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We covered the launch of mEgo last September. The company received a good deal of blogger-buzz but since then things have been quiet on the news front. I checked in with founders Ariel McNichol and Julia Johnston to find out what’s been going on over the past six months and to learn more about what mEgo provides. Our discussion transcript is below. Note that the answers come from both Ariel and Julia throughout the interview.

Allen: Can we begin with a brief bio about yourself?

Ariel McNichol: Over the past fourteen years, I’ve been lucky to be working at the cutting edge of interactive product design and user experience analysis. I’ve created software, websites, games, iTV and mobile products for clients such as Yahoo!, AOL, Wells Fargo, Rockwell Collins, Lucas Arts, Disney, @Home, The Annenberg Institute, BroadbandMechanics and more. I served as the Creative Director for Lotus Interworks and PCCW/Now.com, both multi-national corporations focused on serving the expanding needs of a cross-platform international consumer base. In the 90’s, I created the front end of some of the first broadband PC and iTV user interfaces while working for DirectTV at ZDTV. As the Director of User Experience at Broadband Mechanics, I helped pioneer early online video and rich-media publishing software. Ariel’s mEgo

Julia Johnston - Julia has been a senior consultant in the technology, media and telecommunication industries, providing strategic, legal and financial advice to her clients, with an emphasis on media ventures. Prior to co-founding mEgo, she was Senior Vice President of Business Development for PCCW, one of Asia’s leading integrated communications and new media companies. PCCW is the dominant telecommunications company in Hong Kong. Through its subsidiaries, it is also involved in high tech, real estate and infrastructure projects worldwide. As Senior Vice President, Julia initiated and negotiated content, technology and funding relationships for the "now.com," NOW TV and "gamer.tv" initiatives. Recognizing the importance of media convergence in the early 90’s, Julia co-authored Split Screen - Home Entertainment and the New Technologies in 1992 with David Ellis. Julia graduated with honors in economics from Princeton University and received her law degree from the University of Toronto. Julia’s mEgo

Allen: What is mEgo?

A mEgo is a portable multimedia profile that allows users to share interactive, dynamic and highly personalized visual representations of themselves across the web. mEgo solves the problem of having to create and maintain different profiles on each social network that a user belongs to.

Instead, a user creates a single profile - a mEgo – incorporating not only profile information, but also favorite feeds, content and utilities (YouTube videos, Flickr photos, Amazon.com wish lists, etc) and then posts it to all their social networking sites, personal sites and blogs. When something changes, a user updates his mEgo at a single site (mEgo.com) and it automatically updates wherever it has been posted.

mEgo will enable small social networks to tap into our own API in order to let new users who already have mEgos to join their sites without having to fill out yet another profile. They will still have to register and agree to new sites terms, but the barrier to entry will be greatly reduced by being able to bring their mEgo into the new destination.

Allen: Where did the idea originate from? What was the pain point you are attempting to solve?

The idea originated in my/Ariel’s imagination as a solution to the pain of filling out multiple profiles and loosing data when moving from one destination to the next. I created my first prototypes in 2000 - far too early to get any traction, yet even back then, it was obvious to that profile data should be decoupled from the destination. It took 5 years and meeting Julia Johnston, who’s the most effective, brilliant business woman I have ever known to actually quit the fulltime job and do mEgo properly.

Allen: How many members are on the mEgo team and is the development in-house or outsourced?

We do everything in house, although we are still a virtual company and many of our team members are part time consultants. The fulltime and part time people total 20.

Allen: Can you share some stats about the users on mEgo? Age, gender, location, number of profiles created, active profile count, etc?

We have just over 65,000 users and are currently growing at a rate of just over 1000 new users per day. This has climbed radically since early 2008 when we were at 5,000 users. We are 65% female, mostly 14-25 years old, although the age range is far more spread out than we anticipated.

Allen: Where are most of your members embedding their mEgos?

We did an ad deal on Tagged.com in January - and have seen a huge payoff from it. We have watched thousands of users come from tagged, then place their mEgos on Facebook, MySpace, BlackPlanet, Hi5 and blogs. We also see quit a bit on Bebo and Friendster from international users.

Allen: How are you (or plan to) generating revenue on a person who is using mEgo?

We have been contacted by multiple interactive marketing agencies who want to pay to use mEgo as part of various campaigns. Our first launched in the beginning of March at http://www.adidas.com/missy - which is a contest for adidas based around the Missy Elliot line of clothing called Respect M.E. It is an exciting campaign that enables 10 young women from around to become the new faces of adidas Respect ME. To enter the contest, users much create a mEgo that expresses their undiscovered talents.

For brands, mEgo offers a way to have users pro-actively engage with their content and then distribute their brand-enhanced mEgos to all their social networking pages.

This is early revenue for us, which we’re thrilled with, particularly because the brands we are talking to, like adidas, are marketing mEgo to trend setting youth. Bringing mEgo awareness and distribution to large audiences that would be quite costly for us to market to directly.

Later, after we reach critical mass, we intend to offer user-endorsed ad revenue. We are exploring ways to share revenue with our users. Most likely, our first method will be to incentive users to accumulate ad revenue in order to earn money for their favorite non-for-profits.

Allen: Can you share some of your marketing plan? How are you spreading the word about mEgo?

We will work with brands that have marketing plans to our target demo, like the adidas Missy Elliot campaign. We are also creating ’silo-based apps’ for everything from MySpace to Facebook and all upcoming open social directories. We will most likely pay for featured placement in some of these directories.

Allen: I noticed that your office is located in LA. Do you find that to be an advantage or disadvantage over a location in the Valley?

LA has a huge hi-tech community, that admittedly is buried under the culture of the film industry, but we are here and I hope we organize more in the near term future. I (Ariel) spent the first 10 years of my career in the bay area and I miss it. There is a certain cultural excitement for high tech that is like no where else. This culture, however, doesn’t mean that better ideas or smarter people are in the bay area - in fact, our team is pretty brilliant and we’re mostly all in LA. We actually have a bunch of our developers in Montevideo, Uruguay - and they’re brilliant and bi-lingual.

Allen: What are your "must-check" Web services each day?

I’m obsessed with our own analytics - we use a proprietary reporting, but also google analytics. I have MyYahoo homepage set up with all my needed RSS feeds - the usual blogs, ReadWriteWeb, Techcrunch, Mashable, etc. We are also all on IM all day as we have no central office. We use Jira for our workflow.

Check out the printer we used for our business cards:

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 25th, 2008 at 11:36 pm and is filed under social networking, Interviews, mego. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.