Web Widget Lets Users Keep a Line on Social Sites

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Joining online social networks is easy. Keeping up with all of them can be a pain.

That’s why the founders of Westwood-based MEgo came up with a dynamic widget that functions as a traveling social network aggregator.

MEgo automatically amasses photos, links and feeds of a user across multiple online social networks, including Facebook, MySpace and Friendster. MEgo can also be automatically uploaded into any of the social networks as an avatar an animated representation of the user.

“All the popular aggregators are destinations in themselves,” said co-founder Ariel McNichol. “The key differentiator of mEgo is that it’s portable to all destinations.”

Click on the avatar’s head for a list of her favorite YouTube videos, or her hand, for her wish list from Amazon.com. Friends can leave notes on the avatar, which displays comments from across multiple social networks.

McNichol, an experienced creative director, developed the patent-pending technology with Julia Johnston, an attorney. The two met while working for PCCW, the largest communications provider in Hong Kong.

MEgo, which they started in September, is their first venture. They have built up the company to 24 employees, including nine developers in Uruguay and Romania. With $3 million in angel funding, the company is garnering about 400,000 widget views per day and has been adding about 1,600 subscribers daily. The site is free and revenue comes from advertising.


Takeover Time

ContentNext Media Inc. recently got swallowed by a British media giant for $30 million, but that doesn’t mean the Santa Monica headquarters of the blog news company will see much change.

The office functions as a base for chief executive and founder Rafat Ali, a handful of business development staff and a couple of reporters. Much of its 20-employee company operates virtually as blogospheres go.

The company’s flagship site, paidContent.org, started six years ago as Ali’s attempt to build his career as a journalist. Now, its postings are syndicated by the Washington Post and Yahoo Finance. The site has gained journalistic clout over the years by hiring seasoned reporters and at times scooping the business press.

Staci Kramer, co-editor of paidContent, joined the company in 2004 when she was asked to keep up the site while Ali was on his honeymoon. “The site had just started taking advertising,” Kramer said. “Once you start taking money from people, you can’t just turn off.”

Together, Kramer and Ali built paidContent as a leading digital news site, and launched mobile news site, MocoNews.net; a digital news site out of India, ContentSutra; and a similar site for the United Kingdom, paidContent:UK. The sites get a total of 1 million page views a month.

While the company plans on expanding under its new parent, Guardian Media Group, Kramer said ContentNext is less likely to increase staff in Santa Monica. She’d rather hire more reporters in other parts of the country, including Silicon Valley.


Get Together

This year’s E3 Media and Business Summit at the Los Angeles Convention Center was supposed to be somewhere in between the private country-club event it was last year and the 60,000-person extravaganza staged by Entertainment Software Association in previous years.

John Yamamoto, chief executive of Square Enix Inc., for one, found this year’s E3 more on the intimate side.

“This year’s show is clearly less of a spectacle than E3s of yore, but it’s been a good forum to discuss the ongoing changes and evolution of the interactive entertainment industry,” said Yamamoto.

Square Enix, El Segundo-based North American subsidiary of its Japanese parent company, announced that it will release “Final Fantasy XIII,” the latest installment in its hugely popular role-playing game franchise, for Microsoft XBox 360.

L.A.’s videogame heavyweight Activision Blizzard Inc. didn’t participate in E3 this year, but raised some eyebrows by holding a press conference to unveil some products just a stone’s throw away from the Convention Center.


More Funding

Cognition Technologies, which develops search technology based on linguistics and semantics, has garnered an additional $2.7 million in funding.

The funding comes mostly from Draper Associates and Fingerhut Ventures, bringing the total investment in the Culver City startup to $6 million.

The money will be used primarily to bolster its Semantic Natural Language Processing technology, which adds meanings of phrases and words to computer applications, enabling them to be more humanlike in processing information.


New Officer

Merrick Kerr is the new chief financial officer of Pasadena-based eSolar, an Idealab company.

Kerr was previously the chief financial officer of L.A.-based clean coal company Rentech.

ESolar, which specializes in solar energy, has received $130 million in funding from Google.org and Oak Investment Partners, and recently inked a deal for development of solar energy projects with Southern California Edison.


Staff reporter Booyeon Lee can be reached at [email protected] or at (323) 549-5225, ext. 230.

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