At Pingdom we pride ourselves in making it easy for anyone to monitor the uptime and performance of websites and servers. We are very passionate about what we do and we want to make sure we include you, our customer, when we map out the future of our products.

Yesterday, we showed you a bunch of new cool and shiny hardware that will be used for a new product. Today we’d like to invite you to take part in shaping the next step in our quest to make the Internet a faster and more reliable place: RUM.

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You remember floppy disks, don’t you? Those truly floppy (hence the name) disks of thin plastic, which we all used to store and transfer files with before we had the Internet and USB thumb drives.

Today in 1930, one of the most significant people ever in the computer storage industry, was born. Alan Shugart sadly passed away in 2006, but he leaves an impressive legacy of work, starting out at IBM and later cofounding Seagate. We wanted, in his memory, to take a look at the first floppy drive.

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A lot of things are happening at Pingdom, thanks to you, our dedicated customers. Looking back at the past six months or so we can note that we’ve become a LIR, migrated more than 250k users to a new platform, launched a new control panel, and much more.

That’s not even mentioning the new office we moved into earlier this year and all the great new geeky additions to the team. But we’re really only getting started, and we wanted to give a look at the future.

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Research In Motion, makers of BlackBerry smartphones and related products, has not been in the headlines much with positive news in recent years. But the total number of BlackBerry users worldwide has, despite the bad news, kept growing, at least until now.

With the new platform, BlackBerry 10, around the corner, promising new functionality and updated handsets, is there still hope for RIM? You can decide for yourself after going through these figures.

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Today, the Pingdom team deployed a software upgrade to some of our monitoring probes. Despite thorough testing, this upgrade contained a malfunction that led to false down alerts being sent to a portion of our customers.

Even if the issue affected monitoring for less than 90 minutes for a limited number of customers, it’s of course frustrating if you were one of them. We take a lot of pride in delivering a reliable service and this doesn’t represent what Pingdom stands for.

Let us first stress how rare it is that something like this happens at Pingdom. In fact, this is the first time a similar occurrence has struck us. That said, we want to take this opportunity to provide information about what happened, present what actions we’ve already taken, as well as tell you how we move forward.

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This is our collection of must-read articles for the weekend.  There’s something about performance tuning, Python, web fonts, and more.

Every week we bring you a collection of links to places on the web that we find particularly newsworthy, interesting, entertaining, and topical. We try to focus on some particular area or topic each week, but in general we will cover Internet, web development, networking, web performance, security, and other geeky topics.

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Continuing a string of recent hires, we’re today very happy to welcome interaction designer Magnus Leo to the Pingdom team. We’re excited to find out what he really means when he says “I make things interactive.”

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Musicmetric, an online music analytics firm, has published a report, which it claims to be “the most in-depth study ever of the global digital music landscape.” In the report, we find a list of the 10 countries in the world where the most music has been illegally downloaded during the first half of 2012.

But the report only lists total downloads. What happens if we, instead, put the number of downloads in relation to the size of the population and the number of Internet users?

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We have in several articles recently written about how the top brands in the world are using social media, like Facebook and Twitter. That peaked our interest in these global giants so we decided to start following their web presence as well to see if there’s possibly more to find.

With Coca-Cola in the lead, followed by IBM, Microsoft, and Google, this is a list of some of the biggest companies in the world, and we think you will find it particularly interesting to follow how they perform online.

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Pingdom has studied the uptime of the official websites of all 290 municipalities in Sweden during July, and we can now present that only 17% of the sites scored a perfect 100% uptime. In this study, we also identify the 20 municipalities with the worst uptime record in July.

It’s clear on the basis of this study that website uptime is something that many municipalities in Sweden continue to struggle with. Availability of their websites and other online services is a key issue that needs to be dealt with, as more and more local governments around the world, including municipalities, take to the Internet for communicating with residents and conducting business.

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