Campfire Labs was headed up by Sakina Arsiwala, who held prestigious positions at Google and YouTube, and Naveen Koorakula, who had worked for Yahoo and search companies Inktomi and Picch. In this extension of Groupon’s recent moves towards honing customer experience — after it bought scheduling/social tech company OpenCal, it used that company’s software to create Groupon Scheduler — this acquisition can likely be considered a talent buy.

• Data protection provider Nasuni has been testing the internet’s 16 largest cloud storage providers since April 2009, and Amazon’s S3 Simple Storage Service beat out everyone else in the field when it came to performance (speed), stability and availability, and scalability (capacity). Only six of the 16 “passed” the test (Amazon, Microsoft, Nirvanix, Rackspace, AT&T Synaptic and Peer 1 Hosting). Microsoft Azure made a strong showing alongside Amazon (in fact, the study found Microsoft to be slightly faster than Amazon), but the victor had, according to Nasuni’s report, ”the fewest outages and best uptime, and was the only CSP to post a 0.0 percent error rate in both writing and reading objects during scalability testing.” Click here for the full report.

• On Friday, we reported the U.S. Justice Department was delaying its antitrust case against AT&T, further frustrating the company’s efforts to acquire T-Mobile, and today the two telecom companies have joined the Justice Department in requesting a federal judge make such a delay. This is perhaps unexpected, because AT&T had argued for a quick resolution up until Friday. The two telecoms are expected to file a report by Jan. 12 explaining their plans for any proposed acquisition, and they’ve asked for a conference to gauge any further legal proceedings on Jan. 18.

• Just as we’ve published Peter Koeppel’s analysis of how Netflix damaged its goodwill among subscribers (and lost valuable market share) in 2011, there are rumors from anonymous sources that Verizon might have expressed interest in acquiring the troubled video service. Verizon reportedly wants to launch a streaming video service and would rather pick up one that already exists than develop its own. The rumors, at the very least, boosted Netflix stock value.

• As part of a collection of predictions for 2012, AdExchanger quotes American Association of Advertising Agencies (4As) president Nancy Hill as speculating, “I think we will finally see agencies reaping the benefits of behaving more like Silicon Valley than Madison Avenue… We are seeing true partnerships form that gives everyone the ability to look at a problem from many points of view. Most of the start-up agencies over the last two years are built on this tenet and are flourishing nicely.”

Back in March, AT&T announced it intended to buy T-Mobile U.S.A. for $39 billion. That move would have given AT&T a massive boost in bandwidth, which the company asserted would allow it to provide better service to its customers. It also would’ve made AT&T the largest wireless provider in the U.S., and it would have left AT&T and Verizon in control of 70 percent of the domestic wireless market. The proposed merger has been under fire since then — mostly from competitor Sprint Nextel (one notch behind Verizon in U.S. market share) and from the U.S. government. It came up before committees in both houses of Congress, and the Department of Justice filed its antitrust suit on Aug. 31, citing the chances of, as deputy attorney general James Cole put it, ”tens of millions of consumers across the U.S. facing higher prices, fewer choices and lower quality products for wireless services.” On Nov. 22, the FCC opposed the merger by requesting an administrative hearing — a move that surprised many who were aware of AT&T’s formidable lobbying capabilities (the Washington Post has a detailed report today on what went wrong for AT&T over the course of the proposed acquisition and resultant hearings). In the face of FCC resistance, AT&T withdrew its application to acquire T-Mobile on Nov. 24.

In spite of everything, AT&T still wants to go through with the acquisition, which means the postponement of the antitrust case leaves the company stymied. AT&T says it pulled its FCC application so it could focus on the Department of Justice case; U.S. District Court Judge Ellen S. Huvelle pointed out AT&T could change the terms of its deal with T-Mobile in the midst of emerging from the antitrust case and re-applying with the FCC. ”You could change the deal in a month and everybody’s time will be wasted,” the judge said. That explains why the Justice Department will postpone court proceedings until AT&T and T-Mobile go before the FCC again.

German telecommunications company Deutsche Telekom AG still wants the deal, because it reportedly has enough spectrum to last until the end of 2015.

