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.

There’s no denying that tablets are increasingly used as web browsing devices. We reported a while ago that Apple’s iPad in itself accounted for 1.2% of worldwide web usage. Out of all tablets, iPad accounted for 88% of worldwide tablet web traffic and Android grabbed almost 11%.

And according to several research reports, web ad campaigns get better CTR (Click Through Rates) and lower CPC (Cost Per Click) on tablets than both smartphones and regular desktop computers.

But why better CTR and CPC? It could be because tablets are most often used in environments where the user should feel relaxed, like in their home and in the evening, thereby making them more likely to tap on ads.

We wonder however if there’s not something more sneaky at play here? Could the higher CTR be explained, at least in part, by users mistakenly tapping on web ads on a tablet, something known as the fat-finger problem?

Internet is a powerful tool for disseminating information, communication, entertainment, education and much more. One thing the Internet has not conquered, at least not yet, is smell.

If you’re currently struggling with HTML5, CSS3, jQuery and whatever else web-tech thing you’re working on, get ready to add some kind of code for smell as well.

Olly is a creation of the research team Foundry at Mint Digital. It’s apparently three months in the making and the team calls it “the web connected smelly robot!”

Today is Thanksgiving and although it’s primarily a North American tradition its impact reaches across the globe. The stuffed turkey dinner, Black Friday sales and other traditions associated with Thanksgiving are starting to make an appearance in many other parts of the world.

We wanted to do something a bit different for a Thanksgiving post so we thought, who would a geek want to have over for Thanksgiving dinner?

Of course we would all want different people to join us for different reasons. And yes, we tried to stick to real people.

Who would you invite? Here is our selection.

Don’t panic Ubuntu fans but your favorite desktop Linux distribution has fallen to fourth place in DistroWatch’s latest ranking.

Ubuntu has been overtaken by Fedora, Mint, and openSUSE. Mint now holds the number one spot in all of DistroWatch’s rankings going back at least a year, which leads us to wonder why.

One reason behind this reversal of fortune for Ubuntu could be the change of default interface in version 11.04 or “Natty Narwhal”, released in April 2011. With the new Ubuntu came Unity, an interface previously seen in Ubuntu Netbook Edition, and Gnome was relegated to an option.

There has been quite a bit of controversy surrounding Unity. Now it seems like Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu, may be paying the price for the change. Let’s look at the numbers.

Over the past year, web pages have on average become 25% bigger. We’re not talking about dimensions here, but download size. Based on the top 1,000 websites on the Internet, the average page size has gone from 626 kB to 784 kB.

A 25% size increase in just one year is rather drastic. With that kind of growth, the average web page will be 980 kB in just a year (amost 1 MB!). In five years, a page will be almost 2.4 MB. And that’s just an average, many pages will be significantly larger.

What is behind this exploding growth? Let’s find out.

Late last week Pingdom passed a couple of milestones and we wanted to take this opportunity to thank all of you.

First, we passed 30,000 followers on Twitter, which for us is really amazing. Twitter has become an incredibly powerful tool for us to talk to our customers, distribute information, and do some tech support with as well.

Second, we passed 9,000 likes on Facebook, something we’re equally proud of. Facebook is also very powerful, although we’re sort of feeling our way in terms of what to use Twitter for and what to use Facebook for. Not all users are on both social media networks, for example, and not all types of issues are best dealt with in both places.

On both Twitter and Facebook we talk to many of you on a daily basis and we look forward to continue to do so. Via this blog, the Royal Pingdom blog and our social media we try to keep in close contact with our community

We’re excited for our U.S. readers that Google has introduced its online music service – finally. For the rest of us, we have to wait and see when we’ll be lucky enough to see Google Music’s presence where we live.

Google Music went live almost nine years after Apple opened the doors to its iTunes Store. To see what Google is up against, we have collected a plethora of numbers about iTunes from all over the Web.

As you will see, Google is facing some long odds. We hope for Google’s sake this isn’t a case of too little, too late, considering what a behemoth they are competing with.

We’re all fans of cool screensavers here at Pingdom so we wanted to pick a few of our favorites and share them with you. A great screensaver is a good way to personalize your computer and to make a statement.

Digging deep through screensaver history we found these 10 that we find especially impressive.

Many of the screensavers below work with both Mac and Windows (and at least one with Linux too) but you should probably check the system requirements before downloading a particular screensaver. All the screensavers are free.

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.

Mobile Internet adoption and speeds are increasing across the world. Sweden is one example of a country where Internet connections – mobile as well as fixed – are plentiful and fast.

