Time, money and clicks: in the world of ones and zeros, numbers are what count. From missing bitcoins to billion dollar purchases, here are eight of the most important figures in the web at the right now.
11,000 drones
The number of drones Facebook wants to manufacture. The social media giant’s is paying a reported $60 million dollars to acquire manufacturer Titan Aerospace. The solar-power drones will compete with Google’s Loon weather balloons to bring internet to the 60% of the world still offline.
5%
The percentage of the world’s Bitcoins that are still unaccounted for. In February, $450 million dollars worth of the digital currency disappeared from the vaults of Bitcoin exchange Mt. Gox. 200,000 of the 850,000 lost Bitcoins were later discovered in a digital wallet.
25 years
As of last month, it’s been a quarter of a century since Tim Berners-Lee wrote a proposal to develop an information management system at the Cern lab in Switzerland. That proposal would become the most important medium of communication since the Gutenberg press.
$1 billion
The alleged asking price put to Google in March 2013 for the purchase of WhatsApp (source: BGR). A billion dollars has never seemed like such a small amount.
55 : 54,000,000,000
The ratio of WhatsApp employees to the record number of messages processed by WhatsApp (on December 31). That’s close almost billion Whatsapp messages for each employee.
From $2 million to $2 billion in 2 years
When it arrived on the tech scene in 2012, the virtual reality hardware firm Oculus had a Kickstarter goal as low as $250,000. As the hype grew around its VR headset Oculus Rift, so too did the pledges on Kickstarter, bringing Oculus to $2.4 million in funds. Oculus has since sold to Facebook for a phenomenal $2 billion (approx. €1.4 billion).
3.6 MB
The (rather enormous) size of the mobile landing page for the Sochi Winter Olympics. Even as a heavyweight, the site was a champion in web performance.
3 seconds
The maximum time an average user will wait for a mobile website to load before switching to a different app. (Read more about website performance tricks here)
Feature image: Business graph via Shutterstock / copyright: wanpatsorn