Posted in
Main on January 10th, 2012 by Pingdom
Apple is often referred to as a design leader. Since Steve Jobs came back and took over the company in 1997, the focus and inventiveness shown by Apple’s industrial design team has been remarkable.
Apple’s design prowess has greatly influenced the evolution of the common laptop over the past 10+ years. The company has gone from being a marginal player in that market to become one of the biggest, most popular laptop manufacturers in the world.
That success has of course bred imitation from other laptop makers, some subtle, some not so subtle. Would today’s laptops be as slick and beautiful without the influence from Apple? Most likely not.
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Posted in
Main on December 9th, 2011 by Pingdom
How about paying almost $4,000 for a basic PC? Or $7,600 for a printer? That’s how much you would pay for some classic tech items if they were sold today with prices adjusted for inflation.
After having looked at classic hardware before here at Royal Pingdom, we now thought it would be interesting to dip into the pool of great gadgets again, this time focusing on prices.
So with the help of the Consumer Price Index Inflation Calculator, we’ve brought prices of a few classic tech items into the current year.
As you will see, we should be very grateful for what we pay for most tech today.
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Posted in
Main on November 18th, 2011 by Pingdom
We’re excited for our U.S. readers that Google has introduced its online music service – finally. For the rest of us, we have to wait and see when we’ll be lucky enough to see Google Music’s presence where we live.
Google Music went live almost nine years after Apple opened the doors to its iTunes Store. To see what Google is up against, we have collected a plethora of numbers about iTunes from all over the Web.
As you will see, Google is facing some long odds. We hope for Google’s sake this isn’t a case of too little, too late, considering what a behemoth they are competing with.
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Posted in
Main on November 10th, 2011 by Pingdom
It’s interesting how quickly we humans start taking things for granted. In a fast-moving landscape like technology, especially IT, this becomes all the more obvious.
When you start thinking back to how things were just a few years ago, it’s amazing how different things were. So many of the gadgets, services and sites we all take for granted today simply weren’t around.
In that spirit, let’s take a few steps back in time and look what you DIDN’T have a few years ago. We’ll jump back five years at a time.
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Posted in
Main on November 1st, 2011 by Pingdom
And now for something short and sweet, or bittersweet if you worked at MySpace back in 2006-2007 when the social network was still going strong.
To say that Facebook stole MySpace’s thunder in those years is probably the understatement of the decade. By the end of 2008, the social media focus (and mindshare) had already shifted away from MySpace to Facebook in a massive fashion. A picture is worth a thousand words, or in this case, a chart.
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Posted in
Main on October 19th, 2011 by Pingdom
The Internet’s favorite top-level domain is close to hitting a huge milestone. The .com domain is now on the brink of reaching 100 million registered domain names. It’s a real triumph for what is already by far the world’s largest top-level domain – it accounts for around 45% of all domain names.
It’s not quite there yet, though. There are currently 98 million registered .com domain names, so there are still two million to go. Judging by the chart here below from Registrar Stats, we will reach the 100-million milestone within a few months, sometime around the end of this year.
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Posted in
Main on September 26th, 2011 by Pingdom
The current big international social networks are Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and the newly formed Google+, and perhaps Tumblr, if you want to look at it as a social network. However, go back to around 2004-2005 and these were either not around yet, or just taking their early baby steps. Back then the big ones were Friendster, LiveJournal and MySpace.
And we’re talking in past tense, because oh how the mighty have fallen. Web users are a fickle bunch, and there is probably no market as trend sensitive as social networking.
How bad is it? As you’ll see, they’re all caught in a downward spiral, but they might have peaked later in life than you think.
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Posted in
Main on March 31st, 2011 by Pingdom
As you may know if you’re a regular reader of this blog, sometimes we like to take a trip down memory lane. It’s time for another one of those trips, to the murky past of the Internet and the dawning World Wide Web of 1995.
Let’s start first with the people who actually use the Internet. How many were there back then?
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Posted in
Main on December 6th, 2010 by Pingdom
Nokia is the world’s largest manufacturer of mobile phones. Lately the company has had its thunder stolen by Apple’s iPhone and the plethora of Android devices flooding the market, especially in the fast-growing smartphone market.
In other words, Nokia is in a bit of trouble. However, considering how much flack the company has been getting lately in the tech press, we thought it would be nice to look back and give Nokia some credit for what they have accomplished in the past. Because it’s a past filled to the brim with innovation.
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Posted in
Main on December 2nd, 2010 by Pingdom
Computer hardware has become infinitely more powerful through the years, a trend that has allowed computer makers to push the performance to levels we almost thought were impossible just a decade earlier.
The exponential growth of computing performance is very noticeable when you examine how the performance of the world’s most powerful computer systems, the supercomputers, has changed over time.
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