Kindo Family Blog

For those of you who are interested in our progress from a technical point of view, here is a sanitised list of improvements & bug fixes which we have managed to complete during the last week:

Bugs

• Photos floating to right on profile page, when middle panel exceeds +/-840px in width
• Fixed spacing between the Turkish “on” and the year text field in right panel partners tab
• Fixed Inconsistency in the layout of the right profile panel
• Add link to profile for images in updates section
• Added loading graphic to news page

Improvements

• Created medium size images for each profile
• Added gifts module & gifts page in English

kindo, development

Josh at webaware.com has written a nice blog post about Kindo. Glad you like it Josh!

I give this site the thumbs up for its simplicity. It took me less than 10 minutes to piece together my immediate family, and that of my uncle’s.

This is a good idea, by the way:

What would really take it to the next level is integration with Plaxo, so you could pick and choose from your e-mail contacts to populate the graph.

Or what do you say, Gareth?

New Family Site Launches in 11 Languages

LONDON —November 29, 2007— A family tree is no longer something you only find on the wall in your grandma’s house. Kindo has developed the “Family Tree 2.0″, with features  that will turn it into an online meeting place for generations.

Recent years growth of social networks such as Facebook has demonstrated how useful they can be for sharing news between friends and colleagues. With Kindo, recently launched in 11 languages, families can now use the same tools and technology.

The core of Kindo is the collaborative family tree, and the information added by family members. But features such as family news, a family calendar, and statistics all make it easier to stay in touch with the family. 

Since so many families are spread out around the world, Kindo is already in 11 languages: Swedish, German, French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Polish, Russian, Turkish, Afrikaans, and English.

• More about Kindo: http://kindo.com/blog/whats-kindo/
• The Site: http://kindo.com
• Demo: http://kindo.com/blog/2007/10/26/how-to-use-kindo/en/

For contact and more information:
Nils Hammar
nils@kindo.com
+44 7817 43 10 25

We think that a country where over 3 million citizens have emigrated during the past few years, leaving there beloved and family behind, deserves a great utility to keep in touch with them on a daily basis. It’s not important whether you are in England, France or the U.S. - We give you the means to always have your family at hand.

Once you’ve built up your Kindo tree you’ll see how easy it is to stay in touch!

A few weeks ago, Andrew told me about a tool that he used to coordinate his and his girlfriend’s life: A shared Google Calendar. My reaction was disbelief - Google is great company in many ways, but not sure I want them to manage my quality time.

Anyway, I told my girlfriend about this, and she loved the idea. So I agreed to try it out, and I must say it’s a pretty neat thing. There are no more heated discussions - we now have an rational way of settling disputes over agendas.

If we disagree about what we’re supposed to do, we just check - is it in the calendar or not? Just as before, I’m usually wrong.

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.

Secondly, we have added a brand new page called “Our family”, 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

Other improvements include the following:

• Ability to change one’s user name - on the settings page
• Half-sibling support in the family cloud
• Optimization for: Profile & family page
• Date ordering of the calendar – which has been moved to the family page

The development & translation team have done some sterling work to get this new release out, so well done to everyone – keep up the good work!

“The Hoff” is proud

kindo, family, development

As Mario mentioned yesterday, I had my first Thanksgiving dinner ever last night. My American girlfriend took 1/2 day off from work to prepare the meal, which shows how important this is to American families - she’s an hardcore banker…

Since our families are back home in Sweden and the US, we substituted family with friends. Otherwise we stuck to the traditions. Enormous amounts of Turkey, sweet-potatoes, cranberries etc, just as I’ve seen in the movies.

As a Swede, Thanksgiving is completely unknown, but I must say that I think the Americans got it right this time. Good food, good wine, good company. I even got a chance to play “Amazing Grace” on my slide guitar, and nobody laughed.

In the US they celebrate Thanksgiving today, and it is probably the biggest family celebration in North America. The tradition that dates back to the pilgrim fathers in the very early years of North-American colonization brings families together every year!

The US car assiciation AAA estimates that 39 million Americans will drive more than 90 km just to join their family-turkey-feast. Food is obviously an important element of Thanksgiving. An estimated 40 million turkeys end up on Thanksgiving plates in the US every year.

And even outside the US Americans celebrate. The Troops in Iraq send messages home to their families, diplomats celebrate and even in our team there are people celebrating Nils’ American girlfriend just called and discussed some roasting details, she took off some time today to dedicate full attention to Thanksgiving. If you do a turkey for the first time have a look at the carving video that we found on chicagotribune… almost all the big media in the US is talking about Thanksgiving and turkeys today.

So those of you who celebrate: Happy Thanksgiving, enjoy your dinners, have fun with your families and tell them about Kindo. So you can stay in touch more easily after the big Thanksgiving weekend!

By the way: Canadian Thanksgiving includes similar traditions, but is celebrated in mid-october.

We’re about to release some really nifty new stuff, as well as a few more languages, so to make sure it goes smoothly Kindo will be down for maintenance from 2 pm to 4 pm GMT, today (November 22).

Come back afterwards to check out the goodies we’ve build for you

kindo

The actual British Royal Couple is the first to celebrate a 60 year long wedding. The queen and her husband yesterday officially celebrated their wedding anniversary in westminster abbey, central London. Buckingham Palace released pictures from the sixty years on a especially dedicated website. Kindo wishes all the best for the next 60 years of marriage

By the way: In Kindo you can see the anniversaries of all your relatives (together with all birthdays) in one calendar! So you can keep track of diamond anniversaries in your family and won’t forget to prepare some gifts or at least a greeting card