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With Valentine’s Day approaching – it’s happening February 14, you know – we want to give everyone the opportunity to be a little extra lovie-dovie and cheesy to the geek in their life.

Now we know that many of you will flock to ThinkGeek or some other geeky store to pick up some more or less well thought-out Valentine’s gifts, but that’s not good enough for us.

With just a simple tweet, you can win a gift certificate to be spent on flowers and chocolates for your geek this Valentine.

All you have to do is send out a tweet telling the world what you will do for the geek in your life for Valentine’s Day. Make sure the tweet includes the #pingdom hashtag and you’re in for a chance to win one out of 20 US$50 gift certificates.

Just click here to find out all the details and enter the competition.

This was a post from the guys at Pingdom, a site monitoring service that makes sure you're the first to know when your site is down. Check it out for free.

Every Friday we bring you a collection of links to places on the web that we find particularly newsworthy, interesting, entertaining, and topical. We try to focus on some particular area or topic each week, but in general we will cover Internet, web development, networking, performance, and other geeky topics.h

This week we bring you a collection of articles on JavaScript performance, use of Node.js, PHP, Ruby on Rails, and more.

This week’s suggested reading

• JavaScript Performance: An article by Steve Souder about his speech at the San Francisco JavaScript Meetup, which focused on script loading and async snippets.
• What JavaScript’s Inventor Really Thinks About Google Dart: Google’s Dart language, which attempts to address JavaScript’s supposed weaknesses, is getting a mixed reaction from the inventor of JavaScript itself, Brendan Eich.
• Node.js inventor extends JavaScript programming beyond browsers: Interview: Ryan Dahl discusses why his invention is catching fire with developers.
• Zend Developer Pulse: Zend, “The PHP Company,” is now doing a quarterly survey that “takes the pulse on developers.” Here are the results from the first one from Q4, 2011.
• Monitoring MaxCDN with Pingdom: Taras Mankovski noticed that stylesheets used on one of his sites were not always loading correctly. So he set out to monitor what was happening with Pingdom’s service.
• The future of End-User Experience Monitoring – The core of Application Performance Monitoring: Jonah Kowall at Gartner has published a new research note, discussing this critical aspect of APM.
• How Open Source Licenses Affect Your Business and Your Developers: Copyleft licenses have been the most popular choice for new open source projects. Recently, however, developers and companies seem to be moving from the GPL in favor of less restrictive permissive licenses for open source projects. What’s behind the trend and how does it impact your business?
• Ruby on Rails 3.2 said to speed Web app development: The new version of the Ruby on Rails framework features enhancements like a faster dev mode that could aid Web development.
• The State Of NoSQL In 2012: Siddharth Anand, a senior member of LinkedIn’s Distributed Data Systems team, gives his view of where NoSQL is today, at the beginning of 2012.
• 10 programming languages that could shake up IT: These cutting-edge programming languages provide unique insights on the future of software development.
• Node at scale: What Google, Mozilla, & Yahoo are doing with Node.js: Representatives from Google, Yahoo, Mozilla, and startup i.TV talk about using Node when instability is not an option.
• And finally…
• Minecraft™ LEGO® CUUSOO Project Passes LEGO Review: There will be an official LEGO set based on Minecraft.

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On January 27, 2010, Steve Jobs took to the stage at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco. The anticipation was that he would unveil Apple’s long-rumored tablet device.

The headline for the event was “Come see our latest creation.” That turned out to be the first iPad.

And like it or not, the world of technology – perhaps the world in general – has not been the same since.

Over 55 million iPads sold so far

Just before Jobs introduced the iPad in 2010, he mentioned Apple’s most recent quarterly earnings, which had just been released a couple of days before the event.

He said, “By revenue, Apple is the largest mobile devices company in the world now.” The company reported $15.68 billion of revenue for Q1, 2010.

Fast-forward two years and Apple is the largest company in the world, period, with $46.33 billion of revenue reported for Q1, 2012. And iPad has been a big part of that success, selling 15.4 million units in just the last quarter alone. Since its introduction, over 55 million iPads have been sold.

Apple sold more iPads in the latest quarter than HP sold PCs, according to Gartner’s estimate.

Watch the video below and relive the first time Apple showed off its new device. The embedded video is just the first part of the presentation; the other parts are available on YouTube.

Soon, the iPad 3

Now there are rumors about iPad 3, supposed to be introduced soon with a higher resolution display, faster processor, and possibly also LTE.

Will iPad 3 be as revolutionary as the first iPad? No, but there’s every possibility that it will only reinforce Apple’s domination of the tablet market.

Do you have an iPad or some other type of tablet? Competition in this space is heating up, and consumers are given more of a choice, which can only be good.

Let us know what your thoughts are on iPad and tablets in the comments.

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China has come a long way fast in the world of supercomputers and now occupies the number two and number four spots on the Top 500 list.

Now the country has taken another major step forward by being only the third country in the world, after Japan and the USA, to launch a supercomputer made out of processors made in the country.

Just a few days ago, the Sunway Bluelight, a supercomputer that uses processors designed and built in China, was put into operation.

China is now number two

On the latest Top 500 list, from November 2011, only four out of the 500 computers use non-USA processors, and China is number two behind USA with 75 supercomputers on the list.

Japan is currently top of the supercomputing world with the Fujitsu-built K Computer, capable of more than 10 Petaflops per second in processing prowess.

China’s Tianhe-1A, then capable of 2.5 Petaflops, held the throne for a while in 2010, but since then China has not topped the list again.

Surely the Chinese authorities are keen on reclaiming the throne and perhaps they can do so with the Sunway Bluelight MPP. It is presently at number 14 on the Top 500 list.

Sunway Bluelight MPP

But it’s not for its performance, nor for its energy efficiency that the Sunway Bluelight is making headlines. It’s because it’s completely built with Chinese-designed and manufactured processors.

