United Internet is most likely the largest hosting company in the world, and since United Internet is a public company I decided to take a look at their 2008-2011 end of year summaries.

[disclaimer – I’m still learning how to read these reports, so I apologize for any mistakes. ]

Total Hosting Contracts. Keep in mind they use this term to identify any contract, so it doesn’t mean customers. Especially post 2009 when they switched the term to application contracts (which is a smart move given they are really a saas platform that introduces themselves to customers through a website proposition).

2008 – 3.62 Million
2009 – 4.14 Million

Customer breakdown out of the 2009 number:
Germany 1.95 Million (47%)
UK 1 Million (24%)
France 0.26 Million (6%)
USA 0.82 Million (20%)
Spain 0.11 Million (3%)
*This is interesting as I didn’t know they were so huge in Germany but not quite so big in the USA.

After 2009 they switched to measuring this per application contracts instead of “customer contracts”, which inflates the number a bit, or at least makes it more confusing to me…

2009 – 5.65 Million Fee Based Contracts
2010 – 6.13 Million
2011 – 6.59 Million

Total Employees:
2007 – 3,954
2008 – 4,565
2009 – 4,571
2010 – 5,018
2011 – 5,593 (3,701 of those for the hosting/app group)

Servers Reported:
2008 – 65,000
2009 – 67,000
*After that nothing mentioned.

A couple interesting points:

1. For 2011 out of their “Application” aka hosting / software group their profit margins were 25%. For 2010 they were around 34% (ebita).

2. They describe a lot of their internal hosting setup in these releases. For example they split their hosting setup into frontend servers and backend storage. And in the last couple years have moved to spread these over multiple data centers so that if one goes lights out the other should serve their clients pages (although a few glitches in this in 2011 it appears).

3. In 2011 34.7% of the entire companies gross revenue came from the Applications / Hosting group. It grew 7% over the previous year on a financial basis.

4. The only hosting acquisition I could find was their purchase of FastHost’s assets from Dollamore Ltd in 2008. You can find more on that sale here.

5. In 2011 the Applications / Hosting Group of the company generated around ~$874 Million dollars. Making them the largest hosting company in the world to my knowledge. With EIG/GoDaddy a close second and third.

You can download the reports here. Google search for the year + Annual Financial Report United Internet.

I was reading a book today about the history of cities and one of the little tidbits I really enjoyed was that the Harper Brothers and many other publishers pirated books to sell locally. Which is funny considering their positions now.

Like many publishers of the 1800s, Harper Bros. took advantage of the lack of international copyright enforcement. The firm printed pirated copies of works by such British authors as Charles Dickens, William Make-peace Thackeray, and Anne, Charlotte, and Emily Brontë. Harper Bros.’ best-selling pirated work by a British author was Thomas Babington Macaulay’s History of England from the Accession of James II. The book sold approximately 400,000 copies, a figure that would classify it as a nonfiction bestseller at the turn of the twentieth century. Because international copyright laws were not enforced, U.S. publishers did not pay royalties to either the British authors or their publishers. The American market had grown to be so significant that, in 1842, Dickens traveled to the United States in an effort to secure royalties from the sale of his works. He was unsuccessful at recouping this money, but the trip did give Dickens the material for his book American Notes for General Circulation, which Harper Bros. promptly pirated.

Read more info here on this and other in the early publishing industries.

Just makes you realize that once you are in power the way you got that power quickly becomes “illegal”. You see the same thing with online startups, they abuse all kinds of spam rules, or what they do with information and once they have grown they rewrite history to pretend they didn’t do x.

I grabbed a $40 3g Huawei E173 modem from Digicel here in Panama and I’ve been super impresed with the service. It’s fast and really nice to be able to go anywhere and have internet. I decided to unlock the 3g modem so that I could use the same one on other providers as I travel through Argentina, Peru, Brazil, Australia, and so on.

I haven’t unlocked it yet, I’ll post as I finish that project. But I knew that would wipe out the profile so I had to dig up the APN and other settings for Digicel Panama. Below are the settings to use for your 3g huawei modem to connect to Digicel Panama:

In OSX Lion for the number put “*99#”, and for the APN put “web.digicelpanama.com”. Screenshots below:

I will miss you Kim Jong, you were a crazy fucker and it was one of my dreams to drink and party with you. Hopefully your sons are a million times less crazy and the people of North Korea get some hope (and some food).

And, I want to start a clothing line called “Kim Jong, KJ!” one day. Because everyone should believe they are why the sun rises.

I spent Thursday to Sunday in Miami on South Beach and had a great time, the conference was well done and they had some great speakers! I was also impressed with South Beach, although not that I could ever live there. Unless I get an operation that infuses me with three popped collars, hair gel, fist pumping, non stop base thumping, and general douchery. I should note it did have great beaches and lots of normal people.

