From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
MyHeritage
 |
| Type |
Privately held company |
| Founded |
2003 |
| Headquarters |
Bnei Atarot, Israel (near Tel Aviv) |
| Key people |
Gilad Japhet (CEO) |
| Industry |
Internet |
| Website |
http://www.myheritage.com |
| Type of site |
Social Network
Service |
| Registration |
Yes |
| Available in |
34 languages: English, Spanish, Portuguese,
Portuguese (Brazil), French, Chinese (Mandarin), Japanese, Korean,
Turkish, Italian, German, Russian, Swedish, Norwegian, Hebrew,
Dutch, Greek, Thai, Hindi, Ukranian, Czech, Polish, Hungarian,
Finnish, Danish, Romanian, Bulgarian, Serbian, Croatian,
Lithuanian, Malay, Arabic, Persian |
| 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 30
million users, MyHeritage is one of the largest sites in the social
networking and genealogy field.[3]
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.[4]
Within six years, the company had grown to a community of 30
million members with 320 million online profiles. There are 6
million family trees on the site, and the site is accessible in 34
languages. [5] 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.[6][7] In
2008, MyHeritage acquired Kindo, another family social network site
that was popular in Europe.[8]
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.[9][10] 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.[11]
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.
Genealogy
software
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
online, and offline trees can be published to the family site.
FTB has a Smart Matching feature, which searches the MyHeritage
database looking for family tree profiles that match.[13] 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.
References
External
links
Wikis
Quiz
Map
Search
