mEgo Closes $2.5 Milion... Congratulations Ariel and Julia!

Congratulations to the Co-CEO's of mEgo, Julia Johnston and Ariel McNichol, for closing a $2.5 million angel round. It's a large angel round especially for these times. I know Ariel from the early days of my old startup, GoingOn Networks. She was working with our crazy advisor, Marc Canter... crazy, crazy times. More from SocalTECH.com here.

Tata Nen Hottest Startup Awards... Vote Tekriti!

TATA, one of the largest conglomerates in India, and the National Entrepreneurship Network (NEN), India's non-profit, leader in entrepreneurship education, have teamed up for the TATA NEN Hottest Startup Awards.

My former development partner from my GoingOn Networks days, Tekriti Software, has been nominated. So if you're a reader from India, vote for Tekriti!

New Forbes CEO Network Launched!

The new Forbes CEO Network is finally up. Very cool and congratulations to the Forbes.com and GoingOn team! This was built on my old software company's social media platform. If you're a C-level executive, check it out here.

GOINGON'S NEW HOMEPAGE

Very cool. GoingOn, the company I co-founded, has launched a new homepage. Jon, our new CMO, did a great job.

Also this was done in a low budget manner, which was one of approaches I was advocating before I left several weeks ago. Another executive team member wanted to hire a design shop and spend $150,000 - $250,000 while others thought a few thousand would be good enough for the resources we had. I think I few thousand did a good job :)



Anyway, check it out and learn more about GoingOn here, especially if you're looking for a private-label social media (online community) platform.

BUSINESSWEEK'S BEST OF THE WEB: SOCIAL NETWORKING TOOLS... GOINGON NETWORKS

Even though we're the slowest moving startup in Silicon Valley, we got a little recognition from BusinessWeek's Best of the Web list for "Social Networking Tools" (slide 18 of 26):

Scaling the Social Web
Move over, MySpace. Online players from media giant Viacom to auctioneer eBay are adding networking features for their users


Anyway, I can only hope that we get a real product development person soon since I was just filler until this point. Business development people don't always make the best temporary product heads :)

Buytaert, Cleary and Feld Join GoingOn As Advisors

It's always a great feeling as an entrepreneur to receive confirmation of your vision and company from customers, partners, industry leaders, and really smart people. So over the past couple weeks our team has received such confirmation and I'm very stoked to announce that Dries Buytaert, Bill Cleary, and Brad Feld have joined GoingOn Networks as advisors.

Since our team has significant experience in building new companies, I would say that we're selective in who we ask as advisors, especially since most of us had at least one bad experience with advisors who simply lent their name and did nothing else. Also for our three new advisory board members, we know they do not readily lend their time and name, so we are truly honored to have them join our team.

To give you some more insight into our excitement, here are a few words about each person:

Dries Buytaert is the founder of Drupal, a leading open source CMS platform that the GoingOn platform was built upon. We look forward to working with Dries and will have some cool plans to announce on our involvement with the Drupal community in the near future.

Bill Cleary was co-founder the CKS Group, which went public and eventually merged with USWeb, and current founder of Cleary & Partners. He was instrumental in launching several major web brands from the first boom including Yahoo!, eBay, and Amazon.com. He believes in our vision and how we can transform the corporate marketing landscape and the way people do business through GoingOn.

Brad Feld is Managing Director at Mobius Venture Capital and the most active venture capitalist in the blogosphere. His insights into our space and advice on our operations are things we truly value from him. We're very lucky to have Brad and the rest of our advisors helping us build GoingOn into a great platform and company!

Web Roll-Up?... Well, GoingOn is Like Half A Roll

I like the alarm:clock guys as you might know. I heard for them it's a hobby, so they can't commit as many resources as similar sites, such as TechCrunch, but I've always thought if they invested more time into developing their blog they could do a lot better in terms of traffic and influence. Same with Tony's media business, AlwaysOn, I'm certain if he did some tweaks in the content and invested in marketing the site he would generate a lot more traffic. Of course, since I'm not involved in AlwaysOn's operations he just ignores the few words I throw out here and there. I think he doesn't care so much about its traffic since he makes a lot of money from his events and sponsorships, and the fact that he serves a very niche audience (tech execs in silicon valley) and does well with it.

Anyway, back to alarm:clock's recent post titled, "Web 2.0 Roll-up":

Our beef with Web 2.0 hype is that so many of the companies that fall in this category (we're not even sure it actually is a category) have limited ambitions and growth-management skills. Features are being launched as if they are companies. There is way too much excitement over $12M acquisitions of modest Web 2.0 start-ups by Yahoo and Google. So why not make a run at creating another portal? After all, it wasn't that long ago that Alta Vista and Infoseek were hot portals - and there will doubtlessly be another big-time portal launched in the next few years.

As I posted here before, I agree that there are too many one feature startups without real business models who probably pray for an acquisition as an exit strategy. In some ways GoingOn Networks can be a home for many of these "feature" companies and more developed Web 2.0 companies. While it's not our primarily focus, nor do we want to be the "Ellis Island" of the Web 2.0 landscape ("Give me your poor, your tired, your huddled masses..."), we have incorporated Marc Canter's vision of a DLA (Digital Lifestyle Aggregator) into our platform. People can integrate their Flickr and del.icio.us like many other platforms, but you'll see a lot more after our beta. We do want to provide a digital hub for people's favorite web services and we won't discriminate, so hopefully we can develop this effectively :)

A Web 2.0 Roll-up might start with Technorati for blog search, Rollyo for personalized search, and add features like Zimbra's calendar, a video search like YouTube or Revver, an IM app like Meebo, a comment tool like Digg, plus other doo-dads that you might find on the TechCrunch Index.

Alarm:clock has a good start above. Rollyo? Maybe. Carl, our CTO, joked that we've become the "search engine whore" hooking up with Endeca, a powerful enterprise search solution, and a few others we'll announce. YouTube? Revver? Maybe. Meebo? Maybe. It will be fun over the next few years to see how we develop our platform. Definitely we do not want to become a portal for Web 2.0 services. Our focus is providing a communications platform for companies, so that's why I would call us 'half a roll' or maybe just a 'handroll'.

Cat Is Out Of The Bag... GoingOn Networks, Our Startup

Okay. Matt Marshall let the cat out of the bag. This is the startup I've been referring to since January here. Tony brought me on board last January and it's been a fun ride so far... writing the business plan, creating the financials, watching Tony raise the money (definitely glad that's not my role for this startup), working on product specs, etc.

Since then we've been working to implement the meshed vision of Marc's and Tony's digital world, which Marc posts about today here. Valerie, who also works with IBDNetwork and blogs at their Under the Radar blog andThe Dealmaker blog, came on board at the end of March (part-time basis... she's hasn't ditched her clients) and we're working on recruiting a couple more people that I believe will join soon :) Carl is Marc's colleague at BroadBand Mechanics and our engineering chief (marc and carl are our advisors and technical consultants). He's our techy stud along with Gaurav and his team. Anyway, we're building out a solid team (that's brilliant, cool and fun to work with) and I'm definitely looking forward to helping this company become kick ass in our operations, products, and revenues.