It also made me realize I am super burned out and need a vacation to let my mind rest. I ended up skipping the conference parties just because I needed too and catching up on reading and just nothingness. The weather was amazing, a solid 80 degrees and a gorgeous boardwalk to run on. I ran on Thursday, Friday, and Saturday I did my longest run in a while with 12 miles. I’m doing a marathon training schedule Apey gave me, and going to see about a marathon later this summer I think.

Oh and Cuban food and coffee is awesome. I already knew this from my time living in Boca Raton, but I really miss cheap delicious Cuban food…

I read 4 books and I highly recommend this book that talks about factory girls in China and was just an amazing story (and very well written). Talk about hustlers, I can’t wait to see what those girls do over the next 40 years with their kids and careers. I can’t imagine leaving town at 16 to get a job and navigate such a crazy world, what an adventure!

Please pardon any spelling mistakes, I’m super tired. I’ve actually been getting up while I was there at 7am or 8am to run in the mornings or for the conference.

So I decided to move to Washington DC and after a 3 day car ride that seemed to last forever I have arrived! Just needed a change up from Denver, plus I have a lot of friends here, and I obviously like to move around :).

More updates to follow, work has been super busy especially with a new startup we have been working on for a year that is beta launching in February 2011! Really excited!

I am excited as in a few weeks I’m getting a new desk that adjust so I can work standing up or sitting down. I really like working standing up as it feels more focused and I seem to get more project based assignments done. At our old apartment we had a counter in the kitchen that was tall enough I could work standing up and I spent a few weeks working from there. And after that I decided I wanted to make the change. Standing up is supposed to have quite a few health benefits too, here are a few articles on it:

37 Signals on Standing Versus Sitting
New York Times On Sitting and Standing While Working
Businessweek Your Office Chair Is Killing You

That last article has a great title…

ETA to the new desk’s arrival is about two weeks and I’ll post how it goes then. I’m going to use the old desk as a work area in our upstairs living room for Joel and I.

Still super busy so can’t post much but I highly recommend this article on how to grow rich using a charter city idea. Very cool idea built on it’s success in history.

I’m not really sure what independent art means? Isn’t all art independent or has it been taken over? But I do love this site and their work, check out Resist Today, it features the work of a small group of visual artist who sell prints, wallets, bags, shirts, pillows, etc. Just awesome awesome designs, here are a few:

Check out their products at Resist Today, I wish them luck!

Here is a nice dueling paragraph:

Health insurer WellPoint blames the Great Recession and rising medical costs for its planned 39 percent rate increase for some California customers. To President Barack Obama, however, it’s Exhibit A in his campaign to revive the health care overhaul.

Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, who received the company’s explanation in a letter Thursday, said “it remains difficult to understand” how premium increases of that size by can be justified when WellPoint Inc. reported a $2.7 billion profit in the last quarter of 2009.

Read more here.

Of course their CA subsidiary could be loosing money but the MAIN POINT HERE should be that insurance companies are good businesses in that they are TRYING TO MAKE MONEY. I don’t blame them for that, I blame our government because they either need to slap some draconian laws down or they need to take over the health care industry. Health care is a right not a profit making industry.

I feel this is going to be an interesting year. Vegas.

Check out this cool new netbook from Japan, it has two screens and it expands out! I’m going to try it out and see how well it works.

The Kohjinsha’s Dual Screen Netbook features two 10.1 inch, 1024 x 600 resolution displays, when used together give you a total resolution of 2048 x 600. The Kohjinsha’s Dual Screen Netbook is powered by a 1.6GHz AMD

Just read this story over at TechCrunch, here is a quick summary:

Developers take note: if you’ve got a mashup built off of Craigslist’s data, don’t even think about showing it to anyone who works there. At least, that’s the lesson learned by developer Romy Maxwell, who says that Craigslist has blocked both his mashup and every single project built on Yahoo Pipes a few days after a friendly Email exchange he had with Craigslist founder Craig Newmark.

Hopefully this is all a big misunderstanding but I doubt it. Craigslist is a great idea that was made, has been a huge success, and has been left foundering for the last few years with zero new innovation. So much more could be done, alerts for when new items are posted, better searching, official support for mashups of housing on google maps, requiring people enter an address so the above works. All this would make it a much easier to use website.

I hope someone comes along and crushes them who has better features and an API.

I’ve been meaning to make this post for a while, I just wanted to say thanks to the Guinness Enterprise Center in Dublin Ireland. I was working remotely in Ireland a long time ago and they helped me get a small office, setup high speed internet for VOIP, and a lot more! They were absolutely fantastic and in particular I wanted to thank Dolores Dempsey for her help.

This is a really great center that helps Irish people start companies and they do fantastic work!