Compete the company I co-founded with Reed Cundiff was acquired today by Taylor Nelson Softres [LON:TNS].

Reed and I started Compete in the post-apocalyptic, post-bubble fall of 2000. It was a very strange time to start a company and an even stranger time to try and raise venture capital. Reed and I were lucky in finding an investor that was ready to stand with us during the darkest of days.

That investor was Ted Dintersmith of Charles River Ventures. One of my best experiences during my time at Compete was working with Ted. There’s nothing like working with an investor during the worst of times (2000 through 2004) to really get to know them. I learned a lot during those dark days, most of all who I could really count on. I’m happy to call Ted a friend today and when Scott and I started Lookery Ted was there again as an advisor, a friend and as our first investor.

The incredible team we put together at Compete is my proudest professional accomplishment. Like Andy said building the best team is the most important factor in building a successful company. Thanks to all of you Compete-ers for building Compete into the leader it is today.

Today Taylor Nelson Softres (TNS) announced the acquisition of Compete. TNS is a $2 billion world leader in market information and insight, headquartered in London. Together Compete and TNS are creating the world’s first and largest fully global consumer clickstream panel. Marketers will be able to turn to a single company for comprehensive insights into consumers – online and offline, behavior and attitudes around the world.

I can’t wait to see what the Compete team will be able to do with the global resources of TNS. HOORAY!

Update: Official news of the acquistion on the Compete Blog.

The power of free data APIs continues to amaze me.

It was a little less than a year ago that Compete partnered with Mashery to power it’s free data API. The results of that decision have been profound (slide 17) and continues to impress me.

This week Ask.com integrated Compete.com data into it’s search engine. It’s a project that we started working on last summer. I’m happy to see that it finally launched.

Thanks to Sven, Jay and the good folks at Mashery for making this a reality.

While I’m on the topic of APIs.. I’m spending my day, nights and weekends working on some exciting Lookery APIs we are getting to release; we’ll also be using Mashery to power our APIs.

I’m looking forward to seeing what people end up doing with our upcoming APIs.

Check out the Ask.com / Compete.com mashup.

Heard from Peter Glyman this morning that one of my Money Confessions landed on The Street today.

Money Confessions is a great new Geezeo feature that lets you confess your overspending. If you use Twitter you can link Money Confessions with your account.

Get your Geezeo Account today and start confessing.

Want to earn $1000s a week working from home? (Well sort of..)

Here’s two ways to earn money from home:

1. Have a high traffic site? Join the Lookery Ad Network and get paid for a 100% of your traffic. We have a good number of publishers earning $1000s a week just from Lookery Ads.

2. Join Team Lookery. Interested in building BIG ASS™ data services?

• We’re a small team making a large impact in the online advertising and marketing world.
• We wake up everyday focused on helping developers and small companies make money on every single one of their pages. Allowing them to focus on what they do best, building great sites and apps.
• We rather focus on finding the best people than on geographical convenience.
• We’re funded by a select group of angels all of whom we personally enjoy spending time with. Life’s too short to not have fun with those who back you.

• You are a super bright yet pragmatic engineer.
• You are already a Python star or willing to becoming one.
• You are passionate about engineering and want to push the limits of what is possible.

Interested? Learn more here.

Awesome! The Shareaholic Firefox Extension that Jay and I created for Bzzster.com (almost all Jay) was just named a Grand Prize Winner in Mozilla’s Extend Firefox 2 contest.

The Shareholic extension lets you submit any web page to your favorite sharing or bookmarking service. Including:

• Digg
• del.icio.us
• Facebook
• Bzzster
• Reddit
• Twitter
• Tumblr
• and many more…

Big thanks to the contest judges: Garrett Camp (StumbleUpon), Brendan Eich (Mozilla), Jesse James Garrett (Adaptive Path), Tariq Krim (NetVibes), and Joshua Schachter (del.ico.us) and the contest sponsors.

Jay has some really great future features coming. It’s time to innovate quickly now that so many are copying us. I’m looking at you Mahalo Share.


Install the Shareholic Extension