—————–

Mashable says AOL has sold Bebo, but doesn’t know who bought it or the price paid for the social network. PE Hub’s Dan Primack (via Business Insider) thinks the buyer is in Southern California.

What does AOL say?

No comment. Or more precisely: “We haven’t announced anything,” says PR boss Tricia Primrose.

Okey-dokey! More info if and when it surfaces.

But if Tim Armstrong can get anyone to pay anything for Bebo, it will be a small victory for AOL (AOL).

The previous AOL regime bought the social network for $850 million at the height of the last Web bubble, and the portal has since had to write the whole thing off. For some reason, Time Warner (TWX) boss Jeff Bewkes, who signed off on the purchase, never gets tarred for that one, but I digress…

Armstrong has already announced that if he can’t find a buyer for Bebo, he’ll shut the whole thing down. Which makes it pretty hard to drive a hard bargain. Anyone want to hazard a guess?

PE Hub’s Connie Loizos seems to think it will and brings up the idea several times in an interview with new CEO Jason Rosenthal:

Q: Ning doesn’t have a single non-executive board member; given how much it has raised, how is that, and why is that?

A: Stay tuned, you’ll be hearing from us and seeing things there in coming weeks and months.

Q: Meaning that you’re raising more money?

A: Mmm, I didn’t say that. We’ve run the company a certain way, with a certain board structure. But one thing you can expect from me is that we’re ready to build a board of directors with outside, independent board directors. That’s one of the first things I’ll be working on.

Q: Are you raising more money soon? It sounds like you are.

A: No comment.

You can parse this many ways if you’d like. On the one hand, it seems pretty clear that Ning is going to bring in some new directors, which doesn’t mean that it’s raising money. On the other hand, if it is definitely not raising more money, then Rosenthal could just say that. I’ve asked Ning for any clarification it can provide.

But read the whole interview for yourself. There’s a bunch of good stuff. For instance: Rosenthal, without saying so, makes it clear that the company was happy to see SVP of engineering Jay Parikh leave last fall.

And he says that Ning is finally ready to move on from its dependence on Google (GOOG) AdSense. But that will take a while–the company only began building an ad sales team this year.

There’s not much info on the Ginx.com Web site; the blog ReadWriteWeb.com theorizes that Ginx is “a Twitter management service that recommends news items and other users you should meet, based on your interests.” He notes that Ginx is being used as a URL shortener on Twitter by some people, including Omidyar himself.

You can find hints of what’s happening here by searching for Pierre and Ginx.com on Google. For instance, here’s an example where Omidyar points people to how a Google (GOOG) search for “chimp” triggers a link to a site called BushorChimp.com.

Read the rest of this post

Or maybe they’re just like us: When their 401k’s gets crushed in a once-in-a-lifetime market rout, they think twice before writing another check.

That appears to have happened in October, when VCs spent less money, on fewer companies, than they have in years. Details from Thomson Reuters/PE Week, via PE HUB:

The data show that U.S.-based venture firms invested in just 250 companies in October, down from 565 companies in September and 518 companies in October 2007. You have to go all the way back to January 2004 (when they invested in 232 companies) to find a lower number. The only other October with fewer deals was in 1993.

The amount of capital that VCs are investing also plummeted in October, when U.S.-based firms put $2.5 billion to work, down from $3.8 billion in September and $3.2 billion in October 2007. The October 2008 total is the smallest amount that U.S. VCs have invested since February 2006, when they invested about $2.4 billion. Looking only at October, the last time the monthly total was lower was in October 2004, when about $2.4 billion was invested.”

Recall that in addition to the market getting crushed last month, October also ushered in a flurry of look out! pronouncements from some of the VC world’s biggest names, including Sequoia Capital. So it’s understandable that deal flow might dry up.

But it’s not going away entirely. And it doesn’t mean that VCs are avoiding Web 2.0-like gambles. See, for instance, the $20 million or so that investors just pumped into Project Playlist, yet another music discovery services with both legal challenges (the music labels are suing it) and operational ones (there isn’t much revenue, and getting more will be tough).

Nor does it mean that the investors who fund VCs themselves are bailing out–yet. More on that later.