I first came into contact with Tony Conrad, Martin Remy and the Sphere team back when they were starting to work with TIME.com. I later worked with Sphere while at Dow Jones where we launched the Sphere widget at the 2006 Web 2.0 Launch Pad session and later did some innovative embed implementations ( which Rama Sadasivan championed ) on WSJ.com article pages and blogs.
It’s always special to see news like this for a great group of people – and Sphere has some of the most talented, and dedicated people out there who deserve this great outcome and who I’m sure will continue to do tremendous things for AOL.
When looking at this transaction it’s also clearly a smart move for AOL which gets a wealth of talent, distribution, and good blog street ‘cred.
Raanan Bar-Cohen 
Thanks Raanan – you and Rama played a big role in helping us roll out new offerings. Thanks for the kind words.
Raanan, thanks for the plug!
Overall, great work by the Sphere team!!
added my gravatar
@tony — so much better — thanks !
Rama ?