Fourth generation or 4G mobile networks promise faster connections enabling users to do more while on the go. There’s quite some confusion about what 4G actually is and what technologies can be called 4G or not. 3GPP Long Term Evolution, or LTE for short, seems to be the technology that currently shows the most promise to be able to cut the Ethernet umbilical cord and set us free. Other than the promise of speeds in excess of 100 Mbps, why should you be excited about LTE coming to where you live?

Fresh numbers [PDF] from Informa Telecoms & Media show a majority of the world’s population will have the the option of LTE for mobile broadband soon, with around ten percent already living where LTE is running. We crunched the numbers and here are the key facts.

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At the recent F8 conference Facebook revealed that they now have 800 million active users. Europe, with Russia included, has a population of 727 million. We now have a social network that is so large that it could fill up a major world region with people and still have some to spare (this “spare” being twice the size of Canada’s entire population).

Another cool comparison is that Facebook now has as many users as the entire Internet did back in 2004, the year Facebook was founded.

For fun, here are some other size comparisons you can make.

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Have you ever asked yourself, “what if?”

Today, the global distribution of Internet users doesn’t really reflect how the population is distributed in the real world. Many countries (and whole regions) are either over- or underrepresented. Internet penetration varies wildly between countries.

So let’s do a thought experiment. What would the Internet look like if all countries were on an equal footing in terms of Internet penetration? We’ll take the United States as a baseline, with 78% of its population being Internet users, a level many industrialized countries either match or exceed.

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We know that there are approximately two billion Internet users in the world, but how are they distributed? More specifically, how are they spread over the world’s time zones? The world population isn’t spread evenly, and neither is the Internet population.

We couldn’t find this information anywhere, so we collected the data ourselves and did the necessary calculations to be able to put together this chart. We hope you will find it useful.

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This week, Spotify announced that it’s reached a big milestone: One million paying subscribers (out of a total of nearly 7 million active users). With this, it’s the largest music subscription service outside of Asia (apparently a South Korean service called Melon holds the top spot, according to FT.com).

That becomes even more impressive if you take into account that Spotify only launched two years ago and is available in just seven countries: the United Kingdom, Sweden (Spotify was founded by Swedes), Norway, Finland, France, Spain and the Netherlands.

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It doesn’t feel like 2000 was all that long ago, does it? But on the Internet, a decade is a long time. Ten years ago we were in the era of the dot-com boom (and bust), the Web was strictly 1.0, and Google was just a baby.

Since then people have welled onto the Internet. You don’t actually realize how many more people are on the Internet now until you start comparing numbers. This article is an in-depth study of how the number of Internet users has grown in the past decade.

We’ll start with the whole world, then world regions, then break it down even further into countries. As you’ll see, a lot has happened.

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In July we had a look at the worldwide state of the Internet. Now the time has come for something a bit more specific, the state of the Internet in Europe. We’ll look at this from two angles. First, which countries in Europe have the most Internet users, and second, which countries have the highest Internet penetration. Both are relevant in their own right.

Since Europe is such a diverse market with a multitude of countries and different languages, it makes sense to look at these countries separately. This contrary to the trend where people sometimes try to think of the European Union (much of, but not all of, Europe) as some kind of equivalent of the United States. The language issue alone makes the comparison moot.

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Last year, Google bought an old paper mill in Finland. Now the company is in process of converting that paper mill into a major data center. Construction is already well underway, and the data center is expected to go live next spring. It will be Google’s first dedicated data center in the Nordic countries, with several interesting innovations, for example being cooled entirely by sea water.

Swedish magazine Computer Sweden was recently on location in Finland and has published an article (in Swedish) with new information and pictures from the build. We’ve summarized the important parts of that article and also what other information we could find around the Web, mostly from Finnish newspaper articles.

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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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The world isn’t a fair place, and yet another way this is laid bare is the huge differences shown in Internet penetration among the population of the various world regions. We thought it would be interesting to see what kind of an effect this is having on the world Internet population of today.

Read on for a set of very revealing statistics and charts . . .

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