We did it. We reached the 100 million user milestone at 10:59 Tuesday morning. We have been anticipating this event all year. We started the year with about 70 million users. We had a little celebration and promotion for 75 million users. Then we watched 80 million and 90 million go by. By October it was clear that we would cross 100 million in December. So, on the morning of 8 December all of our staff crowded around a large monitor to watch the registration counter tick upwards to 100 million. We had a little self-induced tension in the event—just 30 seconds before the 100 million mark, someone hit a button on a remote control that switched the display away from the count—some seconds of mad scramble restored the picture.

Check the sequence below and you can watch us reach and pass the 100,000,000 user mark:

If you can’t see a sequence, here is a single picture of the 100,000,000 user count (in the picture are Ondrej Vlcek, our CTO; myself; Jindrich Kubec, who runs our virus research lab; and our two founders, Pavel Baudis and Eduard Kucera:

Then it was time to open the Czech Sparkling Wine (since we are in the EU, we cannot call it Champagne as we do in America) and celebrate. At the bottom you can find some pictures of our staff celebrating and toasting the event.

Now, we had started a contest in late November to reward the 100,000,000^th user with a trip to Prague. We had hoped to run this contest for longer than we did—but our new users came faster than we had expected. The winner is Kevin Bolger of Ireland. Here are the registrants just before and after Kevin:

As much as we love our French users (we are the most popular security product in France), it was fitting that Ireland beat France for this prize. It was only a week or two ago that a hand ball from the French side kept the Irish out of the Football (soccer) World Cup. I am sure most Irish would not consider this a suitable consolation prize, but I am sure that Kevin and a friend will very much enjoy their expense-paid trip to Prague.

We had wanted to announce the results Tuesday or Wednesday but we had a little difficulty contacting Kevin. First our emails from avast and from gmail were blocked as Spam (I guess many ISP spam filters kill emails that have phrases about winning a contest). We finally reached him with a real short email asking him to call us. He did so but still doubted he had won (showing excellent skills at combating social-engineering scams). So, he then sent an email to our technical support to confirm that it was not a hoax. Thankfully tech support told him it was legitimate. Kevin, thanks for going to all this effort and we are glad to have you as our 100,000,000^th user.

The times on the above list are Central European Time so it was rather surprising to see the three US names—depending on their US time zone, they registered between 2AM and 5AM!!!

Also, if you recognize yourself on the above list, send me a note from the email address you used for your registration. We will then send you a copy of our new Internet Security Product when it becomes available—and if you are ever in Prague, we will take you out for a nice evening and show you the sights. And Carmen, since you got beat out by a fraction of a second, if you ever find yourself in Prague let us know and our Italian staff here will take extra care of you.

On the serious side, we thank all 100,000,000 of our users for showing such trust in us. It is a great feeling to be trusted by 100,000,000 users.Passing 100 million registered users.

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For the official press release about the 100 millionth avast! user, click here.