Which is saying something. Because as you might recall, in 1999, Nasdaq was soaring on the back of the dot-com bubble to levels never before seen.

And here we are amid the worst recession since the 1930s. Haven’t even entered that “all important holiday shopping season” yet, either.

Things are looking pretty good for Amazon (AMZN) right now. Sure, there’s renewed competition from retailers like Wal-Mart (WMT). There are potential sales tax issues and income tax liabilities and a raft of Kindle-killers headed to market. But Amazon’s stock is up 131 percent this year, brokerage firms are upgrading their ratings on the company, and analysts are saying it’s only going to go higher.

Said Citigroup analyst Mark Mahaney: “Near-term outlook very positive as AMZN heads into holiday season fully armed against shrinking/de-stocking offline retailers, with one of the must-have gadgets of the season (Kindle), a significantly strengthening International presence, and soon-to-be closed Zappos acquisition.”

Yeah. Things are looking pretty good right now. But we said that back in ‘99 too–when Amazon had a similar P/E.

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 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.”

“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 ]]> http://digitaldaily.allthingsd.com/20070920/digitivity-denizen/feed/ 0 http://digitaldaily.allthingsd.com/20070816/skype-outage/ http://digitaldaily.allthingsd.com/20070816/skype-outage/#comments Thu, 16 Aug 2007 19:09:02 +0000 John Paczkowski http://digitaldaily.allthingsd.com/20070816/skype-outage/ 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.”

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.”