Israeli based MyHeritage, recently funded by Accel and Index Ventures is acquiring UK based, Kindo.com a family tree service. The amount of the acquisition is not announced but given Kindo’s performance (according to Google trends) we assume this was not a big operation. We can assume also that part of the recent funding was dedicated to the acquisition.
So why would a service with 25 million users would care for a small player? Probably to extend its presence in Europe with an existing team and have a plug and play service in 14 languages but also to have a comparable technology and product asset with its main new challengers: Geni.com et Verwandt (in Germany). Kindo’s product is nicely done (see below for yourself) and even better than MyHeritage’s own service. It makes sense to think that both services will merge at some point. [Update: TechCrunch UK has more on this].
Kindo was funded by TAG and Ambient Sound Investment (a fund created by ex Skype engineers)
update: it didn’t strike me when i first wrote this post but Saul Klein is both an investor in Kindo (with TAG) and in MyHeritage (with Index). I assume he was a key facilitator in that deal. If you add to that his ex position at Skype, you end up understanding that the web is a really small family, which in this case is obviously helpful (no play on words)
Are there any open source versions of family tree builder software out there? This type of software can be applied to many things (for example university researchers as one startup recently convered in TC did). Thanks.
great for families around the world
GRAMPS is a free and open-source genealogy program.
Thanks Olya.
great work eliminating another terrible domain name like kindo from being released into the digital ecosphere.
sincerely
Common Sense for Domain Names Foundation.
what’s wrong with the name Kindo? in English it’s a bit childlike sounding but has roots in germanic languages of relatives, & better than a lot of company names coming out of the woodwork lately….
You should be talking to those people who buy up all the domains and you have to search for three weeks to find anything that’s available.
MyHeritage has just released new photo tagging technology.
Take a look.
http://www.yout...h?v=lEuwR0-GlOg
Seems strange that there is still competition in the online genealogy world. Does any one site even dominate?
Which of these, if any, is best suited for asking elementary/middle school students to use? Does any of them specifically advertise to the school population?
@EH, Ancestry.com seems to be a huge player in the US and is expanding their worldwide reach. Ancestry.com is part of the Generations Network which contains: genealogy.com, myfamily.com, rootsweb.com and they own FamilyTree Maker software.
You can read the whole story about how it all happened on our Kindo blog.
Just check it here: http://kindo.co...-a-new-home/en/
The family monopoly is won. Technology is all MyHeritage needed. They are already murdering Geni on the SEO front and now that they have the simple technology of Kindo, it’s over. Geni’s $100m can’t save them now.
Read more about this deal on TechCrunch UK
http://uk.techc...els-myheritage/
Myheritage 支持中文使用，欢迎大家体验一下我们的家庭网络服务。
@Jason maybe they do but on Google trends Geni looks in Better position
@Collin C indeed many seem to forget there are huge historical players out there and that the cost of switching to a new service in this type of category is very high
Ouriel, you’re making the classic mistake of looking at just the .com domain. Unlike geni.com, MyHeritage is distributed across 20 domains including myheritage.com, myheritage.es and 18 other myheritage.* and by looking at only one of them you are observing only a fraction of the site’s traffic. Comscore shows MyHeritage as being at least 8 times larger than Geni in unique visitors. In terms of data, MyHeritage is 12x or more in all key metrics. There is no comparison.
Interesting acquisition. A few other players could be snapped up for cheap. One I like is http://www.Hellotree.com
Dont think they have funding but quality is just as good.