For the record 13 March

13-03-2008

by Charlie Taylor

Irish-led venture capital firm gains from Bebo acquisition | Microsoft buys Kidaro

Balderton Capital, the venture capital firm headed by Irishman Barry Maloney, is to sell its 15.7 percent share in Bebo to AOL, as part of AOL's acquisition of the social networking site. Balderton is expecting to gain USD140 million from the sale of its stake, more than nine times the original sum it invested. Balderton, which recently sold its state in MySQL to Sun Microsystems for USD1 billion, provided Bebo with first-round financing of USD15 million in May 2006. "We got involved in an exciting and competitive investment in Bebo because we believed in the social networking space and the fact that Bebo was positioned for exponential growth," said Maloney. "Our expectations for Bebo have been exceeded in a relatively short period of time, and today's transaction with AOL has delivered an exceptional return on our original investment in 2006," he added.

Register365, a division of Hosting365, has launched a website application built specifically for use on the Apple iPhone, which goes on sale in Ireland on Friday. The application allows users to look up and register internet domain names, all within the iPhone interface.

Microsoft has agreed to acquire Kidaro, a provider of desktop virtualisation solutions for enterprises, for an undisclosed sum. Kidaro specialises in tools which allow administrators to manage virtualised systems. Microsoft said that Kidaro's software will be incorporated into its Desktop Optimisation Pack for Software Assurance, a virtualisation package aimed at enterprise users.

Over 300 students from around the country gathered at Tipperary Institute on Thursday to help celebrate the 30th birthday of the ever-popular arcade game, Space Invaders. The institute hosted the official worldwide celebrations to mark the milestone anniversary of the game. The high-point of the event was the Microsoft XNA Challenge for which students had to design their own version of the classic game from a starter pack.

TalkTalk, the landline company from the Carphone Warehouse, has launched a new broadband package. Talk Complete offers unlimited calls anytime to Irish landlines, 30 mobile minutes to any network any time, 200 international minutes to landlines in any country, line rental and free calls to other TalkTalk customers plus 1Mbps broadband access for EUR55.99 a month (including VAT).

TiVo, the company behind the popular digital video recorder (DVR), is to offer access to YouTube videos directly from the television. The service will be available later this year to broadband connected subscribers with TiVo Series3 DVRs, including the new TiVo HD. In November, TiVo announced that it was partnering with Yahoo to schedule downloads to TiVo boxes from any internet connection.