Monday, May 19, 2008

AOL Completes $850M Bebo Buy

AOL announced today that it has completes its acquisition of social networking site Bebo. The deal, which was originally announced in March, was worth $850M in cash. AOL said that Bebo will become part of a newly created People Networks business unit, which will be headed by Bebo CEO Joanna Shields. The new unit will also include AIM, ICQ, and recent acquisition Goowy Media and social Q&A firm Yedda. AOL said its first initiative with the firm will be to integrate AOL's IM, chat, and mail functionality into EMO, and to merge AIM and Bebo profiles.