Tony Conrad, CEO and co-founder of Sphere–the contextually relevant content engine AOL bought in the spring of 2008 for upward of $25 million–left the Time Warner online unit last month, several sources have told BoomTown in recent weeks.

But, in an effort by AOL’s CEO Tim Armstrong to hold onto entrepreneurial talent, Conrad has agreed to become “Special Advisor” to its AOL Ventures Unit.

Apparently, he is also mulling a new start-up and remains a VC too.

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According to sources close to the situation, AOL has been busy selecting the board for the company, which is still set to spin itself off by year’s end–even as it slows down a decision on a new search deal with either current partner Google or a more emboldened Microsoft.

AOL is using Spencer Stuart in the search for directors, led by well-known headhunter Jim Citrin, sources said, and the company has already settled on several outside candidates.

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Here’s a video interview I did with top Yahoo execs Tapan Bhat and Ash Patel yesterday, after Yahoo finally launched a lot of the new open and social elements that it has long said it was injecting into its most popular products. The initiatives Yahoo finally released into the wild have been long in the making, first discussed as just vaporware by Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang at last year’s Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. Now, after the longest of gestation periods, they arrived yesterday, in an impressive rollout.

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Microsoft officially rolled out its next version of its Windows Live Services tonight, with a heavy emphasis on socializing its online offerings and giving users better tools to share all sorts of information from across the Web within them.

Microsoft said the changes–similar to those made by Yahoo and AOL recently–would “begin rolling out to customers in the U.S. over the coming weeks and will be made available globally in 54 countries and in 48 languages by early 2009.”

You might call this the “Facebooking” of Windows Live, which is the brand name for Microsoft’s communications and other related online services aimed at consumers, especially because the much anticipated changes also include a new profile and a “What’s New” feed.

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Earlier today, BoomTown posted a video of star venture capitalist John Doerr’s 10 tips to start-ups for surviving the econalypse that he ticked off at a roundtable in Silicon Valley on Wednesday.

Beside the words of wisdom from the Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers partner, I also trolled for advice from the panel of well-known entrepreneurs I moderated at VentureBeat’s “How to manage your start-up in the downturn” event.

The message: They will survive! (Cue the disco ball.)

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Here’s a video of star VC John Doerr reciting his 10 tips for start-ups to follow in the economic downturn, dispensed at a VentureBeat roundtable event on the downturn yesterday.

And the Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers VC didn’t need a massive, noisy PowerPoint like Sequoia Capital to make his quick and clear points, which he delivered in four minutes flat.

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Tomorrow, BoomTown is trying to find a silver lining from a group of entrepreneurs at VentureBeat’s “How to manage your start-up in the downturn” roundtable event.

Toni Schneider, chief executive of Automattic will join Max Levchin of Slide, Jason Calacanis of Mahalo, O’Melveny & Myers’ Sam Zucker, and Nirav Tolia of Web 1.0’s Epinions.

Along with my group, for whom I am planning all sorts of verbal tortures (”Exactly how much do you make?”), there is also a star-studded investors panel.

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Germany’s Hubert Burda Media threw a big luncheon in Palo Alto yesterday, which was stuffed full with Silicon Valley types. It was hosted by the company’s Steffi Czerny and Maria Burda, the wife of CEO and owner Hubert Burda, as well as well-known Israeli investor Yossi Vardi.

Burda runs an annual digital conference in Munich, called DLD (Digital, Life, Design), even though the media giant is best known for its old-line magazines about fashion, cooking and crafts.

So here’s the video!

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With all the Yahoo reorganization noise this past week–full of sound and fury, signifying nothing, if you want to go all literary!–BoomTown had little time to post our video on GigaOm’s Om Malik’s Structure 08 conference on Wednesday.

Held at the spanking new Mission Bay Conference Center in San Francisco, it was high-wonk, packed with CTOs and those involved in building the guts of the Internet and its infrastructure, whose jobs are becoming more complicated than ever as Internet usage booms.

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Project Granola?

Apparently, that’s the jokey nickname that’s been given by some in the company to Microsoft’s new online strategy, in the wake of its failed efforts to acquire Yahoo that ended in a big heap of mess this past weekend.

Now, sources tell BoomTown, it is all about “organic”–hence the image of a healthy handful of granola (except for the fact that, in my experience, nobody really likes granola after eating it as much as they think will before).

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Because this is the fast-moving Web and we are a bunch of hip, hopping hep cats, we’re doing some renovation to the AllThingsD.com site and also turbocharging the Voices section too.
The site is still powered by those lovely folks over at WordPress and keeps the amazing style created by the truly intelligent designers over [...]

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So there is a lot of swirl out there about a spate of companies and their supposed plans.
In the interest of time-saving, we will group them all here in one easy list that you can clip and save.
DEALS AFOOT?:
Yes, there is always a lot of sniffing around out there, especially given that a lot of [...]

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