The Sunway Bluelight MPP was installed in September at the National Supercomputer Center in Tianjin, eastern China. It consists of of 8,700 ShenWei SW1600 microprocessors, capable of performing 1,000 trillion calculations per second. Put in another way, 1,000 trillion calculations per second is a Petaflop.

According to China Daily the supercomputer was put into operation just a few days ago, something also noted by an article in Inside HPC, which also included the following video:

The supercomputing future is interesting

No doubt, there is a lot happening in the field of supercomputing, much of which is never known in wider circles. Us geeks at Pingdom try to keep up with developments and report what we find especially compelling to you.

You may also want to go read our article where we compare the K Computer to Apple’s iPad. We try to figure out how many iPads it takes to match the supercomputer’s processing power.

This was a post from the guys at Pingdom, a site monitoring service that makes sure you're the first to know when your site is down. Check it out for free.

Pingdom’s Mobile Podcast is a weekly show about Internet, web, and mobile stuff. In this show we covered the following topics:

Start 0:10

• Welcome
• Updates on the progress of the Carbon Twitter app for Windows Phone. It was rejected for the fourth time but they are now getting some help from Microsoft.
• Thoughts on Nokia’s Lumia 800 Windows Phone smartphone. Is it good enough to revive Nokia?
• Thoughts on RIM ousting its co-CEOs and replacing them with the COO.

Start 36:20

• Apple has (again) presented amazing financial results, breaking all previous records it seems.

About the show

The show is hosted by Magnus Nystedt at Pingdom and Saleh Esmaeili, User Experience Designer at dots & lines in UAE, currently working on Carbon for Windows Phone and Android.

In each show we give out a discount code for our monitoring service. Listen to the show to catch that coupon and save some money.

Join us

We are always looking for interesting guests. If you want to join us, get in touch.

Listen to the show

Subscribe to the podcast’s RSS feed.

You can subscribe to the podcast in iTunes.

Listen using the SoundCloud player:

Pingdom Podcast by Pingdom

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When you arrive at a site that asks you to register for an account before you can access certain content or functionality, does that drive you away?

A recent research report shows that a site that requires users to register does just that, drives users away. On the flipside, the same report shows that about half of all users are attracted by personalization capabilities on a site.

So, on the one hand, we don’t want to register but, on the other, we want personalization.

How can you deal with that in a way that finds a balance between the two? Perhaps social login is the answer.

First, the numbers

In Baynote’s 2^nd annual holiday shopping survey, published January 2012, almost 80% of respondents said they have some issues with sharing personal information in order to get a more personalized shopping experience.

Only 20.8% said they would have no problem giving up some information in return for personalization. Although this is a slight change towards customers being more comfortable giving up personal information compared to the previous year, it still means there is a definite issue here that anyone developing and running a website needs to think about.

In another study, this one by Janrain, we can find some more numbers concerning the willingness of users to give up personal information in order to get personalized content, information or functionality. Let’s look at some of the key numbers:

• 86% of users are bothered by having to create a new account when registering on a website.
• 54% may leave the site and possibly not return.
• 88% of users admit to having given incorrect information when creating a new account on a website.
• 88% of users have left forms incomplete when creating a new account at a website.
• 90% admit they have left a website if they forgot their password or login info, instead of going through the process of answering security questions or re-setting their password.

So, users are not too happy to create a new account to register with a website. But if a website offers personalization options, users are more likely to return, buy from the website, and recommend the site to others:

This paints a clear picture: users are willing to put up with a certain degree of registration but are likely to leave your site quickly and go somewhere else if it’s too intrusive or complicated.

So how do you find the balance between offering the personalization that users want without imposing too much of the registration headaches and annoyances they want to be without?

A possible remedy: social media login

The solution to this dilemma seems to be to make the registration process as simple as possible. Of course, there are plenty of suggestions for how to make your registration form less annoying and more streamlined, but one option that is arguably becoming increasingly popular is social login.

Social login basically means using a social media account like Facebook or Twitter to login to a site. Since most users already have an account with one of the big social media networks, they already have an account to get access to your site. They typically need to allow the app, in this case your site, access to their social media network, but that’s a process of a few clicks, far from the complexity of even a simple new account registration form.

The same study by Jarain we referenced earlier also shows that users are willing to let websites use social login to speed up registration. In fact, users even encourage websites to do this.

Some more key numbers from Jarain’s study, this time pertaining to social login:

• 77% of users believe that websites should offer them the opportunity to use a social network identity to use to log in to the site.
• 41% of users would prefer to use a social login.
• 51% of the users surveyed say that social login’s personalization capability is attractive to them.
• 50% of users say that if a website offers a personalization of their experience, they are more likely to return to the site.

This clearly indicates that most users would be happy to see social login implemented on your site, because it gives them a simpler login procedure, and they can still be offered the personalization they’re looking for.

How did you find the balance?

Joel Spolsky noted in 2003, “Small software implementation details result in big differences in the way the community develops, behaves, and feels.” If you could make a small software implementation on your website and support social login, wouldn’t you do it? Especially if it means that more users will hang around your site, make purchases, and return in the future.

If you run a site where users can have accounts, how did you find the balance between user registration and personalization on your site? And is social login something you have implemented already or do you plan to include it on your site in the future?

Share your experience with us in the comments below.

Photo by NHS Confederation.

This was a post from the guys at Pingdom, a site monitoring service that makes sure you're the first to know when your site is down. Check it out for free.

Have you ever scanned a QR code? If you have, did you get a discount on something? Did it reveal some cool information? Did it give you an offer you just couldn’t refuse?

It’s clear that QR codes are increasing in popularity, but to be truly as viral and useful as many companies hope they will be, they have to become more useful.

We have an example from the Pingdom office today of a QR code that doesn’t deliver any added value to the customer at all. Read on to find out more.

