While everyone is writing-off Bebo as being a) an expensive acquisition by AOL ($850 million in March 2008) b) a sale only two years later for virtually peanuts and c) a social network that appears to have no future in the Age Of Facebook, somehow the memo hasn’t reached them. And why not? Bebo now has its own head again and a new, hungry owner in Criterion Capital Partners, so why not go hire some people to make this happen?

The news is that it’s now hired Akash Garg as its new CTO. He comes with credentials. He was the co-founder and original technical visionary at hi5, the successful social gaming platform. It’s significant that Bebo has made this move. It’s lacked a technical visionary for years ever since co-founder and original visionary Michael Birch exited to AOL. Garg aims to bring on more engineering talent.

We covered Demotix a while back when they launched. Since then they appear to be slowly cracking the business model of a crowd-sourced news, pictures and video agency, something that has been tried before to limited success.

It’s just announced a deal with Publish2 News Exchange where it will distrubute content. That means a much wider distribution for Demotix via Publish2, especially to the cruciual US market. With the addition of Demotix to News Exchange, newspapers will also be able to buy photos a la carte.

If you are a startup entrepreneur and you are in London this Friday then you have a chance to be interviewed for the new “Butcher’s Bunch” (it’s a working title…) slot on TechCrunchTV appearing in September.

We’ll be interviewing entrepreneurs and people on the tech scene across Europe for TEchCrunch TV. But to start off with, we’re doing some quick interviews at the new co-working and events space for tech people in London, TechHub (location and map here).

Before we announce what we plan to do with TechCrunch Europe (in terms of events, plans etc) after the Summer, I thought we should also take your suggestions. Feel free to unload with your ideas in the comments. Remember we don’t have unlimited resources to achieve everything we’d like to do, but I’m really happy to take any suggestions or views. So leave a comment below, email me (mike AT mbites.com) or you can @mikebutcher on Twitter . Ok, go!

The UK land grab continues. Real estate startup Zoopla has acquired property technology company Byteplay Ltd, whose assets include OnOneMap.com, DotHomes.com and Extate.com, all three of which are now pointing to Zoopla.co.uk. The terms of the deal remain undisclosed in what appears to be classic consolidation play.

Byteplay is also the operator of the local ‘propertygazette’ websites, which include bristolpropertygazette.co.uk and coventrypropertygazette.co.uk and a host of others covering UK towns and cities.

Zoopla says the deal is a “win” for estate agents already utilising its service as they’ll now see more leads via the company’s roster of local property sites, which has been given a boost thanks to today’s acquisition. This, says Zoopla, makes it a serious challenger to the market leader in the UK, Rightmove.

Hoping to cash in further on Ning’s shuttering of its free version, competitor Grou.ps is upping the ante with the launch of “WinWin”, a referral program directly targeting so-called Ning exiles.

The service claims to have already migrated more than 50,000 Ning networks, making it the largest “do-it-yourself social networking platform”, and hopes to continue this trend by rewarding new converts and those who encourage others to follow suit. Specifically, Grou.ps will be dishing out credits which can be converted into a host of premium features such as extra bandwidth. The size of the reward is proportional to the size of the migrated network so the bigger the switcher, the more credits awarded to both the referrer and the owner of the converted network.

WikiLeaks, the Sweden-based organisation that publishes anonymous leaks of secret material (most recently 90,000 documents about the War in Afghanistan) has until now, relied on donations to fund its activities. That’s lead to outages when funds became scarce, for whatever reason. But today WikiLeaks is unleashing a potentially devastating strike against criitics which could see it become an almost unstoppable force in the world’s media. It’s joined Flattr.

Flattr is another Sweden-based outfit with close links to The Pirate Bay as the the brainchild of a group of people formerly associated with The [infamous] Pirate Bay, including Peter Sunde. Flattr has a micropayments business model based on the idea of people tipping content they like, Digg or perhaps Facebook Like buttons – but this time with real money. As a result, WikiLeaks Afghan War Diary, which has made headlnes around the world, is currently pulling in hundreds of Flattrs, with most of them anonymous. We covered Flattr’s launch in July.

Runa Capital, a new Russian VC firm, has launched today with a $30m seed fund for early-stage Russian technology startups. It’s founded by Serguei Beloussov, chairman of Parallels and Acronis and will be advised by Alexander Galitsky of Almaz Capital Partners.

In particular the new fund will target the “rapid growth tech sectors” of cloud computing, machine learning, virtualisation and mobile/Internet applications, with the aim of helping local startups focused on these areas to “grow and compete at a global level”. The companies that Runa Capital invests in will also be supported by the Runapark business incubator.

Interestingly, the fund is also offering investors from the U.S. and elsewhere in Europe, opportunities to share expertise and co-invest in order to tap the potential of the Russian early-stage technology sector.