Just spotted there that Benchmark Capital, the financial backer of everyones favourite Irish sports channel Setanta has agreed to invest $15M / £8M in Ireland’s favourite social networking website Bebo.com. The investment is to allow San Fran based Bebo (pronounced bee-bo) to challenge MySpace for Global market share in the social networking industry but particularly in the UK, where MySpace is the more dominant of the two sites, but not by far.
If your from Ireland and have not heard of Bebo where have you been? I thought I was bad for only seeing the first ever episode of Lost two weeks ago. Anyhow as mentioned above it is a social networking site which basically allows everyone to keep in touch with their friends, family and enemies (if they want to) regardless of where in the world they are located. The idea is that everyone who signs up gets a personal webpage which has interactive features such as a blog, a whiteboard (drawing), a flashbox (swf movie) as well as an area for comments to be added. Another very important feature of Bebo and one of the main reasons for its growth is the ability to build up your own network of friends and have them listed on your personal webpage. It is these features that have allowed Bebo achieve over 500,000 Irish members with an estimated 5,000 new signups a day from Irish IP addresses. With this latest investment of $15M / £8M it can only get bigger and better so watch this space.