BradPace.com

This is my first in a series of blog posts on my trip to Pune, India.  On Tuesday October 7th I decided that I needed to take a trip to visit my development team in India and as soon as possible.  We discovered it was not more expensive to book a trip 3 days from now than 3 weeks away.  So we booked the flight and 3 days later I was on a plane.

The entire trip (with a 4 hour layover in New York and travel time by car to Pune) was just over 30 hours.  The trip went well and I even found my ride to Pune.  That was the part I was most worried about.  But my team in India had a nice apartment ready for me just accross the street from the office and that has been VERY convienient!  The team here has taken very good care of me and has made it very easy.  They have several “office boys” who basically wait on me hand and foot and get me anything I need (including making me breakfast and putting the jam on my toast!).

It was great meeting my team in person.  It has been very productive so far.  The team here even had a welcome get-together and gave me a nice arrangement of flowers.

I have had a great time so far.  I am liking the food (mostly) and everyone is very friendly.  Here are a few photos of my travels.  They are kind of weak photos but I will get some better ones posted soon.

I was just doing some keyword research and decided to compare what Wordtracker, Microsoft and Google all had to say about some of my major keywords.  Just using the term “genealogy” here is the information they all provided.  Google said that they had they had about 2,740,000 searches for this term last month.  Microsoft said they had 11,000 searches for it.  And Wordtracker predicted 4,700 searches per day for Genealogy accross all search engines (whatever that means) or about 141,000 per month.

So a few observations.  First, genealogists are  249 times more likely to use Google than Microsoft.  I think this shows that most genealogists are used to doing complex and numorous searches and that they greatly prefer Google to Microsoft.  Second, no one claims the wordtracker tool is anyware close with their prediction tool but this is way off.  They might as well use a random number generator . Anyway I think Wordtracker has the same problem as Microsoft for the Genealogy space.  Because they take all their data from 2nd or 3rd tier search engines that no one in the genealogy space would ever use.  Third, Google rules the world!

Lastly it is interesting to note that last month (July) we had a total of 2.8 million searches done on WorldVitalRecords.com (our genealogy search site).  More than Google had for the term Genealogy during the same time frame!  This is comparing apples to oranges but anytime I can feel like we are competing with Google I will take it.

I love to watch the Olympics and get quite obsessed about it.  I had thought about getting a DVR for some time but just never did it.  Well the Olympics as a good reason so I purchased my Tivo a few weeks ago.  Then I could watch the games on my own schedule and watch just the parts I want to see.  Here are some reasons that Tivo make the Olympics even better.

1) My Tivo HD will record 180 hours of video (I don’t have an HD TV).  Many sessions of the games are 5-8 hours long.  Try and record that on a VCR!  I can easily record every session of the games.

2) I have things to do between 6-9pm and don’t like to watch TV during that time.  With the Tivo I can fire it up at 10pm and not miss anything.  Don’t have to sluff church (like some of you!) because I can catch up later.

3) It is amazing how much “filler” there is in Olympic coverage!  For every hour of coverage there are usually about 20-30 minutes of actual athlete competition.  I can easily fast forward though all the junk and just watch the competition.  I can easily make it though 5 hours of coverage in 2 hours and still see all the exciting stuff.

4) I admit there are some less than interesting events in the Olympics.  Some I can skip completely (like badminton, cycling, rowing, synchronized diving and others).  Some are actually more fun to watch at 3x speed.  Watch soccer at 3x speed and it is like a pinball game with the little white ball just bouncing all over the place. Tivo has a very smooth 3x fast forward and you can still see all the action.  Then just slow it down at the end or during the goals.  I am not a huge fan of gymnastics, but on high speed they are much more interesting.  And I was able to watch the exciting endings of the men and womens team competitions.

Overall I love my Tivo and will never watch TV the same again.  It is amazing that there is actually some good stuff on TV.  And when it is waiting for me I find myself watching better quality TV and actually watching less hours per week. I have also loved their online free content.  Like I downloaded free guitar lessons from Guitar Sherpa.  Plus with YouTube on the Tivo I can tons of other great how-to content.  I would love to see us have a genealogy/family history content channel on Tivo. I haven’t tried an Amazon Unbox movie rental.  This is the future of TV.

