Last Day at RootsTech 2012 the Beginnings

RootsTech is fun as well as educational. It gets a solid 10 out of 10. The participants in this Conference will help to determine the future of genealogy and a lot of technology. The Bloggers are a wonderful, enthusiastic and diverse group.

The presentation in the large conference is impressive with huge projection screens showing the presenters and huge flat screen monitors anyplace the view is blocked to the larger screens. 


The keynote speaker on Saturday is Tim Sullivan, the President and CEO of Ancestry.com. He talks about the future of genealogy in a presentation entitled, "Making the Most of Technology to Further the Family History Industry." He starts by saying technology should get out of the way and help people do genealogy. The keynote and other presentations are live on RootsTech.org.


Ancestry.com has a soon to be announced DNA business. A couple of new business ventures have been announced here at the Conference, including censusrecords.com, the new company from brightsolid.com. Tim is joined by a panel of Ancestry.com product leaders. The team addresses a series of questions selected from Bloggers.


Here are some random observations on the commentary:


Meeting the needs of both experts and those just starting genealogy.
What is happening in the science of Genomics? Dramatic improvements with a huge magnitude of being able to sequence the DNA of individuals. To tell things about your ancestors like what town they lived in, in the past. They will be analyzing millions of genetic markers using massive amounts of data using Cloud computing and massive parallel processing.


Much of the progress of the technology/genealogy industry is based on the individual innovation of entrepreneurs.


Statistics about mobile users on Ancestry.com (remember these presentations are online at RootsTech.org so if you are interested in anything that I mention, go back to the site and listen to the entire presentation). 12% of all visits to Ancestry.com are from mobile devices up from 8% just a few months ago. They are going to be developing their products on mobile first rather than desktops.


How is Facebook.com important to genealogists? Facebook is a major technology trend in itself. Facebook is a way of sharing discoveries, more effective than email.


Publishing this and continuing in the next post.