MyHeritage Acquires Kindo to Enhance Its Online Offering to Families

I have received an announcement from MyHeritage today about the acquisition of a social networking site for families Kindo. The acquisition amount is not disclosed but the goal is quite ambitios: MyHeritage aims to become a “Facebook for families” where family members will be able to research history of their families and stay connected to each other as well.

As you may know, MyHeritage is one of the most popular websites for family-based communications and has a very strong offering, especially when it comes to intelligently sharing family photos with the process tightly integrated into building a family tree. We’ve already seen some interesting competitors launched (including the much-hyped Geni and some new startups I receive pitches from at least every month) but I think that this trend for consolidation of applications working in the same field but with different approaches and functionality is definitely a positive one.

MyHeritage is based in Israel but this acquisition will also mean a new office in London where Kindo is based itself (Kindo team will join MyHeritage as a result of the acquisition as well). MyHeritage is already available in 25 different languages which must be one of the reasons for its strong international presence - the family network already has more than 25 million registered users worldwide.

The philosophy of MyHeritage is based on the growing desire of people to keep in touch with their loved ones no matter where they live with a special focus on sharing photos as the most visually friendly way to share important moments of lives. Photos here are automatically tagged with names of people on the photos (featuring faces recognition technology) to make the entire process of sharing photos more friendly even to users that don’t have any experience in social networking.

Kindo is also focused on family networking but is intended mainly to build the family tree. As far as I understand, today’s acquisition will mean that Kindo’s users will be merged into MyHeritage system where they will get more photo sharing capabilities while users of MyHeritage will receive enhanced family tree building functionality that Kindo provides.

My conclusion is that it is no doubt very good to see this particular acquisition because I think that it will be a wise move for many web applications that serve more as standalone features to be merged to form fully-functional applications instead of the current situation when we have different parts of the same process scattered throughout the web.