Kindo Family Blog

You can read the announcement here (pdf), or get the complete FAQ here, but I wanted to give you some more background on why Kindo and MyHeritage have teamed up.

The first time we met Gilad, the founder and CEO of Myheritage, was in early 2007 – a few weeks before we released the first public version of Kindo. Gareth and me were invited to have lunch with him in Soho in central London, and went there with the objective of learning everything we could about the “enemy”. This proved to be pretty naive, since Gilad is much too nice to be called an “enemy”.

But there we were: A Swede, a South African and an Israeli, all with very different professional background and life stories, talking about the future of families online from very different perspectives. I didn’t expect this, but we found that we had much in common. We shared the same ideas and vision for what we wanted to achieve with our businesses, even though our approach was far from similar.

Kindo had set out to build a site that would help you interact with the family that is around you here and now. We were trying to come up with tools to help you share information and communicate with the people that matter most to you right now. MyHeritage on the other hand had developed amazing technologies to help you find out everything about your family’s history, and had spent years perfecting these technologies. Ultimately though, what interested us both was the opportunity to help families discover more about who they are and their past, and use the web to bring them closer together.

As Gareth and I travelled back on the tube, we talked about how nice it would be to be able to offer our own users the same tools as MyHeritage already had. What really got us excited was their SmartMatching Technology, which matches people in your family tree with 250 Million other names, and suggests who you might be related too. We liked that. We were also jealous of Gilad, since he got to develop features for 25 million registered users - slightly bigger than our own user base…

During this summer, we’ve been thinking long and hard about the future of Kindo, and what the best option would be for taking Kindo to the next level. The more time we spent with Gilad as well as the rest of the team in Israel (not to mention the very loud rooster that runs around in their campus), the more convinced we all became - we’ll be better off together.

So we join the MyHeritage family because we share the same vision and values (as families should), and because we think that we can build an amazing product together – bringing real benefits to families around the world. This is what we’re planning to do over the next years.

As you see from the smiles in the picture below, this is a happy day for us here in the Putney Offices.

Nils and the Kindo family

Some nice improvments on the navigation bar on the Kindo tree. The English users are enjoying it for quite some time already, but now it is live in all languages, so we wanted to let you all know about it.

We have redesigned the zoom bar and have split if of from the info box. The info box now shows the tree creator as well as the person, who’s tree you are seeing at the moment. And you still find the number of people in your tree there.

The zoom bar is now semi-transparent allowing you to still read whatever is underneath. It is ordered vertically and includes some navigation arrows at the bottom, so you now have three ways of moving the tree around:

• drag and drop the canvas to move it around
• click on the arrows to move the tree around
• use the arrow keys on your keyboard to navigate

And in the middle of the arrows there is a “home” button, which you can use to get back of the person, whose tree it is.

What a great effort again from our development team! Though half the team is on holiday or honeymoon, we can now present the brand new and wonderful family photo albums. It’s only the first step to more media sharing features for Kindo but already easy to use and:

• quicker than posting printouts
• doesn’t congest your email inbox
• unlimited photo upload
• only accessible to your relatives
• from any computer with internet connection, at any time

Using it is self-explanatory, but we still want to tell you about it in every detail: In the Kindo main navigation you now find a dark blue Photo tab.

Step 1: Name and describe your album

Just click on “Upload photos” and you can start your album straight away: Give it a name, tell your relatives where everything took place and you can even give a brief description of what the album is all about or start sharing some gossip. Share pictures of your graduation or your birthday, holidays abroad or christmas at home or simply your last Sunday on the couch.

Step 2: Upload photos

Just click on browse and select the pic you want to upload, doubleclick or enter, and the same for the next one. It’s quite comfortable unless you want to upload hundreds of pictures to the same album (we will soon be working on an advanced uploader for those cases ). Once you got all photographic memories selected, just click upload and that is almost it.

Step 3: Organise and arrange

You can now easily drag around photos to rearrange the order in which they will appear later on. The first picture will become the album cover! Just hit save when you are done and that’s it.

By the way: You can always flip back and forth between the edit album, upload photos or organise section. And you can even add more photos or rearrange everything later on, and you can even add photos to your relatives albums! So you can put together all the pics that several people took during the common Easter holiday.

And the best thing is that all your family members will get to know about your new photos through the family newsfeed. With one click they can go there, flip through the album and leave you comments.

Finally: We have an official press release about the family photo albums as well. You can find it on our press page.

From today we have the full range of flags showing all the languages Kindo is available in.

It will make it easier for you to find the language setting you are looking for and shows our international flair Enjoy.

Probably the number one feature request for Kindo, over and above better deleting of profiles in the family tree, is for photos. We always knew that would come, so I’m pleased as punch to say that we’re working on it, and hope to release the first iteration of Kindo family photos soon.

That said, I would like to know if there are any specific photo features that Kindo users would like to see, apart from the usual features you’d find on any social service that enables you to store photos (creating and viewing albums, uploading photos to albums, commenting on both, tagging photos; are the basics).

