Magazine Notes Collaborative Family History Research Site as One of Best for Fun/Home

WEST HOLLYWOOD, CA – July 14, 2011 – Geni, the collaborative family history community and home of the “World Family Tree,” is proud to announce that once again PC Magazine named it one of the “Best Free Web Apps of 2011.” Noted in the Fun/Home category, Geni is lauded for its ability to “connect in every way possible.”

This is the fourth year in a row PC Magazine awarded Geni a “top app” designation. In regards to the growing popularity of using the Web versus desktop software, the publication notes, “Not only are they free, you can run these apps on any computer over the Web—no installation needed. Maybe it’s time to do your work in the cloud.”

You can see the Fun/Home category listed here and read the entire list at PCMagazine.com.

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About Geni, Inc.
Geni is an online community of casual and expert genealogists working together to create a single World Family Tree. Members can invite relatives to help them build their family tree with no limit to the number of people, documents, photos or videos added. They can then discover how they are related to celebrities, historical figures and other members of the World Family Tree. Privately held and based in Los Angeles, Geni’s financial backers include Founders Fund and Charles River Ventures. It was founded by David Sacks, the original chief operating office of PayPal and founder of Yammer, Inc.

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WEST HOLLYWOOD, CA – May 19, 2011 – Geni, the collaborative family history community and home of the “World Family Tree,” today announced continued strong growth including the promotion and addition of key team members across the organization.

With a growing user base and more than 100 million family profiles added by the Geni community, 55 million of which are connected to the World Family Tree, the company promoted two essential employees to the executive team:

• Justin Balthrop is now chief technology officer, responsible for the technology strategy of the company.
• Michael Stangel takes over as vice president of engineering, overseeing the engineering and operations teams.

To further develop business initiatives and better serve its growing community, Geni also promoted and added the following employees:

• Michael Berkovich is promoted to technical lead, platform, responsible for core technologies such as Geni’s API and mobile offerings. He will interact with API partners to ensure that the API and Geni platform promote innovation in genealogy.
• Ian McDaniel is promoted to director of product development, overseeing design and front-end development.
• Greg Drewganis, formerly of Playboy Enterprises, Inc. and Encyclopedia Britannica, joins as director of monetization. He will drive efforts to increase Geni’s subscriber base and will work to form strategic partnerships that add additional revenue streams.
• Charles Edmonds, previously at MySpace, is now customer service manager, ensuring Geni community members continue to receive superior support and service.
• Michelle Kempner, former director of the solutions architecture group at Schematic, joins as user experience designer. She will ensure that Geni appeals to both expert and casual users alike.
• Alan Malloy, formerly of HubPages, joins as senior software engineer. He is the latest addition to the growing team of Clojure programmers working on Geni’s core technology.

“Public curiosity around family history and relationships to various historical figures and celebrities is at an all time high, and is driving millions of people to create and connect family trees,” said Noah Tutak, Geni CEO. “Collaboration is the future of genealogy, and Geni’s strong and growing team will help drive these efforts as well as our next phase of growth.”

Millions of Geni members, both casual and expert genealogists, are creating a single World Family Tree comprised of interconnected family trees from across the entire world. Visitors can sign up for free and easily add and find family members at geni.com.

About Geni, Inc.

Geni is an online collaborative family history community that provides casual and expert genealogists with an easy and comprehensive way to document personal family trees and join the World Family Tree. Members can add and invite relatives to build their family tree, with no limit on the number of people, documents, photos or videos added, while personally connecting with history and finding out how they are related to others in the World Family Tree. Privately held and based in Los Angeles, Geni is financially supported by the Founders Fund and Charles River Ventures and was founded by David Sacks, the original Chief Operating Officer of PayPal and founder of Yammer, Inc.

WEST HOLLYWOOD, CA – May 10, 2011 – Geni, the collaborative family history community and home of the “World Family Tree,” today announced that Real-Time Collaboration and TreeSeek have developed tools using the Geni application programming interface (API) to enable their customers to utilize Geni’s rich data and toolsets.

SharingTime’s AncestrySync, beginning today, can be pre-ordered with the ability to automatically sync genealogists’ offline and online data, acting as the bridge for maintaining offline family trees while taking advantage of the rich data and collaborative community of Geni.

Visitors to TreeSeek, makers of personalized family history charts, will soon be able to automatically import all their genealogy data from Geni into the TreeSeek service to have custom family charts made. The Geni import will be available in beta to TreeSeek users this week.

“Our mission is to drive innovation and openness in the family history industry because we believe that genealogy data should be accessible to everyone,” said Noah Tutak, Geni CEO. “Collaboration is the future of genealogy, and the combination of Geni’s open API and these next-generation genealogy services brings together the best of online and offline tools.”

