Out of the 59 US-based e-commerce sites we monitored during the holiday season last year 28 scored a perfect 100% uptime for December.

Whether this helped spur on the booming sales in the US, we don’t know, but retail e-commerce spending in the US reached $37.2 billion for the November to December 2011 period. That was an increase of 15% from the same period in 2010.

We decided to dig into the numbers for these e-commerce sites to see how well they did in terms of uptime and performance. After massaging the data coming from our Pingdom probes, it turns out that the sites overall performed well during December 2011 in terms of uptime, but response time was an issue for several sites.

Read more

We have pointed out China’s amazing potential before on this blog, and we have also made detailed comparisons between China and the USA.

But with over 1.3 billion people, China has “only” 77 million smartphones, which, per capita, is far behind many other countries around the world, including the USA.

So let’s be honest, haven’t you wondered what if China had the same number of smartphones per capita as the USA?

Let’s play a game of “what if.”

Read more

Just in case you managed to miss it, it’s January 18 today, and countless of websites show their support for the fight against the controversial SOPA legislation in the U.S.

SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act) is a bill in the U.S. House of Representatives and PIPA (Protect Intellectual Property Act) is a bill in the U.S. Senate. Figuring out exactly what the effect would be if the bills would pass is not easy. However, a widespread concern seems to be that it would “threaten prosperity, online security, and freedom of expression.”

In response to SOPA and PIPA, Reddit kicked off a campaign to blackout its site today in protest. That steamrolled and hundreds, if not thousands, of sites around the world are now taking part in this movement.

How each site displays its opposition is different and varies greatly. We have looked at a selection; many brought to us by our Twitter followers.

Read more

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.

Read more

Online social networks are everywhere these days, a truly global phenomenon. But where are the different social networks having the most success in terms of popularity? That is what we’ll try to answer in this post.

We have included 11 social networks in this survey: Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+, Orkut, Tumblr, FourSquare, MySpace, LiveJournal, Hi5 and Bebo.

Read more

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.

Read more

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.

Read more

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.

Read more

We noticed an interesting thing the other day that we’d like to share with you. However, if you’re a Linux enthusiast, you may want to stop reading now…

These are the operating system stats for April for the United States.

Read more

Arguably, there are currently only two superpowers on the planet: the United States and China. Now that the world is growing increasingly dependent on the Internet, how do these two giants stack up online?

We’ve taken a number of Internet-related metrics to compare the two countries, things like the number of Internet users, Internet penetration, the speed of Internet connections, the number of domain names, favorite websites, web browsers, operating systems and more.

Read more