The tech industry is littered with billionaires. We all enjoy a good income, but some clearly have earned more than others. Much, much more. The question is, how much money do the really big names in tech actually have?

To find out, we went through the Forbes 400, a list of the wealthiest Americans, and filtered out the people who work within the tech field, or more specifically: IT.

So here they are, the 20 richest Americans in tech today.

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We’re happy to say that it’s going extremely well for Pingdom. Our uptime monitoring service keeps growing and growing, and we have some big plans for the future that will pretty much take us off the charts.

This is where YOU come in. We are looking for a few brave, kick-ass web developers and a masterful web designer to join our ranks here in Sweden. In return we can offer you a creative environment and the chance to work with some of the brightest minds in the business.

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You could say that this is a post about unexpected success in unexpected ways.

Great products and services often come about more or less by accident and coincidence. The business world sees this kind of thing happening all the time. It’s actually not all that unusual that a company morphs an initial product into something it wasn’t originally intended to be. Because the truth is that it’s not easy to predict how something will be used, or what people will respond to.

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Most country code top-level domains on the Internet represent areas with millions of people, such as .uk (United Kingdom), .ca (Canada), .de (Germany), .se (Sweden), and so on, but there a places where the population isn’t counted in the millions, or even thousands, that still have their very own top-level domain on the Internet. Some of them aren’t even inhabited.

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What happened with the Internet in 2009?

How many websites were added? How many emails were sent? How many Internet users were there? This post will answer all of those questions and many more. Prepare for information overload, but in a good way.

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Now here’s an interesting piece of information. Skype has, as you may be aware of, become hugely popular and has a reported 521 million registered users. It turns out that that is enough to take a considerable chunk of change away from the traditional telephone companies, especially when it comes to those expensive international long-distance calls.

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DNS, the Domain Name System, is one of the major pillars of the Internet. It’s a critical service, and without it we would all have to use IP addresses instead of handy domain names like “Pingdom.com” when we want to visit websites, send emails, and so on.

However, DNS has a huge flaw. Because DNS lacks security features it has been relatively easy for hackers to trick DNS servers with false information. By tricking DNS servers, hackers have been able to hijack entire websites. Needless to say, attacks such as these are a security nightmare and can be used for a large variety of malicious purposes such as site defacement, phishing, malware installations, and more.

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On most social networks, you have to create a username when you sign up. Not only that, that username has to be unique, no duplicates allowed. Facebook on the other hand just takes your real name, no username, and it doesn’t matter if there’s someone already on the site with the same name as yours.

There are probably hundreds of factors that add up to explain Facebook’s success, but the question is if using real names instead of usernames isn’t one of the key features that have helped Facebook grow as large as it has.

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Have you ever wondered about those key moments in time that made open source software such an immense success story? We just did, and here below is our list.

We have narrowed the list down to what we consider the nine most important events that shaped open source into what it is today. The focus is on events that propelled open source forward and resulted in a rich inheritance, or events that strengthened the reputation of open source software in the eyes of the public.

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PageRank (PR) was Google’s original secret weapon, a scale that would rank websites based on incoming links and where those links came from. Although its relevance has arguably faded a bit over the years as Google has added more and more criteria to site rankings, it still goes hand in hand with SEO and every webmaster out there wants to have a high PR.

But do you need a high PR to have a successful site? Search rankings are one thing, but what about actual site popularity and traffic?

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