So a few weeks ago I was lucky enough to attend the Facebook F8 developers conference.  Last week I was gone to boy scout camp and this has been a very busy week.  So this is the first chance I have had to blog about it.  I feel that the company needs to get something out of sending me to a conference like this so I like to get my thoughts down on my blog (don’t know if anyone actually does, but here it is).  I love to live blog at events like this.  I can type so much faster than I can write.  Sadly the wireless network at the conference was lacking and I could never connect to the internet.  Too many connections I think.  So I will have to go off my notes.

The conference was great, but there was little news.  Also, having a top 20 facebook app (were related on facebook), there were no revelations on new features.  So here are some random thoughts on developing social apps on facebook I got from the conference.

• Outsource your ads until you get big enough to hire your own team.  The large app developers on the panel saw a 2x higher CPM on inhouse ad sales.
• Align user behavior with their motivation.  Too many apps try to motivate their users in a direction that conflicts with their current behavior on the app.  Monetization of a social app is like a tight rope balancing act.  If everything is not lined up, your users fall off and leave the app.  But if you can line up your user’s behavior in your app with a monetization method that makes sense to them you will make a ton of $$$$$!
• Leverage the social graph to sell products in your app.  These are the apps that are making the most money. I may write a blog post just about this at some point.  But I believe there are many, many new ways to monetize users in social apps that have never been done or thought of before! Understand those social connections and work to tie in products or services that use those connections.  That’s where the money is.
• As a side note, there has to be a good way to build an MLM business on facebook!  Maybe there are people doing this already and I just have not seen them.  I don’t have much MLM experience but I have always thought they are missing out on the opportunities that the internet provides.  MLMs are all about social connections.  There is money to be made here as well!
• There are a ton of companies making bank building facebook apps for large companies.  And best of all, most do it for “branding” reasons.  Many developers have stopped building their own apps because apps are hard to monetize and have switched to doing contract work building apps for others.  Seems like easy cash but not much long term opportunity. Glad I am not in this business.  I talked to one friend doing this and he jut seemed beaten down and tired!
• I talked to a few developers who are making tons of money using affiliate products instead of displaying ads.  This is an area I am very interested in because I love affiliate marketing!
• When building a new app there are 3 areas you need to understand, execute on, and optimize:

1.      Research – Understand the audience that will be using the app, understand the possible marketing channels you can make use of in the app, and come up with a formula for success by making them match up.  The RockYou guys claim they do this first and if they can not get the audience, channels, and formula nailed they will not build the app.

2.      Growth – Good apps are designed to make use of the social graph from the start.  You have to have a viral factor or the app is doomed to fail.  Once the app is running, tune it for distribution.  Top app companies make daily changes to tune their apps to maximize their viral growth factors.  This is a case where small things can make large differences.  You also need to promote your app in the beginning to “seed” it so you can get the growth you need to start.

3.      Engagement/Monetization – now days everything is engagement of the user with your app.  How many daily or active visitors you have.  Not how many total installs or new installs.  Just this week facebook made a change from showing stats of daily visitors to monthly visitors.  So they are pushing apps that have the most monthly activity and thus reach the most people.  This change propelled our app from the 70s in most popular apps to in the top 20!

I still feel that many of the developers and companies at these events are “gimmick” app developers.  Dumb ideas with little long term value just trying to make a quick buck.  But there are a few (like us) that have a long term vision of providing real value to users.  We will see more and more useful apps as time goes on.  I think there is still a vast opportunity in this area for serious app developers of serious apps!

How to win business and influence friends.  I recently finished the book “Love is the killer app” by Tim Sanders.  This is on Paul Allen’s must read list and I have wanted to read it for a long time.  I actually finished all but the last few chapters about 3 months ago.  But I finally pulled it out again and finished it up.  I can see why it is one of Paul’s favorites.  I want to summarize his ideas and provide a few of my own.

He breaks the book into a few major sections: Knowledge, network, and compassion.  The step in sharing you love in the business world you have to have a foundation of a TON of business knowledge.  There is no better place to gain this knowledge than to read a ton of business books.  He has a whole system for this including reading with a pencil and writing down every one of your ideas in the margins of the book.  Then after each chapter you write a short summary in the blank pages at the back of the book.  Stuff to refresh your memory later on if you need to look something up.  He has 4 steps to really learn the information in a book aggregation, encoding, processing, and application.  I can say that the next book I read I will do as Tim suggests.  It just makes sense.

