Kindo Family Blog

You might have voted yourself or read about the poll on our blog. We gave it some more weeks and an astonishly 1600 people gave us insights into their family’s situations. And the results are stunning.

A vast majority of families is actually international! 54% of the families on a global level have relatives living abroad. So probably many of those, who moved to another country, got to know another culture and maybe even learned another language. If you are a bit lofty and emotional you might say: This is freedom.

It definitely is an indication for the globalization that doesnt only happen on an economic level, but on a personal one as well. It is the time of international exchange and understanding and Kindo wants to foster that.

Here are some more of the results in details:

• In total it’s more than half of the families that have relatives living outside their homecountry
• 61% of the British and 68% of the American families are spread out beyond their countries
• Russia has very international families with 76% having experienced family members to move outside the country.
• Turkey seems to have very local families and only 32% have family members outside Turkey.

That’s the most interesting stuff. As you can see, we have put some more data in graphs, so it’s easier to understand.

All the votes were analyzed by location of the user – we got them from 54 different countries – and language, so to determine nationality we used a mixure of those two criteria. It’s not been a study with scientific entitlement, which makes the great results even more astonishing.
If you do scientific research in this field don’t hesitate to get in touch, maybe we can set up some more detailed undertakings in the future.

By the way: We have made a press release (pdf) out of that as well

Just a quick note to all of you Twitter-ers out there. Kindo Team has joined the Twitter revolution. We’ve added our own account you can follow if you’d like to get the latest Kindo news straight to your client (or cellphone).

Just head over to the Twitter site and follow kindo_family to get the latest updates. We’ve started tweeting already and have got some great friends like RobMcNealy and amuse already.

What are you waiting for then, come follow us on twitter.

“I Love Kindo” says the winner of the “Biggest Family Tree” in English language!

The ‘Greatest Family Competition’ is over. The winners for the ‘Biggest Family’ and ‘Biggest Community’ are decided: It is Tom Tokoph and Matthew Mullins Congratulations to both the winners, enjoy your vouchers. Here’s what they have to say:

Biggest Family Tree Winner (English)

The family tree competition is for the family tree with the highest number of profiles, no matter, if living family or ancestors, and no matter, if you invited those guys to share your Kindo experience or not.

Kindo users are simply in love with the site. They are really happy to see that they are connected ith their families via Kindo. Here is a token of appreciation from one of users and winner of our ‘Power Users’ competition – Tom Tokoph:

I have long been the “keeper” of my family tree. I started a web site for my family many years ago and had uploaded a static copy of our tree. Obviously, the tree changes all the time and as such I would regularly receive requests from family members to change this or that. I would make an effort to make said changes, but it was very difficult. I’d first have to make the changes to the tree, and then I’d print it out, scan it in, and then import it into the web site. This was an entirely inconvenient process!

Then… I found Kindo! What a breeze to set up and invite my family members! Now the responsibility to update the tree falls on every member of my family! And it is so easy to use, anyone can do it! Some of my family members have even added ancestors that were never on my static tree and thus it is a much more accurate representation of our family.

My family is very excited to see how Kindo evolves. There are so many new features that could be added to really make the site a power-horse website for family trees. We are truly looking forward to the evolution of both the Kindo web site, and our family tree!

Biggest Family Community Winner (English)
This is for the tree with the most relatives joining the tree (so only adding profiles but not letting your relatives know about it would not have taken you far in this one).

Here’s a quote from the winner of “Biggest Family Community” competition.

“Using Kindo has been a great at connecting me with family that I have had little contact with. If you want an easy to use genealogical tool, this is something you will want to use.”

Thanks to all who participated! We will definitely do that again some time. Until then: “kin-do” with you family about the latest news and drop by our blog once in a while!

I’ve always been fascinated by apes and monkeys, without quite understanding why.
The opening chapter of Jared Diamonds book “The Third Chimpanzee” presents one explanation.

According to him, and according to other studies, there are good reasons to put the chimpanzee in the human family tree. Scientists claim that the chimp is more closely related to humans than they are to the gorillas, and should be put in the same genus as us.

According to an National Geographic article about the same subject, “studies indicate that humans and chimps are between 95 and 98.5 percent genetically identical”, and “researchers argue that humans and chimp lineages evolutionarily diverged from one another between five and six million years ago”.

I know this is an explosive subject, and I’m not enough of an expert to really say what’s fact and what’s fiction. (Gareth probably could though, since he’s a trained zoologist).

