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 social-media-for-the-enterprise companies haven’t taken off; and his defense of the freemium business model.
Make sure you stay to the end, when I ask Sacks about a rumor floating around Silicon Valley that he tried to put a deal together with Yammer and Twitter back before the company even launched. Bonus: Sacks- as tactfully as possible- says what TechCrunch’s Yammer usage tells us about our company culture. → 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. But what’s even more compelling than Geni’s availability in additional languages is the technology that is helping to translate the site. → 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 create one tree going back four generations. If you have pictures it makes the poster a really cool gift. I gave the one Sacks made for me to my parents and they love it (my father has diligently created our family tree on both sides of the family, with help from his sister).
Sacks also talked about Geni’s overall business. Over $1 million in revenue and he says they’ll be profitable within the year. The company has raised $16.5 million over three rounds. → 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 Poland, and even emerging markets like Brazil. In a clone-rarity, OSN grew twice as fast as Geni in the early days according to TechCrunch.
The merger gives MyHeritage a lot of new features and a whopping combined 540 million profiles, 47 million active users and 13 million family trees. The companies have been quietly merging the sites together for the last few weeks, and all of OSN’s information, profiles, family trees and pictures should be all live on MyHeritage, as of about thirty minutes ago. → 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 reached out to Geni to confirm the news and will update this post once we do.
Also included in the report is GoodGuide’s Series A round of $3.73 million with investors including Draper Fisher Jurvetson and New Enterprise Associates. GoodGuide, another TechCrunch50 company, is building a database of consumer products that gauges how ‘good’ they are with respect to safety, the environment, and the community. The news was confirmed by VentureBeat. → 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 over the account, Yammer charges $1/user/month. Administrators can set access controls, such as IP controls and SSL.
The company already allows interaction with the service via the site, an AIR client, iPhone, Blackberry, IM, SMS and email. This evening they’ve also launched an API to allow third party developers to build Yammer into their applications. → 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 25 languages and has 5 million monthly unique visitors. Support for ten more language will be released this month.
Investors have certainly noticed MyHeritage’s stellar growth. The company has raised a new round of funding – $15 million in a Series D round led by Index Ventures and joined by current investor Accel Partners. That brings their total capital raised to $24 million. → 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 members). → 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 feed, etc.) and launched six months after. Despite releasing later, Verwandt claims to have grown at a faster rate than Geni, adding one million family trees and 9.5 million profiles in the first five months compared to Geni’s 4.5 million after launch. Verwandt now says they have over 1.4 million families and 16 million profiles. Germany makes up about a third of their traffic. The tremendous growth can at least in part be attributed to the site’s availability in multiple languages. Verwandt is available to users in German, Polish, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish and English. Verwandt also has Gedcom import/export, which allows family tree data to be moved around to different applications. A lot of Verwandt’s growth has likely come from Gedcom import data. CEO Sven Schmidt says imports make up less than 5% of their profiles. Geni has export capabilities now, import is coming soon. CrunchBase Information Geni Information provided by CrunchBase → 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 growing at nearly twice the rate that Geni is. In Verwandt’s first five months, CEO Sven Schmidt says they have spread to six languages (German, Polish, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish and English). One million family trees and 9.5 million profiles have been created (4.5 million more profiles than Geni’s first five months). They’ve cannibalized a lot of early adopters in the Europe and South America with strong execution in localized markets and languages. Verwandt is even taking on Geni on its home turf. They’ve just launched in the U.S. under the domain ItsOurTree. Same design, different words. Geni’s simple Flash interface was an innovation among genealogical sites (see our coverage of established competitors like MyHeritage and Ancestry.com). Verwandt is nothing more than a blatant rip of of Geni. But they are executing perfectly, and those 9.5 million user profiles are likely gone for Geni forever. Verwandt’s success means other clones will pop up even quicker than befoe. And that means startups need to think about international strategies right at the start, perhaps even before launch and before the application is proven. CrunchBase Information Geni Information provided by CrunchBase → 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 Vox. But we’ve also compared them to easy site creation tools like Weebly, Synthasite and Jimdo. But recently they’ve added new features to focus on family story telling and milestones. There is now a Geni-like family tree feature, and trusted visitors can upload photos directly as well. And they’ve also added a MyBlogLog-type feature that shows visitors to the site – both their name and an avatar. Sampa sites have areas that are private by default, so only people you invite in see the site (they see it via an invitation URL, and subsequent visits are authorized via a cookie. The hodge-podge of features results in a really compelling hang-out for families to tell their stories, celebrate weddings and births, and share photos and family tree information. The site is also free, although eventually users will be able to pay to have advertisements removed. It’s a good site, and one of many startups that are doing a lot on very little capital – the company has raised just $310,000. CrunchBase Information Sampa Information provided by CrunchBase → 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 and MyHeritage. MyFamily.com competes with Story Of My Life, Our Story and others. Geni’s last round of financing valued the company at $100 million. But none of those competing sites, or even all of those sites aggregated, have caused any financial pain yet for The Generations Network. The company is pulling in $150 million or so in yearly revenue and is hugely profitable according to our source. This is a liquidity event for many or most of TGN’s shareholders, although it is apparently not a complete buyout. Employees and possibly some outside shareholders still have equity in the entity, which is almost certainly preparing for an IPO or other larger liquidity event. The most recent Comscore data says TGN had 8.2 million unique worldwide visitors in August. They’ve raised $95 million to date, although the last round of financing was closed in 2001. The company is not responding to requests for comment. → 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 from Accel and half from two angel investors, Yuval Rakavy and Aviv Raiz). Until recently MyHeritage required users to upload family genealogy information from desktop based software. The information was viewable online but no changes could be made. An unwieldy system, but they still managed to gather 150,000 family trees with 180 million people profiles from 17.2 million users. 