Team Geni Makes a Splash at Burbank Jamboree

The weather was hot in Burbank, Calfiornia, but not as hot as the activities taking place at Jamboree 2008 held June 27-29. The Southern California Genealogy Jamboree, now in its 39th year, has grown into a first class conference for Genealogists. A huge “Thank You” goes out to the So Cal Society that put this show together—it truly ranks among the top genealogy shows in the USA. Another big “Thank You” goes out to those who stopped by our booth to talk with us, share their experiences with Geni and pick up and wear a Geni t-shirt (more on this later).

Last year this was the first ever conference that the Geni Team attended as a vendor. We learned a lot from attendees then and this year was no different. Because this conference took place near our office many members of our team were able to attend and introduce Geni to those who had not seen us previously. In addition, we had time to visit with current Geni users and talk to genealogists about what they’d like to see on our site in the future—this is the kind of valuable information that we bring back to our office and use for planning new features. The tremendous amount of information and requests that we received from attendees at this years Jamboree will surely keep us busy until the next Jamboree.

The conference was held at the “Under renovation” Burbank Airport Marriott and it attracted many attendees who came to learn from the speakers, visit vendors and learn from each other. It will be held there again in 2009 and Geni will be back so if you missed this years conference start making plans for next year (scheduled for June 12-14, 2009).

On day number one, Friday, our team handed out Geni’s cool “Who’s Your Daddy?” t-shirts. On Saturday a lot of these t-shirts were spotted on attendees. At 6pm Saturday we held a drawing and gave a ‘Flip Video’ camera to one of the many Geni t-shirt wearing folks. (note: the Flip video will be very useful in uploading videos to the Geni site when this feature launches shortly-stay tuned for an announcement).

Included with the list of well known speakers such as Dick Eastman of Eastman’s Online Genealolgy, Author Megan Smolenyak and, and David Lifferth of World Vital Records was Geni’s Director of Community, JoAnne Rockower, who spoke on the topic of Collaborative Genealogy. Roots Television was there along with the Genealogy Guys so you may want to check their sites out for additional coverage of this fun event.

Kudos to all who participated in and made this such a successful event for everyone!