Forbes came out with their yearly “rich list” this week, also known as The World’s Billionaires 2011. As usual, it contains a wealth (pardon the pun) of data and we’ve pulled all the stats together for you and added some of our own.

Rather than just giving you a top list of the world’s billionaires (which you might as well read about over at Forbes.com), we went a step farther and created a statistical overview, with plenty of charts, factoids and lists for you to enjoy.

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A significant number of iPhone owners have chosen to circumvent Apple’s default iPhone OS installation with a hacked version that lets them install applications from outside the App Store, have applications running in the background, and so on. It’s called, as you probably know, “jailbreaking”.

There are a lot of jailbroken iPhones out there. Exactly how many is hard to tell, but there are estimates that as many as 8.5% of all iPhones and iPod Touches are jailbroken. That number comes from Jay Freeman, founder of Cydia, a kind of alternative app store for jailbroken iPhones.

So where in the world is it most common to jailbreak your iPhone?

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The iPad has made a huge splash in a very short time, and this in spite of only being available in the United States. Now that its release in other countries is getting closer every day, where is anticipation the hottest? Which countries are the most interested in the iPad?

This is one area where Google can come to the rescue of Apple (something we haven’t seen much of lately). Google Insights for Search can show the “regional interest” for various terms. When a brand name is involved, like the iPad, it becomes very useful since it will be same all over the world and will reflect interest in that brand or product. We used this tool to research the overall global interest in the iPad, and also where in the United States it’s most popular.

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The hardware in the sky that makes the Global Positioning System work is a mystery to most of us. You, however, will soon know a lot more about it.

After all, why wouldn’t you want to know more about the system that makes all of today’s cool location-based services possible? GPS has become our everyman, everyday companion now that it’s present in just about every smartphone out there.

So here you go, more interesting GPS factoids than you can shake a stick at.

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Facebook is easily the most widely used social network in the world today, an international success. Since its start in 2004, it has grown to more than 300 million active users, which is unprecedented. No social network has ever been as big as Facebook is now.

This post takes a look at Facebook’s geographic expansion from its start in 2004 until today in 2009, showing how its popularity has grown year by year.

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Twitter’s meteoric rise to fame has been hard to miss, especially after it really took off in 2009. The latest number being thrown around is that the service will soon have 18 million users in the United States alone.

We all know that Twitter is extremely popular in the United States, but it’s pretty darn popular in the rest of the world as well (Pingdom is on Twitter, and we’re Swedes!) But it took Twitter a while to get there.

Let’s take a tour of the geographic expansion of Twitter from its launch in 2006 until today in 2009.

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The DNS root servers, the backbone for handling all domain name queries on the Internet, used to all be located in North America. Not anymore. Thanks to the anycast technology used by six of the root server adresses, the actual locations of the servers have been spread all over the world and their numbers increased [...]

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