Five years ago, Apple was a successful company with the iPod and its Mac line of computers. But it had not yet launched the iPhone. It had not yet launched the iPad. Back then, Apple’s yearly profit was $2.4 billion. In 2010 that number had risen to $16.6 billion. And in the first quarter of 2011, Apple has already made a $6 billion profit, well on its way to eclipsing previous years. It’s become a cash machine.

Apple is riding a wave of continuous success, and the stock market simply loves it. The value of the company has skyrocketed.

That’s the part we will take a closer look at in this article. How well has Apple done compared with other big tech companies in the last five years, i.e. 2011 compared to 2006, the year before Apple launched the iPhone?

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Three tech companies seem to come up over and over again. They’ve become the trinity of tech, at least as far as most IT consumers are concerned. They are Microsoft, its long-time rival Apple, and Google.

Both Apple and Microsoft are veterans, having started their operations in the 1970s and gone public in the 1980s. In IT, that’s a very long time ago. Just think about it, these two companies were part of the birth of personal computing!

We thought it would be interesting to see how their fortunes (as in “business success”) have changed through the years, and how Google, a much later arrival, compares.

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Google made a huge splash when it announced its plans for the Chrome operating system, a web-centric OS where essentially everything is run through a web browser. One great promise of Google’s Chrome OS is the arrival of low-cost, lightweight hardware, since most of the storage and other data handling is done in the cloud. Perhaps that 100-dollar computer will finally become a reality.

But there is a problem. A rather big one. The strength of the Chrome OS, that it makes maximum use of online resources, also limits its potential adoption. To have any real use of the OS you need a decent Internet connection, and that has some significant implications we need to look at.

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There’s been talk about Twitter being the “pulse of the web”, and there is no doubt that the real-time web and real-time search are burning hot trends. At the heart of Twitter are its status messages, more commonly known as tweets, where people express opinions, share links and let people know what they are doing. Tweets are like the vital red blood cells in Twitter’s stream of information.

So how many tweets are pulsing through Twitter every day? When do we tweet the most? Read on to find out.

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Facebook claims to have Twitter “in the rear-view mirror,” but of course the company is keeping a close eye on what’s happening with Twitter. The recent inclusion of Twitter-style tagging with the @-symbol in Facebook certainly seems more than a little inspired by Twitter.

There is one thing we find a wee bit strange, though. Although we love Twitter and the service is clearly growing like crazy, the way people are talking about Twitter and Facebook often makes it sound like Twitter may overtake Facebook any day now. Those people need to realize how big Facebook really is.

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Verisign, the registry that handles the .com and .net top-level domains (TLDs), has released a new edition of its quarterly Domain Name Industry Brief, a report covering trends within the domain name industry.

As usual the report is crammed full of data about domain name registration trends and which TLDs are the most popular. We’ve cherry-picked some of the more interesting data points for your reading pleasure.

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This is a guest post by David Walsh from WebHostingSearch.com.

HostingCon 2009 in Washington DC is just around the corner. It is the largest hosting conference and provides a great opportunity for people in the industry to discuss the future and the changes in the industry. We are going to give you a sneak peek at 10 trends that most likely will be discussed at the DC event.

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There are now 177 million domain names across all top-level domains, which is an increase by 16% (24 million domain names) compared to a year ago.

These numbers are from the latest Domain Name Industry Brief, a quarterly report from Verisign about the growth of the domain name industry. Verisign has been doing this report a few years now, so we went back and looked at the data for 2006 and 2007 as well so we could show a wider time frame than just 2008 (to see trends, etc).

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The Web has created its own set of words, but their popularity change over time. We have checked the trends for 45 different Web-related terms such as “social media”, “blogging”, “RSS”, “Web 2.0″ and their like. For your convenience, we have collected the results in a handy, alphabetically sorted table that you can see below.

We have focused on the popularity of general terminology, not products. For example, we included the term “microblogging”, but not “Twitter”.

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Every year, companies find that someone has registered domain names involving their trademarks, or variations of their domain names that are confusingly similar to the original. If a solution can’t be found by talking to the registrant of the offending domain name(s), a formal dispute usually follows.

WIPO, the World Intellectual Property Organization (an agency of the UN), has an arbitration and mediation center for domain disputes, and they continually publish the results of these disputes, as well as related facts and figures.

We have summarized some of the most interesting data in this article, and we have also tried to figure out the underlying reason for the increase in domain disputes. Well, at least we have a pretty good theory involving Google AdSense…

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