Date: 04-18-2008
Time Warner’s AOL has bought out Sphere, an Internet service provider (ISP) and portal company, for an undisclosed amount believed to be around $25 million. The startup firm, whose search technology allows crowded contextual content display space, was first approached by AOL to offer its widget technology on AOL news. The San Francisco-based Sphere was founded in 2005 as a blog search engine, and, as of now, about 50,000 websites are powered by their technology. AOL’s COO Ron Grant released a statement saying “Our focus at AOL is providing consumers relevant content wherever they are on the Web, and Sphere’s capabilities fit in perfectly with this effort. Not only will it let us enhance content on our own sites, it will let us distribute our content across Sphere’s growing third-party publisher network.”