What Happened to the 2017 Innovation Showcase Winners?

There were over 450 exhibitors at Rootstech 2018 and they were scattered across a seemingly endless exhibit hall. While checking out all the great vendors and products in the Exhibit Hall this year, I came across one of last year's Innovation Showcase winners, Kindex. This led me to wonder, what happened to all the winners from 2017? 

To refresh my memory, I took at look at the news release from FamilySearch last year. It lists the four winners:

• First Place Judges’ Choice ($90,000 cash, AWS credits, and an investment from Kickstart Seed Fund), Bill Nelson of OldNews USA.


• Second Place Judges’ Choice ($44,000 cash and AWS credits), The Qroma tag mobile app for embedding stories into pictures, tagging them by voice commands, and making the data accessible on various platforms.


• Third Place Judges’ Choice Award ($26,000 cash and AWS credits), Louis Kessler, Double Match Triangulator, an app to help sort DNA matches into groups of relatives.


• People’s Choice ($25,000 cash and AWS credits), Kindex, an app designed to help users create searchable, shareable archives of family letters and other documents using tags to help users easily locate information.

If you recall, the judges for the final round included Alan Doan, CEO of Missouri Star Quilt Company, John Richards, Founder and CEO of Startup Ignition, Kenyatta Berry, host of The Genealogy Road Show, Thomas MacEntee, founder of High-Definition Genealogy, and Dalton J. Wright, partner in Kickstart Seed Fund.

Armed with this information, I set out to contact each of them to see what has happened in the past year. 

In the next few days I will post do a short post of what I found for each of the winners.

Stay tuned...