BradPace.com

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.

So this morning I am just getting started with my morning RSS feeds.  Scanning hundreds of headlines and summaries to keep up with the industry.  I note an interesting post by Google’s Matt Cutts on how he suggests you get links to improve your SEO.  And I was just on the verge of a great idea for how to get links for WorldVitalRecords.com.  You know that feeling when you know you have a great idea in the works but it just hasn’t arrived at the front of your mind.  I had seen the lightning but had not heard the thunder.  Right at that moment my computer starts to shut down without any warning.  No pop up, nothing.  At first I thought something was wrong with my computer.  Maybe it had overheated or something.  But then after all the windows are gone there is a windows screen that says that Microsoft is installing 3 system updates.  It took 2 more re-boots to bet back up and running.

Anyway my great link building idea never came and it’s all Microsoft’s fault!  I feel violated for having my PC taken over. What makes this any different that a hacker taking over my system?  I am thinking that I should sue Microsoft for taking away this great idea.  I’m sure it was a million dollar idea Just one more check against Windows.  Add it to the list!

This is a live blog from the FamilySearch developers conference.  The keynote is given by Ranson Love who is the director of strategic partnerships at FamilySearch.

There is a huge groundswell of genealogy interest in the world and this interest is just in the beginning stages.   The Lord has prepared the world for this work including the open source movement.  Hardware and opens source tools are key to the success of the spread of genealogy on the web.  Also great sets of complex data like wikipedia and google provide solutions to problems that could never have been solved in the past.  Social networking will also be a big boon to the genealogy community.

There is a universal human need for family history.  Everyone wants to know who we are.  Once someone knows that they want to share that information. He mentioned our we’re related success as an example.

What is the killer platform for genealogy?  Open and collaborateive technology.  Open and collaborative. Includes social networking.

There are many challenges to this work.  First the need is worldwide and many of these people do not have technology.  He estimates that there are 70 billion records in the world.  Currently FamilySearch has 6 Billion records and 12 Billion names.  Over half of all children born in the world today have no official record of their existence!  This statistic is getting worse because of the distribution of births in the world. Another problem is that the data in the vault is not owned but governed by 9000 contracts.

FamilySearch can not do it all alone and they need help from partners. They estimate that there are over 10 million genealogists in the world today.  Their vision is they need a global community and free flow of data into open repositories.  Also linked to commercial and non-profit services and richer content is key to their success.  They want partners to succeed because they can reach users who the church cant.  This requires some paridigm shifts.  Moving away from aquiring content but getting access to data.  Also they will not build products any more but  are building platforms.  Moving away from collecting information to sharing information.  Moving away from just a church workforce to a community.  Also they want to develope standards to help the industry.

Key technology components.    New family search creates a collaboration of users and data. In 7 generations that is 127 direct ancestors and 8,319 ancestors of ralated children.  In 10 generations there are 525,311 related ancestors!  Trees provide context to data that many people are interested in. The new family search has increased family history work by 10x in the districts where it has been released.

They have made many advancements in scanning.  Can now digitize an entire roll of film in 20 minutes of processing.  This used to take a live person over 2 hours to complete.  Indexing is then done with double blind entries and then they compare both versions.  This produces quality results.  The farther back in time the harder it is to index because the data is not as organized.  In 2005 they had 800 indexers.  Now they have 160,00 stakes in the US, UK and Germany and includes 120k users and can produce 1.7 million names a day.  They want 300k users in the next 2 years.  They have 3 programs and ways to partner with them:  record access program, web services program, and family history center affiliates.

They are seeing a big change in the attitudes of record custodians over the last few years.  A few years ago they did not want anything to do with digital.  Now they undestand that their data needs to be digital to remain viable and to preserve their records.  FamilySearch is attempting to fill this need and supply what these record custodians need.  They try and do it with no cost to them.

FamilySearch web services contains 2 major areas.  Framily tree and records search.  Both include APIs to collaborate with partners. Need to be able to search any repository and must be able to do a selective copy of relevant data.  Must be able to past the data into desired repository through some type of app.  Must have a persistent link to source to ensure accuracy of the data and lead generation.

They want to build a genealogy ecosystem that includes archives, customers, familysearch, desktop and web app providers and genealogy societies.  All these individual parts need to contribute data into the tree.

We are not in a bubble but the social networking space is getting more competitive.  Just on a side note I have noticed that many people who had very successful apps in the beginning are no longer building apps and have moved on to doing other things.

There are many ways to monetize an app: cpn, cpc, cpi, incetives, cpa, survey (like peanut labs), and cpe, transactions, gifts and subscriptions.  The banner model is broken and does not work.  So we need new and innovative ways to monetize the apps.

