Isreali-based MyHeritage knows what to do with its recently financial injection. It has acquired London-based Kindo, a more visually appealing family tree service with less social networking.
Kindo team
OR.., Saul Klein knows how to bring good companies together. The Index Ventures partner found Accel Partners willing to co-invest 15 million dollars in MyHeritage last week and convinced the Israeli company to acquire Kindo – in which he also invested with TAG. Just my two cents, but who knows.
According to Mike Butcher, MyHeritage liked the fact that Kindo is all about the next generation, instead of just ancestors. By merging their services, MyHeritage leaves their competitors behind on that field.
So that makes four cents by two European bloggers, let’s focus on the facts now. What is already known about the merging of the two services? Venturebeat notes that new family trees cannot be created on Kindo anymore. There’s also an easy export function for Kindo members, so that they can extend their family tree on MyHeritage.
The amount of money it took MyHeritage to add the European family tree service is undisclosed. Read the story behind the acquisition on the Kindo blog.
But in the end, it all comes down to the viral effect of their services. If your friends are on one travel site, you aren’t likely to register on the other. So badges are vital. Dopplr already offered a public profile and widgets for a while, and now Tripit has added a blog widget to their arsenal as well.
The travel sites choose a completely different style. Ok, they both have the impressive statistics thing going on (as long as you travel a lot, of course), but where Dopplr seems to choose for cool maps and a visually appealing app, Tripit goes for simplicity and a RSS feed:
So.., after reading this post, have you decided how to show of your traveling?
Online network for frequent business travellers Dopplr has raised new funding from a group of angel investors in a second financing round. The undisclosed round makes the list of Dopplr backers even more impressive than it already was: Martin Varsavsky, Reid Hoffman and Joichi Ito were some of the initial seed investors, while Saul Klein from The Accelerator Group invested in both rounds.
Dopplr helps you make the most of your trips by sharing your travel plans with people and brands you trust.
The service then highlights coincidences, for example, telling you that three people you know will be in Tokyo when you will be there too. You can use Dopplr on your PC or on the go, and links with many popular online calendars and social networks.
Dopplr expects to use this new round of financing to expand its business globally. Currently, Dopplr’s user base is mostly in Europe and the U.S.
With a network of more than 25 million family members worldwide, 25 language versions, more than 260 million profiles, and 230 million photos, Tel Aviv-based myHeritage claims to be the “second largest online destination for families”. These impressive numbers come from a press release, issued yesterday, in which the company announces a $15 million funding round from London-based Index Ventures and Accel Partners. Index Ventures’ Saul Klein seems ecstatic, saying in the release that he believes “it has the potential to become as important to families as Facebook is for friends and LinkedIn is for professional relationships.”
MyHeritage is now certainly the largest when it comes to funding. One of its main competitors Geni, for example, has raised $11.5 million in total, which is less than half of myHeritage’s total funding ($24 million). The genealogy company will be using the investment to expand the team, establish commercial operations in London and develop new technologies.
A technology myHeritage has just launched is a face-recognizing feature. When users upload or import (e.g. from Flickr) a photo, the technology automatically checks who the depicted person is (as long as he or she is looking into the lens). That means a lot less tagging, you’ll have a machine to do that. MyHeritage will group photos with the same person on it, so that every family member’s vanity need is satisfied. Not a bad idea from myHeritage, which currently hosts around 230 million photos on its own site.
After an exiting week in Brussels, Gent and Paris, we’re now in London to continue our Next Web Open Office Road Trip. The entrepreneurial spirit of the London tech crowd really strikes us. Almost everybody tells with great enthusiasm about their start-up or job.
We arrived yesterday morning and headed to DN Captial, a venture capitalist. Marta Skundric was so kind to lent us a meeting room with Wifi. Check out yesterday’s posts to see how good the facilitations were. We also met venture capital consultant Lea Bajc Then we had dinner with our WebTipr of the United Kingdom, David Petherick. He’s a digital biographer, which means he manages the online identity of busy people. For instance, he’s a shadow blogger for several business men. “Best compliment I’ve ever had from a client was when somebody said he heard his own voice when reading an article by me”, Petherick told us.
After a good night’s sleep – Boris and Patrick suffered from a leak in their areobed – we joined the London web scene at Open Coffee. The initiator of this unique weekly network event, Saul Klein from Index Ventures, helped us organizing a sweep stake. The price: a ticket for The Next Web Conference. Check out the video:
Now we’re working at Piczo, a world-wide social network for teens. Managing Director Europe Chris Seth told us they want to help teens express themselves by allowing them to design and customize their profiles. They have 12 million monthly unique visitors and over a billion monthly page views, thanks to the viral efforts by happy users. Moreover, they’re quite successful in Europe. For instance, they have one million users in Norway, that’s about 20 percent of the whole population.
Once again, we had a blast meeting fellow web savies and hope to welcome everybody in Amsterdam this April.
Update: Vincent Camara from Intruders.tv send me this funny video. Patrick and Boris interview each other about The Next Web Conference and Fleck. It’s recorded during Open Coffee London, yet not at the actual location. They needed some privacy and went to a coffee bar in the basement. Check it out:
Written on 16th July 2007
1 COMMENT Patrick de Laive, Internet entrepreneur and co-founder of The Next Web Conference. Twitter: @patrick
Saul Klein was the first Keynote speaker of The Next Web Conference 2007. He is a partner at Index Ventures and investor in almost all hot european startups of the last couple off years (moo, last.fm, joost, stardoll, spotrunner).
In February this year Saul started a discussion on his blog about “Y Europe can seed growth of its new stars” pointing out all the strengths and advantages Europe has over Silicon Valley. He wants to create better circumstances for startups to grow to multi million companies. Right after this blogpost he started Open Coffee. The First Open Coffee was in London in March (Amsterdam was the second) and the OpenCoffeeClub spreaded out over Europe (and even the US). At the moment there are more then 60 OpenCoffee Meetup Cities worldwide.
Saul didn’t end his European improvement vision after OpenCoffee. Inspired by yCombinator and TechStar, he started a European startups school under the name SeedCamp (if you’re a talented developer/entrepreneur take a look at it).
2 winners of SeedCamp will be presenting their startup during the 2008 version of The Next Web. (more…)
Written on 23rd September 2008
2 COMMENTS 
Written on 15th September 2008
Written on 16th July 2007
Saul Klein was the first Keynote speaker of The Next Web Conference 2007. He is a partner at Index Ventures and investor in almost all hot european startups of the last couple off years (
The Next Web Blog is closely associated with The Next Web Conference which is held annually in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. At this event speakers from all over the world come together to talk about, and show off, the future of the Web. (More info 
