Sphere

Congrats to Sphere !

AOL acquires Sphere.

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.

Full details on the Sphere blog.

Party

We co-hosted a party Tuesday night in NYC along with The New York Times, Sphere, Hearst Interactive, GigaOM and True Ventures.

The idea was to bring together lots of various media companies, both traditional and new — and talk about tech, web2.0, publishing, and all the great activity happening in our space.

The venue was a perfect symbol of the blending on traditional and new, the recently redesigned Hearst building on 57th & 8th ave, with one of the best views I’ve seen in New York – an unobstructed view of central park.

Big thanks to everyone involved especially Shea Di Donna who as always makes it all happen like magic !

It was great to see lots of familiar face including Jason Schaeffer of CNNMoney, Lindsay Campbell of MobLogic.tv, Jamie Thingelstad of Dow Jones, Adam Embick of Sphere, Kelly Leach of Dow Jones, Jon Friedman of MarketWatch, Andrew Madden of Google, Josh Macht of HBR, Karen Saltser of Real Simple, Scott Kurnit, Jeff Misenti of Fox News, Ken Marcus of CondeNet, Tim Morrison of TIME.com, and Christine Mohan of Dow Jones & allthingsD.

Jason Calcanis was also there and captured some video via his Qik.com mobile hookup, and Jamie Thingelstad and Josh Guttman of Sphere also captured a few photos.

Great event and always fun to be back in New York.