Can you hear me now? Oh wait, wrong slogan.
America Online, the sweetheart of the 1990s and early 2000s, is being sold to Verizon.
The acquisition cost: $4.4 billion dollars, or about $50 dollars a share. That’s a fraction of the company’s valuation from a few years back, when it was swallowing up companies.
AOL has a large intellectual property portfolio, domain names, web sites and active users; such portals include TechCrunch, the Huffington Post and Engadget.
Verizon will expand its reach to mobile advertising and it will tap into the AOL customer base with its multi-cultural roots.
It is not yet certain what will become of the Huffington Post, as AOL has been considering to spin off the online publication as a separate unit.