But when I study photos of chimpanzees, and my own cousin living in here London, I clearly see similarities.

The time is over, we have grabbed the data so the names of the winners are kind of on cards and in envelopes already Just need to contact them now to get their authorisation and comments!

So you can look forward to a nice feature about the greatest families on Kindo in the next days!
And maybe you are among the winners as well…

Just a brief reminder, that our biggest tree competition will end this week on wednesday! So go back to Kindo and invite some relatives quickly, if you want to be among the winners!

We will announce the winners on Wednesday here on the blog!

Good luck and hope that many relatives accept your invitations.

Latest news from the development desk is that we have been able to re-introduce the ability to delete partners from family trees. This feature request has been quite common over the last few months and I know that a number of our users will be happy.

It is still not possible to delete parents, but this small improvement will definitely improve the overall user experience.

Here is a movie which shows how to delete profiles:

The family and friends that surrounds you during your first years in life make a big impact on who you become later in life. The same is true for a startup, which is why it’s so important to get the team right from the start.

So as we today announce funding (see pdf here) from top European seed investors - including Saul and Robin Klein (The Accelerator Group), Stefan Glänzer (former chairman of Last.fm, founder of Ricardo), and ASI, a VC-firm set up by the founding engineers of Skype - I know we got off to a good start. When I worked with some of them at Skype, I was blown away by how good they were.

Kindo now has all the opportunities you can ask for to grow up and become what we set out to become - a global brand, focusing on the family and the family life.

It’s worth remembering why this is an exciting vision. When we set out building the business less than a year ago, we did it because we wanted to build something that helped us keep in touch with our families back home. We’re all avid users of other social networks, and used Facebook to stay in touch with our friends, and LinkedIn to keep track of our business contacts. But even though the family is the network that will stick with you for the longest, there were no good and dedicated social network for the family and relatives (at least that we could find). Tons of sites that could help me learn more about my ancestors, but I really want to learn more about the folks that are still around, my living family. So, we decided to build this site, because we wanted to use it.

Secondly, being entrepreneurs, we realized that there’s a real opportunity to build a real global business in this space. If you look out on the world of the web, you realize how many of the biggest sites out there that are social networks, in some kind of shape. Facebook and MySpace comes to mind immediately, but there are so many other local players (skyrock.com, vkontake.ru, netlog.com, etc) that aren’t spoken about in the press, with huge numbers of loyal users, growing rapidly. Social networking is here to stay, for friends, your business relations, or your family.

There are over 1,000,000,000 Internet users in the world today, all of them with a family or a family history to explore. So, this is not a niche product, for a niche audience - we’re building a global product, for a global audience. And since this audience doesn’t only speak English, we don’t either. We might be a small little toddler, but we’re already speaking 14 languages fluently. Imagine where we’ll be when we’re a teenager.

Our beloved users find different methods to make the best possible use of our family trees. While some connect to their family members around the globe using Kindo, teachers use it as learning tool for school students.

(Image Credits: St. Luke’s School)
Lee Crook Bruner, a Spanish Teacher and his students in the St. Luke’s School, New Canaan loves Kindo.com. Lee can be reached at his email id

What I love MOST about kindo.com is that I use it to teach family vocabulary to my students. This provides a new take on the age-old family tree project, and it’s great that we can switch the website interface to different languages! Each of my students makes their own tree, gets a minimum of two family members to participate and then present it to the class using their new vocabulary. Your website is a fantastic tool for education.

Thank you Lee for your kind words of appreciation for us at Kindo. Please keep your feedback coming and keep connecting with your family members through Kindo.

It always feels great, if users tell us that Kindo really helps their families. We get a lot of feedback, and we are always interested in hearing all your opinions (so keep writing ).

Last week Simon got an Email from our French user Fatima, who uses Kindo bilingual with her Arabic relatives in North Africa (”le Maghreb”). It’s so nice and she agreed to her quote being published, so here is what she wrote us:

“Hello,

I just bumped into Kindo, started my tree and added my relatives [...] I’m delighted to see that Kindo is translated in Arabic. I live in France and will now be able to keep in close touch with my family living on the other side of Mediterranean Sea in Algeria.
Thanks a lot and keep the effort going!

Fatima Bouzidi”

We are happy to hear that, and it’s exactly, why we have built Kindo! Let’s keep it going…