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

As you no doubt have noticed by now, Mozilla launched Firefox 4 this week. It was downloaded 7.1 million times in the first 24 hours, and is now up to 15 million downloads and counting.

We figured a Firefox infographic would be nice to celebrate this event, so we made one for you. We hope you like it!

Read more

Have you ever wondered where in the world Macs are the most popular? We have, so we decided to find out.

To do this, we examined OS market share numbers from across the world to identify the countries where Mac OS X has the highest market share.

You’d expect the United States, Apple’s home market, to lead the pack, but it’s not quite that simple.

Read more

This week, Spotify announced that it’s reached a big milestone: One million paying subscribers (out of a total of nearly 7 million active users). With this, it’s the largest music subscription service outside of Asia (apparently a South Korean service called Melon holds the top spot, according to FT.com).

That becomes even more impressive if you take into account that Spotify only launched two years ago and is available in just seven countries: the United Kingdom, Sweden (Spotify was founded by Swedes), Norway, Finland, France, Spain and the Netherlands.

Read more

China just officially climbed to the top position in the supercomputer performance race. You may have read that the country now has the fastest, and also the third fastest, supercomputer in the world.

But this was no overnight success. It’s been a long race for China to get there. Back in the 90s, China’s presence in the supercomputer top 500 was almost non-existent, so most of this progress has happened in the last decade.

Read more

It doesn’t feel like 2000 was all that long ago, does it? But on the Internet, a decade is a long time. Ten years ago we were in the era of the dot-com boom (and bust), the Web was strictly 1.0, and Google was just a baby.

Since then people have welled onto the Internet. You don’t actually realize how many more people are on the Internet now until you start comparing numbers. This article is an in-depth study of how the number of Internet users has grown in the past decade.

We’ll start with the whole world, then world regions, then break it down even further into countries. As you’ll see, a lot has happened.

Read more

Enormous amounts of email circulate the Internet every day, there can be no doubt about that. But how does the amount of email compare with that of traditional mail, also known as “snail mail”?

It would be interesting to know, wouldn’t it?

We’ve done the research and done the math, so look no further than the small infographic we’ve put together here below, a comparison of email and snail mail volumes in the United States.

Enjoy!

Read more

Although the growth of Firefox has stagnated a bit lately due to the increasing competition from rival browsers, it’s still one of the biggest success stories in the history of the Internet and has the second-largest user base of any web browser.

Firefox has a widespread global user base, but we wanted to find out where it is most common, or another way of looking at it: how are the Firefox users distributed?

Read more

Facebook recently passed an incredible milestone, 500 million active users. And it keeps growing.

Although Facebook initially focused on the United States, it soon turned its eyes towards the horizon and the rest of the world. And it’s a tactic that’s been working extremely well. Facebook’s current user base is more than 1.6 times the size of the entire US population. If Facebook were a country, it’d be second only to China and India.

And speaking of countries… Now that it’s gone global, which countries have the most users on Facebook?

Read more

The world is a big place, but so is the Internet. We know which countries are the largest in the real world, but what about on the Internet?

This article examines which countries are the largest in terms of Internet users, and will also look into their growth potential. That last point is very interesting to look at, because it’s an indication of how the power balance on the Internet might shift in the future.

But before we head on to the charts, let’s start with a few interesting findings.

Read more