All Things Digital

Compete must have used a fair bit of the $43 million in VC funding it’s raised since 2000 on marketing, because market research outfit Taylor Nelson Sofres is acquiring it–despite the “digital intelligence” company’s reputation for inaccurate Web site traffic measurements and its loss of $4.5 million on $14.9 million of revenue in 2007.

Under the terms of the deal, TNS will purchase Compete for $75 million in cash and another $75 million in performance-based earn-outs over the next two years.

Compete, which has long been overshadowed by metrics verterans like comScore and even newcomers like Quantcast, was overjoyed to be among the early acquisitions in the consolidation beginning in the Web-traffic analysis sector. After all, TNS might have bought Alexa. “Why are we excited about becoming part of the TNS family,” Compete execs wrote in a post to the company blog. “Because it means joining our click-stream data with TNS’s massive consumer panel operations, consumer research capabilities and ad-measurement databases on a global scale. Marrying online and offline consumer data with media spending and exposure is the holy grail of marketing. All of our marketer, agency and media partners will benefit from access to new consumer, brand and media research that will revolutionize how they plan and measure their performance. It’s a big, exciting vision that neither company could do on its own.”

The cheeky folks at the Pirate Bay may need a peg leg or two when Sweden’s legal sharks are done with them. A Swedish prosecutor filed charges today against the popular BitTorrent tracker’s proprietors, accusing them of “promoting other people’s infringements of copyright laws.“

“The operation of the Pirate Bay is financed through advertising revenues,” said prosecutor Hakan Roswall. “In that way it commercially exploits copyright-protected work and performances. … [This case is] a classic example of accessory–to act as intermediary between people who commit crimes, whether it’s in the physical or the virtual world. [The Pirate Bay] is not merely a search engine. It’s an active part of an action that aims at, and also leads to, making copyright-protected material available.”

Pirate Bay’s defiant operators, predictably, disagree. Though they acknowledge the site maintains an index of BitTorrent files, they say no copyrighted material is stored on their servers. They colorfully describe the charges as “idiotic,” and have so far refused to take the site offline. “In case we lose the pending trial (yeah right) there will still not be any changes to the site,” they wrote in a recent post to the site’s blog. “The Pirate Bay will keep operating just as always. We’ve been here for years, and we will be here for many more.”

Internet addiction disorder may not be a classifiable mental disorder, but that doesn’t mean it’s not a marketing demographic, right? According to an online survey conducted by advertising agency JWT, many U.S. adults feel they can’t make it a week without Internet access, with one in three choosing online activities over sex and time with friends.

“It is taking away from offline activities, among them having sex, socializing face-to-face, watching TV and reading newspapers and magazines. It cuts into that share,” said Ann Mack, director of trend-spotting at JWT. “I don’t suppose their partners are too pleased about it.”

Unless of course, their partners fall into the same marketing demographic for which JWT has concocted

Posted at 12:01 AM PT

What’s most surprising about today’s Skype outage is not its 12- to 24-hour duration, but the fact that it’s the first such outage we’ve seen in years. In its relatively brief history, Skype has rarely gone offline. The service’s last reported outage occurred in October 2005.

So while today’s event is certainly annoying for fans of the widely used VOIP (voice over Internet protocol) service, it’s likely not indicative of some lurking infrastructure problem. “This is the most significant outage for the service in years, yet we already foresee scores of headlines trumpeting the flaws of VOIP communications based on this outage alone,” writes Ken Fisher at Ars Technica. “That’s unfortunate because we think Skype network performance has been spectacular on average, given that it’s free and heavily used. In fact, it would appear that the Skype P2P network is indeed in fine shape, it’s just that the authentication system (which authenticates but also provides location services for routing purposes) is hosed.”

Fire up the rumor mill. Apple’s .Mac service, which allows subscribers access to email, data storage and Web publishing tools for $99 a year, will go offline for maintenance tomorrow from 10 a.m. to 12 p.m. PDT–hours that coincide quite nicely with those of the press event at which Apple is rumored to be launching its radically redesigned iMacs. Could it be that the archaic online services suite will see a major upgrade as well? Perhaps even the one based on Google’s Web apps that Apple CEO Steve Jobs seemed to hint at during this year’s D conference?

I’ll give you a concrete example. I love Google Maps, use it on my computer, you know, in a browser. But when we were doing the iPhone, we thought, wouldn’t it be great to have maps on the iPhone? And so we called up Google and they’d done a few client apps in Java on some phones and they had an API that we worked with them a little on. And we ended up writing a client app for those APIs. They would provide the back-end service. And the app we were able to write, since we’re pretty reasonable at writing apps, blows away any Google Maps client. Just blows it away. Same set of data coming off the server, but the experience you have using it is unbelievable. It’s way better than the computer. And just in a completely different league than what they’d put on phones before.

“And, you know, that client is the result of a lot of technology on the client, that client application. So when we show it to them, they’re just blown away by how good it is. And you can’t do that stuff in a browser.

“So people are figuring out how to do more in a browser, how to get a persistent state of things when you’re disconnected from a browser, how do you actually run apps locally using, you know, apps written in those technologies so they can be pretty transparent, whether you’re connected or not.

“But it’s happening fairly slowly and there’s still a lot you can do with a rich client environment. At the same time, the hardware is progressing to where you can run a rich client environment on lower and lower-cost devices, on lower and lower-power devices. And so there’s some pretty cool things you can do with clients.”