Next he says you have to build your network.  Not just of business contacts but of real friends.  These are the people you will help with all the knowledge you gain.  He also believes in sharing contacts and hooking people up with other people in your network.  Paul is a great example of this.  He has a very large network and uses it to get business done.  Not just for himself but for others as well.  This book was written in 2002 just as LinkedIn and other social sites and tools were just taking off.  I am sure he would suggest using these new tools today.

Last is to use compassion in the business palace.  This is such a 180 from how most people see business working.  Share, teach, and love others and eventually they will do the same back. I think that this may be true.  But what is true for sure is that if you love others in business it will make life so much better!  Feel better about yourself and gain a reputation of a knowledgeable, kind business person.  That is the place to be.

The only problem with reading this book is I can’t help but think of all the times I did not share when I could have, or did not care when I should have.  This book has changed the way I see business and will work in business the rest of my life. I completely suggest reading this great book!

Just a few thoughts from me.  First of all I think that these principles are already used in volunteer organizations (like the LDS church).  Everyone wants everyone else to succeed, and everyone shares their knowledge and skills.  It only makes sense this would work in business.  Also with the recent surge in social networks and applications it is easier than ever to build your network and keep in contact with large amounts of people.  Tools like blogging, LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter and FriendFeed all fit into this philosophy very well.  This book today should be called “Love is the killer social network” because that is what it is (or could be).

I will close this post with Tim’s last paragraph in the book “Why do we have to wait for these moments? Why is it only during peak experiences that we offer the love? Why does it take a championship season to show emotion? Why not reach inside ourselves and, whenever and, whenever we have an appropriate urge, tap in to that love and express it. It can make a wonderful world of difference to you and to
everyone around you.”

Next books on the list “Influence, the psychology of persuasion” and “Actionable Web Analytics”.  When I am done I would be happy to share the knowledge

If you read this blog you will know I love my iphone.  And I love my iphone apps.  Being that my last phone was a Palm Treo and that I have purchased and installed many apps on both the treo and the iphone I wanted to compare the 2 processes from both a user perspective and a business perspective.

iphone app store.  I love how the app store works.  It is easy to use and navigate.  From a user perspective it is nice to know all the apps are located in one place.  One problem with palm apps was that there was hundreds of sites that sold apps.  This made it hard to know what was available.  Everything is in one place at the apple store.  It is also nice to know that apple has reviewed all the apps in the store and they adhere to some type of quality standard.  One big worry with the palm apps was if you were going to get a virus or something from downloading the app.

From a business point I think apple has nailed it.  App developers know that they can just build their apps and sell them.  Sure apple takes 30% (or whatever it is).  Plus Apple will make a ton of money from this.  I don’t think that Palm made much money from apps.  This is also good I think for the users.  It is nice to know that with only one place to buy you are getting the best (and only) price.  Some may complain that no competition in this area is bad.  But I think it works for all parties involved (users, developers, and apple).  That is why it will do so well in the years to come.

Palm Apps:  I appreciate that palm opened up their platform and tried to make it available for anyone to sell and install an app.  But just imagine if Palm had used the centralized store model that apple is using now.  That cash info may have saved palm and made them into a power in the smartphone industry.  As a user I just hated searching and pricing all the palm apps.  I never did quite trust many of them and did not trust many of the developers.  I never once purchased an app directly from the developer.  And never purchased from the palm app store.  It was always from a trusted 3rd party.  I was always worried about getting the app again if I had to reinstall.  With the iphone I know that my purchased apps will always be available.

All in all I love the experience of the iphone application process. My only problem with it is that everything goes through the itunes software on my PC.  This works great for the music, video and podcast stuff.  But I loved how the palm pc software seamlessly integrated all my contacts and notes.  I liked doing things on the PC and just syncing it to my treo.  Mostly notes.  I would take short notes on the palm and then expand on the ideas on the PC later.

