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 30th, 2011 by Pingdom
The Middle East is perhaps not what many people think of as one of the hottest telecom market in the world but new numbers by Informa Telecoms & Media may change your mind.
In total, the Middle East will see over 250 million mobile phone subscriptions by the end of 2012. Iran, by far the biggest market in the Middle East for mobile phone subscriptions, will account for around 90 million by end of 2011, predicted to grow to 122 million by end of 2016.
In terms of smartphones, the UAE is predicted to have over 70% smartphone penetration by 2016, up from 47% today. Compare this with the United States, with a smartphone penetration of 40% as of September 2011.
Let’s have a look at some of the other numbers to see what else is interesting.
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Posted in
Main on November 17th, 2011 by Pingdom
There should be no doubt in anyone’s mind that Apple’s iPad is the biggest seller in the tablet space, but we have seen many iPad competitors come out over recent months, including Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1, Blackberry PlayBook, Amazon Kindle Fire, and many more.
However, despite all these Android tablets, according to comScore in October 2011, 95.5% of all tablet web traffic in the U.S. comes from iPad.
That is a stunning number. So, is anyone really buying all these shipping Android tablets, and what do people do with them after they buy them? Because they don’t seem to be surfing the Web.
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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 September 9th, 2011 by Pingdom
We are in the middle of a new browser war, with Microsoft, Mozilla and Google all fighting for Web and HTML 5 supremacy. Ok, that was a bit dramatic, but there is some seriously intense competition going on right now.
With that in mind, you’d expect all three companies to do their utmost to get their latest and greatest web browsers on as many computers as possible. Google is doing that with Chrome. Mozilla is doing that with Firefox.
Microsoft is NOT doing that with Internet Explorer. Big emphasis on “not.”
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Posted in
Main on September 2nd, 2011 by Pingdom
The growth of the microblogging platform Tumblr has been nothing short of amazing. The increase in users and overall attention the service is getting is reminiscent of when Twitter took off. There are now almost 28 million blogs on Tumblr. A year ago there were seven million.
As if that wasn’t impressive enough, Tumblr users will soon have cranked out a whopping 10 billion posts. That’s a huge milestone for Tumblr. At the current rate of more than 37 million posts per day, this should happen in about a week.
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Posted in
Main on August 31st, 2011 by Pingdom
Remember domain tasting? At its worst, millions of domain names were yanked up and dropped every day in this rather nasty scheme that abused the five-day “add grace period” for domain registrations. Things were bad, really bad. Back in 2006-2007, a full 94% of domain registrations were the result of domain tasting, only 6% were legitimate, permanent registrations.
Domain tasting was largely killed off by some policy changes from ICANN in 2008 (with a final death blow early in 2009), so we thought it was interesting to see this historical chart of .com domain names that actually showed visual evidence of the practice, and when it disappeared.
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Posted in
Main on August 23rd, 2011 by Pingdom
China is not only the largest nation on the planet, these days it’s also by far the largest on the Internet (which wasn’t always the case). It has twice as many Internet users as the United States. And it’s only getting started.
The current situation is as follows…
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