statistics

Play your way with Sudoku Game

Sudoku Game from MicroTools4U is freeware that lets you tackle Sudoku puzzles from a widely customizable interface. It includes ready-made puzzles but can also generate new ones. It also has full undo-redo, two sets of candidates, and multiplayer statistics.

Sudoku Game opens with an attractive wood-grain background and a basic game layout, with a timer and player, game, and other data to the right. When you first run Sudoku Game, a wizard walks you through the steps of setting up the program, overseen by what appears to be a California Raisin mascot. You start by creating a Player (that's … Read more

Airbnb hits 10M nights booked, 200,000 listings worldwide

Airbnb, a service that helps travelers book places to stay that are rented out by homeowners, renters, and landlords, has reached a milestone.

The company announced today that 10 million nights have been booked on its service since its launch in 2008. To put that figure into perspective, Airbnb revealed that 2 million nights were booked last June, and it reached 5 million in January -- four years after its founding. Less than half a year later, it has tallied the same figure.

But before the company's growth is marveled at, it's worth noting that Airbnb in March acquired its largest U.K. competitor, Crashpadder, for an undisclosed sum. … Read more

Apple's Mac base hits 66M users, 40 percent on Lion

Apple's Mac userbase has grown to 66 million users, the company announced today at its Worldwide Developers Conference.

The company, which also unveiled new MacBook Pros and a MacBook Air at the event, says that it has sold 26 million copies of Mac OS X Lion since its launch last summer, and 40 percent of its users are running that operating system.

That 40 percent figure proved important to Apple. During its keynote, the company said that it took Microsoft's Windows 7 platform 27 months to hit the same penetration rate as Lion, which needed only nine months … Read more

Apple: 30B apps downloaded, 400M App Store accounts set up

Apple's operation is showing no signs of slowing down.

Keep track of what else Apple is announcing at our WWDC keynote live blog.

At his company's Worldwide Developers Conference keynote today, Apple CEO Tim Cook announced that the Cupertino, Calif.-based firm has 400 million App Store accounts. In addition, the company has 650,000 apps in its App Store, and users have downloaded 30 billion apps so far. All that has helped Apple dole out $5 billion to developers since the marketplace's inception.

Back in March, Apple announced that its App Store had reached 25 billion downloads.… Read more

YouTube users uploading 72 hours of video each minute

YouTube might not be getting all of the attention Facebook gets nowadays, but that doesn't mean it isn't growing.

The Google-owned online video site announced its seventh birthday in a blog post yesterday, and to help celebrate the milestone, it announced that users now upload 72 hours of video to its service each minute. To put that into perspective, just one year ago, YouTube users were uploading 48 hours to the site every minute.

Just in January, YouTube said that 4 billion videos are viewed on the site each day. At the time, it also said 60 hours … Read more

Who's topping the big data charts?

Thanks to the rise of open-source data analysis tool Hadoop, business intelligence and analytics have reached new levels of interest and hype as the market scrambles to keep up with the volume of data and the need to make sense of it immediately.

In the wake of Yahoo nurturing Hadoop, an ecosystem sprung up among other big Internet companies developing their own tools, in many cases variations of database management systems. Facebook eventually rolled out Cassandra, Google introduced BigTable, and from there variations began to appear among smaller companies and open source foundations.

The majority of these databases rely on … Read more

How often do you use your iPad?

According to CNET UK's Crave blog, in a recent survey conducted by coupon site MyVoucherCodes.co.uk, out of a group of 1,531 U.K. iPad owners, many claimed their iPads were largely going unused. We want to know what our readers think.

According to the poll, 26 percent of iPad owners responding to the poll only use the tablet once per week while 10 percent say they may not use it at all. While those numbers come from a small sample size on a single site's survey, I wanted to know if our readers were having similar usage patterns with their iPads.

I find I use my mine nearly every day, whether I'm reading a book, catching up on the latest social goings-on with Facebook, or mulling over a crossword puzzle. The iPad also comes in handy for creating some cool content for my film experiments and perfecting my musical chops in GarageBand.

How do you use your iPad? Answer the poll and let me know in the comments!… Read more

15 years of Download.com, the original app store

Long before the iTunes Store was a glimmer in Steve Jobs' eye, Download.com launched in 1996 as the most comprehensive, safest place to get all your software, from the latest drivers and codecs to professional-grade programs. It was, and still is, notable for scanning and testing its software catalog to ensure that none would infect your computer. We take a look at the history of the software world before Download.com, the rise of modern software, and where software stands now.

The software world before Download.com: The software world grew rapidly throughout the 1980s and early 1990s. In … Read more

VC funding continues record pace in third quarter

Venture investing for the third quarter of 2011 reached new heights yet again with a record $7.9 billion in funding for 790 companies according to a new report from private company research firm CB Insights.

The report released today shows that, despite market turmoil and economic uncertainty, VCs opened their wallets at a record level in the third quarter. And if this pace continues, we're on track for 2011 to see the highest levels of financing in more than a decade, potentially at $30 billion for the full year.

I discussed the new report with CB Insights CEO … Read more

Is storage holding back virtualization?

Virtualization's benefits--server consolidation, improved resource utilization, faster application deployment, and overall flexibility--have made it one of IT's most important tools.

Earlier this year, a Gartner survey of more than 2,000 CIOs indicated that virtualization was one of their highest priorities in 2011 (eclipsed only by cloud computing).

But given the benefits and the rapid adoption of virtualized environments, can we expect virtualization will be extended to 100 percent of applications? If not, what are the barriers to increased virtualization footprints with the enterprise?

Tintri, a provider of VM-aware storage appliances, recently conducted a survey of 126 virtualization … Read more