mEgo, a startup that lets you create a portable Flash-based avatar that includes aggregated content from your social network profiles, has closed a $2.5 million funding round. The site has also announced that it has reached its 1 millionth registered user since launching at 2007’s TechCrunch40 conference, with a 20% growth rate month over month.
mEgo’s widgets allow users to import information from sites like Flickr, Facebook, and Twitter, which are then presented alongside customizable avatars (you can see an example below). Each source of information can be associated with a different button on the widget that users can place themselves. For example, in the widget below music buttons are positioned on the avatar’s ears and display the user’s Last.fm profile when clicked. mEgo widgets can be placed on blogs and most social networks, and see around 30 million impressions per month.
There are a number of other companies working on embeddable avatars, including Gizmoz and Voki, but mEgo differentiates itself by acting as a hub for a user’s photos and network profiles rather than just a fancy self-portrait.
Cool widget… but a customizable character (instead of that white thing) would be even cooler…
Melvin, you’re a mind-reader…the full avatar engine is coming next month. Better looking than any avatar engine out there
more flexible, dynamic, etc. It’s exciting!
And this is to remind us that some people are not aware of the so called economic crisis.
Sorry but I can’t see the value here even with 30 mil impressions.
Congratulations Ariel! Great to see such a smart SoCal entrepreneur do well.
Go get ‘em Ariel.
Another sign of how people and applications are becoming one identity?
Best of luck to Ariel and company.
Who invested in this round?
FYI Their traffic is dismal. Look at those graphs.
useless
what interests me about this company is that they’ve found a backdoor way to make money out of being an aggregator.
virtual goods seem like the one sector where pennies are still moving. enough pennies and you’ve got a dollar.
why would someone buy a virtual pair of sunglasses? or furniture? beyond me, but the evidence of success by habbohotel and gaia are undeniable….guess this isn’t designed for suits in the valley.
Widgets man, whod’a thunk?
I have NO idea what this particular idea is good for.
Seems one million people already noted what it is good for…
I’m embarrassed for this… who cares
doesn’t matter- avatar sites are still driving traffic and IMVU is quite profitable. popular avatar sites – imvu, gaia, stardoll combined are drawing 10 m users / month. just saw another site trutoon.com where you can customize avatar with your face.
I asked my daughter about mego a few weeks ago, and of course she knew all about it. at 14, it seems it’s where she’s spending a lot of time tinkering with her avatar. And as far as i can tell, it hasn’t asked for a credit card yet.
It looks pretty fun. good for mego for raising dollar$ in this tough time.
this is awesome , it’s huge!
Congrats, Ariel & Julia!
thanks Bernard!
why?
Plain flash avatars http://toolwi.com/muzpic/ ))
I don’t know anymore is that how an avatar looks like nothing but a silhouette on a canvas.
I guess it would be fun on a mobile as an easy interface.
Go for it.
Who were the investors?
The Mego widgets have great options, but they take a lot of memory resource.