Xochi Birch

XOCHI-BIRCH

Xochi Birch, the founder of Bebo.com together in January 2005. Today, Bebo has over 40 million registered users and has surpassed MySpace in many countries and is currently the sixth most popular site in the UK, bigger than AOL, Amazon.co.uk and bbc.co.uk

Beboers can leave comments on other pages, send private messages and set quizzes for each other. They can limit access to selected friends or publicise their pages to the world. The Birches are particularly proud of a feature they call ffART, for ‘free-form art’, which allows users to draw pictures on each others’.

Privately-owned Bebo claims about 40 million global members, and the deal promises to significantly expand AOL’s growing business of selling advertising on the Internet outside of the United States.

“I was never a big company type of person and my ideal job was to be self employed. The ironic thing is you work a lot harder for yourself than you do for anybody else.

“You heard about all these other internet companies succeeding by starting off in a bedroom or a garage and I felt ‘yes, we can do this.”