The Swedish Post and Telecom Authority (PTS) is in charge of monitoring the electronic communications and postal sectors in the country. In the latest report from PTS on telephony and the Internet, which covers the development through the the first half of 2011, we found some nuggets of information in terms of mobile data subscribers and traffic we felt worthy of a comparison to what’s happening globally.

These numbers should also be a good indication of how rapidly mobile Internet use is ramping up in other, similar countries (for example the rest of Scandinavia).

Since it was Father’s Day here in Sweden yesterday – yes we know it varies around the world – we thought we’d pay homage to some of the people behind the Internet as we know it today.

Some of the obvious choices would include Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn for TCP/IP, Vannevar Bush for much of the conceptual thinking behind the Internet, Ted Nelson for coining the word hypertext, Tim Berners-Lee for the World Wide Web, Marc Andreeseen for co-authoring Mosaic, and many others.

But why go for the obvious? We thought it would be fun to give some credit to a few lesser-known contributors to some technology or product that is a part of Internet history. These are guys who have made important contributions that affect us all but that may not have received the same accolades as others. So even though this didn’t exactly turn out to be a Father’s Day post, let’s take a look.

The construction work on our new office is now in full swing. We thought it would be fun to share some before-and-after pics from the teardown of the old innards, which should give you an idea of the great potential this place has. It’s going to be completely customized for Pingdom once it’s done.

As you may know, we’ll be moving our headquarters to a brand new office that’s smack in the middle of Västerås, Sweden. We’re already in central Västerås, so it’s not far from our current location, but we need more space. Hence, new office!

Although there’s been much talk about the demise of Flash lately – including right here on this blog – no one can deny that it’s brought us a wide assortment of strange and wonderful web animations through the years.

So today we’re kicking off a series of articles called Friday Fun, where we’ll try to bring you some of the more fun, weird, quirky and wacky corners of the web, and we start with Flash animations.

It’s interesting how quickly we humans start taking things for granted. In a fast-moving landscape like technology, especially IT, this becomes all the more obvious.

When you start thinking back to how things were just a few years ago, it’s amazing how different things were. So many of the gadgets, services and sites we all take for granted today simply weren’t around.

In that spirit, let’s take a few steps back in time and look what you DIDN’T have a few years ago. We’ll jump back five years at a time.

In April 2010 the late Steve Jobs wrote an open letter addressing Apple’s insistence on not supporting Adobe Flash on its mobile platforms. He concluded: “New open standards created in the mobile era, such as HTML5, will win on mobile devices (and PCs too). Perhaps Adobe should focus more on creating great HTML5 tools for the future, and less on criticizing Apple for leaving the past behind.”

Shortly thereafter, in an interview with the Wall Street Journal, Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen said: “The technology problems that Mr. Jobs mentions in his essay are ‘really a smokescreen.’”

Hindsight is of course 20-20 but even though Jobs’ open letter was written just under two years ago, wasn’t the writing already then on the wall for Flash and Adobe?

In the world of supercomputers – imagine computers the size of a warehouse – everything is about getting as many flops (floating point operations per second) as possible. Think of this as how many calculations the computer can perform in a second.

Currently the fastest supercomputer in the world, as ranked by the Top500 list, is the K Computer capable of more than 10.51 petaflops.

Since most of us don’t work with supercomputers and will probably never even come in direct contact with one we wanted to give you a simple frame of reference to understand them better.

The Next Web published an article in August entitled “How text messaging as we know it will die in 3-5 years.” In the article Niall Harbison argues that the advent of smartphones and apps such as WhatsApp results in users transitioning away from SMS to these alternative messaging options. So let’s try to see what we can find out.

Even though consumer spending this upcoming holiday season may be “careful and controlled,” there’s no doubt that we’ll be struck by the spirit of giving again. If you’re a retailer – online or offline – by all accounts, customers will this year use mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets to find your store and your products, more than they have before. So get ready, build a mobile web site if you don’t have one or improve the one you already have.

Mozilla’s development pace for Firefox went into overdrive this year, as they adopted a strategy similar to that which Google uses for the Chrome web browser. Mozilla’s new, rapid release schedule for Firefox calls for a new version every six weeks. On Tuesday, November 8, it’s already time for the release of Firefox 8.

But there are clouds on the horizon. For every new version of Firefox that Mozilla releases, a fraction of users are for whatever reason not being upgraded. There’s a long tail of older versions starting to form, and over time this may accumulate enough version fragmentation that it could become a real problem.