By Graham K. Rogers

Tim Armstrong was just interviewed on CNBC about the deal he is doing with Verizon that values AOL at $4.4 billion. Part of the importance of the deal is the merging of the pipe-owners with the content. Most notably here is the strong development of content that the inclusion of Huffington Post has allowed, growing the company considerably since Ariana Huffington and her team arrived.

Armstrong was previously with Google as President its Americas operation and the 33 year-old has turned AOL round. AOL is one of the earliest communications companies, previously known for its archaic @aol addresses. Later it became part of AOL-Time Warner. Since Armstrong took the company out of that relationship, it has grown in value from around $1 billion to its current valuation, based on a sale price of $50 a share.

This is likely to stimulate other such relationships as players begin to try to make sure they are at a table with a diminishing number of chairs.

Graham K. Rogers teaches at the Faculty of Engineering, Mahidol University in Thailand where he is also Assistant Dean. He wrote in the Bangkok Post, Database supplement on IT subjects. For the last seven years of Database he wrote a column on Apple and Macs. He is now continuing that in the Bangkok Post supplement, Life.