Emily Chang - eHub Interviews

eHub Interviews »»

eHub Interviews Amiglia

Thanks to Paul and Milena Berry, Founders of Amiglia.com for this email interview posted May 8, 2006.

eHub: What is your web application/service about?

Amiglia: Amiglia is a social software site for families, focused particularly on sharing photos and building a family tree.

eHub: Why did you start this project?

Amiglia: We see a big gap in social software right now—its all Friendster and Flickr which is built much more for hipsters developing friends and dates. Families have really interesting and very strong connections, but they also need their privacy and isolation in the right mix.

eHub: How much time do you devote to its growth?  Do you have a day job?

Amiglia: Yeah Milena and I both have day jobs, I run the IT group for a public company valued in the low billions. I pretty much live, breathe and sleep the technology we’re building on so that gives us a real advantage. Milena teaches robotics and consults for an internet start-up. We’re very excited about Amiglia and work on it pretty much all the time. There’s no evening, weekend or lunch hour that isn’t spent on it.

eHub: How large is your team and what are your backgrounds?

Amiglia: The team is family, but we’re a strong small group. Along with Milena and me, my dad Tim Berry is involved at funding and business planning strategy level. We’ve worked together in the past building Bplans.com and PaloAlto.com. We also have some programming resources in Bulgaria and Mexico.

eHub: What is your design philosophy?

Amiglia: Because Amiglia is focused on families, and the older pre-Internet generations are not yet very web-savvy, we are always looking for ways to simplify the design. Also a very important audience for us is the kids and toddlers - so we’re pushing for a toy-like, cartoony design as well. In our own family we have seen the kids getting really excited when you put them in front of a slideshow and we’ve got more coming that way. The other element we’ve built into the core of our design is the concept of a network, and we think the Family Tree has a dynamic and simple way to show a sophisticated network.

eHub: What technologies are you currently using?

Amiglia: This is a heavily database driven application, built primarily in Cold Fusion with a SQL server back-end. It scales nicely and allows us to develop rapidly and integrate key AJAX components where necessary. The site uses a lot of XML and one of our plans is to constantly optimize the code to reduce the hosting costs as traffic grows.

eHub: If your project is live, what are the most requested features from your users/community?

Amiglia: We are live and we have a really healthy and active beta user group. Right now our key requests have to do with Flickr imports and with our Uploading tools. Flickr has so many users that we want to work with Flickr and make it easier for their users to use Amiglia for their family photos. The current mass uploading tool we’ve deployed is weak in the Mac world, so we’re looking to build a nice Mac widget in the near future. We’ll also be spending a lot more time developing the interface around the usage patterns we’ve seen in the two weeks since launch.

eHub: Does your user base reside in a primary geographic location or is it distributed?

Amiglia: Since I was born in Mexico and grew up in the United States, and Milena was born in Bulgaria and educated in Amsterdam and New York, we’re really thrilled to see Amiglia going international straight from the gate. There have been blog posts and corresponding user sign-ups not only from all over the US but also from France, Russia, Finland, Japan, China, Brazil, Spain, Mexico and others.

eHub: Where do you see the project heading in the next 6 months?  The next 2 years?

Amiglia: In the next 6 months we hope to be out of our Beta and give our users a stable product. We would like to improve on user interaction design, make sure that no Mac user is left out, as well as drive people to easier uploading, so that they build out their family photo album, not only their family tree. We’re also looking forward to starting relationships with photo scanning and photo printing services to complete our product offering.

In the next 2 years we’ll be integrating deeply with two major markets: new parents and travel/trip logging. We think of Amiglia.com as filling a different need than the standard photo sharing sites as well as having a better toolkit for users.

eHub: What is the greatest challenge to your success?

Amiglia: We’re currently investigating better technologies for a more graphic and interactive approach to building out your family tree. We’ve had some challenges with users not getting through the installation of the Amiglia Mass Uploader tool, so that’s also definitely something we’re working on.

eHub: What is the one thing you need to get to the next phase of the project?

Amiglia: We have been really happy to see Amiglia spread from blogger to blogger around the world. Such large attention is putting some strain on our servers and we need to upgrade our hosting situation. We just got our first round of funding though, so we’re on the case.

eHub: Do you have a business model?  If so, what is it?

Amiglia: Our business model is going to be subscription based. People are spending a lot of time and money on their family albums, and putting up with solutions that are far inferior. Our model will let people try the product and begin to use it, and then have some fees as they begin to invest more of their time into it and have a fully scaled family network. Our model is described in detail here: http://www.amiglia.com/intro/price.htm

eHub: If you’re able to disclose this information, how much traffic or usage do you see on an average day?

Amiglia: We’d rather not disclose—but we’re really happy with the Beta launch success. We were quickly featured on LifeHacker.com and have been spending the last few days on Del.icio.us Popular, which is exciting stuff.

eHub: What is the one thing you’re most proud of about the project?

Amiglia: We’ve gotten some wonderful emails from new users who are thrilled at what they’ve been able to create in such a short time. People are ecstatic at the possibility to link their family trees with their photo albums, together with logging their personal bios (especially useful for old great grandfathers and the like) and family stories. Other people love the geo-locating and mapping capabilities that we’ve integrated in trip albums - allowing them to present a slideshow of their trip together with a satellite and road map of the area. Hearing that they’ve been looking for something *exactly* like this really makes our day.

eHub: How would you describe the shift that’s occurring with the web right now to future generations?

Amiglia: For us what Web 2.0 is about is realistic goals and interesting ideas. After the whole bubble blew out, the people who survived it realized they really love what they do and don’t have to be the founders of eBay to have created a really interesting company that provides a valuable service. We would like to believe that Amiglia.com fits right in this category. We are very close to our family, our family loves using Amiglia and we hope to provide its benefits to all other families out there looking for a creative and intuitive family tree building and photo sharing tool.

eHub: What site(s) do you visit everyday other than your own?

Amiglia: We are big fans of BabyCenter.com because we have a little girl due in May; they’ve done a fantastic job with content and product mixed together. Other heavily visited sites are of course eHub to keep up with what’s new, Digg, Delicious, BoingBoing, LifeHacker—the usual suspects.

eHub: How many hours of sleep do you get a night?

Amiglia: Milena does a little better than I do but that’s getting harder with the third trimester of pregnancy. I’ve inherited insomnia so it was never all that much. Lots of naps on the weekends help do the camel sleeping tactic though.

Thanks to Paul and Milena Berry, Founders of Amiglia.com for this email interview posted May 8, 2006.

Visit Amiglia
Originally added to eHub on Mar 16, 06

» More eHub Interviews

eHub Interviews is a series with the creators of Web 2.0 applications and services by Emily Chang, author of eHub, designer, and co-founder and principal of Ideacodes, a strategic web consultancy in San Francisco that she co-founded with Max Kiesler.

Also see eHub Interviews in Japanese at CNET Japan