QR codes: a mixed bag of success

There’s no doubt that QR codes have been applied in some rather creative and useful ways, for example:

• Business cards come to mind as a good example of where QR codes can add value and functionality.
• Placing them on DVDs and movie posters where scanning the code takes you to the trailer for the movie.
• Google’s experiment with using QR codes for logging in to its website.
• Tesco’s virtual supermarket in South Korean subway station.
• A QR code on the rooftop of a building so it’s viewable in Google Maps.
• A rather macabre example of the use of QR codes is that they’ve apparently been placed on some tombstones.
• And other more “special” applications.

A survey by Chadwick Martin Bailey in the USA, released this month, revealed that QR codes is something people don’t really know what it is, even though a majority recognize one when they see it.

Here are some key data points:

• Almost 80% of people had never heard of “QR code,” but just as many admitted to having seen one.
• Smartphone owners were understandably a bit more QR code savvy; 50% have scanned one.
• But 57% of those who have scanned a QR code did nothing with the information it revealed. Only 18% made a purchase.
• 18% said the information from a QR code is not useful, 42% had mixed feelings.

The burger and the QR code

Since we work so hard, we get hungry, and we look forward to lunchtime with great anticipation. Today, one of the Pingdomers went to a Max restaurant and brought his meal back to the office to eat. Max is a well-known Swedish chain of hamburger restaurants, and we have one right around the corner from the Pingdom HQ.

Someone around the table noticed the paper bag from Max had a QR code on it, and someone else decided we had to find out what secrets it kept, so they took a picture.

Once the code was photographed, it was revealed that it had a URL embedded in it. The URL was http://www.max.se/kampanj/momsfilibabba/QR, which automatically and instantly redirects to http://www.max.se/momsfilibabba.aspx. That page looked like this on the iPhone we used to scan the QR code with:

This page doesn’t present any offer, discount, or anything special to the benefit of the customer, at least not as it relates to having scanned the QR code. The page does, however, show off Max’s “moms fillibabba” promotion. This promotion is all about lower prices at Max. Lower prices is a result of the reduced sales tax on restaurant food in Sweden effective January 1, 2012.

We all like that the price of Max’s hamburgers has gone down, but it doesn’t seem like you should end up on that page when scanning the QR code.

And to make it even less understandable, the page you land one after following the QR code, just redirects to the company’s homepage:

As you can see, also the homepage doesn’t offer anything in particular in reference to the QR code. We fully expected some kind of special offer or something because we had taken the time to take a picture of the code, follow the embedded URL, etc.

You know, “Thank you for eating at Max – here is 10% off on your next meal!”

Unfortunately, this is a lost opportunity for Max to make an impression for being cool enough to have put a QR code on its paper bag.

Where is the imagination?

Besides some of the examples mentioned earlier, it seems like we’ve not come across the “killer application” for QR codes yet. At least our experience today with Max hamburgers was a disappointment, which caused confusion more than excitement.

We’re a fairly techy bunch at Pingdom. Perhaps if someone with less inherent interest in anything digital were to scan the same code, his or her experience would be even more confusing than ours.

As we applaud Max’s willingness to embrace new technology and put QR codes on its paper bags, we also question the usefulness of the code in this particular case. Hopefully the next time someone in the Pingdom office goes to Max, things will be different.

We’d like to send a special thank you to our Twitter followers who helped out with some examples of the use of QR codes.

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We have pointed out China’s amazing potential before on this blog, and we have also made detailed comparisons between China and the USA.

But with over 1.3 billion people, China has “only” 77 million smartphones, which, per capita, is far behind many other countries around the world, including the USA.

So let’s be honest, haven’t you wondered what if China had the same number of smartphones per capita as the USA?

Let’s play a game of “what if.”

Comparing two giants

We pick the USA again as a measuring stick because it has the largest number of smartphones of any country in the world. But that may not last very long though.

According to Strategy Analytics, China has already bypassed the USA as the number one smartphone market in terms of shipments. The company reported 23.9 million smartphones sold in China in Q3 2011 compared to 23 million smartphones sold in the USA during the same period.

Smartphone penetration

In December 2011, Tomi Ahonen published a list of countries and their respective smartphone penetration. We will use this list for most of the numbers in the remainder of this article.

According to Ahonen’s numbers, Singapore is the country with the highest per capita smartphone ownership with rate of 90%. USA is tied for position 16 with Greece, Ireland and Portugal. The smartphone penetration in these countries is 35%.

China comes in at a distant 41^st place, with only 6% smartphone penetration. So, for smartphone penetration, we get this situation:

Where it gets interesting, is if we look at the real number of smartphones in each country, and apply the smartphone penetration rate in the USA to China (meaning if China had 35% smartphone penetration, like the USA). Now the situation changes quite dramatically. And if we add in the estimated sales of smartphones worldwide in 2011, this is what it looks like:

Smartphone data usage

According to Nielsen, the average smartphone owner in the USA used up 435 MB of mobile data per month in Q1 2011. On aggregate, that means that in the USA smartphone users consumed 48 PB per month. If we again toy with the idea that China has the same smartphone penetration as the USA, Chinese smartphone users would use up 207 PB during the same time period.

Cisco forecast that the worldwide consumption of mobile data per month would land at 600 PB in 2011. Note that Cisco’s figure is not particular to smartphones, but we think the numbers are nonetheless interesting to compare.

The reality may be even more amazing

This was of course just a thought experiment, but don’t be surprised if reality turns out to be even more amazing. And this was just a look at two countries, so what would it look like if we included some other big markets, like Brazil and India?

One thing is for sure, and that is that everything in mobile telecommunications seems to be moving at breakneck speed. We showed you recently how fast the world’s population has taken to mobile technology. This “what if scenario” only reinforces how different the mobile world is from so many other technologies that have come before it.

