ePals Acquires Media Personalization Platform Newstogram, News Site DailyMe

ePals, developer of a social learning network, this morning announced that it has acquired Newstogram, maker of a media personalization and content recommendation platform. Also included in the deal was news site DailyMe – both are businesses owned by a company called Nexify.

The transaction was in ePals stock and amounted to about $3 million.

ePals says the acquisition provides it with a robust platform for personalization of media and learning applications, and enhances its capability to match learners with each other based on interests, across its network of approximately 700,000 classrooms and ‘millions of users’ in 200 countries.

The platform will allow media publishers – including more than 20 media companies that currently use the Newstogram platform – to create ‘educational’ pages that highlight their content.

Newstogram / DailyMe founder and CEO Eduardo Hauser will become president of ePals’s Media division, while chief product officer Neil Budde joins at EVP.

Before starting Nexify, Hauser was EVP of Latin America for AOL and VP News and Information at Venevision. Neil Budde previously was the founding editor and publisher of The Wall Street Journal Online, and VP and Editor in Chief of Yahoo! News, Finance and Sports.

ePals CEO Miles Gilburne also used to be an executive at AOL, by the way. A venture capitalist, he served for five years as SVP of Corporate Development for AOL before stepping down from those duties in December 1999. He was elected to the board of directors of AOL in 1999 and continued to serve on the board of directors of Time Warner, until stepping down in May 2006.

ePals issued to Nexify 4,449,686 restricted common voting shares at a price of US$0.67 per share. In addition, ePals issued to Nexify warrants to acquire an additional 307,000 restricted voting common shares, at the same price. The warrants are exercisable up to 4 years from the date of closing.