Introduced in December 2010, the Geni API gives partners access to the world’s largest completely open and free API for genealogy data, including instant access the research of more than six million genealogists and data from more than 100 million individuals’ profiles. Real-Time Collaboration and TreeSeek join other Geni partners like Progeny Genealogy, tpstry, Mobiwolf, and TelGen.

Millions of Geni members, both casual and expert genealogists, are creating a single World Family Tree comprised of interconnected family trees from around the world. Visitors can sign up for free and easily add and find relatives at geni.com.

About Geni, Inc.

Geni is an online community of casual and expert genealogists working together to create a single World Family Tree. Members can invite relatives to help them build their family tree with no limit to the number of people, documents, photos or videos added. They can then discover how they are related to celebrities, historical figures and other members of the World Family Tree. Privately held and based in Los Angeles, Geni’s financial backers include Founders Fund and Charles River Ventures. It was founded by David Sacks, the original chief operating office of PayPal and founder of Yammer, Inc.

“This is a smooth transition that we’ve been planning for some time,” said Sacks.  “Geni has made excellent progress under Noah’s leadershipand I’m happy for him now to fully take the reigns.”

Under the guidance of Tutak Geni has become the world’s leading collaborative genealogy product, offering features similar to those on Wikipedia for group editing and revisions.  The site has grown to more than 6 million users that have created over 100 million profiles, more than half of which have been connected in the World Family Tree.  Additionally, Tutak oversaw the development of Geni’s crowd sourced translation engine (tr8n), which has turned the site into a truly international community that is available in more than 70 languages.

Tutak, 37, joined the company in March 2007, and has also served as Vice President of Product Management, Vice President of Communications, and Director of Customer Service. He holds a BA in Pure Math from Cal State University, Northridge.

Tutak said, “Geni’s approach to collaborative genealogy is unrivaled, both in terms of community participation and technological innovation.  It is a true honor to serve as the CEO and to continue pushing the genealogy space towards greater heights.”

About Geni, Inc.

Geni is solving the problem of genealogy by creating a single family tree of the world. Using the basic free service at Geni.com, users can build their family tree, invite relatives to join it, find relatives in other trees, and then merge trees. The largest tree on Geni contains over 50 million people. Geni’s pay services include enhanced research tools as well as keepsake products created from family tree data. Geni welcomes both casual genealogists and experts who wish to discover new relatives and stay in touch with family. Geni is privately held and based in Los Angeles, California. Its financial backers include Founders Fund and Charles River Ventures. It was founded in 2006 by serial entrepreneur David Sacks, who was the original Chief Operating Office of PayPal and also the founder of Yammer, Inc.

LOS ANGELES, January 11, 2011 —Geni, the world leader in collaborative genealogy, announces that its genealogy database has exceeded 100 million profiles.  Just a week ago the site revealed that its single World Family Tree (called the Big Tree) reached 50 million connected profiles.  This tremendous growth has been fueled by the release of a suite of collaboration tools that have been embraced by users, and expanded upon in the past year.

“We knew that the community wanted tools to make collaboration easier, but we didn’t realize the amount of impact the tools would have.  Our efforts for the past year will continue to pay dividends in 2011 as we release more sophisticated tools to aid our community’s research efforts,” said Geni’s President Noah Tutak.

Geni has experienced a tremendous growth phase by dedicating resources to the development of many features that empower the Geni community to solve the problem of genealogy:  forming a single family tree of the world.  Geni’s significant growth is a result of several factors:

-        Features introduced on Geni in 2010 have created a Wikipedia-style environment for research and collaboration.

-        Geni is a free service with a premium model, meaning anyone can use the vast majority of the features on the site without a barrier-to-entry, including profile merging and search capabilities for documents, discussions and more than a hundred million profiles.

-        The release of an API that allows the automation of many collaborative tasks.

-        Implementation of tr8n, an open source translation tool that Geni developed to crowd source the site’s translation efforts.

With the release of the API, Geni has become a vast information source for third parties ranging from international genealogical societies to researchers at MIT.  As the API functionality expands and the collaboration efforts grow, Geni is positioned to become a key resource for historians, anthropologists, and genealogy experts around the globe.

About Geni, Inc.

Geni is solving the problem of genealogy by inviting the world to build the definitive online family tree. Using the basic free service at Geni.com, users add and invite their relatives to join their family tree, which Geni compares to other trees. Matching trees are then merged into the single world family tree, which currently contains nearly 50 million living users and their ancestors. Pay services include enhanced research tools as well as keepsake products created from family tree data. Geni welcomes casual genealogists and experts who wish to discover new relatives and stay in touch with family. Geni is privately held and based in Los Angeles, California.