DemandTec is devoted to pricing, merchandising and marketing analytics, and it’s vertically focused in retail. The company has about 450 customers, including heavy-hitters like Target, Unilever and Fresh Direct, and it holds 31 patents. IBM is bulking up its “Smarter Commerce” (a roughly $20 billion market, according to IBM) efforts here: DemandTec’s cloud-based software analyzes in real time both online and in-store purchase scenarios, taking into account factors ranging from competitors’ prices and the customer’s buying history to the weather itself. The company will be integrated into IBM’s Software Group, and this software-as-service acquisition shows IBM jockeying for position in retail software capabilities against SAP and Oracle.

The acquisition will have to go before DemandTec shareholders for approval and pass regulatory clearances, with IBM projecting the actual closing for the first quarter of 2012.Meanwhile, DemandTec is expected to report $91.4 million in revenue for the current fiscal year.

Efficient Frontier will evidently continue on as an independent entity under the umbrella of Adobe’s Digital Marketing Suite. There’s been no announcement yet of how much Adobe paid, but it’s worth noting Ad Age cited Efficient Frontier‘s 2010 revenue as $37.5 million.

Interestingly, Condaptive’s platform is aimed at developers, assisting them in building location- and context-aware apps. It’s not hard to see how such technology could come in handy for ad targeting, but this is the second acquisition Millennial has made that seems aimed at the supply side. Last February, the company acquired TapMetrics to offer developers an intuitive dashboard for managing sales and revenue.

“Condaptive has a unique algorithmic approach to building audiences, and are able to deliver data driven insights that we believe will prove valuable for both advertisers and developers,” wrote Millennial Executive Vice President and CTO Chris Brandenburg. “Additionally, Condaptive has built a suite of tools for their internal usage that will now be exposed to our developer community, opening up new opportunities for improving the mobile experience.”

All of Condaptive’s staff is joining Millennial Media in its Technology and Innovation Group, while Condaptive founder and CEO Hemang Gadhia, has been named senior vice president of audience intelligence.

The price tag is $60 million, with $40 million in venture capital supplied by Disney’s Steamboat Ventures. That’s an 83% decline from what News Corp. paid in 2007 — $250 million as well as a $50 million earnout.

Onatela’s service, developed with Verizon, costs users $2.99 a month. In March, Onatela inked a deal with Photobucket to send uploaded mobile pics to their appropriate photobucket accounts.

Both MySpace and Onatela seem to be maintaining radio silence. However, if the deal comes to fruition, Onatela could seriously increase its presence in a burgeoning marketplace.

In the article, some sources that spoke to VW had varying theories on the origins of the rumor.  Some think that Glam CEO Samir Arora may have started them to make the company seem attractive; another believes that Glam may be speaking with European private equity firms. But despite the stories, the sources familiar with the situation did deny any true existence of a bid for Glam….for now.

The publisher’s main focus is three editorial sites on video games, high tech and e-business, reports Reuters. M6 chairman Nicolas de Tavernost stated that the firm has planned a mid-sized acquisition in the Online “sector.”

The firm’s online offerings currently combine specialized sites linked to the Group’s TV channels, e-commerce sites including Mistergooddeal as well as community sites.

During his talk at Microsoft’s MIX08 online technology conference in Las Vegas, Ballmer spoke about the $41.2 billion offer for Yahoo, saying the strategic buy would improve the firm’s efforts to create a powerful competitor to Google. He said to Guy Kawasaki in a Q&A at the event, “So it may be my last breath at Microsoft, but we’re going to be there, working away, building share.”

He continued to joke “In online, yeah, it’s Google, Google, Google, and we’re in the game. We’re just the little engine that could,” the article continues. Maybe this move would be enough to put Steve Ballmer on the listing of “Fortune’s 25 most powerful people in business”, which incidentally he is not on. Not only is he not on this list as of yet, but his Google “competitors” Larry Page, Sergei Brin and Eric Schmidt share the #4 spot where Microsoft founder Bill Gates took the #7 spot.

In addressing the issue of the Yahoo bid during the interview, Ballmer reportedly did not have much to say about the firm’s $31 a share bid. “We’ve made an offer, and it’s out there, baby.” Included in the discussion of this issue, Ballmer offered that should the deal in fact go through, many duplicated areas of business between the companies would be consolidated, stating “We shouldn’t have two of everything. It won’t make sense to have two search services, two advertising services, two mail services, and we will have to sort some of that through.” At the end of the day this writer is most concerned about what would happen to her Yahoo email account should the deal go through. Where there were three, there will be two.