Liz Gannes

Recent Posts by Liz Gannes

Living in the Past Together: Ancestry.com Buys 1000memories

1000memories, a rare social start-up that’s focused on the past rather than the present or the future, has found a fitting acquirer: Ancestry.com. It’s almost too obvious.

1000memories’ current team of six employees is staying intact, and moved over to Ancestry.com’s office on Monday to continue working on the same products. An update to the ShoeBox app today will enable sharing photos directly to Ancestry.com.

A photo-scanning and scrapbooking app for iOS, Android and the Web called ShoeBox is 1000memories’ current product, with some 260,000 users. Earlier in its life, the company had helped people create online memorials for friends and family who passed away.

1000memories co-founder Rudy Adler described the acquisition as a way to get the support of the most senior company in the industry, and to have access to Ancestry.com’s own million paying subscribers.

“The next frontier of digitizing family records is photos,” Adler said.

Last year, 1000memories had raised $2.5 million in Series A funding led by Greylock Partners and including Caterina Fake, Ron Conway, Keith Rabois, Mike Maples, Paul Buchheit and Chris Sacca. Though he wouldn’t disclose financial terms of the deal, Adler described the acquisition as a “happy” outcome for those investors.

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Nobody was excited about paying top dollar for a movie about WikiLeaks. A film about the origins of Pets.com would have done better.

— Gitesh Pandya of BoxOfficeGuru.com comments on the dreadful opening weekend box office numbers for “The Fifth Estate.”