March 2009
19 posts
Last-minute talk preparation
Heading to bed… almost midnight in Woods Cross, Utah.
Cloud-family-tree-website talk and Twitter talk are basically ready to go.
Footnote talk is in good shape but I could stand to go over it again for the new audience.
Up at 5 am tomorrow… set up from 6 to 7 am. First talk at 10:40. The booth will be largely unstaffed for this one.
Tomorrow night: Sizzler for dinner!
Amazing Powerpoint/Keynote Tips from Xobni's CEO →
Back from St. George
Caught the redeye back from Las Vegas late last night, slept most of the way. Managed to get the black monitor box home without paying United’s oversize fees or shipping it via FedEx.
Now on to preparing the two new talks for the South Davis Family History Fair next week: one on Twitter and the other on Ancestry Family Tree vs. Geni. I want to make these really enjoyable and worthwhile...
February 2009
18 posts
Two Talks Done
The talks went fairly well today.
About 6-8 attended the Genlighten talk. I didn’t sense much response from the audience, but several seemed to get the idea. Unfortunately, the extension video cable I’d bought wasn’t high enough resolution and the screen image was blurred (i.e., double… poor sync of some kind.) The top was cut off the screen as well.
The Footnote talk...
Off to St. George
I’m off once again to a genealogy conference. This time it’s the St. George Family History Expo. I’ll be staffing the Genlighten booth and giving a talk on “What Family History Consulants Should Know about Footnote.com”. I’ll also give a presentation on Genlighten itself, hopefully to a room full of interested potential providers. The following two weekends...
PayPal Integration
Justin’s got PayPal Web Payments Pro integration working on the Genlighten staging site as of today. Still plenty of glitches, but we can now place lookup orders in our cart and checkout using either credit cards or PayPal.
Setting up a test account in the PayPal Developer Sandbox was a bit painful, but once the process was completed I had no problem paying for a lookup with my (test)...
“People sometimes ask us how much we look at the competition. The answer: not...”
– From What everybody else is doing is irrelevant, by Jason from 37Signals “Signal vs. Noise” blog.
“Take leave of this doubt, cull,
although the best also decays,
and keep your...”
– Theodor Fontane (1819 -1898) Found in the March 2008 issue of “Der Steckverbinder” [“The Connector”] the internal newsletter of German connector manufacturer ODU, p 24.
WatchThe latest Genlighten “How it Works” illustration from Kevin Menzie. Cyndy found the “enhancement” process particularly humorous.
Footnote Talk -- Round One
For months my status updates on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and elsewhere have said something like “preparing for my upcoming Footnote talk”. Tonight was my first attempt at giving that talk, albeit to a small and friendly audience at our local Family History Center here in Wilmette. Six FHC patrons attended, along with one of our volunteers. Considering that I was still generating...
Payment Processing Learning Curve
We’ve been planning on using Braintree Financial’s gateway, vault and APIs to power our payment processing routines for Genlighten’s back-end. But they’ve grown selective about working with tiny startups, and merchant banks apparently don’t like to do business with what they call “Third-Party Payment Aggregators” (TPPAs), so Braintree’s CEO strongly...
“Noca is building a new online payment system to provide significantly reduced...”
– A description of the payment-processing startup Noca.com, from www.killerstartups.com.
“I want to go to Williams College,” I continued. “And with all due...”
– Bo Peabody, in Lucky or Smart, via Gabor Hits Send.
“There is nothing that can’t be made stimulating. Even if Thing A is dull,...”
– Kathy Sierra, posted on Twitter, 06 February 2009
Genlighten and Techstars... maybe next year!
I had the privilege of meeting Micah Baldwin of Lijit at the Techstars Chicago Meetup last week. He was fun to talk to and offered some good advice about what Techstars would be looking for in a promising startup.
He was nice enough to send a follow-up e-mail today encouraging me to apply. I’d love to, but after thinking about it quite a bit I’ve concluded that we’re not quite...
WatchKevin Menzie of Slice of Lime shows how he prepared an illustration for an upcoming magazine ad for Genlighten.
