In other words, they couldn't get the money they wanted, so they petulantly shut down the service. When they got push-back from doing that, they came up with this scheme.

If they actually can get this model up and running with everyone in the world being able to see their data, I'll be curious how that goes, especially as I'm not familiar with what sort of data they keep. Do they track the IPs of people who use tr.im links?