MyHeritage

MyHeritage

Type	Privately held company
Founded	2003
Headquarters	Bnei Atarot, Israel (near Tel Aviv)
Key people	Gilad Japhet (CEO); Nir Sharony (CTO); Uri Gonen (VP of Project Management); Ran Peled (VP of R&D); Ran Michnowski (VP of Operations); Guy Shalev (Senior Director of RIA); Shmulik Albo (Creative Director); Chris Shearer Cooper (Genealogy Architect); Gal Cohen (Chief Scientist); Ania Rivera (Marketing Manager)
Industry	Internet
Website	http://www.myheritage.com
Type of site	Social Network Service
Registration	Yes
Available in	38 languages: English, Spanish, Portuguese, Portuguese (Brazil), Catalan, French, Chinese (Mandarin), Japanese, Korean, Turkish, Italian, German, Russian, Swedish, Norwegian, Hebrew, Dutch, Greek, Thai, Hindi, Ukrainian, Czech, Slovakian, Polish, Hungarian, Finnish, Danish, Romanian, Bulgarian, Serbian, Croatian, Lithuanian, Malay, Arabic, Persian, Latvian, Afrikaans
Current status	Active

MyHeritage is a family-oriented social network service and genealogy website. It allows members to create their own family websites, share pictures and videos, organize family events, create family trees, and search for ancestors.^[1][2] With over 60 million users, MyHeritage is one of the largest sites in the social networking and genealogy field.^[3][4]

In 2003, CEO Gilad Japhet and a team of genealogy enthusiasts founded MyHeritage in Japhet's living room in the small town of Bnei Atarot, just outside Tel Aviv, Israel.^[5]

Within seven years, the company had grown to its current size as a community of more than 60 million members with more than 861 million online profiles. There are more than 21 million family trees and 132 million photos on the site, and the site is accessible in 38 languages.^[6] This makes MyHeritage the second-largest genealogy company in the world.

In 2008, the company raised $15 million, when venture capital firm Index Ventures joined Accel, which had invested earlier in the company.^[7][8] In 2008, MyHeritage acquired Kindo, another family social network site that was popular in Europe.^[9]

In February 2010 MyHeritage acquired the Germany Online Social Networking GmbH (OSN) who has genealogy web sites in ten different languages, which are represented in over 15 countries. Among others verwandt.de^[10] in Germany, moikrewni.pl^[11] in Poland dynastree.com^[12] in the US. OSN started in June 2007 with the project verwandt.de and was able to grow within two years to over 10 million trees with over 100 million profiles. With this new acquisition, MyHeritage grew in size and added a number of new features.^[13]

In June 2011 MyHeritage also acquired the Polish Family Network, Bliscy.pl, from Polish Internet publishing company Wirtualna Polska.^[14]

In November 2011 MyHeritage acquired U.S based FamilyLink.com, a subscription service that provides access to a large database of historical content including census, birth, marriage and death records, as well as a sizeable archive of historical newspapers.^[15]

Web services

Family pages

The MyHeritage product line focuses on services for families, family historians, and genealogists. Its primary service is the family pages, which are online profiles for entire families. Members can use their family pages to invite other family members, share photos and videos, schedule birthday parties and events, and stay in touch with their family.

Photo tagging

MyHeritage is able to automatically tag the faces of people in photos that members upload onto their family pages. If the person in the photo is in the family tree, then the software can also identify them automatically.

Celebrity look-alikes

MyHeritage offers facial recognition technology that allows users to upload a picture of themselves and find out who they look like. Users can compare their faces to celebrities and also find out whether a child looks more like their mother or father.^[16][17] The software is able to detect human faces automatically, without the need for the user to tag their face in the photo.

Research

MyHeritage genealogy research allows users to search for their ancestors online. The company uses a metasearch engine, which searches its own database and queries 1,526 other databases.^[18]

Users can choose up to five spelling variations to search at once using either Soundex or Megadex methods. Megadex is unique to MyHeritage and allows users to select a subset of the most common spelling and sound variations in names, and search with that selected subset. Even if databases do not support Soundex, all queried databases support Megadex, which makes it more reliable and effective.^{[citation needed]} Researchers can also store and annotate their results.

The company publishes two blogs. One focuses on the online community, families and family-interest topics, and new product developments. The other focuses on genealogy, new developments in the field and the best resources, methods, and tools for researching family history.

