If you thought Steve Jobs and Bill gates are (and were) great businessmen, get a load of Michael Birch, the entrepreneur formerly formerly of Bebo. The double formerly being because in 2008 Birch and other shareholders in the site sold the social network (very much on its way out at that time) for 850 Million USD to AOL. Now Birch has recently bought it back from them for just 1 million USD.
See also: Bebo bought back by founder for just $1 Million
Anyway, now he’s got his website back, for a fraction of what it was sold it for, Michael Birch and his good lady wife, fellow Bebo starter Xochi Birch, are now gearing up to rebrand the service as Blab, a sort of crossover between Vine and MSN messenger. The service allows you to record short videos to send to your friends, even if they don’t use Blab.
Blab is simple, the user holds the appropriate button on screen and releases it to send to their recipient, regardless of whether they have Blab or not. The service allows video messaging to be easy, discreet and on demand, which is why 775,000 people are already on the app’s waiting list. It also offers traditional video chat with each user using their camera at the same time, although both users must have the app for this.
How is it different to Snapchat and other contenders? Blab developers insist the service will be different, so sayeth Shaan Puri, CEO of Monkey Inferno, Birch’s app development company. “At first glance, it’s easy to lump Blab in with other popular services (Instagram, Snapchat, Vine, etc..) but there is a fundamental difference,” he says. “Those products were built to show something to your friends. Blab is built to communicate with your friends. This is obvious once you’ve used the app – so our challenge will be to get people to give it a try for the first time.”
Blab will be released to the public shortly with most internet sources saying they’ll be hands-on with it ‘soon’, in the meantime, check out the informative and funny video from Birch explaining last years big buyback of Bebo.