All Things Digital

AOL is turning into the Oprah Winfrey of the digital world, it seems, opening up Time Warner’s (TWX) checkbook to as many start-ups as it can.

Last month, it was $850 million in cash for social-networking site Bebo.

And, today, it’s a much smaller slug for Sphere, which started as a blog search engine and morphed into a widely distributed “contextually relevant” content engine, used on news and blog sites across the Web (and which AllThingsD uses on this site, in fact).

While one source said the price was upward of $25 million, sources at other companies to whom the San Francisco-based start-up also talked, including Google (GOOG), said Sphere was looking for more than that.

In any case, the sale is surely a win for CEO and Co-Founder of Sphere Tony Conrad, a longtime entrepreneur who also has been a VC at True Ventures, which also invested in Sphere.

Oh, it’s a mosh pit of jolly interbreeding in the Web 2.0 start-up world!

Sphere raised about $4.25 million from many investors, some of which included Radar Partners, Trident Capital and well-known Web players Scott Kurnit and Will Hearst.

AOL has surely shown a knack for snapping up small and innovative properties with clever technologies–the Truveo video search engine and communications app maker Userplane, for example–and has let them stay relatively intact, as it has promised it will do with Sphere.

But it also has not exactly leveraged any of them in a massive way either and still faces the problem of holding onto talent from those start-ups, as BoomTown reported here.

One hopes that AOL can do more with the more complex and elegant Sphere, which has deep relationships with major publishers all over the Web, including many Time Warner properties like Time.com and CNN.

It would be a shame for Sphere to fall into one of AOL’s deep holes there.

But perhaps not, given all the frenetic multitasking activity at AOL of late, including yesterday, when it also announced a deal in which its Platform-A online ad division would sell ads for Verizon (VZ) on the Web and for its mobile units.

Oh, and its top execs, CEO Randy Falco and President Ron Grant, whom AOL sources tell me have been AWOL of late, have also been ferreting away on a possible deal to be the alternative for Yahoo (YHOO) in its takeover battle with Microsoft (MSFT).

While Yahoo troops are not really happy with such a union, as BoomTown reported here, neither are some top Time Warner execs at the possibility that AOL might simply be being used as a stalking horse by Yahoo, in an effort to get Microsoft to up its bid.

“Do you think they’re using us?” joked one Time Warner exec to me yesterday, given the deal activity seemed to have slowed down this week.

Um, yes, of course!

While that wouldn’t be sporting, if Yahoo does end up going to Microsoft, it just means AOL will need to get a lot more energetic and do a lot more Spheres in the future to keep up.

What to think of the announcement yesterday that Verizon will open itself up to consumers who want to use non-Verizon-sold phones for their wireless service?

Was it a bold way to thwart new rivals, like Google and Apple, who are promising–but have yet to deliver–a world without the fascist rule of the “Soviet ministries,” as Walt Mossberg has called the cellphone carriers, with new phones, networks and software?

Or perhaps a clever PR feint by the U.S.’s No. 2 carrier to get regulators (and consumers) off its back as an auction looms for new wireless spectrum, in which Google convinced the Federal Communications Commission to set aside some for a new open network?

Or maybe more consumer confusion, since pricing is unclear and Verizon’s CDMA technology is not compatible with more GSM networks?

Or maybe, just maybe, it means the American market–long held hostage by the onerous rules of companies like Verizon–might finally be like the rest of the world and let consumers make their own choices about the phones and perhaps software they want to use?

Well, we have absolutely no idea, since we’ll believe it when we see it and when other carriers follow suit. Right now, most seem to love their consumer-trapping walled garden approach, through which they think they are protecting consumers from the wilds of the more democratic wireless world.

Thanks boys, but we can handle it, I think.

Nonetheless, others weighed in on the move, although with different takes:

Read more »

Sure, John’s daughter is adorable, but we have to draw the line at child labor here at AllThingsD.com!

In other words, more cute kids!

Today, John gives a roundup, for the last time in 25 whole minutes, about the iPhone launch, which actually arrived today like clockwork at 6 p.m. The video can be found here or you can also watch it below or read the text version.

Also in his Digital Daily column: Upgrades to AT&T’s questionable network that the iPhone rides on and the noiseless noise from competitors BlackBerry and Verizon.

Yesterday, it was his talented eyebrows, and today, John Paczkowski’s very lustrous hair gets a workout in his Digital Daily video.

Using Selsun Blue, John washes away all pretense that Lonelygirl15 is anything more than a marketing shill with a recent deal with Neutrogena. Here is a direct link to today’s video, which is also below (don’t judge us for our promiscuous link-love here at AllThingsD.com).

Here is his text post about it in his Digital Daily column.

He also posts here about Verizon’s Ivan Seidenberg’s latest boneheaded remark about the benefits to his company of the Apple iPhone rollout in a week, especially given that the carrier is not selling them. (Seidenberg also made another gooney remark about BlueTooth technology at the D conference a few years back that you can see here in a video).

And John chronicles the sweet revenge of entrepreneur Sky Dayton here, who was pilloried for buying the business.com domain for $7.5 million in the midst of the dot-com bubble–it is now for sale for $300 million to $400 million.