AOL’s Parent Company Just IPO’d. No, It's Not 1992

There’s this Italian company called Bending Spoons that owns AOL. It just went public, and the stock went up 39% on its first day of trading. Closing at $40.50 instead of its $29 price at its IPO gives it a market cap of $25.7 billion—more than twice its pre-IPO valuation of $11 billion. Wow, things are going great for AOL—oh, and Evernote, Meetup, Vimeo, and Eventbrite, which Bending Spoons also owns. Bending Spoons is an acquisitive company that likes brands that are—as our President might say—no longer hot, but are arguably still good. Never mind that AOL first became a public company in 1992, and once achieved a market cap of $200 billion. In other 1992 news, EchoStar, which owns Dish Network, which owns the husk of—you guessed it—Blockbuster Video, has seen its stock spike more than 600% in the past year. I think we all know what to pop in the ol’ VCR right about now: Subscribe and interact with our community, get up to date with our customised Newsletters and much more. Thermoelectric generators probably won’t eliminate the charger for your Apple Watch, but for smaller, screenless wearables, the heat constantly escaping from your skin could fundamentally change how we power o