Timeline and Timebook

MyHeritage allows users to automatically generate timelines and timebooks from their family data. Timelines show an interactive story of the family, displaying births, marriages, deaths, as well as photographs and videos that are stored on the site. Timebooks show the life and story of individuals in the tree through pictures and information.^[19]

Genealogy software

Family Tree Builder

Family Tree Builder

Developer(s)	MyHeritage
Stable release	5.1 / May 2011
Operating system	Windows
Available in	Multilingual 35 languages[20]
Type	Genealogy software
License	Freeware and retail (Premium version)
Website	www.myheritage.com/family-tree-builder

Family Tree Builder (FTB) is genealogy software to create family trees. The free download version is distributed as freeware, with no restrictions, no registration is required to download the software. Users may pay a fee to "unlock" the additional features in the Premium version. The free download version may thus be considered a kind of registerware and crippleware. Users may add birth, death, and marriage dates; notes about where their ancestors lived, their profession, hobbies and interests; and picture of ancestors. The program can also create charts that show how two people are related. Users can build their family tree either offline or on a secure online site, and offline trees can be published to a family site.

FTB has a Smart Matching feature, which searches the MyHeritage database looking for family tree profiles that match.^[21] The program checks the name, birth date, and parents of the entries in the database, and when it finds similar tree profiles, tells the user who created each tree, who may then confirm the match or not. This allows people to share their family trees and genealogy research with the entire MyHeritage community. Genealogists can find other family historians who have common ancestors, and fill in holes in their family tree that other people have completed. Other aspects of FTB include automatic face detection technology, a maps module based on integration with Google Maps, and Smart Research - a technology to research the family tree's individuals in key genealogy databases.

External links

• MyHeritage website
• ScanCorner - Strategic Partner of German-speaking MyHeritage ^[22][23]

References

1. ^ Vascellaro, Jessica E. (2006-06-22). "New Ways to Dig For Your Roots Online". Wall Street Journal. http://online.wsj.com/public/article/SB115093951770087066-VCkmv3rxObcQG6_4whhJ_VpeVZY_20060723.html?mod=tff_main_tff_top. Retrieved 2008-01-21. 
2. ^ "MyHeritage.com". Washington Post. 2006-01-29. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/01/26/AR2006012601897.html. Retrieved 2008-01-21. 
3. ^ "Family Trees Grow Online, Advice On Researching Your Roots". CBS News. 2006-11-25. http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2006/11/25/earlyshow/saturday/main2208518.shtml. Retrieved 2008-01-21. 
4. ^ "MyHeritage Media Kit". MyHeritage.com. http://blog.myheritage.com/media-kit/. Retrieved 2011-11-22. 
5. ^ "Company history and culture". www.myheritage.com. http://www.myheritage.com/FP/Company/about-myheritage.php. Retrieved 2008-01-21. 
6. ^ "MyHeritage Media Kit". myheritage ltd.. http://blog.myheritage.com/media-kit/. Retrieved 2010-08-04. 
7. ^ "Good news: top investors join the MyHeritage family". http://www.myheritage.com/blogs/companyblog/2008/09/good-news-top-investors-join-t-1#more. 
8. ^ "MyHeritage Takes 180 Million People Profiles To War With Geni". TechCrunch. http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/08/28/myheritage-takes-180-million-people-profiles-to-war-with-geni/. Retrieved 2008-01-21. 
9. ^ MyHeritage acquires Kindo,TechPluto
10. ^ verwandt.de
11. ^ moikrewni.pl
12. ^ dynastree.com
13. ^ MyHeritage Buys Germany's OSN, Now 540 Million Profiles Strong, by Sarah Lacy, Feb 2, 2010, TechCrunch
14. ^ http://eu.techcrunch.com/2011/06/07/exclusive-myheritage-acquires-polands-bliscy-pl-now-760-million-profiles-strong/
15. ^ http://techcrunch.com/2011/11/21/social-network-for-families-myheritage-furthers-u-s-presence-with-acquisition-of-familylink/
16. ^ "You look like which star? Or not, at MyHeritage.com". San Francisco Chronicle. 2006-02-03. http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2006/02/03/DDGHQH1N5T1.DTL&type=printable. Retrieved 2008-01-21. 
17. ^ Heim, Joe (2006-02-12). "Living: You may have a famous face". The Seattle Times. http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/living/2002797311_yourceleb12.html. Retrieved 2008-01-21. 
18. ^ "Research overview". http://www.myheritage.com/myheritage-research-overview. Retrieved 2009-04-02. 
19. ^ "New on MyHeritage: Timeline and Timebook Features". http://blog.myheritage.com/2010/03/new-on-myheritage-timeline-and-timebook-features/. Retrieved 2010-05-14. 
20. ^ "Family Tree Builder". http://www.myheritage.com/family-tree-builder. Retrieved 2009-04-02. 
21. ^ "Smart matching". http://www.myheritage.com/FP/smart-matching.php. Retrieved 2009-04-02. 
22. ^ "Blog post about ScanCorner on German MyHeritage blog". http://blog.myheritage.de/2011/09/bewahre-deine-erinnerungen-fur-immer-auf/. Retrieved 2011-09-22. 
23. ^ "Our Partners page on ScanCorner.ch". http://www.scancorner.ch/unsere-partner. Retrieved 2011-09-22.