Former Pogo execs join NeoEdge through merger

NeoEdge has merged with Offspring, a casual and social games company founded and headed by former Pogo.com executives Lesley Mansford, Andrew Pedersen, Karen Schulman, and Todd Heringer. Lesley Mansford will take the helm as the company’s new CEO, with NeoEdge’s Dan Servos, along with Andrew Pedersen, Karen Schulman, and Todd Heringer all assuming Senior Vice President roles.

NeoEdge is a digital media services platform provider that helps add in-game advertising into casual game offerings through full-screen mid-roll video ads, overlay ads and sponsorships. The services platform also generates consumer communities through sponsored social rewards in existing casual download and online flash games. Casual game publishers like Yahoo! and NBC Universal currently use NeoEdge to deploy over 500 ad-supported casual games throughout the NeoEdge partner network.

In September, 2009, NeoEdge announced $4 million in new financing co-led by Vanedge Capital and Jefferson Partners of Toronto, Canada. Vanedge Capital’s principals are Paul Lee, former President of Electronic Arts Worldwide Studios, and Glenn Entis, former Chief Visual and Technical Officer of Electronic Arts Worldwide Studios and former CEO of DreamWorks Interactive.

For more details visit the company’s web site at www.neoedge.com

Happy Birthday, Pogo.com

Electronic Arts announced that Pogo.com is officially ten years old. Pogo.com launched in 1999 as a start up and has grown from a small offering of games with dozens of players to a global destination offering hundreds of games to millions of users in the North America, France, Germany and the United Kingdom making it one of the most trafficked sites on the web, and #1 in stickiness (average minutes/visitor) amongst the top 10 online properties - according to tracking data from comScore.com. In the past four years Pogo.com players have logged more than 6 billion hours and 8 billion game sessions on the site.

Pogo.com is known for its online community of players who forge life-long friendships through the site and spend way too many hours all kinds of casual games. Pogo has local sites and communities in UK and Germany. The Pogo.com premium service, Club Pogo, offers players a variety of VIP features including exclusive games, no ad interruptions, private chat and avatars. Club Pogo had over 1.75 million paying subscribers at the end of August 2009.