It’s always interesting when Google decides to push something on their main property, the Google search page. Considering how ubiquitous Google is, this is such a power move.

What we mean is that no other company can cast its net this wide by just modifying its home page. We all use Google. It’s like your TV remote suddenly coming alive and telling you that yeah, you should check out that Google+ thing.

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Here’s a thought, or rather a theory, that we’d love to run by you.

It starts with a little piece of irony. Most advertisers want people to buy their product, i.e. pay for it. When an app (on any platform) is free and sponsored by ads, a large portion of its user base will be people who want something for free. If we’re allowed to generalize here, they don’t want to pay if they can avoid it.

Spotted the problem yet?

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Few tech companies can tap into the zeitgeist like Apple does. Another excellent example of this has been the hype build-up leading up to the iPad 2 launch. People just couldn’t stop talking about it.

Of course, with the first iPad being such a popular product, interest in its successor has been growing rapidly over the past few months, and speculation has been running rampant.

You know how we love proper data, so here is a graph showing the interest in iPad 2 leading up to the March 2 announcement (based on Google search stats).

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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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With Ubuntu 10.4, codenamed Lucid Lynx, Ubuntu will change its look completely. Everything will be brand new; the logo, the user interface, and the color scheme (no more brown). It’s set to be released on April 29, less than a month away.

We are very curious to see if this makeover will give Ubuntu a boost in popularity. It’s already the most popular desktop Linux distribution, but will this new look, this new branding, make it easier for Ubuntu to cast its net even wider and grow the Linux user base as a whole?

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We wanted to share an interesting observation regarding the two social networks that are dominating our collective mindshare these days: Facebook and Twitter.

Both get their fair share of attention from the media, but a very interesting pattern has emerged over the last year that we will reveal here below.

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We have entered a new era when it’s easier than ever before to get your opinion out there. Writing a short message on Twitter takes almost no effort at all and it is immediately published on the Web. Services like Twitter have amplified the word-of-mouth effect several times over.

For an extreme example, just check out the talk on Twitter when Gmail is down.

There is a parallel here to blogging. What regular blogging once did for word of mouth was to make it possible for anyone to become a publisher (going from “one-to-one” to “one-to-many” communication). This has now been taken one step further since even those reluctant to maintain a blog won’t think twice about sending out a quick message on Twitter or any other micro-blogging service.

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Few have managed to make better use of the Open Source model than Mozilla, and we recently saw some very impressive numbers on how much of Mozilla’s work is done by volunteers versus its internal staff that we thought were worth sharing with you (emphasis in the quote below added by us).

Even as Mozilla’s internal staff has grown to 250, from 15 in 2005, an army of volunteers still contributes about 40% of the company’s work, which ranges from tweaks to the programming code to designing the Firefox logo.

Since we are a naturally curious bunch here at Pingdom, we had to ask ourselves how much the time that these volunteers contribute is actually worth in terms of money.

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We know Twitter is getting a lot of press these days, but how much? And how much media attention are they getting compared to other hugely popular sites and companies like Facebook, YouTube and Google? Read on to find out.

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Sony Ericsson just reported a $300 million loss for the second quarter of 2009 and Nokia reported a 71% decline in profits for the same period. Times are tough for the (shrinking) mobile giants.

Gee, wonder why…?

Have a look at this article for a very telling illustration.

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