Richard Kivel and John Finlay Join Familybuilder

The following announcement was written by Familybuilder:

Familybuilder welcomes genetics expert Richard Kivel to its Board of Directors; genealogy expert John Finlay to its Board of Advisors

New York, NY - August 28, 2008 -  Familybuilder (http://www.familybuilder.com) today announces the addition of Richard Kivel to its Board of Directors and John Finlay to its Board of Advisors, experts in genetics and genealogy respectively. Familybuilder caters to social network members who use its Family Tree application on the popular social networks Facebook, MySpace, Bebo, Hi5, and Orkut. Kivel and Finlay will support the company's mission of helping more families connect online and through its forthcoming DNA services.

Kivel joins Andrew Merkatz (Co-Founder & Chairman), Ilya Nikolayev (Co-Founder & CEO) and Steve Schlenker (DN Capital) on the Board of Directors.  Finlay joins Scott Heiferman (CEO, Meetup) and Richard Eastman (Publisher of Eastman’s Online Genealogy Newsletter) on the Board of Advisors.

Familybuilder is the only genealogy service to operate a family tree application on all the major social networks and is quickly becoming one of the most-used genealogy services online.  Familybuilder is currently ranked as the #4 online genealogy destination in the world (per comScore) with over 4 million users and over 20 million family tree profiles that have been added to the application.   Per Adonomics, Familybuilder ranks in the top 50 applications found on Facebook (out of 40,000).

With the addition of Kivel and Finlay, Familybuilder is poised to further disrupt the family/genealogy space and will continue to move ahead of more established genealogy services on the Internet.  Familybuilder's family/genealogy services are positioned to leverage the social graphs of multiple online social networks at once to help people find and communicate with relatives, build family trees, preserve family history, track family activity and is fast becoming the Internet's favorite social tool for people interested in genealogy and simply keeping in touch with family members.

Richard Kivel has a 20 year track record leading high tech and biotech organizations, taking companies through the full life cycle from licensing technology, raising initial capital, hiring management as well as acquisitions and public offerings. Kivel is a frequent guest lecturer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Sloan School of Management and has been a Judge for the MIT $50K/$100K Entrepreneurship Competition since 1998. Kivel also serves on the Global Board of Directors of the MIT Enterprise Forum and serves as a Lead Catalyst for the MIT Deshpande Center for Technological Innovation and is a founding board member of Biolink USA-Ireland. Kivel is currently the CEO of TheraGenetics and a member of the Board since April 2006 when the company was formed.  Kivel earned an M.S. in Management from Boston College, a B.A. from American International College and has completed the “Advanced Course in Genomics, Drug Discovery, Theherapeutics and New Innovations” at the University of Pennsylvania. He is also a graduate of the prestigious MIT Executive Management Program, “Birthing of Giants”.

John Finlay graduated from Brigham Young University with a degree in Computer Engineering. In 2002, John founded the PhpGedView open source genealogy project, which quickly grew to be the largest open source genealogy application worldwide. He is currently a full-time faculty instructor at Neumont University teaching computer science courses. Each quarter John leads teams of Neumont students who work on Family History related open source projects.

"I am pleased to announce the addition of both Richard Kivel and John Finlay to our Familybuilder family," said Ilya Nikolayev, CEO of Familybuilder.  "Richard Kivel brings a huge amount of experience that’s crucial for our exciting soon-to-launch DNA products while John Finlay is a genealogy legend who will contribute significantly to our product development goals.”

About Familybuilder
Familybuilder™ is a NYC-based software company that builds genealogy and family-oriented applications for online social networks. The company's flagship product, Family Tree, is the first genealogy application to be introduced on Facebook, Bebo, MySpace, Hi5, and Orkut. The company raised a $1.5 million dollars Series A round of financing in February 2008, led by London-based DN Capital. Familybuilder launched in June 2007 and is privately held. Further information and links to the Family Tree applications on the various social networks can be found at (http://www.familybuilder.com).

Trademarks belong to their respective owners.

Comments

[George Souza]

Good to see they added a genealogy expert. But eh, Family Builder and PhpGedView are competitors?