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Kindo merges with MyHeritage

By Andy | September 22nd, 2008 | 6 Comments

FINALLY, I can blog about it!. It’s been on the cards for some time now but finally Kindo has merged with MyHeritage. Now they can boast a user base of over 25million people, not a bad jump in traffic there guys!

I’ve been working as the ui designer for Kindo since December 2007. They’ve come on leaps and bounds, taking on some of the more established genealogy websites (Geni and Genoom). The Kindo team is unlike any other group of people I’ve ever had the pleasure of working with. Dedicated, passionate and above all a true pleasure to work with. They really do deserve to bask in the glory of what they’ve achieved AND to get excited about what they’re going to accomplish in the coming months/years.

WELL DONE GUYS!!!

Here’s the official press release from the Kindo website:

The first time we met Gilad, the founder and CEO of Myheritage, was in early 2007 – a few weeks before we released the first public version of Kindo. Gareth and me were invited to have lunch with him in Soho in central London, and went there with the objective of learning everything we could about the “enemy”. This proved to be pretty naive, since Gilad is much too nice to be called an “enemy”.

But there we were: A Swede, a South African and an Israeli, all with very different professional background and life stories, talking about the future of families online from very different perspectives. I didn’t expect this, but we found that we had much in common. We shared the same ideas and vision for what we wanted to achieve with our businesses, even though our approach was far from similar.

Kindo had set out to build a site that would help you interact with the family that is around you here and now. We were trying to come up with tools to help you share information and communicate with the people that matter most to you right now. MyHeritage on the other hand had developed amazing technologies to help you find out everything about your family’s history, and had spent years perfecting these technologies. Ultimately though, what interested us both was the opportunity to help families discover more about who they are and their past, and use the web to bring them closer together.

As Gareth and I travelled back on the tube, we talked about how nice it would be to be able to offer our own users the same tools as MyHeritage already had. What really got us excited was their SmartMatching Technology, which matches people in your family tree with 250 Million other names, and suggests who you might be related too. We liked that. We were also jealous of Gilad, since he got to develop features for 25 million registered users - slightly bigger than our own user base…

During this summer, we’ve been thinking long and hard about the future of Kindo, and what the best option would be for taking Kindo to the next level. The more time we spent with Gilad as well as the rest of the team in Israel (not to mention the very loud rooster that runs around in their campus), the more convinced we all became - we’ll be better off together.

So we join the MyHeritage family because we share the same vision and values (as families should), and because we think that we can build an amazing product together – bringing real benefits to families around the world. This is what we’re planning to do over the next years.