When we covered the slate of companies helping people chronicle family stories and milestones, we left out a quiet but excellent Redmond, Washington startup called Sampa.
They aren’t new, and we’ve covered them before. The reason we left them out is that we’ve had some difficulty in categorizing them.
In many ways Sampa is a blog platform with a focus on privacy features, like Vox. But we’ve also compared them to easy site creation tools like Weebly, Synthasite and Jimdo.
But recently they’ve added new features to focus on family story telling and milestones. There is now a Geni-like family tree feature, and trusted visitors can upload photos directly as well.
And they’ve also added a MyBlogLog-type feature that shows visitors to the site – both their name and an avatar. Sampa sites have areas that are private by default, so only people you invite in see the site (they see it via an invitation URL, and subsequent visits are authorized via a cookie.
The hodge-podge of features results in a really compelling hang-out for families to tell their stories, celebrate weddings and births, and share photos and family tree information. The site is also free, although eventually users will be able to pay to have advertisements removed.
It’s a good site, and one of many startups that are doing a lot on very little capital – the company has raised just $310,000.
Sampa is awesome. I used it — took virtually no time and the results were *stunning*.
Marcelo is one of the most prolific developers I know. He also maintains the excellent Seattle Startup Index featuring the most popular of the Internet startups in the Seattle area (fresh each month):
http://seattle2...ndex-Octobe.htm
My far-flung family used Sampa to create a web site and blog around a family member’s medical crisis. The mutiple layers of privacy were perfect for our situation.
We love Sampa. Easy to use, easy to control, and looks great. One of my favorite local (seattle) companies.
I thought that linking images to crunchbase was going to be discontinued after adding the widget.
Both Marcelo and Paul are really good people, and credits to the Seattle startup scene. It’s impressive how much they’ve accomplished on the cheap.
Great company, love how little funding they’ve taken, plus EVERYONE knows Marcelo in the Seattle startup scene, he’s done an amazing job networking himself.
Not sure how they stack against MyFamily2.0? That’s their main competitor, not Geni.
Sorry … can not get past the Windows look and feel. But to their credit, it was easy to sign up and execute some basic edits.
Seems nice place to hang out with family members, hopefully this social networking will further lead to network with fellow citizen.
hmm, founded by a former Microsoft employee, but uses Microsoft enemie Nr.1 on his site, Google. The search on the site is provided by Google.
Sampa means rubbish or garbage in Bahasa
The ‘Sampa’ site and its continuously up-graded features just beats everything else I have tried including ‘My Family’ and ‘My Space’.
We (myself and fellow ex-students from a wide variety of countries have been using ‘Sampa’ for the past 12 months and it is the perfect platform to keep in touch. The technical back-up team are great and very responsive to enguiries. Thank-you.
a new social networking website again? come on, it’s already boring.
– randall, a good programmer, now working on premature ejaculation herbal
sampa is super thing, im glad i found out about it, and now it makes my life more colorful
oldtimerock from v
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