LOS ANGELES, January 5, 2010 —Geni.com, a world leader in collaborative genealogy, today announced the addition of the 50 millionth person to its World Family Tree, also known as “The Big Tree” within the genealogy community.   Among the cutting edge features that allowed this tremendous growth are:

-        A Wikipedia-style collaboration environment including more than 50 “Curators”, which are the equivalent of a Wikipedia Administrator

-        Advanced merging features that allow users with common ancestors to connect their family trees

-        An alpha version of the Geni Developer API, which allows automation of some common merging tasks

“We are very proud of this milestone that the Geni community has worked so tirelessly to reach,” says Noah Tutak, Geni’s President.  “Collaboration is the only means by which Geni can reach its goal of creating a single family tree for the world, and the progress our users have made is incredible.”

For the past year, Geni has focused on the rapid release of tools and features that empower its users to collaboratively solve the problem of creating a single world family tree.  On October 20^th, 2010, Geni released the Projects features, which allows users to collaborate on specific branches of interest in The Big Tree such as Rulers of Provence, France, US Presidents and Vice Presidents, or Passengers of the Mayflower.

In addition, Geni users can now follow specific genealogy profiles, Projects, and other users of the site. Users are notified via a Facebook-style news feed when there are updates to profiles or Projects that they follow.

Geni’s userbase of nearly 6 million users has created over 90 million genealogy profiles, more than half of which are included in The Big Tree.  Geni’s Wikipedia-style collaborative environment makes it easy for anyone to connect and contribute to The Big Tree. This crowd sourced approach has created a free resource that everyone can access via Geni’s website or its newly released API.

About Geni, Inc.

Geni is solving the problem of genealogy by inviting the world to build the definitive online family tree. Using the basic free service at Geni.com, users add and invite their relatives to join their family tree, which Geni compares to other trees. Matching trees are then merged into the single world family tree, which currently contains nearly 50 million living users and their ancestors. Pay services include enhanced research tools as well as keepsake products created from family tree data. Geni welcomes casual genealogists and experts who wish to discover new relatives and stay in touch with family. Geni is privately held and based in Los Angeles, California.

LOS ANGELES, December 15, 2010 — Geni, home to the world’s largest family tree, today announced that they have open-sourced their tr8n crowdsourced translation engine. Tr8n was originally developed by Geni to translate their own site. When Geni gave a few dozen users access to the translation tools, they translated the entire site into seventeen languages in less than two weeks, submitting over 15,000 translations. Geni decided to open source the engine so other sites can take advantage of the technology.

“When we decided to translate Geni into other languages, we looked at a number of options, including hiring professional translators and using Facebook’s translation tools. We quickly realized that there weren’t any great options out there,” said Noah Tutak, President of Geni. “When we discovered that one of our engineers, Michael Berkovich, is fluent in both a Slavic language and a language written right-to-left, we knew we had the in-house expertise to build our own solution. We’re very pleased with the solution that he built”

Tr8n is a Rails engine for crowdsourcing translation. Translators can vote on existing translations, or submit their own inline while browsing the site. The tr8n engine takes into account the grammar rules of each language to provide accurate translations for any context such as the viewing user’s gender and number ranges. Developers can extend tr8n by defining their own rules.

The tr8n engine is a complete translation solution with:

• Built-in support for over 250 languages
• Full support for right-to-left languages
• Translation statistics, rankings, and dashboard
• Management tools for extensive customization
• Discussions for translators

“This solution is superior to the default Rails translation framework,” said Amos Elliston, CTO of Geni. “Crowdsourcing your translations means you no longer have to hire expert translators, and your site is quickly and painlessly translated by users in real-time. As your site evolves, new text is translated almost immediately, without the traditional bottleneck you find with paid translators.”

The advantages of tr8n over other popular crowdsourced translation solutions, such as Facebook’s Translation for Facebook Connect, include:

• User experience – users are not required to have an account on another site
• Data Ownership – site operators own their translations
• Powerful – more flexible syntax and context rules for translating complex phrases
• Performance – translations occur at render time rather than after page loads

The tr8n engine can be seen in action at http://www.geni.com. Developers interested in more information can read the documentation and download the source code at https://github.com/berk/tr8n.

About Geni, Inc.

Geni is solving the problem of genealogy by inviting the world to build the definitive online family tree. Using the basic free service at Geni.com, users add and invite their relatives to join their family tree, which Geni compares to other trees. Matching trees are then merged into the single world family tree, which currently contains nearly 50 million living users and their ancestors. Pay services include enhanced research tools as well as keepsake products created from family tree data. Geni welcomes casual genealogists and experts who wish to discover new relatives and stay in touch with family. Geni is privately held and based in Los Angeles, California.