Do you have a website? Do you like knowing that it’s working ok? Pingdom exists for this very reason, to alert you when your site has downtime, so you can fix it.

With this in mind we have released a new application that we call the Pingdom Desktop Notifier, which sits in your Windows system tray. Pingdom’s uptime monitoring service does the actual monitoring, so you have the benefit of our entire monitoring network. The Desktop Notifier checks in with the Pingdom service at regular intervals and alerts you with a popup if your website goes down.

You don’t need to have an existing Pingdom account to get started. If you don’t have an account, the app will create a free one for you when you install it. It even sets up monitoring of your website for you automatically.

The Pingdom Desktop Notifier works as a completely stand-alone application, but of course all the nifty features of the Pingdom uptime monitoring service are available at the click of a mouse button if you want to use them (it has a direct link to the Pingdom control panel).

Those of you who are already using Pingdom can think of this as a complement to other alerting methods such as email, SMS, Twitter and iPhone push notifications.

The app works for Windows XP/Vista/7.

Get it here.

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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