Photo of the flags by futureatlas.

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Every single day – well, except the weekend – we’re giving away a 1-year Basic Account package, worth almost $120.

This promotion continues and one lucky person every day has a chance to walk away with this catch.

What we do is that each day, at a different time each day, we post a message to one of our social media accounts – Facebook, Google+, or Twitter – with a link containing a discount code.

The code entitles the first person that applies it to a transaction to a 100% discount on a 1-year Basic Package, worth $119.40.

Each day’s discount code can only be used once, so the first person that applies it to a transaction gets it – first come, first served.

Note: This discount code can only be applied to new signups and upgrades, not to renewals. This is due to a technicality in our present system.

Good luck to everyone!

Picture by Andrew Magill.

This was a post from the guys at Pingdom, a site monitoring service that makes sure you're the first to know when your site is down. Check it out for free.

Pingdom’s Mobile Podcast is a weekly show about Internet, web, and mobile stuff. In this show we covered the following topics:

Start 0:10

• Welcome
• Updates on the progress of the Carbon Twitter app for Windows Phone.
• Thoughts on Intel coming back to smartphones. Example: Lenovo K800.

Start 16:25

• Saleh had posted two pieces on Google+ about iOS fanboys criticizing Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich. He has a chance to explain himself. .

About the show

The show is hosted by Magnus Nystedt at Pingdom and Saleh Esmaeili, User Experience Designer at dots & lines in UAE, currently working on Carbon for Windows Phone and Android.

In each show we give out a discount code for our monitoring service. Listen to the show to catch that coupon and save some money.

Join us

We are always looking for interesting guests. If you want to join us, get in touch.

Listen to the show

You can download the MP3 file.

Subscribe to the podcast’s RSS feed.

You can subscribe to the podcast in iTunes.

Listen using the SoundCloud player:

Pingdom Podcast by Pingdom

Or you can use the player below:

This was a post from the guys at Pingdom, a site monitoring service that makes sure you're the first to know when your site is down. Check it out for free.

Just in case you managed to miss it, it’s January 18 today, and countless of websites show their support for the fight against the controversial SOPA legislation in the U.S.

SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act) is a bill in the U.S. House of Representatives and PIPA (Protect Intellectual Property Act) is a bill in the U.S. Senate. Figuring out exactly what the effect would be if the bills would pass is not easy. However, a widespread concern seems to be that it would “threaten prosperity, online security, and freedom of expression.”

In response to SOPA and PIPA, Reddit kicked off a campaign to blackout its site today in protest. That steamrolled and hundreds, if not thousands, of sites around the world are now taking part in this movement.

How each site displays its opposition is different and varies greatly. We have looked at a selection; many brought to us by our Twitter followers.

Asofterworld.com

Boingboing.net

Castle-g.com

Crypto.cat

Explosm.net

Flickr.com

Girlgamer.com

Good.is

Google.com

Icanhascheezburger.com

Imgur.com

Inkerro.com

Joyblind.com

Minecraft.net

Opendns.com

Protestsopa.org

Reddit.com

Regretsy.com

Sonicretro.org

Technobuffalo.com

Theoatmeal.com

Triggerpit.com

Wikipedia.org

WordPress.com

Xkcd.com

Xbmc.org

Which one is your favorite?

SOPA is now on hold, but not cancelled and sites will go back to normal tomorrow. There’s no doubt that this struggle is beginning, and it will be interesting to see how this situation evolves.

Do you have examples of anti-SOPA blacked-out sites that we didn’t include here but that you think deserve a spot in the collection?

Tell us about it in the comments below.

This was a post from the guys at Pingdom, a site monitoring service that makes sure you're the first to know when your site is down. Check it out for free.

So what happened with the Internet in 2011? How many email accounts were there in the world in 2011? How many websites? How much did the most expensive domain name cost? How many photos were hosted on Facebook? How many videos were viewed to YouTube?

We’ve got answers to these questions and many more. A veritable smorgasbord of numbers, statistics and data lies in front of you. Using a variety of sources we’ve compiled what we think are some of the more interesting numbers that describe the Internet in 2011.

Email

• 3.146 billion – Number of email accounts worldwide.
• 27.6% – Microsoft Outlook was the most popular email client.
• 19% – Percentage of spam emails delivered to corporate email inboxes despite spam filters.
• 112 – Number of emails sent and received per day by the average corporate user.
• 71% – Percentage of worldwide email traffic that was spam (November 2011).
• 360 million – Total number of Hotmail users (largest email service in the world).
• $44.25 – The estimated return on $1 invested in email marketing in 2011.
• 40 – Years since the first email was sent, in 1971.
• 0.39% – Percentage of email that was malicious (November 2011).

Websites

• 555 million – Number of websites (December 2011).
• 300 million – Added websites in 2011.

Web servers

• 239.1% – Growth in the number of Apache websites in 2011.
• 68.7% – Growth in the number of IIS websites in 2011.
• 34.4% – Growth in the number of NGINX websites in 2011.
• 80.9% – Growth in the number of Google websites in 2011.

Domain names

• 95.5 million – Number of .com domain names at the end of 2011.
• 13.8 million – Number of .net domain names at the end of 2011.
• 9.3 million – Number of .org domains names at the end of 2011.
• 7.6 million – Number of .info domain names at the end of 2011.
• 2.1 million – Number of .biz domain names at the end of 2011.
• 220 million – Number of domain name registrations (Q3, 2011).
• 86.9 million – Number of country code top-level domains (e.g. .CN, .UK, .DE, etc.). (Q3, 2011).
• 324 – Number of top-level domains.
• 28% – Market share for BIND, the number one DNS server type.
• $2.6 million – The price for social.com, the most expensive domain name sold in 2011.

