Yammer founder and CEO David Sacks came all the way from his office upstairs from us to talk about his new $25 million round of funding. We discuss a lot of interesting things in this clip including why Sacks says Yammer wasn’t everyone’s new favorite word, a pivot; why he still loves Geni, the company Yammer spun out of that we don’t hear nearly as much about; why more… → Read More
Genealogy site Geni is going global today with the addition of its site translated into 22 new languages, including Spanish, German, French, and Hebrew. The site will add dozens more languages in the coming weeks.
Noah Tutak, President of Geni, said that this additional language functionality is a result of the site’s international user base. Half of Geni’s traffic comes from outside of the U.S. → Read More
A couple of weeks ago Yammer CEO David Sacks came by the office to give us some news. Sacks, who is also the CEO of genealogy site Geni, also told me about a new product Geni is launching; – family tree posters.
There are two 16″ × 20″ versions – $30 for a printed poster, $120 for a canvas, framed poster. One of Geni’s key features is to allow the merging of family trees, so it’s easier to… → Read More
Israeli genealogy site MyHeritage has completed its third acquisition, buying Germany’s OSN. OSN operates seven genealogy sites including Verwandt.de in Germany, Moikrewni.pl in Poland and Dynastree.com in the US. It was launched in 2007 just after LA-based Geni and, at first, it was just your typical German clone. But it added features and grew fast in older European markets like Germany and… → Read More
Yammer, the Twitter-like short messaging service for business users, has been experiencing a prolonged period of downtime today due to DNS issues. The service first went down over 12 hours ago, was alive for a short period tonight, and then became unresponsive again a few hours ago. The issue is also affecting sister company Geni, who share the same DNS servers. → Read More
PEHub has reported a handful of new unannounced funding rounds based on recent SEC filings. Included among them are ancestry site Geni, which raised $5 million in Series C funding with investors including Charles River Ventures and Founders Fund. Geni’s team, which includes former PayPal exec David Sacks, is also behind TechCrunch50 winner Yammer, a Twitter-like service for businesses. We’ve… → Read More
Yammer, a Twitter-like messaging system for businesses, has seen solid growth since launching last week at TechCrunch50 (and taking the top prize).
CEO David Sacks says there are now 10,000 networks and 50,000 users just one week in. Yammer’s business model is to let people use the service for free, spreading it throughout the enterprise. When and if a company wants to take administrative control… → Read More
It’s been just a few days after our post on Geni’s big growth numbers – and now big news from Israeli competitor MyHeritage.
The site has grown from 180 million profiles a year ago to 260 million today, they say. Registered users have also grown, from 17 million to 25 million. Compare that to almost 2 million users for Geni. 230 million photos have been uploaded to the site, which is available in… → Read More
Geni founder David Sacks has said all along that he wants to create a single family tree for the whole world. Based on some usage stats the company will announce on Thursday, they’re moving towards that goal: over a million unique visitors in August (growth has been steady).
And the biggest family tree at Geni now has over 600,000 profiles and 40,000 users (profiles include deceased family… → Read More
Genealogy social network Verwandt has raised an undisclosed series B from Hasso Plattner Ventures (HPV), said to be in the “multi-million-dollars” but otherwise undisclosed. They closed their first round in July 2007 from Hamburg-based Neuhaus Partners. Verwandt was originally a clone of Geni.com (although Geni has evolved significantly since then and now has photos, a family news… → Read More
Family genealogy and social newtork Geni got to five million profiles in the first five months after launch. Their early growth propelled them to a $100 million valuation and a lot of positive press. In August the inevitable German clone launched. The clone, called Verwandt.de is a near carbon copy of Geni. But unlike most clones, which never do as well as the original application, Verwandt is… → Read More
When we covered the slate of companies helping people chronicle family stories and milestones, we left out a quiet but excellent Redmond, Washington startup called Sampa. They aren’t new, and we’ve covered them before. The reason we left them out is that we’ve had some difficulty in categorizing them. In many ways Sampa is a blog platform with a focus on privacy features, like… → Read More
Spectrum Equity Investors has led a $300 million investment to acquire a majority interest in Provo Utah-based The Generations Network (the parent company of Ancestry.com, MyFamily.com and other sites) according to a source with knowledge of the deal. The Generations Network competes with a number of new Internet startups that we’ve recently covered. Its Ancestry.com site competes with Geni… → Read More
Israeli startup MyHeritage was a bit of a sleeping giant. Until newcomer Geni came along and shook up the genealogy world with its slick new viral family tree application. Geni quickly reached 5 million people profiles and a monster $100 million valuation just a few months after launching. MyHeritage has been around since 2005. They’ve quietly raised $9 million in venture capital (about half… → Read More
Genealogy site MyHeritage is merging with Pearl Street Software. Through the team-up MyHeritage will pick up Pearl Street’s VP of Technology and gain control of the #2 family tree software in worldwide sales (Family Tree Legends), the #2 family tree submission site (GenCircles) with more than 160 million ancestors, and more than 400 million public records in the Family Tree Legends Records… → Read More
Germany is starting to build a name for itself as the startup cloning capital of the world. German clones of popular U.S. services keep popping up. Twitter (Frazr, Dukudu). and Facebook (Studi.vz) are two recent examples. TechCrunch contributor Gregor Hochmuth termed these German clones Copy/Paste innovation. The latest German clone, Verwandt, means “related” in English. Its design and… → Read More
We just got word that genealogy site Geni will be announcing that they’ve hit their 5 millionth profile, just five months after launching the service. This is up from 2 million in March. You can view the press release here. This is not the number of registered users (Geni had 100,000 when reporting 2 million profiles), but rather the number of people put into Geni family trees. A user, after… → Read More
When genealogy site Geni announced that it had raised a venture round from Charles River Ventures valuing the two month old startup at $100 million, more than a few eyebrows were raised. For the last couple of months, people have referred to “Pulling a Geni” when they try to raise money at a super-big valuation immediately after launch. At launch, Geni appeared to be like many other… → Read More
Seven week old Geni raised a $10 million second round of financing last week, led by Charles River Ventures (see our coverage of CRV here), with a post-money valuation of $100 million. George Zachary from CRV is joining the Geni board of directors. This was originally passed to us as a rumor, and Geni founder and CEO David Sacks has confirmed the story. This is a 10x increase in valuation for… → Read More
Rumors of the new startup by former PayPal COO David Sacks to be called Geni started a couple of weeks ago. A few days later, on January 16, Geni launched. It allows people to create quick and beautiful family trees, got a flood of early attention and started to spread virally at a blistering pace. One commenter said “this site could be greater than facebook.” Hyperbole? Yes. But that… → Read More
David Sacks’ new startup Geni, which we wrote about last week, has gone live. The initial product is a very easy to use Flash tool to create a profile and a family tree – including siblings, spouses, cousins, aunts and uncles, and their families. When you add a relative, there is an option to add their email address and have the tree sent to them as well. They can add their own data… → Read More
David Sacks apparently has something left to prove. He was an executive at PayPal. After their $1.5 billion acquisition by eBay in 2002, he then went on to create Room 9 Entertainment, a production company that produced and financed the (really excellent) movie Thank You For Smoking. He purchased the Uma Thurman overdose house from the movie Pulp Fiction a while back. And now he has a new startup… → Read More
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