AOL has hired a pair of New York investment bankers, Morgan Stanley and Allen & Co., to manage the sale of its ICQ instant-messaging unit.

Sources familiar with the situation said interest in buying the asset from two major non-U.S. companies prompted execs at the online service to put a process in place for a deal that will likely occur after AOL becomes an independent company in December.

AOL bought ICQ in 1998 for about $400 million–$287 million outright and $125 million in earnouts for the team.

Sources said AOL to looking to recoup $300 million.

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BoomTown just got to Paris, as in France, to attend and moderate sessions for the third annual Le Web conference. Le Web is organized by Loïc and Geraldine Le Meur, with 1,500 people signed up to hear a range of Internet players, many of whom are from the U.S., tomorrow and Wednesday. Silicon Valley speakers include Marissa Mayer of Google, LinkedIn’s Reid Hoffman and Dan’l Lewin of Microsoft. And some interesting European execs include France Telecom Orange Chairman and CEO Didier Lombard and Jacques-Antoine Granjon, CEO and co-founder of a very interesting fashion sale site, Vente-Privee.com.

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We’re posting all the interviews from the sixth D: All Things Digital conference that took place in late May.

But–as many readers have requested–they will all be available in their entirety in this column.

In the less contentious spirit of DEMOfall and TechCrunch50, two demo conferences taking place simultaneously this week, we’re happy to bring you all the demos we had onstage at the D6 conference.

Last, but not least: the G.ho.st Web operating system, which lets users access their desktop from any computer with an Internet connection. It’s also the name of a one-of-a-kind joint technology venture between Israelis and Palestinians.

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Tonight, The Wall Street Journal and Reuters had nearly identical stories, noting that Microsoft was interested in buying Yahoo’s search business, which–oh, we bloggers are so touchy when we don’t get even a smidgen of credit, aren’t we?–BoomTown speculated was just what the software giant was interested in yesterday.

To be fair, both Reuters’ and The Journal’s reports make such a plan by Microsoft even more definitive and both have interesting new details, which are intriguing.

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Here’s a terrific shot of AllThingsD.com’s Walt Mossberg with well-known Israeli entrepreneur Yossi Vardi.
(Click on the image to make it larger.)

They’re onstage at an event called the Israel Business Conference, put on by an Israeli business publication called Globes.
Walt was interviewed by Vardi. At one point, he noted: “In 10 years, I believe that most [...]

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