150,000 new profiles are added daily. That dwarfs Geni, although MyHeritage had a long head start. A couple of weeks ago MyHeritage unveiled a number of fundamental architectural changes to their service. They’ve taken the best features of Geni and married them to the stuff at My Heritage that has worked over the past couple of years. Users can now upload data (name, email, born/died dates, photos, etc.) directly on the MyHeritage website in addition to the client, choosing from17 different languages. The user interface, which like Geni is in Flash, shows a couple of different views to quickly move around a family tree. Over 100 million photos have been uploaded to the site, and users can tag faces with names an attach them to user profiles. That isn’t all MyHeritage is up to, though. They acquired Pearl Street Software late last year. That acquisition brought matching technology to the company which allows the service to compare family trees to find overlap – even if names are spelled differently or the basic data is somewhat off (slightly different birth or death dates, for example). They are just beginning to roll out the matching service, but they expect to see a lot of overlap between family trees. If both sides agree, the trees can be merged at appropriate places. MyHeritage hopes, like Geni, to one day have much of the world’s genealogy mapped online. Given that 1 billion people are online today, MyHeritage’s 180 million people profiles is a good starts towards reaching that goal. They eventually hope to have 3 billion profiles, including people who’ve passed away. And at that point the family relationship between any two → 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 Collection. The addition of the team and products put the company in a better position to deal with upstart Geni, which announced over 5 million profiles in 5 months in July. They’ve also been getting a great deal of the press. However, Geni still has a long way to go when taking on the established ancestry industry. MyHeritage has a large lead on the site with over 10 million registered users of their site. Ancestry.com, the leading genealogy site, has added 5.6 million people to their family trees this week. As a sign of the competition, MyHeritage will now be making all the Pearl Street Software free. Update: This acquisition actually took place in December 2006 but was not announced until now. Integrtation been ongoing since that time. → 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 functionality is very similar to its U.S. counterpart, Geni. In fact it goes well beyond similar – Verwandt is a Geni clone dressed up in some cuddlier graphics. It uses the same layout and quick sign-up flash-based registration form as the U.S. site. They’ve also copied the family tree navigation and profile pages. Take a look below to judge the similarities for yourself. The motivation and business process is clear: 1) Find a proven concept in the U.S. or elsewhere, 2) Clone the service, 3) Profit. And they have been profiting off these clones quite a bit. The Samwer Brothers have invested in Alando.de (eBay clone sold to eBay) and Studi.vz (Facebook clone sold for $100 million). They’re also investors in Frazr. See Gregor’s post for a longer list of clones. Certainly other countries, including the U.S., engage in their fair share of cloning as well. However, the flood of clones coming from Germany suggests an unwelcome trend. Verwandt seems to be cloning some of Geni’s success as well. They have over 1.5 million profiles in under 2 months of operation, compared to Geni’s 5 million. They’ve also secured an undisclosed level of financing, most certainly helped by Geni’s $100 million valuation. There’s a lot of great innovation going on outside the U.S., but this rip and flip mentality may prove short-sighted as the real McCoys continue to innovate and internationalize, and solid German startups like Xing are forgotten in the controversy. → 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 adding themselves, begins to add other people. If you include an email, that user is notified of the existence of the tree and can choose to sign up or not. Every non-deceased person who’s added, therefore, is a potential Geni user. That single viral component to the service will ensure orders of magnitude greater growth compared to established competitors like ancestry.com. Geni has raised a total of $11.5 million in capital – the last round was $10 million on a $100 million valuation. They continue to add features that have proven to be successful at creating growth at Facebook and other social networks, suggesting that valuation may not be as crazy as it seems at first blush. → 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 “family tree” websites, just with a better looking and easier to use (Flash) interface. The site is extremely viral. When I first created my account I added my mother and father, along with their emails. They added more family members, who added yet others. Seven weeks after launch there were 126 people in my Geni family tree. Today, Today, after 15 weeks or so, there are 305 people in my family tree. All but three, myself included, were added by others. Geni, The (Family) Social Network Geni won’t be successful if all they can do is get people to add themselves and a couple of relatives and then rarely revisit the site. They want viral growth and the kind of big page view numbers that the large social networks see – up to 20 per day per visitor. To get there they’re adding a few proven features to the site. And by adding these features, they are essentially creating a social network with the family, as well as family friends, as the core. There’s a direct analogy to facebook – instead of colleges and universities, Geni is focusing on family units. New features include: photo uploading and sharing map view of people in your tree by birthplace or current location calendar of upcoming birthdays, anniversaries and other family events Add family friends as “friends of your family tree” Gedcom export – export your tree in the standard genealogy file format All of these features will incentivize users to use the site frequently, even daily. The photo sharing feature is modeled on Facebook – users can upload photos and they are then available to everyone in the family tree. Photos can also be tagged with the names of anyone in the tree or any family friends. Those pictures will then appear in the profile of those users. That means people’s profiles get built out even without their active participation. Geni also has more features planned in the near future. These include Gedcom imports, family → Read More
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