Internet users

• 2.1 billion – Internet users worldwide.
• 922.2 million – Internet users in Asia.
• 476.2 million – Internet users in Europe.
• 271.1 million – Internet users in North America.
• 215.9 million – Internet users in Latin America / Caribbean.
• 118.6 million – Internet users in Africa.
• 68.6 million – Internet users in the Middle East.
• 21.3 million – Internet users in Oceania / Australia.
• 45% – Share of Internet users under the age of 25.
• 485 million – Number of Internet users in China, more than any other country in the world.
• 36.3% – Internet penetration in China.
• 591 million – Number of fixed (wired) broadband subscriptions worldwide.

Social media

• 800+ million – Number of users on Facebook by the end of 2011.
• 200 million – Number of users added to Facebook during 2011.
• 350 million – The number of Facebook users that log in to the service using their mobile phone.
• 225 million – Number of Twitter accounts.
• 100 million – Number of active Twitter users in 2011.
• 18.1 million – People following Lady Gaga. Twitter’s most popular user.
• 250 million – Number of tweets per day (October 2011).
• 1 – #egypt was the number one hashtag on Twitter.
• 8,868 – Number of tweets per second in August for the MTV Video Music Awards.
• $50,000 – The amount raised for charity by the most retweeted tweet of 2011.
• 39 million – The number of Tumblr blogs by the end of 2011.
• 70 million – Total number of WordPress blogs by the end of 2011.
• 1 billion – The number of messages sent with WhatsApp during one day (October 2011).
• 2.6 billion – Worldwide IM accounts.
• 2.4 billion – Social networking accounts worldwide.

Web browsers

Mobile

• 1.2 billion – The number of active mobile broadband subscriptions worldwide in 2011.
• 5.9 billion – The estimated number of mobile subscriptions worldwide in 2011.
• 85% – Percentage of handsets shipped globally in 2011 that included a web browser.
• 88% – Apple iPad’s share of global tablet web traffic in December.

Videos

• 1 trillion – The number of video playbacks on YouTube.
• 140 – The number of YouTube video playbacks per person on Earth.
• 48 hours – The amount of video uploaded to YouTube every minute.
• 1 – The most viewed video on YouTube during 2011 was Rebecka Black’s “Friday.”
• 82.5% – Percentage of the U.S. Internet audience that viewed video online.
• 76.4% – YouTube’s share of the U.S. video website market (December 2011).
• 4,189,214 – Number of new users on Vimeo.
• 201.4 billion – Number of videos viewed online per month (October 2011).
• 88.3 billion – Videos viewed per month on Google sites, incl. YouTube (October 2011).
• 43% – Share of all worldwide video views delivered by Google sites, incl. YouTube.

Images

• 14 million – Number of Instagram accounts created during 2011.
• 60 – The average number of photos uploaded per second to Instagram.
• 100 billion – Estimated number of photos on Facebook by mid-2011.
• 51 million – Total number of registered users on Flickr.
• 4.5 million – Number of photos uploaded to Flickr each day.
• 6 billion – Photos hosted on Flickr (August 2011).
• 1 – Apple iPhone 4 is the most popular camera on Flickr.

What’s in store for 2012?

For 2012, there’s every reason to think that the Internet, by any measure, will keep growing. As we put more of our personal as well as professional lives online, we will come to rely on the Internet in ways we could hardly imagine before. For better or worse, the Internet is now a critical component in almost everything we do.

We will be back again early next year to wrap up 2012. In the meantime, you may also want to check out our annual summaries for 2008, 2009, and 2010.

This was a post from the guys at Pingdom, a site monitoring service that makes sure you're the first to know when your site is down. Check it out for free.

No, we didn’t go to CES this year, but we’ve followed the action from Las Vegas from afar with great interest.

Today is the last day of CES, so we wanted to bring you a selection of what we thought were the most exciting new gadgets and technology coming out of Las Vegas this January.

So here’s our pick for the ten most exciting gadgets at CES 2012, in no particular order.

Nokia Lumia 900

Could it be that Nokia finally has a hit smartphone on its hands after years of falling behind? We were optimistic already when the Lumia 800 came out, but now the 4.3-inch display and front-facing camera of the 900 are really seducing us in a bad way.

Parrot AR.Drone 2.0

More sturdy construction, compass, HD camera – there’s a lot to like about the updated Drone. Exactly what we would use it for, we still don’t know, so that hasn’t changed. But who really cares?

LG TV with voice and gesture control

The future of TV may be upon us, and LG seems to be showing the way, adding voice and gesture control to its SmartTV lineup. We think this will add a whole new dimension to watching sports events.

GoPro HD HERO 2

GoPro showed off the HD HERO2, a rugged video camera capable of recording 1080p video. Plus, the Wi-Fi BacPac + Wi-Fi Remote Combo Kit allows you to remote control 50 cameras at a time as well as stream video live.

Razer Project Fiona gaming tablets

More than anything else, this has our juices flowing. 10.1-inch display (1,280 x 800 pixels), Hydra-style controllers, Intel Core i7 processor, Dolby 7.1 surround sound, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth 3.0, and more. Wow! Unfortunately we may have to wait up to a year before being able to buy it.

Samsung Series 9 laptops

The second generation of Samsung’s stylish laptop certainly isn’t cheap (starting around $1,400), but they are simply gorgeous. And you now have to models to choose from, a 13-inch and a 15-inch model.

Intel making a comeback?

Although it’s not a particular gadget, we wanted to tip our hat to Intel for possibly setting the stage for a comeback in the mobile areas. We’ve now seen both tablets and smartphones running Intel processors, and it will be exciting to see what they come up with next.

Angry Birds for Samsung Smart TV

It was announced at CES that Finland’s pride and joy Angry Birds will come to Samsung’s SmartTVs. Now, we’re perhaps not that excited about that it’s Angry Birds and Samsung necessarily, but we look forward to what gaming has to offer on TVs in the future.

