Kindo Family Blog

When I have heard about the Barcamp at Lake Constance I knew straight away that I wanted to go there. After all I grew up only 20 kilometers from the lake.
Finally the barcamp took place yesterday and today at the brand new venue of Zeppelin University. Some of the top bloggers and internet thinkers around Germany, Switzerland and Austria were present, like Robert Basic, Jan Theofel and obviously the organiser Oliver Gassner. I gave a session on the internationalisation of webservices, talking about Kindo and some of our experiences while getting this service live in 16 languages!

Thanks for the huge attendance and good feedback! Hope I will see some of you guys again soon. And maybe some of you barcampers gave Kindo a try

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Yesterday the Kindo team released Norwegian, which now means that Kindo is available in 16 languages.

Thanks a lot to Eirik, who did all the translations voluntarily! It’s great to see how big and international our Kindo family has become and that there are so many committed people.

If you have a Norwegian surname, and would like to find out some interesting facts about your families origin then visit the Norwegian lastname pages .

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.

The new language was made possible by Aske and Brian who have translated the whole website voluntarily. Brian had got it rolling and Aske finished it off. Thanks a lot for your help guys!

The new Danish version takes our language toll to 15! The Kindo family is spreading the globe

It’s an interesting fact that something like mother’s day exists in almost all parts of the world (even in Arabic cultures), but has very different origins. Kids and the husband giving gifts like flowers to the “mother” is very common in lots of different places as well.

A whole lot of countries will celebrate mother’s day next Sunday (as always on the second Sunday in May), the 11th of May. That includes the United States, most of the countries in Central Europe, most of the countries in South America and many others from all over the globe, like China, India, Australia or Japan (find the full list of countries here). However, the UK and Ireland have had their mothers day already this year: it’s traditionally three weeks before easter.

The mother’s day tradition in the UK roots in the Christian tradition of visiting one’s “mother’s church” annualy. But people were worshipping mother’s even earlier, like with the Cybele festival in ancient Greece. The jews celebrate their mother’s day in the month of Shewat, the Arabs generally on vernal equinox, the day when the sun is exactly above the equator.

On Kindo you look up what your mum has written in the “personal” section of her profile! Then you can go to our gifts page and find find her the perfect present for mother’s day!

photo credit: houghtonabout

We are proud to announce that Kindo is now available in three more languages:

• Arabic, which looks great with the text from right to left
• Simplified Chinese, which is simply beautiful
• and Traditional Chinese, whatever you prefer

The Chinese translation has been done voluntarily by the IT-team of CJCHT, a consumer goods company with offices in Hong-Kong, China, Taiwan, the US and the UK. Those guys had seen Kindo and liked it so much that they helped us realising the Chinese site.

It is a next step in bringing our family social network to the world’s high-growth Internet markets. Kindo is one of an increasing number of European and US-based Internet start-ups that have realized the big potential of fast-growing markets like China or Africa. According to Internet World Stats, the growth in Internet users since the year 2000 amounts to about 620% in China and 490% in the Middle East, as compared to a European growth of only 170% during the same period.

Gareth said: “Launching Chinese and Arabic is a logical step in our truly international strategy. China is a very exciting opportunity for us, and we’re eager to expand further in Asia”.

To make this release a reality, our development team has managed to overcome technical challenges, such as the writing direction in Arabic, and the handling of the more than 50,000 characters in Chinese.

Thanks again to Henry and his team at CJCHT.
嗨

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

Since going live on the 22nd of October, people from all over the world have been trying Kindo. Personally, it’s been an amazing journey as we’re able to see what countries people are joining Kindo from, and thus how Kindo is growing.

As of today, the number of countries Kindo users are in has grown to 116

Probably the most interesting and exciting country so far is China - since we’ve launched, the number of Chinese users has steadily increased, which is awesome - so we’ve got one or two surprises up our sleeves for them in the coming months.

Similarly, I’ve personally been really surprised at how active South African users have been. We all know how small the South African internet population is, so it’s been encouraging from that point of view, but it also shows how spread out South Africans are around the globe… We need more Afrikaans users though!!

So, for interests sake, here’s a list of the most popular countries, in no particular order:

kindo, family, families, countries, reach

OK, so South Africa is not the biggest internet market in the whole wide world, but I love it, and it’s deeply rooted in my psyche and my memories. But, thanks to lovely Google Analytics, we’re able to check out where people are using Kindo in South Africa…. and as you can see from the image below, it’s roughly in the following areas, most to least:

Pretoria, Cape Town, Rosebank, Johannesburg, Bramley, Auckland Park, Durban, Midrand, Parow, Centurion

What I want to know is, “Wie die blerry hell is op Kindo in blarry Parow!”

Keep ‘em coming folks, we’ve got so much more for you…

kindo, south, africa, london, usage

We’ve been working pretty hard the last few weeks to get Kindo to a Public release, so this week we started telling people around the world about Kindo, and asking for their feedback.

The result has been that we’ve now got people from literally all over the world (73 countries now) using Kindo, with the exception of a few countries/areas (Greenland, most of Africa, some of the Middle East, Mongolia, and two South American countries I don’t want to name here So it’s pretty exciting stuff! To react to this we’re going to be rolling out some more languages soon, and focussing on making the application as consistent as possible across all languauges (not easy given differing string lengths…).

Anyways, onto the blog posts and reviews that I want to say thanks for! (In no particular order at all)

Spanish:

• http://www.labrujulaverde.com/
• http://noticiastech.com/
• http://www.teknear.com/
• http://www.visualbeta.es/
• http://www.online.com.es/
• http://www.loogic.com/
• http://fernand0.blogalia.com/

Italian:

• http://www.pasteris.it/

German:

• http://jetzt.sueddeutsche.de/texte/anzeigen/404531
  
• http://pierromarie.wordpress.com/2007/11/01/kindo-ein-platz-fr-familien/
  
• http://www.web2null.de/
• http://wireltern.eu/
• http://www.kropi.de/
• http://infopirat.com/

Swedish:

• http://www.emerge.se/

French:

• http://bhibon.free.fr/

Japanese:

• http://kaz.tumblr.com/

Chinese:

• http://www.benmao.com/blog/

English:

• http://blog.myfatkid.org/
• http://www.killerstartups.com/
• http://www.digfoot.com/
• http://urlbump.com/
• http://momb.socio-kybernetics.net/
• http://simplespark.com/
• http://www.emilychang.com/
• http://www.gottaquirk.com/
• http://www.scott.za.net/

kindo, web2.0, london, uk, putney, family, blogging, blogs, reviews

For all you South Africans out there, from South African Genealogy:

I am a South African, but have been in the United States of America since 2004 studying Family History and Genealogy at Brigham Young University. I have a passion for South African genealogy and family history and hope to be able to impart some of what I learn, onto others who share my same passion.

I recently returned from the United Kingdom, France and the Netherlands after doing genealogical research in theses countries for 10 weeks. I learned a great deal about methodologies, preparation and immigration research to name a few. I hope to share what I learned including relevant information regarding South African research and links to helpful websites in working with family histories and trees.

Please feel free to write comments, share ideas and ask general questions or request a topic for a future post. (I will not respond to specific questions on your ancestors - sorry). Thanks J. du Plessis

south, africa, genealogy