Have you ever scanned a QR code? If you have, did you get a discount on something? Did it reveal some cool information? Did it give you an offer you just couldn’t refuse?

It’s clear that QR codes are increasing in popularity, but to be truly as viral and useful as many companies hope they will, they have to become more useful.

We have an example from the Pingdom office today of a QR code that doesn’t deliver any value to the customer at all. Read on to find out 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.”

Every single day we’re giving away a 1-year Basic Account package, worth almost $120, to one lucky person that has a chance to walk away with this catch.

What we do is that at a different time each day, we post a message on Twitter with a link containing a discount code.

The code entitles the first person that applies it to a transaction, to a 100% discount on a 1-year Basic Package, worth $119.40.

The work on getting our brand new office ready continues at breakneck speed. We shared with you the progress back in November and now it’s time for an update.

We’ve been visiting the office on a weekly basis to keep an eye on what’s happening. Since the last time, the main development is that there is now carpet in most of the office as well as the dropped ceiling is in place. Basically, it’s all coming together.

What we’re probably most proud of, however, are the handles for the bathrooms. They stay lit in green until someone occupies the bathroom; then green turns to red. How clever is that?

Read on to find out what other cool stuff the new Pingdom office offers.

Yesterday we introduced you to Svante, our new System Administrator, and today it’s Fredrik Berglund’s turn. Would you believe it, Fredrik also comes from Eskilstuna, just like Svante, and Fredrik also got started with programming on a PC with Intel 286 processor. They even went to the same university!

But let’s turn our attention back to Fredrik, for a moment.

That 286 PC, which his dad dragged home, really got Fredrik working hard on his programming skills, getting to grips with assembly language and even hexadecimal code. His interest in computers then took him to studies in computational science at Mälardalens University.

This week, the Pingdom team, is getting reinforcement in the form of Svante Boberg who joins us as System Administrator.

At Pingdom, Svante will work with a wide range of tasks, including maintenance of infrastructure, upgrades, and more. To put it in another way, he will make sure it all runs.

Svante hails from Eskilstuna, which is right next door to the Pingdom HQ in Västerås, Sweden. He started using computers at a very early age, and began programming in QBasic on his first computer, which was an Intel 286-based PC.

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.

So what happened with the Internet in 2011? How many email accounts were there in the world in 2011? How many websites? How much did the most expensive domain name cost? How many photos were hosted on Facebook? How many videos were viewed to YouTube?

We’ve got answers to these questions and many more. A veritable smorgasbord of numbers, statistics and data lies in front of you. Using a variety of sources we’ve compiled what we think are some of the more interesting numbers that describe the Internet in 2011.

If you want to work for a popular, fast-growing web services company with a global audience, Pingdom is the place for you.

Do you live in Sweden? Then why not jump on these opportunities right away?

We’re starting a new year with lots of things happening and with lots of promise and excitement for the future. Pingdom is going from strength to strength, and we’re looking to expand our great team with another set of talented and driven individuals.

No, we didn’t go to CES this year, but we’ve followed the action from Las Vegas from afar with great interest.

Today is the last day of CES, so we wanted to bring you a selection of what we thought were the most exciting new gadgets and technology coming out of Las Vegas this January.

So here’s our pick for the ten most exciting gadgets at CES 2012, in no particular order.

In December, we looked at how the Internet has spread across the world from 1991 to 2010. We presented this in the form of an animation, highlighting each country in different colors depending in what percentages of the population were online.

Now we bring you a follow-up. This time we use data from the World Bank for mobile subscriptions per 100 people and map it out over the years.

As it turns out, there’s quite a difference between the two.

Last week we published an article declaring that NGINX had become the second most used web server software in the world, thereby overtaking Microsoft Internet Information Server (IIS).

In that article, based on figures from Netcraft’s Web Server Survey, we looked at the data for “active sites.” NGINX had in that category pulled ahead of IIS for the first time, even though it was by a slim margin. NGINX accounted for 22,221,514 servers and IIS accounted for 22,142,114.

As we noted then, if you instead look at Netcraft’s “Market Share for Top Servers Across All Domains,” NGINX is still behind IIS. The margin is substantial but closing. We stated that NGINX might take the number two spot even in that category this year.

Now, let’s find out if that can happen and if so, when.

Apple is often referred to as a design leader. Since Steve Jobs came back and took over the company in 1997, the focus and inventiveness shown by Apple’s industrial design team has been remarkable.

Apple’s design prowess has greatly influenced the evolution of the common laptop over the past 10+ years. The company has gone from being a marginal player in that market to become one of the biggest, most popular laptop manufacturers in the world.

That success has of course bred imitation from other laptop makers, some subtle, some not so subtle. Would today’s laptops be as slick and beautiful without the influence from Apple? Most likely not.

The Consumer Electronics Show (CES) will officially kick off in Las Vegas tomorrow. One thing we know for sure is that tablets will be one of the hottest types of gadgets in this year’s show. That’s evident already from the pre-show coverage: there’s everything from Toshiba’s “thinnest and lightest” tablet to a “waterproof” LTE Android tablet.

And since CES is upon us, we know we’re just a few days into the new year, so chances are that not many actual figures for sales of tablets in 2011 will have hit us yet.

However, we have managed to find a few and wanted to see how they stack up against the forecasts that have been made.

In the latest Netcraft Web Server for January 2012, the lightweight open source web server software NGINX amassed more active sites than Microsoft Internet Information Server for the first time.

That makes NGINX the second more used web server software in the world right now, only trumped by Apache.

Let’s look at the numbers.

Yesterday reports started circulating that Eastman Kodak Co. is on the brink of filing for bankruptcy protection.

The company, which was founded in 1892, is just about synonymous with photography, and has been immortalized in popular culture in countless ways. Who doesn’t remember Paul Simon’s “Kodachrome,” and haven’t all of us used the saying “it’s a Kodak moment”?

As you prepare for the news whether the company will live on or not, we’ve collected 10 Kodak cameras you can rest your eyes on.

Swedish hosting provider Binero has announced that it has DNSSEC-signed all of its customers’ .se domains. This brings the total amount of signed .se domains to more than 100,000 from the previous total of 5,000.

“Nearly one in ten Swedish domains are now validated against attacks with manipulated dns-information, like phishing,” Binero’s press release said.

It’s hard to find any worldwide numbers to compare to but ICANN reported yesterday that 88 TLDs (Top-Level Domains) are DNSSEC signed.

But what is DNSSEC (Domain Name System Security Extensions) and why should you care whether your domains are signed with it or not?

On December 2, 1991, Apple released the first version of QuickTime. Back then, QuickTime was at the forefront of bringing video to personal computers, and it has, without a doubt, had a tremendous impact on personal computing, multimedia, and the Internet since its introduction.

But in the twenty years since then a lot has happened, and the question is what is the relevance of QuickTime today in a web- and mobile-centric world?

Earlier this year we noted that over 6 trillion text messages were sent in 2010, a rise of 41% compared to the year before. The growth may have been declining – SMS saw a 53% increase from 2008 to 2009 – but SMS and MMS are still going strong. This is in spite of social media like Twitter and Facebook having grabbed many of the headlines.

But what did it look like for the Christmas and New Year we’ve just been through?

As 2011 draws to a close we wanted to take a look at computer and information security in the twelve months that have passed.

What will probably stick in most people’s minds is the Sony PlayStation Network and Qriocity hack, which resulted in an outage lasting 23 days. In other developments, hacktivist groups like Anonymous and LulzSec took to social media to further their causes, and mobile malware got more attention than ever before.

All in all, there’s no doubt that 2011 was a very busy year for IT security professionals.