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Main on April 29th, 2012 by Pingdom
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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Main on April 27th, 2012 by Pingdom
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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Main on April 27th, 2012 by Pingdom
This week we thought you would be interested in reading about the latest processors from Intel called Ivy Bridge.
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Main on April 26th, 2012 by Pingdom
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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Main,
Podcast on April 26th, 2012 by Pingdom
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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Main on April 25th, 2012 by Pingdom
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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Main on April 25th, 2012 by Pingdom
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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Main on April 25th, 2012 by Pingdom
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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Main on April 24th, 2012 by Pingdom
Google’s Dropbox competitor is finally here. At 09:30 PST, we detected that the drive.google.com website went live.
The interwebs have been buzzing with talk about this for a long time. Some of the earliest mentions of this service go back to 2006, so Google Drive has been many years in the making.
The recent intensity of the buzzing made us set up monitoring to see if we could catch Google in the act, so to speak. And now we have.
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Main on April 24th, 2012 by Pingdom
IRC (Internet Relay Chat) has been around since 1988, which makes it ancient in Internet terms. And although it’s still used by hundreds of thousands of users around the world, IRC has seen a dramatic downturn in usage.
We have talked to the creator of IRC, and others, about why the once so widely used technology has seemingly fallen out of favor with so many users.
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