Google has responded to my question about potential product plans related to public records. The official statement: "While we're always working on new products to better serve our users, advertisers and publishers, we have nothing to announce at this time." However, the Google spokesperson did note that it already has one initiative that addresses public records: Google Patent Search. The low-profile service was launched in 2006, and uses the same technology that powers Google Book Search to archive 7 million patents and over a million patent applications in a searchable, online database. I had posed the question...
This computer screen saver is incredibly beautiful, dynamic, amazingly hypnotic, free (!), and literally alive. You can get the full story here, but Electric Sheep is Scott Draves' open source, distributed computing project which creates and disseminates new user-generated and/or computer-generated fractals to everyone who's downloaded the screen saver. I've been running the Mac version for about four or five years and find myself involuntarily staring at it for long periods. Over time, you'll actually see it evolve, and get to know family trees. I sometimes recognize dynamic fractals patterns I've seen elsewhere in nature. I've seen fractals that...
The CEO of the company that owns genealogy site Ancestry.com has pledged to open up the platform to outside developers. In an interview with The Industry Standard yesterday, The Generations Network CEO Tim Sullivan said Ancestry.com was committed to opening up the platform, which has been developed over the last 10 years. "We will absolutely open up our platform," Sullivan said. "It's on our roadmap." However, Sullivan added that that it was unlikely to happen in the next six months, owing to other unspecified priorities for the company. He also did not describe what opening up Ancestry.com would entail,...
Israli-based genealogy site MyHeritage is looking to expand its online social capabilities with the acquisition of Kindo, a service that covers a bit of family tree-building as well as social networking. The terms of the acquisition have not been disclosed, but with both MyHeritage and Kindo having a received funding earlier this year as well as a growing international reach, these two family-oriented services have common goals for connecting users. MyHeritage, which received $15 million in its third round of funding just weeks ago, has spent a large portion of its development efforts on growing the technology behind its service,...
