Amiglia the Blog

Amiglia - Clicked by MSNBC

Will from Clicked at MSNBC posted about Amiglia while we were at the hospital, giving us a big traffic surge, and sorry guys I think temporarily slowing the site down while were off in delivery...

"Hi Paul and Milena, nice job with this site.  I really like that interactive family tree.  I’ve been showing it to anyone who walks past my desk or blips up on my IM."

A Nice List To Be On (Google, Yahoo, Ebay.. Next Acquisitions)

Google, Yahoo, eBay.. Next Acquisitions

Here is another long in-depth article by me. I jumped in the web 2.0 bandwagon not very long ago. But I think I learned quite a lot of things.. I should thank Om Malik (GigaOM), Michael Arrington (Techcrunch) and Digg for this. Here are my findings; the winners and losers of web 2.0..

But before starting let me state the acquisition behaviors of big fish:

Google and Yahoo buy small, innovative startups. In some sense, they reward the creativity. The acquisitions are generally low priced.
MSN acquires small search startups; the prices vary
eBay makes big and very profitable (IMHO) acquisitions; examples are Paypal and Skype.
AOL is very hungry for social web applications.
I’d like to see Amazon and Apple also in this list, but I didn’t hear anything about their acquisitions.

On the list was Digg, Technorati, Facebook, Pandora, Wordpress and...

Amiglia
Social networking for families.. Very good implementation. May feed AOL’s hunger for social applications.

Eva Zoya Berry is Born!!!

As proud as we are of Amiglia and its potential, Milena and I are over the moon with life. Eva Zoya Berry was born at 3:09 PM on the 24th of May 2006, after one extremely difficult labor and delivery. She was 7lbs 14.5oz and 20 inches long.

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Powered by Amiglia.com

If you have a bug or a feature request for the site, please do send it in to us still, while we're going to be obviously quite slowed by this beautiful creature, we're lucky enough to have Baba Zoya (grandmother in bulgarian) as well as Nana and Dandad all visiting and helping love this little one. So I'll be getting to things as I can.

Amiglia on Diva Marketing Blog

Toby Bloomberg posted a short online interview with Milena on her Diva Marketing Blog:

Capturing memories at special times is a must. Sharing your memories is a must as well. Have you seen the cool new mash-up (my new fav word) Amiglia? It combines photos, blogs, videos, music, calendars, tags, chat, Google maps all in the format of an interactive family album.

Amiglia is a family owned small business. Milena Berry, one of the founders, and I exchanged a few emails. I was intrigued with the name of the company - Amiglia. Milena told me it's a  wordplay of the Italian word for family "famiglia." Here's a peek inside this famiglia start-up business..from the perspective of Diva Milena.

Amiglia for your Famiglia

The Under the Radar Blog wrote about Amiglia's secret sauce today:
Sector: online photo management and social network for families
Funding: Private funding with a business model of sales. Amiglia Basic membership is free giving 1GB of photos and videos per year and Amiglia Standard membership is $49.95/year giving 100 GBs of photo space per year (approximately 20,000 high resolution photos!). More pricing options here.
Secret Sauce:A photographic family tree with music and video! This site has really grabbed on to the idea of how much families love pictures of each other and how they love to make connections between all the family members. The site has easy mass uploading, upload by email or from your camera phone. Video clip support, no ads, backup DVDs and storage of the original high resolution photos. Parents and relatives can record sound bites to go with their pictures. This site is heavily database driven application, built primarily in Cold Fusion with a SQL server back-end. Albums can be connected to each other, making it a great way to connect photos and profiles from living relatives for a family history book or upcoming reunion. When you upload new photos to your own album, they also get automatically uploaded to any related families’ albums. You can also create a single family site, and provide your relatives with separate family passwords for upload rights, edit rights, etc. Rafe Needleman wrote, “Amiglia’s add-ons to this structure are well targeted to navigating this network: there’s a Java-based game for children, where they get to identify family members; and there are mapping tools to show destinations on a family vacation.”

Growing the Family Tree

Bob and Joy Schwabach from On Computers wrote this detailed review about Amiglia's genealogy tools today:

There's a new Web site and service for creating a chart of your family tree, and it is by far the best we've ever seen.

The site is called Amiglia.com , and it lets you attach photos, commentary and sound to a treelike structure representing your extended family or group, past and present. Anyone on the tree can add his own stories, pictures and memories.

The leaves, so to speak, are linked to each other; a change in one is recognized by the others. A broadcast e-mail can be directed to all members who have an address listed. Clicking on the "people" tab can show you everyone at once in a huge display of close relatives and distant cousins.

The leaves, so to speak, are linked to each other; a change in one is recognized by the others. A broadcast e-mail can be directed to all members who have an address listed. Clicking on the "people" tab can show you everyone at once in a huge display of close relatives and distant cousins.

The Amiglia.com  site is in beta testing right now and free to all comers. A calendar will be added soon, allowing for the scheduling of family reunions and other events. After beta testing is over, general membership will remain free, with 1 gigabyte of storage. Above that, the charge will be $50 a year for 100 gigabytes of storage. That's enough for 20,000 photos and a lot of explanations.

Family Tree Now Bloggable!

We've just added a new feature -- you can blog your family tree! Or of course, post it to any other website you have. Underneath the family tree is a link called "Blog this Tree!" Here's what the Demo Tree looks like on our own blog:

Click on any person to see their profile

Talking tech on Family 2.0 posts an update on Amiglia

Rachel Cook from Talking Tech on Family 2.0 posted a nice update on Amiglia:

An update on Amiglia. The founders have updated some great things on the site. I also like the new Flickr import feature and I have fallen in love with the video segment that automatically plays on your family homepage, a neat trick…shows a slideshow of the family photos you uploaded of each family member. I am yet to upload all my photos. Which I have an issue with (1500 - 2000 photos) just of family!!!! So I am not sure yet how to go about doing this.

I like the new look on the family trees - must have a play.

I think however, my choice will be to stick with Amiglia.

Great technology Amiglia.

A blogger from the Philippines posts about Amiglia

Pinay from the Philippines posted a beautiful slideshow powered by Amiglia with the following comments:
I finally found the time to check out amiglia, an interactive family tree maker. what i love about amiglia is that you can actually upload and share photos, recipes (yup, recipes), music, video, etc... it literally is a family activity... online.

SimplifierLab calls Amiglia "a smart, best-of-breed Web 2.0 genealogy application"

SimplifierLab posted the following today:
Amiglia is a smart, best-of-breed Web 2.0 genealogy application created by fellow ITP alums, Paul and Milena Berry. And, it's free during their beta period. "[Genealogy] is the third most popular pursuit...behind the twin vices of gambling and porn," according to Matty Sallin during his thesis presentation of Family Hedge, another genealogy application (Quicktime video + chat transcript).

Family linkages are the most basic social networks and, therefore, easily lend themselves to social applications that are meaningfully relevant to all of us. Amiglia focuses on the social aspects among family members rather than the taxonomy. For one, it has hooks into Flickr, making photo-sharing (a natural family activity) simple and accessible. It has a calendar so you can track birthdays and other important dates. You can even add photo journals of trips courtesy of an integrated Google mashup. It even has a fun family tree game for kids. Best of all, it's free during the beta period -- no software to purchase or install. It's all online and collaborative so the onus of maintaining the family tree can be shared across its members. Take it out for a spin: Family 2.0: Amiglia.com.