There’s no doubt that when the first iPhone was launched in 2007, it revolutionized not only the mobile phone industry, but the tech industry at large.

But what we have discovered is that, at least in terms of the guiding principles behind the iPhone’s raison d’être, Apple has been thinking about this for a long time.

What we’re about to reveal originates in a document dated 1979, in which Jef Raskin, then Manager of Publications at Apple, laid out many guiding principles behind the Macintosh computer’s design.

It’s almost spooky how applicable it is to the modern Apple and its thinking especially behind the iPhone.

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We’ve noted many successful open source projects and products before on this blog, and the Web is arguably the biggest one of them all.

Two such products we’ve failed to recognize, however, are the very first web browser and server, simply called World Wide Web, developed by Tim Berners-Lee.

Today is especially important in the history of the web since on April 30, 1993, CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, released World Wide Web into the public domain.

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Knäppa is a recyclable camera just introduced by IKEA. It is complete with zoom (move your arms in and out) and image stabilization (rest your arms on something).

Clearly, Knäppa is super simple, made out of one sheet of cardboard that folds up, one button, two plastic screws, two batteries, and a USB port. The company wants customers to use the camera to take pictures of their homes to share with others through the IKEA website.

But what may be the most amazing thing about the Knäppa camera is that its manual comes in 29 languages.

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George Orwell’s arguably most famous novel, the dystopian Nineteen Eighty-Four, coined a number of phrases that are in widespread use today. One of them was “Big Brother,” an authority figure who watches every move you make, everywhere. The term has become synonymous with mass surveillance. As you can imagine, the book is easily as relevant today as it was back in 1949 when it was first published. (It’s a great read, btw.)

The usual complaints about modern-era Big Brothers – aside from that annoying reality show – tend to be targeted at initiatives to place more surveillance cameras in various locations (e.g. the camera-riddled London). Then of course there is the monitoring of our activities on the Internet by governments, ISPs and organizations with their own agendas.

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This week we thought you would be interested in reading about the latest processors from Intel called Ivy Bridge.

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In this continuing series of interviews about web performance we now turn to cloud application platform provider Heroku.

James Ward, Principal Developer Evangelist at Heroku, will take us through the current state of web performance, detailing what Heroku is working on, and give some advice as well.

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In this show, we talk to Nicolai Solling, Director of Technology Services at help AG, about security in general and Google Drive in particular.

First, we continue on the topic of the Flashback Mac trojan, which continues to haunt the Mac community, even more so than previously thought. And apparently Macs spread malware to Windows PCs at an alarming rate. The main topic of the show is Google’s new online storage service Google Drive, and how you can secure the information you store in your online drive with TrueCrypt.

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As you may have heard, Facebook very recently passed 900 million active users. We think it’s pretty safe to say that it’s by far the largest social network in history.

That number, 900 million, is hard to get your head around. It’s such a huge number. We thought it would be fun to illustrate it with a neat little infographic. Enjoy!

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We hope you had Pingdom monitoring for WWDC tickets, as Apple just opened up this year’s ticket sales.

A little while ago we showed you how to set up an alert with our monitoring service, so that you could get notified when Apple started selling the tickets.

How many took advantage of this? Quite a few people did and here’s what some of them had to say.

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Instagram is one of those crazy success stories, an app and social network that has grown tremendously fast. If you’ve noticed an increase in Instagram pictures being shared to other social networks lately, you’re not imagining things. Sharing from Instagram to Twitter is now double what it was two months ago, and 20x what it was a year ago.

Sharing from Instagram is not just increasing because more people are downloading the app, the average user is also sharing more. This according to data from Distimo (in collaboration with Skylines for photo sharing data), who just released their latest app store market report. The report also included this very revealing chart.

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