From the press release:

“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.”

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There’s been lots of discussion about possible acquisitions in the telephony/communications industry of late. My favortie scenario: Microsoft acquires Nortel, and IBM picks up Siemens’ enterprise software business. Given their close relationship around UC, the Nortel/Microsoft works nicely. Same goes for IBM/Siemens–IBM already OEMs Siemens’ technology for its upcoming Unified Telephony product, and the two companies have hammered home the idea of openness in the market.

Of course, such deals would create some challenges. Microsoft would suddenly find itself in the hardware business, since it would have to support Nortel’s legacy PBX customers for many years to come. IBM would, too, but at least the company has experience in the space (albeit, not recently, but still…). On the other hand, IBM would clearly have to back-track on its messaging that it is NOT in the telephony business.

All this is just musing… what potential M&As do you like in this space?

Word out of Silicon Valley this morning is that Yahoos board of directors has rejected a purchase offer from Microsoft, setting the stage for perhaps a larger battle over the future of the Internet giant. Microsoft is in a strong position; its offer of $31 was substantially higher than recent trading prices. But Yahoos argument is that given future growth projections, its stock is worth at least $40 a share.What happens next is anyones guess. Microsoft could implement a hostile takeover and buy up shares of Yahoo on the open market, or it could seek to replace Yahoos board with one that will accept the buyout offer. The wild card in all this is Google, the NY Times recently reported that Google had opened up discussions on a potential partnership meant to thwart Microsofts acquisition efforts.

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Is Yahoo moving into the online office market? Today on TechCrunch Michael Arrington posted about a $350 million acquisition of Zimbra that’s likely in the works. Zimbra provides an open-source messaging and collaboration platform that provides users with web/Ajax-based access to integrated email, PIM, calendaring, voice and online documents.

During his keynote speech at VoiceCon today, IBM Lotus boss Mike Rhodin announced the acquisition of white-label webconferencing service provider WebDialogs. The WebDialogs service will be offered within the Lotus Sametime unified communications client. Rhodin and Executive IT Architect Ron Sebastian also outlined new features of the Sametime 8 client and positioned Sametime at the core of their ever increasing unified communications and collaboration product footprint. Rhodin also announced a partnership with Siemens to develop a middleware solution dubbed “Lotus Sametime Unified Telephony.” The offering will provide the glue between Sametime and diverse PBX environments, provide users with control over incoming call routing and integrate voice into Sametime’s presence capabilities.