They’re all beautiful names, but my favorite is Pikknurm, which in Estonian means “Long Lea” (thanks Andrus for translation).

Welcome to our family of last names, Estonia.

Equally impressive was Alexander’s mother. Even as Alexander smashed his nose into a heavy iron gate, and he started crying as if the world was about to end, she remained cool and made sure he got the attention he needed.

To me, this seems to be the biggest challenge of parenthood - how can you avoid worrying too much, when you know how dangerous the world is to a kid growing up?

I guess you just have to accept that these are lessons for life - painful, but useful. (And since the day I smashed my own head open on an iron gate when I was five, I’ve been quite good at avoiding them.)

Look at how fast the ducklings swim to get back to their mother in the end - impressive!

photo credit: skenmy

Isabelle is still slightly too young to get the Kindo concept, since she was born on February 26, 2008. But in a few years, I think she’ll spend lots of time on the site - researching her family history, looking at old photos from family holidays, and inviting her grandmother to the school play coming up next month, for example.

Welcome!

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.

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.