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Aol Waters Seed.com With StudioNow Purchase

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Jan 25, 2010 

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Gavin Dunaway  |

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Aol Waters Seed.com With StudioNow Purchase

ADOTAS – Aol is awfully busy for a Monday — while I’m still waiting for the caffeine to kick in, the company announced that it scooped up online video company StudioNow and confirmed that CTO Ted Cahall is jumping ship while bringing Jeff Reynar on board as head of technology for engineering and products. Wow, that left me breathless.

In a $36.5 million deal to be payed in cash and stock, StudioNow’s video creation platform will be integrated into the Seed.com content-management system. It’s a handy asset for the fledgling Seed.com, which is akin to journalism crowd-sourcing — the site assigns stories, buys them from “freelancers” and then distributes them to the relevant Aol site, of which there are 80-odd flavors.

In his first blog post as Seed.com programming director, former New York Times technology reporter Saul Hansell said Aol is taking on that (possibly Sisyphean) task of redefining journalism for the Internet age. The goal? “Satisfy the world’s curiosity.”

No sweat, right? Well, at least now they got a video creation platform, which will make things a bit easier…

As for Cahall, it looks like another Aol exec bites the dust, which isn’t surprising considering that the company is attempting a pretty extravagant makeover. TechCrunch broke the news last week, though Aol denied denied denied it until today. Cahall invented DynaPub, Aol’s content publishing system that’s getting shoved out of Seed’s way.

So while the company is now on the hunt for a CTO, it’s brought on Goolge vet and search maestro Reynar, who led the internal startup teams for Google Squared and Google Blog Search before cofounding and serving as CTO for DBT Labs. Reynar will be focused on the content business and work on beefing up the engineering in New York.

Tags: AOL, cto, DBT Labs, dynapub, Google, saul hansell, seed.com, studionow and ted cahall

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