Toshiba Satellite Ultrabook

An apparently still unnamed ultrabook from Toshiba was on display. It promises to be a bit more affordable than present ultrabooks and supposedly it’ll be available in May for $799.

Panasonic Toughbook tablet

By specs and looks the Toughbook, a 10.1-inch ruggedized tablet running Android, doesn’t excite us much. But the fact that a Panasonic executive demoed it by dropping it on stage means it could be tough enough for us to carry with us in data centers and server rooms.

Is it a sign of things to come?

Some may say that big tech shows like CES are doomed; that they are a dying breed. We obviously don’t know if that’s true or not but, with the amount of new and cool technology coming out of Las Vegas this week, it’s hard to imagine that CES will disappear anytime soon.

What caught your interest from CES this week? Share with us in the comments below.

All photos appear courtesy of VentureBeat.

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In December, we looked at how the Internet has spread across the world from 1991 to 2010. We presented this in the form of an animation, highlighting each country in different colors depending in what percentages of the population were online.

Now we bring you a follow-up. This time we use data from the World Bank for mobile subscriptions per 100 people and map it out over the years and the world.

As it turns out, there’s quite a difference between the two.

Mobile uptake comes later but happens much faster

You would probably expect the number of mobile subscriptions to start increasing later than the number of Internet users, and you would be correct. To make the comparison to the Internet penetration animation easier, we used the same time period, 1991 – 2010.

First a few comments on the animation below:

• The picture is an animated GIF. You may have to reload the page to see the animation again.
• In the animation, the redder a country is, the higher the number of mobile subscriptions per 100 people is.
• In the animation, white means there is no data from the World Bank or that there are no mobile subscriptions.

Here are a few numbers that further highlight the stunning growth in mobile subscriptions around the world:

• 102 – The number of countries that the World Bank show mobile subscription figures for in 1991.
• 227 – The number of countries that the World Bank show mobile subscription figures for in 2010.
• 0.4% – The average mobile penetration per country in the world in 1991.
• 91.1% – The average mobile penetration per country in the world in 2010.
• 6.59% – The mobile penetration in Sweden in 1991, the highest of any country for that year.
• 206.3% – The mobile penetration in Macao in 2010, the highest of any country for that year.
• 94 – The number of countries that in 2010 had more than 100% mobile penetration.
• 2002 – This year saw the first mobile penetration of over 100% and it was in Luxembourg.
• 171% – Mobile penetration in Libya in 2010.
• 167% – Mobile penetration in Russia in 2010.
• 188% – Mobile penetration in Saudi Arabia 2010.
• 90.2% – Mobile penetration in U.S. in 2010.

Still room for growth

There are mainly two things that strike us when watching this animation: how fast the mobile penetration has developed and how many countries see penetration over 100%, in some cases over 200%.

That there can be more mobile subscriptions than people in a country can easily be explained by individuals having more than one mobile phone, and that some subscriptions may be laying dormant when the user has abandoned them for whatever reason.

With an average mobile subscription rate of 91.1% worldwide in 2010, there’s plenty of room for growth. In markets that already have 200% penetration or more, there’s little room to grow in terms of the total number of handsets, but replacement cycles can be shortened to drive demand.

In any case, there doesn’t seem to be anything slowing mobile uptake down, that’s for sure.

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Pingdom’s Mobile Podcast is a weekly show about Internet, web, and mobile stuff. In this show we covered the following topics:

Start 0:10

• Welcome
• Dell plans to launch tablet by the end of 2012
• RIM Improves BlackBerry PlayBook With 2.0 Upgrade
• The iPhone turns 5: Evolution of a game-changer

Start 16:25

• Erik Pettersson of Improove.se joins us to talk about his mashup of Google Analytics and Pingdom. You can see a simple demo at http://demo.pingalytics.com.

Start 38:10

• Nokia and Windows Phone – do they stand a chance with Lumia 900
• It’s Raining Android Tablets
• The Lenovo IdeaPad Yoga looks really cool

About the show

The show is hosted by Magnus Nystedt at Pingdom and Saleh Esmaeili, User Experience Designer at dots & lines in UAE, currently working on Carbon for Windows Phone and Android.

Join us

We are always looking for interesting guests. If you want to join us, get in touch.

Listen to the show

You can download the MP3 file.

Subscribe to the podcast’s RSS feed.

You can subscribe to the podcast in iTunes.

Listen using the SoundCloud player:

Or you can use the player below:

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Last week we published an article declaring that NGINX had become the second most used web server software in the world, thereby overtaking Microsoft Internet Information Server (IIS).

In that article, based on figures from Netcraft’s Web Server Survey, we looked at the data for “active sites.” NGINX had in that category pulled ahead of IIS for the first time, even though it was by a slim margin. NGINX accounted for 22,221,514 servers and IIS accounted for 22,142,114.

As we noted then, if you instead look at Netcraft’s “Market Share for Top Servers Across All Domains,” NGINX is still behind IIS. The margin is substantial but closing. We stated that NGINX might take the number two spot even in that category this year.

Now, let’s find out if that can happen and if so, when.

Apache is still number one

If we look at January 2011 to January 2012 for “Market Share for Top Servers Across All Domains,“ we get this chart:

As you can see from the chart above, there was a notable increase in number of sites in July-August 2011. As Netcraft noted, there was a similar increase for all server software, so there was very little change in market shares.

This jump Netcraft explains by “particularly large increases in the number of sites hosted by Softlayer, AmeriNOC, China Telecom, and the social networking communities Tumblr, Skyrock and Hyves.”

In any case, Apache is still the undisputed king of web server software, followed by IIS, NGINX and Google. In fact, Apache is growing faster than the other three.

But our interest here is to look at when, if at all, NGINX may overtake IIS so let’s leave Apache out of the equation for now.

