MyHeritage

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. With over 50 million users, MyHeritage is one of the largest sites in the social networking and genealogy field.

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.

Within seven years, the company had grown to its current size as a community of more than 56 million members with more than 765 million online profiles. There are more than 18 million family trees and 117 million photos on the site, and the site is accessible in 36 languages. 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. In 2008, MyHeritage acquired Kindo, another family social network site that was popular in Europe.

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 in Germany, moikrewni.pl in Poland dynastree.com 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.

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

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. 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.

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. 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.