This week, Spotify announced that it’s reached a big milestone: One million paying subscribers (out of a total of nearly 7 million active users). With this, it’s the largest music subscription service outside of Asia (apparently a South Korean service called Melon holds the top spot, according to FT.com).

That becomes even more impressive if you take into account that Spotify only launched two years ago and is available in just seven countries: the United Kingdom, Sweden (Spotify was founded by Swedes), Norway, Finland, France, Spain and the Netherlands.

To see just how geographically concentrated Spotify’s current user base is, take a look at this world map showing Google search volume for “Spotify” (including popular variations like “Spotify download” and similar terms) during the past 12 months.

That map says it all. Spotify really is just getting started, and in a very limited territory at that. So far, the service has been taking baby steps compared to what might lie ahead.

Here’s a different view of the regional breakdown of the countries where Spotify is available, based on the same data as the map. Just to make it easier to see the proportions.

Note, this is all normalized data, i.e. it’s adjusted by the size of the countries (or some similar criteria, like the total number of searches in a country), so this doesn’t necessarily mean that most of Spotify’s users are in Sweden.

What’s clear is that in a relatively small market, Spotify has managed to get a million paying subscribers (plus millions of ad-funded free users) in a very short time.

Now imagine Spotify finally gaining access to the United States, the largest paying music market in the world, and making a similar splash there. It could be a game changer.

An investment in Apple stock 10 years ago would be worth 47 times as much today. An investment in Amazon would have given you 14 times your money back. Not a bad way to spend some dollars in 2002.

Those are far from the only stocks that would have given huge returns over a 10-year time span, though. Other notable mentions include Akamai and Red Hat, both returning more than 10 times the money over the past 10 years.

Read more

Have you felt the effects of BYOD in your company? Chances are, you and your colleagues want to Bring Your Own Devices to the office and use instead of, or in addition to, the equipment the company has issued. But BYOD arguably has immense implications in terms of security and many other areas.

Read more

Just a couple of weeks ago we reported that South Korea has the fastest average Internet connection speed in the world, reaching 17.5 Mbps in the latest report by Akamai, covering Q4 2011.

Now we take a look at where in the world Internet speeds have grown the fastest over the last four and a half years. It may surprise you, which countries actually made it onto the list.

Read more

Lately there’s been a tremendous amount of hype about the potential of an “Instagram for video” as the next big thing. However, there’s a fundamental problem that stands in the way of that. For lack of a better word, it’s the problem of scannability (yes, that’s probably a brand new word…).

Twitter can be scanned quickly. Tweets are bite-sized and take mere seconds for users to process. Instagram is pretty much Twitter for images, where entries can also be scanned in mere seconds. Sometimes it doesn’t even take that long.

Read more

Admit it, you have an iPad! And you lug it around with you in the data center, when checking your servers, when troubleshooting, and all the time, really.

Simply, we know many sysadmins use iPads (and other types of tablets as well) in the daily work. So, to inspire you, we have tested a bunch of apps for iPad that we think you will find interesting.

After a rigorous selection-process (and input from our Twitter followers), we can now present to you 10 great iPad apps for sysadmins.

Read more