Videoegg just launched a new product called ad frames.  Basically there is a small preview on the page and when the mouse is placed over the ad a larger video frame comes up with the real video ad.  Advertisers only pay for actual views of the video. Lookery now has a guarenteed CPM of $1.25 for app developers.
Direct response is driving most of the money on social networks.  Branding dollars are starting to come as social networks grow.  The big brands don’t have a choice but to pay to get involved.  Most large brands need to do many things like sponsoring apps, buying ads and participating in anyway they can. Most brands spend 6x more on TV than on online spending.  This will shift to more online spending over the next few years.  We are monetizing new kinds of user experiences.  It doesnt matter knowing what a user buys if you know who the user actually is.  This is what most large companies are having trouble understanding.

How effective is the current monetization methods?  Many apps are making money with virtual currency.  Ads are not working as well.  VideoEgg obviously says that ads that are engaging user better and are making app developers more money.

From an advertiser perspective all the ad companies are very much about branding and selling CPMs and no one is talking about actual trackable performance.  The good think about AdWords is that it is based on results and tracking ROI.  It is conserning that the ad networks on social networks don’t speak to this.  I am sure this means that CPM is the only way to monetize social media. There is still a lot to figure out in this area.

How do you gage application engagement? The facebook numbers are fairly useless and can be misleading. It is a good idea to break and track users into different groups. Like fluff friends does this with creators, sharers, and consumers. Also compare viralness and stickyness. Both need to be tracked. Time spent on site, page views per site, number of monthly visits, number of content items added are some examples of good numbers to track.

What makes an app fizzle out? Is the app dynamic and is there something new each time the user comes to visit. The type of app also matters. Is it something that you only need to do once? The best apps always have more tasks for the user to do.

Packrat is a very engaging app and looks good. Engagement is different for each app. The more the user is involved the more the engagement. Ways to improve engagement include unlock able levels or features and always adding new things. Also user generated content is a great way to bring users back. User forums have also been very engaging for users to create a community around your app. Some apps elect a user to be the moderator of the forum and to filter feedback.

What makes an app viral?  Viral marketing is all about your customers selling to other customers. Really it comes down to getting friends to invite friends. Viral marketing is not new, it just happens more easily and much faster.  Now viral growth is getting built into APIs and the actual platform.  That is what Facebook has done well.

With recent changes to Facebook most app developers are focusing on tuning their apps and optimizing the user interface.  Just like content is king on the web, functionality and user experience is king in apps.  If you have a great app it will grow.  As the platforms change their policies and systems, the good thing is that everyone has to play by the same rules.

Let people know that you have interacted with them.  When this happens people will participate more because they know that something happens at the end.  Like Scrabulous, you know that you have to take a turn because your partner is waiting for a turn.  These useful personal interactions are key to viral growth. Watch your uninstalls because vitality doesn’t do any good if you have a bunch of uninstalls. The average uninstall rate used to be 20% and now it is up to as high as 50%. Redo the user interface and get new graphics to re-engage users and you can also email them and let users know about new features and enhancements.

Games continue to have the largest viral growth and have not been hampered by recent changes by Facebook.  The game experience is much different than other web experiences.  Games offer an experience that progresses.  Things change based on what the user does over time.  That has helped them grow viral.

User feedback is vital to viral growth.  If you listen to your users you will know what you need to do to improve the user experience.  This will help virality.  Think how you can reward your users for their actions like leaderboards and scoring.

As I said in a previous post, most experts agree that you need to launch a new app with a very conservative stance on growth.  So if facebook allows you to send 5 invites per person per day then only send 3 so you can make sure you can optimize the experience and the messaging.  Once you actually start seeing viral growth you get more aggressive and turn up the invites.  This way when your app is viral you have the ability to grow your app.

A short session based on an O’Reilly report.  Over 600 new apps are still added to the system everyday. App usage has leveled off.  And Usage of superwall and funwall are declining. Most categories have a defined app what is the big winner.  A few don’t like food and games.  The top used apps are games, music, dating, travel and just for fun. Some of the categories with the most opportunity are travel and fashion.

What is a social game and how does it differ from a multi-player game? Bringing people together who know each other or who have shared interests. The psychology of social games will continue to grow. Experiencing the web with your friends is more enjoyable than by yourself. Users are looking for lightweight games that are easy to play and understand. Social games can reach a much broader audience and the social experience is more important than the actual game. People enjoy competing with each other and having a winner and a looser.

How do you monetize games? Many companies see the application as the ad unit. So the game itself is a branded ad. That is what BuddyMedia is doing now with several major brands. It is a good way to get big brands into the social media. BuddyMedia averages a partner deal of $100k to build their app. Sponsorship of games has also been productive. Videoegg ads have also been successful. Some games actually charge the user for upgrades. Like ghost racer allows users to upgrade their car for $20 and they make about $1k per day from upgrades. There are 19 year olds that are making 50k per month on their social games.

Some drawbacks to gaming is that games are hit driven. Meaning that they go viral and take off. Then they level off and die. Continued growth is difficult. People tend to tire easily from playing a game.