KMGi Group is an
online advertising
Online advertising, also known as online marketing, Internet advertising, digital advertising or web advertising, is a form of marketing and advertising that uses the Internet to promote products and services to audiences and platform users. ...
Internet company that includes WikiExperts.
History
Founded in 1997 in New York City by
Alex Konanykhin
Alex Konanykhin (born Alexander Pavlovich Konanykhin () September 25, 1966) is an entrepreneur and former banker. He started his career by founding a private bank in Russia towards the end of communist rule. Konanykhin is sometimes spelled as Kon ...
, Nikolai Mentchokov, and Elena Gratcheva as an advertising agency. The company later shifted focus to work primarily on website design. The company name is based on the initials of the founders' last names. The company's first headquarters were located in the
Empire State Building
The Empire State Building is a 102-story, Art Deco-style supertall skyscraper in the Midtown South neighborhood of Manhattan, New York City, United States. The building was designed by Shreve, Lamb & Harmon and built from 1930 to 1931. Its n ...
. At that time, many of the company's employees were Russian.
The company began with 35 employees based in one physical location, but has since moved to the use of a
virtual office
A virtual office is part of the flexible workspace industry that provides businesses with any combination of services, space and/or technology, without those businesses bearing the capital expenses of owning or leasing a traditional office.
A vir ...
, using employees from different countries instead of just one location.
Webmercials
In 1998 KMGi introduced the use of
Macromedia
Macromedia, Inc. was an American graphics, multimedia, and web development software company headquartered in San Francisco, California, that made products such as Adobe Flash, Flash and Adobe Dreamweaver, Dreamweaver. It was purchased by its riv ...
’s Flash Technology for
online advertising
Online advertising, also known as online marketing, Internet advertising, digital advertising or web advertising, is a form of marketing and advertising that uses the Internet to promote products and services to audiences and platform users. ...
.
Alex Mentchoukov, the agency's chief creative officer, created a way of using vector-based graphics for Web advertisements without using as much bandwidth as pixel-based graphics. From this work, KMGi became one of the first companies to create animated, television-style "webmercials" for the Internet.
In August 2000, KMGi partnered with Unicast to move from using the