Bye, Bye Bebo – AOL Dumps the Popular Social Site

By Ian Bell Published June 17, 2010

AOL is paring back its ambitions in the world of online social networking, selling a website called Bebo that it bought a little more than two years ago for $850 million.

Bebo, which launched in 2005, has failed to match the huge popularity of sites like Facebook and Twitter.

Recommended Videos

AOL Inc., which is based in New York, tried to use the site to drive traffic to its other ad-supported Web properties, but it hasn’t taken off. The site had about 5 million users in February, according to comScore Inc., compared with Facebook’s 210 million. AOL said in April it planned to shut the site or sell it.

The buyer is the private investment firm Criterion Capital Partners LLC.

The California company did not say how much it is paying, but analysts have speculated that the site would fetch just a fraction of what AOL paid for it.

Ian Bell

Publisher

I'm the co-founder and CEO of Digital Trends Media Group, which I launched in 2006 out of my home office to share my passion…

Topics

QuickCharge: This Week in EV

Computing

Google makes Gemini’s AI avatars social, so friends can now appear in each other’s content

Google Gemini lets you share your AI likeness with friends, tag each other in prompts, and star together in generated videos.

Google is making Gemini's personal AI avatars more social, letting you share your likeness with friends and appear together in AI-generated images and videos. You can share your avatar, tag friends in prompts, and create content featuring everyone's digital likeness.

https://twitter.com/GeminiApp/status/2115885244805251519

Computing

Subvocal’s glasses promise to let you talk to your computer in complete silence

Voice dictation is incredibly convenient, but talking to your computer in public can be embarrassing. Subvocal thinks it has a solution.

Subvocal smart glasses use radar to track your mouth movement and convert it to text using AI

Typing has always been a bottleneck between what we think and how quickly we can communicate it to a computer. AI-powered dictation tools like Wispr Flow have made things considerably better. You can practically ramble your way through an entire email, or even an article, and have it transcribed into text in seconds.

But there's a rather awkward problem with talking to your computer. Try doing it in a quiet office, a library, or even your favorite cafe, and more often than not, you tend to attract some attention or end up disturbing others. A startup called The Subvocal Company thinks it has found a solution to this issue. It has developed a pair of smart glasses that promise to turn silent mouth movements into text at over 200 words per minute.

Computing

North Korean hackers pull off a $6.3 billion crypto heist in one of the biggest thefts so far

Cryptocurrency issuers and networks froze approximately $2.7 billion, the remaining stolen assets pose a major challenge.

North Korean hackers have stolen a staggering $6.36 billion in cryptocurrency from Binance, according to blockchain intelligence firm TRM Labs. On October 29 the attack reportedly drained funds across 10 different blockchains in roughly 20 minutes. TRM attributes the operation to TraderTraitor, a North Korean state-sponsored hacking group.

How did hackers steal $6.3 billion from Binance?