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In an interesting development, the Innovator Showdown Semi-finalists were announced with an obscure post on the RootsTech.Devpost.com website. There was no press release sent to the bloggers and there was only one post that I could find on Facebook. I would not have known had Randy Seaver not posted a note on his Genea-Musings blog.
Some of the Semi-finalists are well known to me and I have been communicating with them for some time. Some are repeats from last year's contest. Here is the list, unfortunately, they did not provide links in the announcement, but Randy did.
- Champollion 2.0
- CSI: Crowd Sourced Indexing
- Cuzins
- Double Match Triangulator
- Emberall
- JoyFLIPS
- Kindex
- OldNews USA
- QromaTag
- RootsFinder
There is a page on the DEVPOST website with all the submissions. Here is a screenshot of part of that page.
There were a total of 40 submissions listed. If you want to get a good idea of where family history aka genealogy is going today, you can browse through the list. I have written about a couple of these programs recently. Of course, there are other important, new family history related programs that are not on that list. I will try to highlight each of the RootsTech 2017 Innovator Summit Semi-finalists between now and the Conference.
I am, however, somewhat appalled at the lack of publicity given the announcement so far. Other than the tech folks, I am not sure how many of us read the DEVPOST regularly.
I think the lack of announcements for the Innovator Showdown semifinalists is another indicator of the direction RootsTech is going, which is to say, less and less emphasis on actual "tech."
ReplyDeleteI think they are struggling with how much "tech" there is in RootsTech.
DeleteNot that many people know of devpost -- even some developers don't -- but it's the wrong medium to reach a larger community. Conspicuous by its absence is that your can't log-in via Google+. I try (and fail) to keep FB related to friends & family, and use Google+ for genealogy, but I couldn't see why this option was unavailable.
ReplyDeleteThanks for that insight. I guess I don't understand their strategy.
DeleteJames, both Christine Woodcock (who were judges for the semi-finals) and I announced the list on our blogs,via several social media channels and in several Facebook Groups. See https://geniaus.blogspot.com.au/2016/12/rootstech-innovator-showdown-semi.html and http://scottishgenealogytipsntricks.blogspot.com/2016/12/innovator-summit-semi-finalists.html
ReplyDeleteNo direct announcement was made to the RootsTech Ambassadors, I did pick it up from the blogs. But you would have to know about the announcement to see it on the RootsTech.org website or be looking for it every day. Thanks for you comments and thanks for acting as a judge.
DeleteAnd it was posted on the Rootstech site as well
ReplyDeletehttps://www.rootstech.org/innovator-showdown
See my comment above.
DeleteI'm surprised you didn't see it in the Facebook Group for Ambassadors, James. It was not only posted by myself and Jill Ball the day the announcement was made, but it was also pinned to the top of the page so other Ambassadors could help us spread the word.
ReplyDeleteUnlike some, I do not live on Facebook. Apparently some of the "other Ambassadors" did help spread the word because that is where I picked it up. Hmm. Only a couple of days after the initial decision. Thanks for your work and contribution.
DeleteIt was posted to the Ambassador Facebook Group - where Ambassadors are to look for ALL communications this year. Email is no longer being used. Randy Seaver picked it up from there.
DeleteWould you suggest that I delete the post?
Delete