For example, here are some ideas that have been flying around the Kindo office of late:

1. Send photo as digital postcard - imagine sending that photo of your wedding / family event to your family easily
2. Add to your favourites - imagine having a list of all your favourite photos of your family
3. Let people outside my family tree see my photos - imagine being able to allow your close friends to view your photos without them having to log in
4. Being able to crop/move/rotate photo’s - imagine being able to do stuff to your photos in the browser so they look better
5. Viewing some stats - imagine being able to see how many people viewed your albums / photos, and what photos are most popular

Anyways, these are just some ideas, and are pretty much influenced by what is already out there.

We’d like to build stuff that people will use a lot, and enjoy using, so it’s really important that we get some feedback from you guys to understand what’s really important to you!

So, please comments in this post - what do you want to see in a photos feature??

kindo, features, web2.0, photos, users, usability

Nothing in families’ lives is perhaps more colored by traditions than the way we celebrate Christmas… IF we do it, that is. (We are happy to see people from all over the globe with the twelve languages on Kindo.)

Diversified nationalities and religions backgrounds don’t only exist among our users, but also in the actual Kindo Family office. When we soon are to blow out the candles here for some holiday leave, one thing we have in common is how we all plan to go back and spend some time back home. During the rest of the week, we’ll therefore send you some season greeting cards from our different countries. First out is Sweden:

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Martin’s here! Last week in the office, I tried to tell the other guys about our Saint Lucia tradition, the 13 of December. For me, about then is when the whole Christmas thing starts. In traditional celebrations in schools and offices, Saint Lucy typically comes as a young woman with lights and sweets early in the morning. It is one of the few saint days observed in Scandinavia. More on that here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St._Lucia_Day

Otherwise, the big celebration day in my country is the Christmas Eve. My family has a big Christmas tree inside, which we decorate the night before. The traditional dish we eat is a big smorgasbord, with the grilled ham, herring and meat balls as my favorites. My sister uses to play the horn in the church and my family goes and listen to her and take part of the ceremony. Not all Swedes are as keen on this anymore though…

One huge Swedish tradition is actually to watch “Christmas Donald Duck” at 3PM, a one hour Disney compilation, an idea that probably originates from the days when TV only sent animated film once a year. After that, many people give each other Christmas gifts. When we were younger, Santa knocked on the door and delivered them. In the evening, my family eats the rice porridge. The one who finds one of the almonds in the food has to make up a rhyme instantly. The rest of the day, we eat chocolate and play games. For me, Christmas is all about seeing the family. This year, it’ll be extra fun since it’s the first time for my sister’s new born twins!

Almost everybody here likes the Simpsons, but there are some Simpsons-Freaks in our team. So the new cinema movie was a must-see for us. But now we have the whole Simpsons family on Kindo

Everybody knows Homer and Marge, Bart, Lisa and Maggie, but there are 75 others… WHAAAT? Yes, 75. Probably even more… I guess I forgot Hugh “Hugo” Simpsons II for example, Barts twin from treehouse of horror. Have a look at the tree and log in

• email: the.fake.bart@googlemail.com
• password: raepreadri

Anybody missing in the tree? Have you got the ultimate Simpsons knowledge?

Besides, the Simpsons tree is a superb chance to get in touch with Kindo, especially for those who do not want to sign up straigth away. Check how the Simpsons tree is working, fall in love with Kindo and sign up your own family tree.
Enjoy and tell me if you like it!

Right now there are lots of proud moms and pops here at our Putney offices! Today we’ve just released our first public version of Kindo [www.kindo.com], along with some nice improvements to our baby:

1. Pruning is better (and you can use your keyboard to move your family tree around)
2. Invitations are smoother (and we’re playing nicer with Hotmail)
3. Your profile page has more information for your family (more status updates, and a better calendar)

Since we’re no longer in “beta”, you can be sure that your tree and pages will work as expected. So continue to build your beautiful trees, and share it with your whole family. And tell your friends to start their own tree too!

We feel we’re far from the finished article - Kindo will grow up, evolve, and get bigger and better all the time. We’ve launched a new Kindo forum [http://forum.kindo.com] too, which is a good place to ask questions if you need any help. Please tell us what you do and don’t like about Kindo, and also tell us how you want it to grow too!

Bye for now!

web2.0, Europe, UK, London, Putney, Kindo, family, social, startup

Kindo is where families get together, build their tree and grow. That’s why we’re called Kindo.

Kin:
a person’s relatives collectively; kinfolk.
family relationship or kinship.
a group of persons descended from a common ancestor or constituting a family, clan, tribe, or race.

Do:
to perform (an act, duty, role, etc.)
to execute (a piece or amount of work)
to be the cause of (good, harm, credit, etc.); bring about; effect.
to create, form, or bring into being:

Some users have already discovered that we have launched a shop where we can order Kindo-merchandise. On http://kindo.com/blog/shop/, everyone can find something that suits them: t-shirts, training clothes or why not something for the baby?

Kindo does not make any profits at all on the sales. We have though a small margin of up to £1 that goes directly to charity. The idea is that we will launch a votation here on the blog where YOU can choose where the money should go to. You can off course post any suggestions now already.

Read more about the Kindo way of sustainability here.

In order the check that everything works with the shop. I put an order last week, and today I got the result in my mailbox! (See the picture above). The size is quite big on the t-shirt by the way… I have a medium on the picture. The t-shirt has a quality feeling and the nice Kindo-logo makes me proud when I walk down the streets…

The person who set up the shop was Onkel Mario, big up for him!