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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 
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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
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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
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Kindo release Spanish last names Nice work guys!
_ EstadÃsticas 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.
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Respek for Damien, he’s produced something fresh and easy on the eyes
_ Presenting v6 - blog - coda.coza
My previous design lasted for almost half of that time. Despite its shortcomings (lack of a feature-rich CMS) and obvious design flaws, and given the amount of recognition that it received, I became hesitant to change it much. Until the waves of spam attacks began.
Since my blog was running on a bespoke system, it became increasingly difficult and time-consuming to manage, which partly explains why I haven’t been posting as regularly.
So after a tricky data migration and clean-up (the volume of crap I’ve written in the past 6 years is embarrassing), a tiresome metadata capturing process (adding titles and tags to 770 posts), and a couple of design revisions later, this blog has undergone a complete overhaul and is now powered by WordPress 2.5.1 with a super collection of plugins.
OK, so this has become somewhat of a labour of love the last month or so, where I’ve snuck bits of time here and there to get this to a point where I’m happy it makes sense, and there’s not much more I can add to it now…
Please check it out, let me know what you think, comment on this post for feedback (or email me), and send me typos!
Once I’ve done one more pass of it and I’m happy it’s ready for consumption, I’m gonna create a page for it to live at (while other plans get rolling - thanks Ed!).
Here it is: Building a Startup You Love is Hard (BaSYLiH) - Final Draft.
Edit: If you’d rather read on Scribd, here it is - thanks to David for putting it there.
Enjoy
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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!
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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!
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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.
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Interesting news… As I’m gonna be switching to Ubuntu soon, gives another option for virtualisation on the desktop…
_ Canonical adds
Parallels to Ubuntu partner repository - Download Squad
If you go to to the add/remove applications window in Ubuntu and click on the third party applications option, you’ll see that VMWare Player is available. And starting this week, you can also download and install Parallels Workstation for Linux.
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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
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See what I did there…? kindo problem to have…?
It’s the last thing in the world that I’d *like* to see happening, but then again it’s a problem that you want to have as a growing web service for families…. growth = load = site is slower…
From our blog:
_ Too much love…
We’re getting tons of new members to the Kindo family at the moment, which is great stuff. But it also creates some problems with speed - some people are experiencing a really slow Kindo, which makes tree building a quite painful experience. We’re working on speeding things up, so hang in there.
So, we’re working on this like mad now, trying to scale things so we’re back to the zippy speed we were at before Christmas… more soon
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We’re getting overwhelmed by support requests from our latest project and are looking for an open source customer support solution, does anyone have any suggestions? The main functionality required is to be able to divert emails sent to a support address to a ticketing system.
We also need the following:
- Allow emails from more than one account to be diverted to the system and converted into tickets which can be assigned to team members according to language.
- Have predefined responses stored in a database which can easily be included as a basis for an email
- Allow specific emails from specific accounts to be automatically assigned to individuals
- Have various levels of importance for support requests
- Should allow the creation of different groups with various role capabilities
If you have any suggestions or experience to share please let me know in the comments.
