A new year has arrived, and we here at Pingdom have dived headlong into it. For example, just last week we launched a new iPhone app that can be used to access our uptime monitoring service.

And while 2009 promises to be a great year for us, we certainly can’t complain about 2008. In fact, 2008 has been a very good year for us.

In 2008 we have:

• Nearly doubled our customer base.
• Nearly tripled the number of sites we monitor.

At the end of 2008, Pingdom was monitoring the uptime of 34,353 sites.

Judging by the feedback we have been getting from people around the Web, people are finding the service highly useful and often something of a lifesaver.

One of the main benefits of using Pingdom is that you can be alerted of site problems, and there has been a significant amount of alerting going on in 2008. We sent out:

• 4,872,832 email alerts (yep, almost 5 million)
• 448,584 SMS alerts

Ok, enough chest beating.

We’re truly looking forward to what 2009 will bring, and we promise you that we will be working hard to make the Pingdom uptime monitoring service even better and more useful.

And finally, a BIG THANK YOU to all our great customers! Without you, we wouldn’t be anywhere.

Have you ever wondered how much money Google, Microsoft, Apple, IBM, Yahoo, Amazon and other tech giants have in the bank? What kind of assets do they have, how much spending money do they have? The vague answer is, “a lot.” But if you want to find out exactly how much, read on.

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Microsoft and open source, those are two things that traditionally don’t mix. Quite the opposite; the more hardcore members of the open source community tend to view Microsoft as just one step below Satan.

But while much of the open source community has little love for Microsoft, Microsoft is actually trying desperately to send some love back. The Redmond giant may have its own business reasons for doing so, of course, but that doesn’t change the fact that Microsoft is contributing to open source in more ways than most people are aware of.

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What do Android, Visio, Flash, Hotmail, Google Analytics and Powerpoint all have in common? Can you guess?

The answer is: None of them were created by the companies who now own them. They were acquisitions.

These products have continued to develop at their new homes, but the seed of innovation that sparked an actual, new product came from the outside. The key word here is innovation.

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We all know Google is huge and their wide range of services are bound to have a fair share of competitors, but you may be surprised just how wide-ranging Google considers its competition to be.

Here below we have included a quote from Google’s latest SEC filing with some very interesting information about what Google has to say about its competition.

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Big sites and services like Yahoo, Facebook, Twitter and many others rely heavily on open source software to run their operations. Happily, this isn’t a one-way street. They are also giving back to the open source community, not just by contributing to existing projects, but sometimes by open sourcing their own internal projects, giving back something completely new.

And what these popular sites can contribute is often quite valuable. Since they tend to be very large, they run big operations and have been forced to create solutions for scalability and performance problems that most other sites simply don’t have to deal with.

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