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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.

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!?)

Finally, the much hyped Startup Predictor from YouNoodle has gone live. A very impressive little application which (I’m sure) is incredibly accurate.

I’m wondering how I’m going to spend my retirement. Caffeinehit has been valued at $14,400,000 for in three years time (August 1st 2010). Lovely.

It’s great to see coverage of MyBuilder and Kublax in the FT today (6th August 2008).

I’ve got the pleasure of working with MyBuilder at the moment and have recently pitched for doing some design work for Kublax. Having seen what Kublax can do (it’s just gone in to Alpha) I can happily say that it’s one of the first websites that I’ve seen that I actually thought “you know what, that could be really useful”. Once the design is nailed (obviously if it’s not done by Caffeinehit it won’t be quite as good!) but it will be awesome, a definite success.

MyBuilder is another one of those sites (although maybe not as relevant to me) that you will find really useful. I often hear friends and family saying “do you know anyone that could do…”. With MyBuilder it allows you to find and use builders on the site that are local to you and recommended by people that have used them through the site.

The team at MyBuilder are awesome and I honestly think that if the ‘credit crunch’ and property market behave themselves they could find themselves in an incredibly interesting position in the next year. I hope so at least.

Read about all the other success stories (and failures) from last years Seedcamp on the FT.com.

If you think you’ve got what it takes you can submit your idea to this years Seedcamp.

I’ve just put the finishing touches to the new look Caffeinehit. I thought it was about time it had a bit of a sprucing up and spring clean. Being the 1st birthday and all it seemed a very suitable time!

It would be great to hear what you think, so leave some comments here…

Check it out here: www.caffeinehit.com

I was just using Google Maps, as I often do and spotted a new addition to the interface, a neat little dropdown giving the option of viewing photos AND wikipedia content on your maps.

Now, I know it’s only going to be a matter of time before they introduce browser type ‘add-ons’ to your Google maps but for the time being this is a seriously sexy addition. One issue that I have with Wikipedia is that there is no way to view location based content in any sort of context, to have it viewable on a map makes it seem somewhat relevant.

Not only does it add interest to the basic google maps it does look pretty cool at the same time. I know this is pretty common place with many mashups but it’s nice to see Google finally adding a little bit more to the basic Google Maps.

Another release via Caffeinehit Ltd is the new look last name pages for Kindo. The original design was made only for one country, Sweden. Now there is last name data for a number of countries there needed to be a page that was easy to add future countries to.

Anyway, here’s the design I came up with, since it’s launch traffic has sky-rocketed. Watch this space and while you’re at it, why not see if your surname is in one of the countries listed on the site.

More: Kindo Surname Pages

Another recent creative release from Caffeinehit Ltd was the photo gallery solution for Kindo.

Kindo is one of the fastest growing family tree websites on the internet, their recent release of photo albums is set to increase their web traffic even more. The final design was designed to be simple and allow users to easily browse and share their photos with their family.

I can’t wait to hear how people react to it, Kindo is becoming such a massive website it really does make it a great testing ground for my designs and UI solutions. Let’s see how this one goes.

Check out Kindo here: www.kindo.com

Well the latest creation to come out of Caffeinehit Ltd has hit the web, the new Nintey Ten website has just been put live.

I had the challenge of re-designing and re-branding Ninety Ten. With quite a short deadline it was about creating something that was simple and effective, allow people to go to the site and find out about the company and their products quickly.

With a new style navigation, updated logo, colours and branding guideline I think it updates the brand and gives them that web2.0 look they were looking for.

Post your thoughts here…