Wednesday, January 28, 2009

Genea-Musings: More FamilyLink.com News

Genea-Musings: More FamilyLink.com News with Randy Seaver: "I'm amazed by the tremendous shift in emphasis from 'genealogy content on WorldVitalRecords' emphasized in March 2008 to 'social networking using web sites and personal media devices' emphasized in November 2008.

The application of We're Related to Facebook, Myspace, Bebo, Orkut, Friendster, Yahoo, hi5 and iPhone is the major development shown in the presentation, and appears to be the focus of development over the past six months.

One message I received from this presentation is 'a company has to do what it has to do' in order to survive and be profitable. It has to take risks, innovate, try to catch the next technology wave, etc. It appears that FamilyLink.com is riding the wave right now. Will they succeed or wipe out?"Paul Allen posted Near Death Experiences yesterday on his http://www.paulallen.net/ blog, in which he describes how close startup companies can come to failure. Near the end of his post, he wrote:

"...but FamilyLink.com (corporate site) had its own very intense near-death experience in the past few weeks. Amid the global economic meltdown, a bank loan was called, and we scrambled for weeks to find a way to pay it off. A few options emerged, some less attractive than others, and then finally, a couple of days after Christmas, we were completely delivered from our financial pressures. We have now finalized our Series B funding which will be announced shortly.

"Amazingly, at about the same time, we turned profitable. Just six months ago we were losing nearly $300,000 per month. But through a combination of very painful cost reductions and the growth in our subscription, advertising, and product revenue streams, we literally turned the corner the week after Christmas, and hope to never turn back."

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