Gary Mekikian
Gary Mekikian is an American businessman who is the co-founder and chief executive officer of M&M Media Inc, a Los Angeles–based media technology company. Prior to M&M Media, Mekikian co-founded International Integration, also known as i-Cube; answerfriend, which became Inquira; and GATeIC.
Mekikian is a co-organizer of LA2DC.org, a Los Angeles–based organization whose mission is to raise awareness of modern-day genocides and the Holocaust, and to eliminate genocide as a war tactic.
Mekikian has a BS in electrical engineering from the University of Southern California and an MS from Stanford University, and he holds patents in media technologies and medical devices. Mekikian is a member of Stanford University's Graduate School of Business MSx Alumni Advisory Board. He collaborates with Stanford University professors Dr. William Barnett and Dr. John Roberts to write and teach case studies on entrepreneurship, information technology, semiconductor industry, and the mobile internet.
Education
After attending Hollywood High School for two years, Mekikian earned an electrical engineering degree from University of Southern California and an MS from Stanford University.Career
Early ventures
In 1993, after working at Hewlett-Packard Company as a sales engineer, Mekikian joined the founding team at International Integration Inc., also known as i-Cube, which went public in 1998. i-Cube was acquired by Razorfish, Inc. in 1999.Mekikian began working with Dr. Deniz Yuret, a researcher in Natural Language Processing at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Sundar Subramaniam, a co-founder of i-Cube, to found answerFriend, Inc., which developed commercialized web based question-answering technologies. In 2002, answerFriend merged with another natural language processing technology company, Electric Knowledge, to form InQuira. In 2011, Oracle Corporation acquired Inquira.
In 2006, Mekikian co-founded GATeIC a semiconductor IP company.
M&M Media / TREBEL Music
In 2014, after a patent was issued on a new method of delivering and monetizing digital media on mobile and desktop devices, Mekikian co-founded M&M Media, Inc., a digital music distribution company that released the TREBEL Music app to reduce digital media piracy by specifically targeting a demographic which uses piracy as a form of digital media consumption.TREBEL Music operates in Indonesia, Mexico, Colombia, and the US, and its investors include fashion mogul, Chris Burch, global pop star Maluma, NBA basketball star, Thaddeus Young, soccer star Memo Ochoa, and Indonesian media mogul, Hary Tanoesoedibjo.