AOL to buy Bebo for $850 millon cash

Here’s an interesting development: AOL have announced the purchase of social network Bebo for $850 million in cash. Previous coverage didn’t even mention AOL as a potential buyer.

From BusinessWire:

With a total membership of more than 40 million worldwide, Bebo is a global social media network which combines community, self-expression and entertainment to enable its users to consume, create, discover and share content. Bebo is one of the leading social networks in the UK, and is ranked number one in Ireland and New Zealand, and number three in the U.S. Its users are heavily engaged and view an average of 78 pages per usage day. Bebo has approximately 100 employees operating in offices in the UK, San Francisco and Austin, TX.

The deal comes just one week after AOL’s launch of Open AIM 2.0, an initiative that allows the developer community greater freedom to access the AIM network and integrate AIM into its sites and applications, and the announcement by Apple of a downloadable AIM application for the iPhone.

Under the terms of the agreement, AOL will acquire Bebo for $850 million in cash.

“Bebo is the perfect complement to AOL’s personal communications network and puts us in a leading position in social media,” said Randy Falco, Chairman and CEO, AOL. “What drew us to Bebo was its substantial and fast-growing worldwide user-base, its vision of a truly social web, and the monetization opportunities that leverage Platform-A across our combined global audience. This positions us to offer advertisers even greater reach and marketers significant insights into the desires and needs of consumers.”

Allen Stern at CentreNetworks:

What does this mean for AOL? It brings their ad inventory for Platform-A skyrocketing upwards with a youth and young adult demographic. This is a good complement to their current AOL properties which tend to tick a bit further up the age chain. AOL also announced last month the launch of 20+ Web sites in 2008.

Search Engine Journal:

Bebo is based out of the UK, San Francisco and Texas and has become the social network of choice among British Internet users and those in commonwealths, being the #1 social network in Ireland and New Zealand.

With 40 milllion worldwide members, Bebo will introduce a new outlet for AOL’s Platform-A behavioral driven advertising, AOL search and AOL properties to grow in conjunction with (Bebo is currently a Yahoo advertising partner).

Will post up more coverage as it comes in.

Updates:

Om Malik:

The deal also shows the schizophrenic nature of my former employer, Time Warner. Jeff Bewkes wants to get rid of AOL (and Time Warner Cable) and focus entirely on his old Hollywood style businesses. Earlier this week he was happy to talk deal with Yahoo and get rid of AOL, which is going to through a major crisis, as reported by several other outlets. And at the same time they are spending $850 million in cash on Bebo. Maybe it helps AOL become a more sexy acquisition, or a spin-off candidate?

Charles Arthur in The Guardian:

But now the question is – as it always is – has AOL bought just after the wave has broken? News Corp’s acquisition of MySpace initially looked like a mistake, but now seems sensible. Do AOL and Bebo make a match made in heaven… or hell? After all, AOL’s tried an old-world merger. Now it seems it’s trying a new-world one.

Michael Arrington:

As an aside, and despite rumors of their possible sale, AOL is clearly putting a massive effort into transforming the company from a dial up broadband provider into a company has the competitive fire. The opening of AIM, mentioned above, is just one indication. The company has been releasing genuinely innovative new products and has also made a number of smaller strategic acquisitions over the last year or so. And there are lots more to come, apparently.

Mike Butcher:

Time Warner’s AOL has acquired leading social media network Bebo for $850 million in cash. It seems like a good move which will supercharge AOL’s advertising reach into social networking, and immediately put the heat on Microsoft, which has failed in social networking, and ailing Yahoo!, almost certain to be acquired itself very soon.

Rethinking government news

Where do government and other public sector folk get their news from?

  • Info4Local
  • eGov Monitor
  • GCN
  • Kable
  • Individual government department websites
  • Any others?

I wonder if there is a possibility for putting together a one-stop-shop for news, aggregating the popular sources in one place. I’d also like to see conversations added to the mix, so the news items could spawn discussion.

There are a few models one could use:

  1. Digg, with user submitted news and voting for popular stories. Will people bother though? Could you automatically feed stories in via RSS? Would similar stories be grouped together? This option will include comments on each item though.
  2. TechMeme, drawing together the stories along similar lines. Lack of commenting might be an issue, and it’s a very complicated thing to get right
  3. OnePolitics, aggregating a set list of sources. Simple enough to get up and running, but doesn’t seem to sort content by topic.

Would appreciate any thoughts on this: Where do you go now for your news? Is there a need for such a site? Which of the three models would be of most use to government folk?

£4 million to help local authorities fight climate change

Interesting news item this morning on eGov monitor:

 A new £4 million programme to help local authorities tackle climate change was announced by Environment Minister Phil Woolas and Local Government Minister John Healey today.

The programme will spread existing best practice on climate change among local authorities, and provide training and mentoring to help them reduce emissions and adapt to the already unavoidable effects of climate change.

The programme, jointly funded by Defra and Communities and Local Government, will be tailored to local needs and priorities, with delivery being co-ordinated at a regional level.

It will be interesting to learn how this best practice is going to be shared. The first thing I would do would be to start a Community of Practice on the subject.

Hello, Rohan Silva

I, like Nick Booth and presumably countless others, got an email from someone called Rohan Silva today, who has an @parliament email address. Rohan writes:

I thought you might be interested in how Cabinet Office minister Tom Watson‘s speech yesterday on new technologies and the internet “mashed up” Conservative Party policies, speeches and ideas from the past 18 months. (Comically, the link to Tom’s speech isn’t actually working at the moment: http://www.tom-watson.co.uk/?p=1899 – and it’s not been published on the Cabinet Office website…)

It’s well worth reading Tom’s entire speech alongside our previous key speeches on this subject, and seeing for yourself just how much of it has been purloined from Conservative Party announcements. But for those of you who don’t have time to do that, here’s a selection of some of the most obvious thefts in Tom’s speech, along with some suggestions about other Conservative Party internet related policies that he may want to borrow for his next one…

What follows is a job lot of loosely related content from Watson’s speech, along with the Tory equivalent from where it was ‘stolen’. There are obviously problems with this, as Nick points out in his post:

Rohan: I know and can find a whole range of already public sources for these ideas: books, websites, blogs, reports commissioned by goverment and others. These ideas are out there and both parties are getting to grips with them and talking about them. I would have to be something of a moron to believe that all the government is doing is nicking ideas from you when it is much more credible to believe that you are all reading about and experience the same radical shift in how we communicate and collaborate.

It’s kind of interesting that the Tories are targeting a group of interested folk in this way. But several things annoyed me:

  1. The list was sent to everyone in the bcc field, so I have no idea who else got this. Great way to start a conversation.
  2. Why not post this on a blog somewhere, point us to it and start a discussion around it?
  3. As Nick points out, why not engage with Tom and see to it that these ideas get implemented?

This ain’t the way to go about it, boys.

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