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FINALLY, I can blog about it!. It’s been on the cards for some time now but finally Kindo has merged with MyHeritage. Now they can boast a user base of over 25million people, not a bad jump in traffic there guys!

I’ve been working as the ui designer for Kindo since December 2007. They’ve come on leaps and bounds, taking on some of the more established genealogy websites (Geni and Genoom). The Kindo team is unlike any other group of people I’ve ever had the pleasure of working with. Dedicated, passionate and above all a true pleasure to work with. They really do deserve to bask in the glory of what they’ve achieved AND to get excited about what they’re going to accomplish in the coming months/years.

WELL DONE GUYS!!!

Here’s the official press release from the Kindo website:

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.

I posted this idea on Twitter the other day and as @DrewPreston pointed out, it’s actually not a bad idea. So, if there are any entrepeneurial students, homeless people or someone with just too much time on their hands and access to a moped, this really could be a good thing for you.

OK. So my office in Kings Cross is annoyingly far away from Starbucks. I know, you should support local business and not power the corporate monsters BUT their coffee IS the best. However, other times I’m working in Blackfriars - Starbucks every four doors.

SO, the proposition is that you can phone a number 0800 STARBUCKS or login to www.getmeafrickinstarbucks.net and order a Starbucks for delivery (you set up an account and add some credit). It then puts you in touch with your local caffeine dealer who (using the GPS on his iPhone) it then sends him a message asking for you to deliver your favourite Grande Latte to address X.

They price up the cost of the Latte by say £1 and hopefully it’s still hot by the time it gets to you. It could also be a great opportunity for other local businesses to advertise with the caffeine dealer, personalising those funny cardboard wrap-arounds with local adverts.

Anyway. Can someone please do this? Remember, you read it here first. I’d expect free delivery. Thanks.

Yammer.com is a Twitter style messaging system but for corporate communications that’s just been announced as the winner of TechCrunch50. The concept itself is very simple and it the business model is equally as simple. You pay $1 admin access for every user you have on your Yammer network. Keep in mind that they had 2,000 companies (10,000 people) sign up on the first day along I’d like to think that they’re on to a winner…

I guess as with all these things it will be a case of waiting and seeing. As with all new things on the web that generate a decent amount of buzz and hype people just want to try it out. As the first 3 months are a free trial we won’t really what the user traction is going to be like until the new year.

Anyway, why this post title? Doesn’t it make perfect sense for something like this to be incorporated into Basecamp or something similar? It would be perfect! I guess that this could be something that 37Signals have up their sleeves but it would make perfect sense to update their current messaging system with something that’s a bit more fluid, like Yammer.

The other runners-up at TechCrunch50 are: Atmosphir, FitBit, Grockit, GoodGuide and Swype (any more web 2.0 names anyone!?)

That’s right, the world of photo tagging and automatic facial recognition appears to be a little bit closer and dare I say, a little bit scarier.

MyHeritage have developed a funky product that allows you to upload all of your photos and then the system automatically groups photos.

So, say for example you upload a family album which has photos of you from when you were 4 all the way through to the present day the system will (with a little bit of learning) be able to match you in all the photos and in turn tag them for you.

Anyway, it’s a seriously exciting product with endless opportunities for the future. I guess it’s just a case of seeing how they develop it. Good job!

Ahhhh… how Captain Pugwash never fails to amuse me. Speaking of which in the Metro this morning there was this rather amusing article about a billboard advertising Portsmouth Dockyard.

It goes to show just how wrong you can go in advertising! Anyway, here’s the article…

Royal Navy tourism bosses have been forced to remove a billboard - after sniggers that it appeared to show two sailors doing something a bit rude.

The billboard, advertising tours of Portsmouth Dockyard, has a photo portraying the heat of battle in Nelson’s day.

But drivers passing it in Winchester, Hampshire, thought of a much naughtier alternative.

A dockyard spokesman said: ‘It was put up in all innocence and no one here realised what it looked like until it was pointed out to us.’

Source: The Metro