My great grandfather on my father’s, mother’s side (is that the right way to say that) was John Henry Western. Last time I was at my grandmothers house she said she had an audio tape that someone had given her 30 years ago and she had never listened to. It was a tape to tape real (if thats what you call it) and she had no idea what was on it. So I took it and had it digitized at Allens Camera in Provo. It took them a few weeks but for about $30 I had a CD with over 45 minutes of audio. It was very rough sounding with poor sound quality, lots of pops and hisses, and loud and soft parts. About half of it was him singing at a birthday or wedding party. But about 20 minutes was my grandma’s cousin interviewing him. He was 80 at the time.

I put the .wav file into Audacity and cleaned it up. Normalized and equalized it, removed the pops and chopped it into 2 files. One with his speaking part and the other with the singing. Then I saved both as mp3 files to share over the internet with my family. Overall it took about 2 hours to edit the audio. I am far from an audio expert. My biggest problem so far has been how to share this with my family. I cant upload it to facebook and my wordpress will not let me upload an mp3.  Finally I had to upload the mp3 files to my own server and just link to them as a regular link.  There has to be a better way.  I know there is an audio plugin for wordpress I need to check out.

Listen to John Henry Western Sing.  Listen to John Henry talk. (right click to save the file)

The singing was good but I really love the interview part. He talks about when he was a boy and they moved from the Pioche Nevada area to Deseret Utah (outside of Delta). He talks about a few memories and also gives some words of wisdom to his posterity.

I heard about a new web service called Evernote.com on one of my favorite podcasts (this week in tech or TWIT).  The site is still in beta but I wanted to try it out.  I signed up for the beta and within a few hours had an invite in my inbox.  The idea behind evernote is that it is a place to store your “brain” on the internet and then go back and search it later. Their tagline is to remember everything! Upload anything you want to store for later reference.  Images, snipits of text from webpages or emails, text notes, and even audio can be stored on evernote.  One think that made evernote interesting to me is their multiple client strategy.  They have both PC and Mac clients.  As well as a nice pure web interface and firefox plugin. They are also working on blackberry and iphone clients that are coming soon.  This is important because often time you want to access this data from strange places.

The coolest thing about this service is their ability to scan and index all the data that you add as notes.  So if you upload a digital photo of a receipt you can later automatically search for the text in the image and evernote will highlight it on the image.  I am sure there are other online OCR apps but this is the first I have seen that does it well.

My first thought was that this would be a great place to store family history and genealogical data online.  I immediately uploaded a bunch of family history pages I recently scanned at my Grandmother’s home.  This included photos with names, newsletter articles, and pedigree sheets.  About 60 high res images.  I uploaded the images using their PC client and it took about 30 minutes to not only upload the images to the website but to also OCR all the text on the pages.  If I had all my genealogy on this site I could easily search for any person, place or date and Evernote would show me all the documents I have that relate to this person (assuming there is some text associates with the photos).  You can also manually tag images.  Here is a few screenshots of a search I did for my grandfather Elwin (Pace).

Here is a pedigree file where I searched for James Pace. (Yes I do have second cousins in my tree! Paces on 2 sides.)

Here is a photo that shows it does pick up hand written text as well (searched for Paul). (Yes that is me on the right with my oh so hip 70s pants.  I don’t think I was invited to be in the photo).

Now this is in beta, but here are the drawbacks. I did not that the OCR is only about 50-60% accurate.  Surely not good enough for what we do on WVR. There are many places that I thought it should have picked up “Elwin” when I did the search (like the pedigree).  Also it is hard to flip through the results.  They just list every note in order that has your search results.

Next their tagging feature is very week.  Facebook does that best at tagging photos (selecting an area on the photo to tie a tag to) and Evernote just does it at the noto (or photo) level.  Lame!  Also because some of the OCR is not correct I wish I could see how their software sees all the text and be able to fix it or add the text to anything they missed.  So I could know for sure that everything was indexed correctly.  This is a major drawback to this system.

All in all I think this site/software is very cool and as it improves should be very useful.  Just the mobile aspects of this are amazing.  Think about doing price comparisons at the store by just taking photos with your phone and mailing them to Evernote.  Then going back and comparing all the prices and features.  But I think it needs to have better OCR and indexing and a few more features before it is ready to be a serious tool (especially a genealogy tool).

I have been a subscriber to Netflix for sometime now and love the service. All in all I have enjoyed the movies I have received from Netflix and am always amazed at how fast they turn around my movies to be me the next batch. Netflix is also a great resource for how-to videos.

