Designer and Developer Frontend Technology Forum 08

By zibin on November 7, 2008 · Filed Under China Web2, Event

Regarded as THE forum for web and frontend developers, D2 will be held on the 29th November in Shanghai. Being a forum by developers for developers, the forum is being organized in turns. TaoBao was the founding organization, Yahoo China took the honor the second time and Tudou will be organizing this time.

Coordinator Blank (怿飞) is expecting close to 200 developers this time. The topic that interests me the most is Microsoft’s IE8 as the future platform. I wonder what IE8 brings for developers. IE8 will probably push Silverlight into the limelight, will the temptation to promote Silverlight overshadow the effort to introduce standards multimedia support such as the proposed canvas, svg and video element in HTML 5?

I am also hoping that IE8 will announce more support for standards. We know that one of the headache developers face is the task of serving codes that run on different browsers. Part of this headache stems from IE’s non standard-conforming browser. Mobinode Chinese article took a look at the importance of standards, written by yours truly.

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Genoom, Huge Family Tree Extending to China

By Gang Lu on November 6, 2008 · Filed Under Family Tree

If you run a family-centric site, I bet you can not forget China, although none of those family-centric sites has rocked Chinese market yet. We got in touch with Bob Samii, Marketing Director of Genoom.com which is reported as the 3rd largest social networking site (with 3.5millions user profiles) focusing on connecting families.

Genoom is created by David Díaz Daré, now CEO of the company. The project started in March 2007 and its beta version was first launched in July. In Genoom, users can add family trees, personal information, photos, videos, and related documents about ancestors and living relatives alike, limiting access to uploaded information through invitations and custom group privacy settings.

Available in 16 different languages, Genoom recently also added Chinese language support. We talked to Bob who kindly shared his understanding of the product and the business:

The key features of Genoom

- Multilingual: now translated in 17 languages with a big focus on Spanish-speaking countries;

- Fast-loading AJAX platform and most others are Flash-based;

- Facebook application which allows users to access and build their family trees within FaceBook accounts.

- the first site support GEDCOM.

Keep the idea simple: Discover and stay in touch with your family

“Some of other sites are more focused on the research and genealogy discovery aspect, e.g. Ancestry.com has a DNA test service, but our intention is to create more of a family-oriented communication tool. Just like Facebook is for your friends, LinkedIn is for your business contacts, Genoom is for staying in touch with your family within a private, secure network.” Bob said, “There still isn’t any clear winner, as you noted, but we believe that family-based social networking is poised to be a massive market.”

Chinese market has Big potential, but how-to?

Localizing Genoom in Chinese is more than just the translation and it is important to understand and know the peculiarities of the Chinese culture. Bob told me they had hired a person from China to join the team who will be responsible in supporting their efforts in China. It is a good move, but it also reminds me two things, Geni used to set up an office in Shanghai but closed it after a year; Kindo which is now merged with MyHeritage has also hired a Chinese staff based in London. So which can be the first truly grabs Chinese users?

The revenue: ads and charge for services

the primary income source can split between advertising and charge for services. The advertising can be combined with paying accounts, which will offer additional services to the user. “In the next phase, we foresee utilizing other income ways, such as commercialization of objects related to the family.” Bob mentioned.

David Diaz Daré said, “By adding Chinese language support to the Genoom network, we’re able to connect a large population to family members both locally and globally, unlike other family networking sites. Our goal is to make Genoom as internationally accessible as possible, to connect even distant family in ways previously not available due to geography and language barriers.” The insight is absolutely brilliant, but eventually waking up the family tree market is still not an easy-to-do and note that the competition is already tough.

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