A couple days ago at the Web 2.0 Summit, AOL CEO Tim Armstrong caused a little bit of a stir when he hinted that AOL is working on a “secret” technology project. When pressed for details on what exactly it is, he was vague. But after fishing around with our sources, we have a pretty good idea.
The secret project is a new content-management system (CMS) which will make it easier to produce and… → Read More
Blog content engine Sphere, which was acquired by AOL in 2008, is rebranding itself as Surphace. According to a blog post on the site, Surphace’s name is a better fit with next year’s product roadmap for the content platform.
The post explains that Surphace will include the beta version of its self-serve platform S4 (it’s currently in alpha); SurphBoard, which is an updated editorial user… → Read More
Conceptual products are fun. There’s no denying that. Everybody wants to see a car that looks like a jet, spaceship or rocket. Just the problem is, more often than not, the concept car does not exist in real life. A recent article by Kontra alleges that concept products are actually bad for the company, citing the success of Apple as evidence. Apple internalizes all of its concepts, even going… → Read More
Tomorrow AOL will announce the acquisition of San Francisco-based Sphere, a blog content engine that launched in 2006. The price is not being disclosed, but sources are suggesting it’s in the $25 million range, or possibly a little more. More details from Om Malik When Sphere first launched as a blog search engine they were already late to the blog search game. Technorati and others had been… → Read More
[photopress:msftsursph.jpg,full,center] Microsoft may be redesigning the Surface in order to make it more appealing to consumers. Current rumors point to a sphere-shaped Surface, which may or may not have been making the rounds in Redmond’s rec rooms. Apparently the thinking is that the current table-top design of the Surface isn’t consumer friendly enough, never mind the fact that… → Read More
At first glance, blog search as a category is oversaturated. Ok, at second glance, too. Not only did Google enter the market directly in late 2005, they’ve also increased the rate that they index blogs and other regularly updated sites for core Google search. TechCrunch, for example, is now indexed multiple times per day by Google, and new posts are often available in a normal Google search… → Read More
http://video.google.com/googleplayer.swf?docId=-6626464599825291409&hl=it Maybe you woke up today and said to yourself, “You know, I’d love to watch an online video and be made to feel like a complete dunce.” If that’s the case, then block out 20 minutes from your schedule and watch this video on how to turn a sphere inside out. I’m glad to have majored in… → Read More
Blog search engine Sphere has kept a relatively quiet profile recently. After a private beta launch in late 2005 and a big-press full launch in the spring of 2006, they’ve kept mostly to themselves. Instead of focusing on building a better blog search engine (an area that Google now dominates after a recent Technorati refocus), Sphere has spent its time developing technology that… → Read More
When blog search engine Sphere launched in May 2006, it included a unique feature that discovered, on the fly, stories related to what you were reading regardless of whether or not the two stories were hyperlinked. The feature, called “Sphere It,” has grown in popularity and has helped Sphere get itself embedded in top blogs and news sites. We include a Sphere It link at the bottom of… → Read More
The annual Web 2.0 Summit kicked off today at the Palace Hotel in San Francisco. The conference Summit, which has been sold out for months, is noticeably larger than last year and hundreds of people are milling about, seeing and being seen. The highlight of last year’s conference for me was LaunchPad, where thirteen young startups showed their stuff to the audience. See our coverage from… → Read More
San Francisco-based Sphere’s only been around for three months, but it’s already locked down two important deals. Both deals leverage its “Sphere It” technology, which performs a semantic analysis on the text within the page being searched and returns blog results that it finds relevant to the article. In May we wrote about Sphere’s deal with Time.com. Next week… → Read More
San Francisco-based blog search engine Sphere is less than a month old, and already has links to its “Sphere It” functionality embedded in a number of time.com articles (example). Tony Conrad, Sphere’s CEO, says that they are currently testing the feature with Time.com. The links are prominently placed below the headlines of articles and link directly to Sphere blog search… → Read More
New blog search engine Sphere launched just moments ago and has also announced a $3.75 million round of venture financing. In addition to covering the launch of Sphere here, we have a podcast interview with CEO Tony Conrad and advisor Toni Schneider over at TalkCrunch. Sphere, which follows in the footsteps of previous blog search engines like Feedster, Technorati and IceRocket, as well as… → Read More
Company: Sphere Launched: Private Beta Launch this Weekend Status: Funded by Doug MacKenzie, Kevin Compton, Phil Black, Will Hearst, David Mahoney, Vince Vannelli and Mike Winton Previous Post: October 8, 2005 Location: Palo Alto I met with Tony Conrad, one of the founders of Sphere, today at our office (ok, its a house, but it’s also an office – just ask the IRS). Sphere is a new blog… → Read More
Om Malik writes about Sphere, a new blog search service that appears to be getting ready to launch. Sphere is taking a crack at building a more relevant blog search engine. Traditional link analysis just doesn’t work with blog posts because new posts don’t have time to gather links. Instead, Sphere seems to be be trying to determine blog authority on a given subject area, and determine… → Read More
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