This last weekend I got a couple of very poor movies (both no-name scifi movies). I read the descriptions on netflix and the story sounded interesting so I got them. I did not pay attention to the user ratings of the movies (both where 1.5 out of 5 I found out later) or the user reviews of the movies. That was my mistake. Both films were very amature looking, poor picture and poor sound. And the acting was BAD! I didn’t make it past the 10 minute point in either movie. The moral of the story is I need to read the reviews and pay attention to the user ratings. In this case I think the community knows best. I also wonder how much the user contributed data ads to the user experince on netflix. I think as time goes on this data will become more valuable to them.

Just want to add that I am still greatly disapointed by the selection of “watch live” movies and TV shows they have. Netflix had a several hear head start in this area and are now behind. I think Hulu has a better selection of content than Netflix has in their streaming service. I wish they would just make it so you could watch anything live. I would still pay my monthly subscription.

A few weeks ago my boss Paul Allen gave us the mandate to spend 10% of our work time on our own genealogy.  I had been spending some time already doing my family history but this will be a great reason to get more serious about it.  I already have all 4 of my grandparents lines at least back 5 generations.  Although I don’t have full sources and documentation for it all yet.  I don’t have it all plugged into one family tree file with me as the root person yet.  That is one of my first steps.  But I admit that I have been so busy on my normal work tasks I have been working 50-60 hour weeks just trying to keep up.  And I have not started my 10% time.  Maybe I need to create a task in bugzilla and make it a P1 .

Anyway, this last weekend was General Conference for the LDS church and I thought this would be a perfect time to really dig into the project and start it off on the right foot.  On Sunday morning my dad called and asked if me and my family wanted to travel to Delta (Utah) to visit my grandmother Grace Western Pace.  She is pushing 90, has lived alone in her home since my grandpa died 35 years ago, and has failing eye site.  But is very sharp mentally and is in pretty good health.  I thought this visit would be a great chance to get some family history data and to see what she has available. She is not the genealogist of the family but I was supprized to find she had just stacks compiled family histories.  Pedigree charts,   hundreds of family group charts, photos and historical stories.  Literally  thousands of pages of information.  I think much of the genealogy information I already have and was able to get online (who knows when I find the roadblocks there may be something there I can use).  But the photos and all the stories where great info to find.

Anyway I took my laptop and my scanner to digitize some of the info I found.  My first problem, all the family history pages are those really long ones and they dont fit in my scanner.  Who came up this that crazy size page anyway!  So to get all the info I had to scan every page twice.  What a pain.  It also means that I will have time in photoshop pulling out and stitching together the images.  But I was able to get several hundred pages of information scanned.  She did not offer to let me take any of the information even though no one has looked at it in 20 years.  It’s ok, that gives me a reason to visit her more often.

I also installed FamilyTreeMaker 16 and started my tree consolidation project.  I am doing the same project on familylink.com so that I can compare the 2 systems.  I received a free copy of FTM 16 as a gift so I wanted to give it a try. I have found FTM experience to be very poor.  Too many popup windows and I find it hard to use.  Also everytime I run the program I get a Windows popup that reads “this program has known compatibility issues”.  Because I am running Vista I am sure.  Also I cant even view the pedigree view because I keep getting an error that I dont have a default printer setup.  Very frustrating! I also tried to merge feature to merge in my grandparents trees and I could not get the feature to work at all.  It could never find my grandparent to start the merge.  It also gave no tips as to what info it needs to match up a person in my tree to the uploaded merged tree. FamilyLink.com tree builder does not have any merge functionality.  We need to think about that.

One note is that my first question on the FamilyLink.com family tree was “does it have an export feature?”.  I need to have a way to get the information out of the system if I am going to build my tree there.  It does have an export feature and it seems to work well.  But I had a hard time finding it because it is just called “Gedcom” in the menu.  I need to change this to “Export” or something similar.  Also it would be nice if we could export to all the major family tree formats. I will have to run a usability test on the export functionality on Family Link and promote this feature better.

I think this idea of editing a file locally on your PC, then importing it to an online system to share it and edit it online, then exporting it so it can be edited back on the PC is interesting.  I would like to do more research to understand better if genealogists typically do this type of thing.