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Now that both Hanukah and Christmas are over and Kwanzaa will be wrapping up shortly after the New Year ball drops, we can look ahead into 2013 with high expectations. However, you can’t know where you’re going unless you know where you’ve been as my mother likes to say, so let’s look back at what this 12-month period brought to the world in conjunction with Office 365 provider SherWeb.

As we threw away our 2011 calendars and unwrapped our 2012 ones, Pingdom, a website monitoring service, revealed that nearly 2.1 billion people all over the world are now leveraging the Internet. That breaks down to nearly one third of the total world’s population, a number that is pretty amazing considering 1993 was the year the Internet started being utilized within homes across the globe. Also this month, YouTube revealed it had reached a major milestone in the form of recording nearly one trillion video plays and streaming four billion videos a day. That equates to 60 hours of video being uploaded to the site each and every minute.

The month for lovers, February was highlighted by Apple Co-Founder Steve Jobs receiving a prestigious and posthumous Grammy award for his innovations in relation to the music powered by the Apple iPod and ITunes store and Google (News - Alert) stated that a smartphone that costs around $400 currently will cost around $20 by 2012. The search giant added, “There’ll be an Android in every pocket” by that year. In the following month, the new iPad sold three million units in only its first three days on the market, something sure to make Jobs smile from the grave.

April showers weren’t so bad this year due to the news that Google officially unveiled its reality glasses and Apple let us in on the secret that it was now worth $600 billion. What exactly does that kind of cash even look like is my first question. And one of May’s biggest stories was that that smartphones are now all the rage and are being leveraged faster than any other previously released technology including TVs, radio and computers.

As temperatures outside increased, at least here on the East Coast, in June, once again Google made headlines when it revealed that for the first half of 2012 it recorded nearly $21.6 billion in online ad revenues, outstripping the $20 billion for print ads in the U.S., according to SherWeb. This prompted company officials to question, “Only TV remains more profitable than the Web, but for how long?”

July is marked by SherWeb debuting its distributor model in the cloud industry. This offering will enable MSPs, VARs, ISVs and IT consultants to sell business-grade hosted services like Office 365 without then having to deal with any customer issues.

“One of the most common requests we hear from our partners is for support in the provisioning of new cloud services, and SherWeb is proactively addressing that barrier to entry with this integrated offering through Ingram Micro,” said Jason Bystrak, director of Sales, Services, Ingram Micro North America, in regard to the news.

In August, Usain Bolt, an amazing almost nonhuman runner from Jamaica, won three gold medals at the Olympics. And if that wasn’t enough, he then was touted as being the most tweeted about athlete in history according to Twitter (News - Alert), with nearly 150 million tweets being delivered that had to do with him.

As the summer wrapped up and the fall began, September ushered in the arrival of the Windows Server 2012. This solution differs from previous versions as it does not support titanium-based computers. In addition, the iPhone (News - Alert) 5 received the same amount of preorder sales in a mere three days that the iPhone 4S had in a month, enabling Apple to set a new record.

The month that is a favorite of many due to Halloween, October, sparked the launch of SherWeb’s Hosted Exchange 2013. Delivering enhanced touch and usability in Outlook Web Apps, it even enables users to view contacts from multiple locations including Exchange, Facebook and LinkedIn (News - Alert). In addition, the Smart Search function prioritizes search results based on previous behavior.

“SherWeb has worked diligently since January to master this new e-mail platform,” added Rima Hatoum, product manager at SherWeb. “As a respected world leader in Exchange, SherWeb has always been among the first to release Microsoft’s latest versions and 2013 testifies to this leadership.”

October also was a great month for Mark Zuckerberg’s baby Facebook as it reached its one billion user landmark.

Further, in November we saw the Apple iPad 4 and Mini sell approximately three million units in only the first three days it was on sale and “Gangnam Style,” a hilarious yet ridiculous video made by Korean singer PSY was confirmed as being the most viewed YouTube video ever. This month also brought the news that iPhone sales for the holidays was expected to surpass nearly 46 million units, a number so large even Santa probably had a hard time wrapping his head around how many smartphones he would be delivering to those who were nice.

As you can see, this year has been a game changer for many huge corporations including SherWeb. Now it’s onto a New Year that is sure to be filled with newly launched products that will continue to change the technology realm for the long term.

Happy New Year everyone!

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