NGINX could overtake IIS by mid-2012

If we take the percentage growth rate that IIS and NGINX, respectively, had between December 2011 and January 2012, and apply that throughout 2012, we get the following chart:

If this comes true, NGINX would overtake IIS somewhere around March or April 2012.

In a more conservative estimate, we took the average monthly percentage growth rate for October 2011 to January 2012, and applied that throughout 2012. As it turns out, this only delays NGINX’s possible overtake by a few months.

Finally, if we take the average monthly percentage growth rate for the entire 2011, and base the estimate for 2012 on that, NGINX will overtake Microsoft’s web server software sometime in July or August 2012.

Is Apache next?

This is of course all forecasting, guessing and conjecture, but it will be interesting to see how things pan out over 2012.

There’s no doubt that the small upstart NGINX has the momentum in the battle for web server software supremacy. We firmly believe that it will bypass IIS sometime during 2012, even in the “all domains” category, the question is just when it will happen.

But after it does, will NGINX set its sights on Apache? That will certainly be a whole other ballgame, and we’ll be following it closely.

Top picture by Robert.

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Apple is often referred to as a design leader. Since Steve Jobs came back and took over the company in 1997, the focus and inventiveness shown by Apple’s industrial design team has been remarkable.

Apple’s design prowess has greatly influenced the evolution of the common laptop over the past 10+ years. The company has gone from being a marginal player in that market to become one of the biggest, most popular laptop manufacturers in the world.

That success has of course bred imitation from other laptop makers, some subtle, some not so subtle. Would today’s laptops be as slick and beautiful without the influence from Apple? Most likely not.

We’ll look back at how Apple’s laptops have evolved over the past decade (well, since 1999). We’ve only included the “landmark” models, the ones introducing really big design changes. We’ve focused mostly on the actual design, not on hardware specs or features, although Apple has made significant contributions in those areas as well.

iBook G3, 1999 (a.k.a. “the Clamshell”)

Also known as the “Clamshell,” the iBook G3 was meant as a low-end option to Apple’s PowerBook line. If you remember the original iMac desktop computer, you’ll see how it mirrors its rounded, colorful design. Just like the original iMac, the iBook G3 was available in multiple colors. As all Macs of this era it used the PowerPC CPU (Apple didn’t switch to Intel until 2006), in this one the G3, hence the name.

iBook G3, 2001

The 2001 model of the iBook was arguably much less out there design-wise than the Clamshell, but had a more efficient and compact design. It was much lighter and smaller than the original iBook. Gone were also the playful colors. You could get it in any color you wanted, as long as it was white.

There would also be an iBook G4 which continued this style, introduced in 2003 and updated until it was discontinued in 2006. It replaced the white, slightly translucent casing with one that was completely opaque (but still white).

PowerBook G4, 2001 (Titanium)

Although the PowerBook line had been available since 1991, the familiar metallic titanium design arrived with the PowerBook G4 in 2001. Steve Jobs intended this to be a completely reinvented PowerBook, and it delivered. From being a black and rather chunky device (a typical laptop of the late 1990s), the PowerBook suddenly became sleek and elegant. It was also one of the very first widescreen laptops available to consumers.

Where iBook was meant as the more affordable consumer option, the PowerBook line was meant for demanding customers. This was right in line with Apple’s plan to have one high-end and one low-end entry in the laptop and desktop computer markets.

PowerBook G4, 2003 (Aluminum)

The 2003 PowerBook G4 was the year Apple went aluminum. The Aluminum PowerBook G4 also introduced the backlit keyboard which has been present in most of Apple’s laptops ever since.

MacBook, 2006

2006 was the year Apple made the switch to using Intel CPUs in its computers. With this switch also came the retirement of the iBook and PowerBook series, which were replaced by the MacBook and MacBook Pro series.

The MacBook Pro carried the torch from the PowerBook, and the initial 2006 design was basically just a carry-over from the PowerBook, with a few design tweaks. (That’s why we didn’t include pictures here, it was very similar to the Aluminum PowerBook G4, but with an Intel CPU inside).

In 2008, Apple completely abandoned its black and white plastic casings for MacBook, essentially making the lower-end unibody aluminum MacBook Pro its new MacBook. The company would later briefly reintroduce a unibody polycarbonate version, which was scrapped after a year.

MacBook Pro, 2008 – today (Aluminum Unibody)

In 2008, Apple introduced the now famous aluminum unibody style (i.e. the body is carved out of a single block of aluminum) for its MacBook Pro line. This made the laptops not just sleeker, but made them very sturdy as well. The use of unibody designs has lasted until today and is now a typical Apple design trait which has also carried over into several other Apple products.

MacBook Air, 2008 – today

Designed to be as thin and light and portable as possible, the original MacBook Air wasn’t quite the success Apple probably would have liked. In retrospect, however, it is clear that this was just the first step in another reinvention of the laptop.

While the first MacBook Air was often viewed as underpowered, the technology available finally caught up with Apple’s vision in 2011, when it became a raging success.

Apple’s design impact today

They do say that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery… Well, Apple, consider yourself flattered.

Just look at recent laptops and so-called ultrabooks from the likes of Samsung, HP, Acer, LG, Asus, Dell and many others. They all borrow significantly from Apple’s design language.

To illustrate, none of the following are Apple laptops:

Clockwise from top left: HP Envy, LG Z330 (or Z430, we’re not sure), Asus Zenbook, Acer Aspire S3, Asus Zenbook again (because the view was quite revealing).

We could have included many more, but those should be enough to get the point across, we think.

A final note, and a final image

Before someone blows a gasket, Apple of course didn’t reinvent the modern laptop all on its own. The company certainly doesn’t operate in a vacuum. That’s what’s so great about a market with lots of competition. That said, you’d be hard pressed to point out any other company that has done more for the evolution of laptops over the past decade.

