23 March 2013

RootsTech III Day 2 Keynote Session

The keynote session started at 8:30am with two contrasting talks.

 
Jyl Pattee, a motivational speaker from momitforward.com appealed to the right brain by asking the audience to think of a wow moment, then suggested we should create, capture, archive and share these moments, and do so on a regular basis using social media. She told stories with impressive photos and videos.
 
Tim Sullivan, CEO of Ancestry appealed to the left brain. He mentioned they had a challenge in developing and maintaining a website that worked for both beginners and experienced users.

Collaboration is important, even experienced users can benefit from the contributions of beginners who may have access to unique petsonal data

Ancestry now has 45 million trees with 4 billion people; and they're not 100% accurate.

The company now has 2.7 million subscribers across all it's sites; 1200 employees with 50 who have been with the company for more than 10 years, 200 for more than 5 years, and one-third new in the past year.

In news Sullivan announced:

  • A new version of the iOS app will launch in the next few days with a Facebook and Twitter interface. Over one third of new registrants now come from a mobile device, and that has been about half in past two months.
  • The price of the AncestryDNA service is reduced to $99 effective today for everyone, subscribers and non-subscribers.
  • Ancestry plans on spending $100million in the next five years to add new data. Part of that will be in a collaborative project with FamilySearch to digitize and index 140 million very much neglected US probate records from 1800 to 1930 assuming rights can be negotiated.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

I think the $99 DNA cost is great but sadly I understand it will still be a few months before we see it available in Canada.