Today Apple updated its WWDC page announcing that tickets to the annual developer event will go on sale tomorrow, April 25, at 10 a.m. PDT. If you had Pingdom monitoring enabled for Apple’s page, you were likely among the first ones to know about this.

However, since Apple has apparently changed tactics this year, even if you monitored the page with our services, you may not necessarily be one of the first ones to get a ticket tomorrow.

All is not in vain, however. The same technique can be used for many other things.

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In today’s branded world, it is almost impossible to imagine a company that does not own the domain associated with their name or brand. But several of today’s famous domains had a very different use before they were big.

For example, did you know that iCloud.com once was the personal homepage of a Japanese professor?

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There is no denying that Android, Google’s operating system for mobile devices, is big. For example, Android is the OS on 42% of all consumer compute devices.

We have scoured the web for data that will help us show exactly how big Android is in the smartphone world. And in every way we looked at it, Android is ginormous.

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In the 30 years since the introduction of Lotus 1-2-3 very little seems to have happened when it comes to how spreadsheets look and work. When it launched on January 26, 1983, Lotus 1-2-3 was not the first spreadsheet; that title goes to VisiCalc. But since it became the killer app of the first IBM PC, it certainly ranks as one of the most important pieces of software ever. We connected with the developer of Lotus 1-2-3, Jonathan Sachs, to get his take on spreadsheets and the last three decades. Read on for the complete interview.

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What kind of battery life do you demand from your laptop? Would you be fine with a few hours, or do you want a full workday out of one charge, or perhaps even more? This is a question facing many of us, and recently we at Pingdom spent some time thinking about it.

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Remember netbooks, those underpowered but very small and inexpensive laptops? If ever anything came and went in a whirlwind, that’s the example to we’d point to. Netbook sales are now a mere shadow of their former glory.

To some extent, netbooks were probably hampered by the wave of lightweight laptops that started appearing a couple of years ago. They weren’t quite as small, but small enough, and much more powerful. What they weren’t, however, was cheap. In that way they could not supersede the netbook.

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According to the latest global web browser statistics, Safari accounts for 7.1% of desktop browsing traffic. That puts Safari in fourth place, after Chrome, IE, and Firefox.

But where around the world is Safari really popular? There must be places where it can claim much higher figures than 7.1%, surely. Of course there are, and, as it turns out, many of them are places you go if you don’t really want to pay taxes.

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The heyday of the iPod was a huge deal for Apple. For many people, it was the first Apple product they owned, and those who fell in love with it often went on to buy other Apple products. This was sometimes referred to as the iPod halo effect, and gave Apple a mass-market reach it had never had before. Without the iPod, Apple wouldn’t have been anywhere near as successful in the past decade.

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Apple has been dominating the tablet market ever since the company released the iPad, so calling the current situation a tablet war might be a bit overly dramatic. But things are heating up. The number of Android-based tablets is growing, and now even Google itself has joined the fray with the Nexus 7.

What is the current standing in this “tablet war,” and how does it differ across the world? Luckily, we can get an idea by using data from StatCounter. Their data is based on web usage (visitor stats from 3+ million websites), so it will represent the tablets actively used to surf the web.

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Just a few days ago Mozilla revealed the Firefox OS, formerly called Boot 2 Gecko, a mobile OS. There’s much to like about the upcoming OS (to be launched in 2013), but Mozilla sure has a tough fight on its hands to get traction in the crowded mobile space. We wish Mozilla good luck and look forward to seeing the new OS on actual handsets next year.

Every Friday 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, performance, security, and other geeky topics.

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