Although much has been said about Steve Jobs’s contribution to Apple’s success, we should not forget to credit Apple’s industrial design maestro, Jonathan Ive. And we’re sure there are plenty of unsung heroes in this story as well. There usually are.

Finally, just one more image, in case you had any doubts whatsoever about how cool this unibody thing actually is. It’s a shot of a stripped MacBook Air.

As if a crustacean had just walked away from its shell…

Data and image sources: Apple, Wikipedia. The exception here being the non-Apple pics, which come from their respective manufacturers.

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The Consumer Electronics Show (CES) will officially kick off in Las Vegas tomorrow. One thing we know for sure is that tablets will be one of the hottest types of gadgets in this year’s show. That’s evident already from the pre-show coverage: there’s everything from Toshiba’s “thinnest and lightest” tablet to a “waterproof” LTE Android tablet.

And since CES is upon us, we know we’re just a few days into the new year, so chances are that not many actual figures for sales of tablets in 2011 will have hit us yet.

However, we have managed to find a few and wanted to see how they stack up against the forecasts that have been made.

Mo’ tablets

After scouring the interwebs for any kind of sales and forecast numbers relating to tablets in the last couple of years, here’s what we found.

Forecasts for 2011 (worldwide, units):

• 50 million (IDC, March 2011)
• 51.9 million (JP Morgan, September 2011)
• 53.5 million (IDC, July 2011)
• 54.8 million (Gartner, October 2010)
• 62.5 million (IDC, September 2011)
• 63.6 million (Gartner, September 2011)
• 70 million (Jefferies, May 2011)
• 23.6 million (only Q4, 2011, IDC, December 2011)

Actual 2011 numbers (worldwide, units):

• 15.5 million (only Q3 2011, FutureSource Consulting, January 2011)
• 7.2 million (only Q1, 2011, IDC, July 2011)
• 13.6 million (only Q2, 2011, IDC, September 2011)
• 18.1 million (only Q3, 2011, IDC, December 2011)
• 72.7 million (NPD DisplaySearch, January 2011)
• 62.5 million (IDC’s forecast for Q4 and the Q1-Q3 numbers)

Forecasts seem pretty accurate

As you can see, we don’t have that many actual sales numbers yet for 2011, but expect those to trickle in over the coming months. According to this quick comparison between forecasts and actual numbers, there is not that much difference between what analysts thought the sales of tablets would be in 2011 and the actual results.

You could of course argue that some research companies keep adjusting their forecast for the entire year when they release sales figures every quarter or so. How hard is it then to land on the “correct” figure, whatever it may be?

However, there’s no doubt that consumers around the world are buying more and more tablets. What may be in doubt, at least somewhat, is what they actually do with them.

Cute cat-as-iPad-stand photo by Veronica Belmont.

This was a post from the guys at Pingdom, a site monitoring service that makes sure you're the first to know when your site is down. Check it out for free.

Pingdom’s Mobile Podcast is a weekly show about Internet, web, and mobile stuff. In this show we covered the following topics:

Start 0:10

• Welcome
• Happy new year

Start 21:00

• The mobile web in numbers
• Symbian is still top mobile OS
• Apple’s App Store generates 6x the revenue of Android Market in the US

Start 41:35

• Ice Cream Sandwich & General Android post-ICS? End of Fragmentation?
• Unmodified Holo theme now a requirement for devices with Android Market access
• RIM PlayBook Now Available for $199 in the US
• iPhone 4 drawn entirely with CSS
• iPhone 4S coming to China and 21 more countries this Friday
• Samsung Galaxy 3GS?

Start 60:10

• Predictions about mobile, web, and Internet technologies in the year ahead.

About the show

The show is hosted by Magnus Nystedt at Pingdom and Saleh Esmaeili, User Experience Designer at dots & lines in UAE, currently working on Carbon for Windows Phone and Android.

Join us

We are always looking for interesting guests. If you want to join us, get in touch.

Listen to the show

You can download the MP3 file.

Subscribe to the podcast’s RSS feed.

You can subscribe to the podcast in iTunes.

Listen using the SoundCloud player:

Or you can use the player below:

This was a post from the guys at Pingdom, a site monitoring service that makes sure you're the first to know when your site is down. Check it out for free.

In the latest Netcraft Web Server, for January 2012, the lightweight open source web server software NGINX amassed more active sites than Microsoft Internet Information Server for the first time.

That makes NGINX the second most used web server software in the world right now, only trumped by Apache.

Let’s look at the numbers.

NGINX is bigger than IIS for active sites

Looking at the development of the top four web server software packages from January 2011 to January 2012, we get this chart:

With Apache in such a big lead, the changes between the other three aren’t that noticeable.

In absolute numbers, in January 2012, NGINX had 22,221,514 servers and IIS had 22,142,114, so the difference is very small.

If we exclude Apache in order to get a better picture of the fight between NGINX and IIS, this is what it looks like:

It’s worth noting that it’s in the category for “active sites” NGINX is ahead. If you look at Netcraft’s “Market Share for Top Servers Across All Domains” numbers, NGINX is still behind IIS, but the gap is closing. It’s conceivable that if the trend continues, NGINX will take the number two spot even in that category later this year.

The future seems bright

Not long ago we published an interview with one of the members in the NGINX team.

In that interview, Andrew Alexeev who’s in charge of Business Development and Marketing for NGINX, said that statistics from sites like Netcraft and W3techs doesn’t influence the direction of NGINX.

However, he added, “it does show us that NGINX is headed in the right direction, because for quite a while we’ve been the only web server with its market share steadily growing. So, the web server surveys are actually good indicators for us in gauging whether we’ve been delivering a valuable product.”

So by those very same indicators, the NGINX team has done a tremendous job.

Image credit: NGINX logo by Cliff Wells.

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