Tuesday, September 28, 2010

Michael Jones Gets Exit At Thing Labs

Michael Jones, CEO of MySpace and former founder of Userplane, has another exit under his belt today, as AOL announced it has acquired Thing Labs, a San Francisco maker of web-based, social software. Financial terms of the buy were not disclosed. Thing Labs makes the Brizzly web-based software for sharing and discovering content. AOL said it expects to integrate aspects of Brizzly into its Lifestream product, and instant messaging service AIM. Thing Labs was foundedin June of 2008, with funding from Jones, Polaris Venture Partners, SoftTech VC, and Jeff Clavier. This is at least the second time Jones has benefited from an AOL acquisition; his own startup, Userplane, was acquired by AOL in 2006. It has been a very acquisitive day for AOL, which announced--in addition to buying Thing Labs--that it has acquired tech blog network TechCrunch, and video content syndication firm 5min Media.