is a web software start-up based in South-West London, looking for a motivated, senior-level UI person to help us deliver a compelling product for a venture backed project.

This is an opportunity to own the entire user experience, from turning ideas into compelling HTML/CSS mockups that our engineers can run with, where you will be tasked with putting together the bleeding edge of web technologies and design aesthetics to produce an engaging, immersive product. Your background should include a blend of the creative and technical sides. Your technical proficiency and real-world experience should also show in your portfolio. You should have 3+ years experience developing frontend interfaces, be able to create mockups, and be a great communicator.

In return, you’ll have the opportunity to work on a visible web product with an extremely talented team in London.

Responsibilites:
• Ownership of interface design.
• Designing storyboards, page layouts, site grids and interface demos, and prototyping.
• Ability to apply design thinking skills upstream of the traditional role of the designer.
• Knowledge of the capabilities and limitations of modern front-end technologies & approaches (XHTML/CSS, ActionScript, JavaScript, AJAX, DHTML, etc.) and the curiosity to tinker and play.

Required experience:
• 3+ years experience in front-end web development
• Experience translating comps and wireframes into flexible and usable code templates
• Strong working knowledge developing cross platform/browser compatibility (IE, Firefox, Safari, Opera, etc.) for dynamic web applications
• Hand coded (X)HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. Please provide evidence of progressive techniques, separation of markup, presentation and behaviour layers in your front-end code including use of unobtrusive JavaScript
• Experience with Smarty, Flexy
• Experience in developing web applications with rich client interfaces using AJAX, drag and drop, and other DOM Scripting techniques
• Familiarity with JavaScript frameworks and animation libraries like Prototype, Scriptaculous and JQuery
• Knowledge of SEO best practices
• Experience with SVN
• Excellent verbal, writing, visualization, and presentation skills

Desirable:
• Medium to strong PHP skills
• Experience with Seagull PHP framework a definite plus
• Familiarity with Apache

To apply:
E-mail your cover letter and resume to hello AT technovated DOT com
Subject header must have UI WEB DEVELOPER-LNDN.

No recruiters or offshore development teams.
This is a 3 month contract with the possibility of extension.