Bebo in AOL Clutches, AOL has acquired social-networking site Bebo, of which I have been a member since the beginning. The Bebo in dollars is 750 Million. Now it just flashed in front of my eyes the other companies that AOL purchased or acquired, like Netscape!. Hope Bebo was purchased under better plans.
Bebo with over 40 million bebos, was among the gobble up talks like who is buying Yahoo. Bebo sale was definitely happening, that is what Techcrunch said. Techcrunch also suggested a $1 billion price tag,all the information but who the potential buyer/s were.
The AOL and Bebo were had already facilitated friend-invite interoperability between the two services. That was the last hint that noone spoke about. The last thing I know about AOL and acquisition was that Yahoo was looking to purchase them.
I hope AOL would make some advertising revenue and keep the company running. In a conference call on Thursday, Falco and Ron Grant, AOL's president and COO, as well as Bebo president Joanna Shields, said that integration between Bebo and AOL's AIM and ICQ messaging properties will be crucial. Combined, they said, AOL will own a "social graph" of 80 million people, bigger than the 67 million that the independently-run Facebook currently counts but still significantly smaller than News Corp.'s MySpace.com.
Joanna Shields, president of the San Francisco-based Bebo, will continue to run the social network and will report to Ron Grant. The deal was brokered on AOL's side by Bank of America Securities and Deutsche Bank Securities. Bebo had hired investment bank Allen & Co. when it opted to put itself up for sale.
Grant estimated in Thursday's conference call that the deal will ideally be complete within a month.
Read more at News.com
tag: social network business, Bebo, AOL, facebook, myspace, netscape
