MyHeritage buys WorldVitalRecords

It must be time to update the "Who Owns Genealogy" file. MyHeritage just announced the purchase of WorldVitalRecords. This puts MyHeritage, formerly an online family tree site into the middle of the genealogical records market. Here is the quote from the press release:

PROVO, Utah & LONDON & TEL AVIV, Israel- MyHeritage, the most popular family network on the web, announced today the acquisition of WorldVitalRecords.com. This is MyHeritage’s seventh and largest acquisition since 2007. The purchase marks a significant move into the US market commercially and operationally, and will boost MyHeritage’s offering to families with the addition of a vast database of several billion historical records. With offices and staff in Europe, Australia and Israel, MyHeritage will now be adding its first US-based office in Utah, often cited as the family history capital of the world.
“We are delighted to join forces with the talented WorldVitalRecords.com team in Provo to deliver meaningful value to families across the world,” says MyHeritage CEO and Founder Gilad Japhet. “Combining close to one billion family tree profiles on MyHeritage with WorldVitalRecord’s massive library of historical data delivers a perfect one-stop-shop for families looking to discover and share their family history“.
Founded in 2006, WorldVitalRecords.com is a subscription service which provides access to a huge database of historical content, covering several billion individuals within census, birth, marriage and death records, as well as the web’s largest archive of historical newspapers. This content will deliver new insights and value to the 60 million people who have signed up on MyHeritage in 38 different languages, creating more than 900 million profiles in 21 million family trees.
When brought together under the MyHeritage umbrella, the company’s innovative Smart Matching technology will automatically match any of the new historical data to the relevant users’ ancestors and relatives within the family trees.

I am sure I will have more to say about this in the near future. It is time to speculate about where the online digitization projects are ultimately going to lead genealogy. Here's the link to the news story from Israel:
http://www.globes.co.il/serveen/globes/docview.asp?did=1000699997&fid=1725