Ancestorcloud

About

Ancestorcloud is a living, breathing, funded startup based right here in Provo. It is making a home in a space where the tech innovation is as old and slow moving as many of its users.

The Problem

Ancestry and Family Search serve as robust search engines for individuals to find information pertaining to the dead, but are inevitably incomplete. It is at this point that active hobbyists spend significant time, money, and resources striving to overcome these "roadblocks." They are left on their own to locate "groups," start Facebook pages, purchase flights to investigate locations with potential information, and build personal networks in an effort to solve their problems. They are left without tools to connect them to the millions of fellow enthusiasts who not only share their passion, but could help them when with the host of "roadblocks" the average enthusiast comes across. Ancestorcloud is stepping in to introduce new and long standing social networking principles that will empower these hobbyists to connect over their passion and to do family history better, together.

The Solution

Development on Ancestorcloud's Marketplace began in December. In it, genealogy enthusiasts can post and solve "requests" for help with family history problems. Users can purchase "Ancestorcoin" to incentivize others to solve their problems and in turn "Ancestorcoin" may be used to do the same or may even "cashed out" to send real money to their bank account. See the designs here.

The Tech

• The Marketplace is an HTML5 web application.
• It is (being) built on a Mongo, Express, Angular, Node (MEAN) stack.
• SASS and the inuitcss framework are used handle styling
• Grunt handles the front and back end task automation, and build processes
• Codeship is used for continuous deployment
• Eventually this will look to be a mobile app that will utilize ionic and Adobe phonegap

Why a developer would be interested

This is real. Ancestorcloud is real investor backed startup building software that will be used by significant numbers of real people, rather than an arbitrary project for college credit. It will provide exposure the Utah's thriving startup scene as well web technology that plagues the industry but is not formally taught at BYU. The tech is built using bleeding edge web technology and practices. It will solve problems related to real-time data, persistent data, legacy browsers, payment processing, file uploads, search, web performance, first class UI/UX, restful services, modular/scalable architecture, social networking, etc.

People

• Mikey Murphy
• Brady Kelley
• David Wardell
• Joshua Grigg