Infobases, Inc.

Infobases, Inc.

Company type	Private
Industry	Family history, Genealogy
Founded	1990
Headquarters	Provo, Utah, United States
Products	Historical and genealogy CD-ROMS

History

In 1990, two BYU graduates by the name of Paul Allen and Dan Taggart created Infobases as a company, and began offering LDS publications on computer floppy disks. They chose to use the Folio infobase encryption and compression technology that Allen was familiar with, having worked at Folio Corporation since that company's founding in 1987. Folio was co-founded by Paul Allen's brother Curt Allen, and by his brother-in-law Brad Pelo. Using Folio technology seemed a natural way to offer LDS publications as a business venture.

Infobases was quite successful due to the somewhat narrow, but unfulfilled LDS market, and by 1996 Infobases was gaining national attention as an up-and-coming successful company. By 1997, the LDS Collector's Library had been sold to thousands of church members. These new buyers simply wanted to make their use of LDS scriptures and associated publications a much richer experience due to the combined benefits of Folio technology and Infobases' work of scanning these hundreds of books and documents, and publishing them as CD-ROMs.

Throughout 1995-1997, Infobases itself sold LDS publications on CD-ROMs, and worked with other organizations, such as Daughters of Utah Pioneers and Utah State Historical Society, to make their own unique publications readily available, and searchable, on CD-ROM. These new CDs were a wonderful resource that made the study and use of LDS and Utah history publications much easier.

Infobases founders Paul Allen and Dan Taggart, saw a need to embrace the growing use of the world wide web for the purposes of family history research. They purchased Ancestry Publishing, a 13-year-old publishing house that specialized in family history materials, and converted it to Ancestry.com. The growing interest in using the internet to research one's family history has seen an explosive growth in the potential market. Allen and Taggart saw this as an opportunity in 1997, and today, Ancestry.com (known as MyFamily.com after November 1999) is one of the most successful internet companies in the nation.

In 1996, Infobases invested in Ancestry, a print publishing company founded in 1983 by John Sittner. Infobases purchased Ancestry outright in 1997. Paul Allen and Dan Taggart began running Ancestry independently from Infobases in July 1997, and began creating one of the largest online subscription-based genealogy database services. The company changed its name to "MyFamily.com" in November 1999 since its mission included both genealogy and connecting families to each other.

External links

• Paul Allen The Lesser, Internet Entrepreneur
• Utah Department of Commerce, Business Entity Search "Infobases", Infobases first registered in April 1997.