Skype’s founding engineers give Kindo the nod

by Sarah Manners

It’s been near on four months since I first blogged about Kindo – a social networking site “where families get together, build their tree, and grow.”

As you know, social networking has been the online topic dejour for the past year. We all belong to at least one of these fabulous sites; four of the top 10 sites on Alexa are social networks and you just need to do is look at the Google Zeitgeist for 2007 to see just how important social networking was to the online community in 2007 (and don’t for a minute expect that this trend is not going to continue).

While there are other family networking sites around it is still a fairly new concept – but it’s on the rise. Kindo attributes this to the fact that Internet users have seen the benefits of social networking for business (like Linkedin) and friends (Facebook). Now, not everyone wants to accept their mum as a friend on Facebook (not me mummy dearest) but they do want to interact with their families – that is why sites like Kindo are perfect.
I started my tree a few months back and was stoked to see how much it had grown. Almost my entire extended family (and if you were wondering there’s a frik load of them) have signed up and have started growing their own trees – the long term-marketing opportunities on Kindo are clearly très appealing.

Having been born in Zimbabwe and lived in South Africa for pretty much my entire life there’s another reason this site stands out from the competition in my eyes - there are three South Africans and two Zimbabweans directly involved as well as another two SA investors. That’s pretty damn cool in my eyes even though they’re all based in London ;-)

Speaking of investors… the latest news:
Kindo has just announced that it has secured additional funding from Ambient Sound Investments (ASI) – an initiative established by the founding engineers of Skype! Exciting news to say the least.

Why Kindo? Well, according to ASI’s Eileen Broch: "In the short time since they've been live, Kindo has proven that they know how to build a product that can be embraced by young and old alike. It is already loved by families around the world, which is what appealed to us the most."

If you have a squizz at the list of investors currently involved in Kindo’s seed funding you’ll see that ASI is in excellent company. Helping to grow Kindo’s global footprint are Saul and Robin Klein of The Accelerator Group (TAG), and Stefan Glänzer, last.fm’s first investor and executive chairman until it was acquired by CBS.

While other family networking sites are concerned with ancestry or genealogy, Kindo is focused on family ties, and therein lies the rub. This family networking site is offered in 14 languages and operates on a global level – while no specific figures can be mentioned I can tell you that it’s north of 7 figures. All that in a matter of months!

Well done to the team at Kindo, and if you haven’t registered do so now – you won’t regret it. Check out their blog for all the latest Kindo news.

2008/02/07 | permalink | comments (1) | trackbacks (0)

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