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While in Silicon Valley recently, I had a chance to meet up with Tony Conrad, who is a venture capitalist. We talked about one of his ventures, Sphere, which got its start in 2005.
Well, now the company is a part of Time Warner Inc. (NYSE: TWX)'s AOL (the price tag of the acquisition was not disclosed).
At the core of Sphere is compelling technology -- that is, an advanced search system. However, the issue was: what to do with it?
At first, Sphere used its platform for blog search. Unfortunately, it was kind of late, as seen with other entrants like Technorati. "There just wasn't enough for a sustainable business," said Conrad.
So, by taking advantage of its nimbleness, Sphere changed its business. Essentially, the system understands the context of a page and can deliver a list of relevant article links. It's cool stuff -- and you can see examples of the technology on sites like WSJ.com, Reuters, and CNN.com. In fact, there are nearly 70,000 sites that use the technology.
Actually, Conrad showed me various charts of the traffic numbers for Sphere -- and, yes, they were pretty compelling, with about two billion pages per month.
Tom Taulli is the author of various books, including The Complete M&A Handbook
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