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Editors’ note: Last.fm is owned by CNET’s parent company, CBS.

Fring's Last.fm add-on will play out first on Symbian S60 phones.

Starting this week, Symbian Series 60 users with the latest version of Fring (for Symbian 9.1 | 9.2) can sign on to their Last.fm accounts from the Fring add-on’s screen.

Sorry, Windows Mobile and
iPhone users. Fring almost always test-runs on Symbian first before the fun stuff (first file transferring, now music streaming) trickles down to other platforms. But it could be worse–Fring doesn’t develop for BlackBerrys at all.

There’s a social aspect, too. Pressing the “friends” button takes you a screen that shows you what your friends on Last.fm are listening to, and lets you chat with them using you other IM and social networking add-ons, without leaving the Last.fm module.

From there, you can play custom- and public-streaming stations, with the familiar controls to stop, skip, save, and ban a song. There’s album art on the mini player interface, and basic details about the song title, album name, and artist name.

Although Fring has long let you chat with friends over Skype, IM, Facebook, and Twitter, the recent introduction of a Last.fm add-on is the start-up’s first foray into streaming content.

Although support for Twitter was not available for the initial release, Fring promises on its Web site that the implementation is coming soon.

(Credit:
Fring)

Maybe taking publicity into his own hands will help the general public realize he’s just sadly misunderstood. Right.

The timing of the Google Adwords move appears to coincide with Cruise’s recent appearance on The Oprah Winfrey Show, where he made an earnest attempt to convince Oprah and the public that he’s not the couch-jumping lunatic he made himself out to be the last time he was on the show.

Tom Cruise and his publicity crew are apparently buying up ads on Google AdWords. Hollywood Newsroom first noticed the fact that when you type in “Tom Cruise” in a Google search, paid sponsored ads for the Scientologist’s official, soon-to-be-launched Web site appear. “Stay Tuned For Official Site Launch” and “Get the real scoop from Tom Cruise,” the ads proclaim.

Firefox is already plenty fast. In one test, it comes in just behind
Safari in speed, but in this case, “slightly slower” still means “blazingly fast.”

The next question would be, “What will Firefox do with its market dominance?” Unlike Microsoft, which sat on its hands as soon as IE knocked off Netscape, Mozilla is almost certainly going to keep doing what it has always done: push the envelope of browser development and innovation. That’s what happens when you’re led by a community, not a monopolist.

(Credit:
Mozilla)

What will you do with such an impressive boost to JavaScript? I suspect that this will lead to far more applications being written specifically for Firefox. Will this mean that Firefox, not Internet Explorer, will become the new default target development platform for Web developers? Perhaps. If they can squeeze more functionality and performance out of Firefox, that’s where their development time is going to be spent.

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Thanks to Mozilla’s pioneering work with TraceMonkey, however,
Firefox is about to become even faster. Think massive performance boost.

How fast is that? Mozilla shows some early results of its efforts:

Today Firefox is still the province of geeks, but its increasing market share among Web developers suggests that it’s already overtaking Internet Explorer in developer affections. With an impressive speed boost, it’s very likely that this movement away from IE will become a mass exodus.

CNET’s Stephen Shankland has already covered the story in detail, so I won’t belabor it here, but this promises to be an impressive breakthrough for browser performance–and especially for Firefox. As Mike Shaver, Mozilla’s interim vice president of engineering and former chief evangelist, declares:

The goal of the TraceMonkey project–which is still in its early stages–is to take JavaScript performance to another level, where instead of competing against other interpreters, we start to compete against native code.

I like this new overlord.

TraceMonkey dramatically improves Firefox performance

The real ire, however, came as the result of RIM’s outlook for the next quarter. The company said it expects revenue between $2.55 billion and $2.66 billion as well as earnings per share between 84 cents and 89 cents for its second fiscal quarter. But analysts had been expecting earnings per share of 90 cents, and investors hammered RIM’s stock in after-hours trading, sending it down more than 9 percent. Before the earnings announcement, shares of RIM rose $1.87, or about 1 percent, to close at $142.35 Wednesday.

RIM added 2.3 million new BlackBerry subscribers during the quarter, and shipped 5.4 million devices, it said. The company is expected to hold a conference call later today to discuss its quarter, and I’ll update this post if anything interesting comes out about RIM’s performance and its outlook for the rest of the year.

UPDATED 3:15pm - RIM co-CEO Jim Balsillie and Adele Ebbs, vice president of investor relations, told analysts that the company plans to spend more money in the upcoming quarter on marketing initiatives, among other things, designed to lift RIM’s profile with consumers. If you’ve been watching television lately–especially the NBA Finals–you’ve seen dozens of BlackBerry ads, and with the BlackBerry Bold expected to make its debut later this summer, expect to see more.

RIM recorded first-quarter revenue of $2.24 billion, up 107 percent from last year’s first fiscal quarter. Earnings per share were 84 cents per share on net income of $482.5 million, compared to last year’s first quarter, when earnings per share were 39 cents per share. Both of those numbers were within guidelines set by the company last quarter but slightly off of what analysts polled by Thomson One were expecting: $2.27 billion in revenue and earnings per share of 85 cents.

Doubling revenue and earnings per share wasn’t good enough for Research in Motion’s investors, who punished the company Wednesday after its outlook fell short of expectations.

Perhaps the unanswered question is if RIM isn’t concerned about the
iPhone, why does it feel the need to boost advertising spending at this particular point in time? Balsillie briefly touched on that notion in terms of the expected growth in the overall smartphone market, which he sees as “a bit of a land grab game right now.” This town may very well be big enough for both RIM and Apple as the overall market grows; “all roads lead to adoption right now,” he said.

Updated 3:15pm PT with comments from conference call.

Balsillie also professed to be unconcerned about the pending debut of the iPhone 3G, pointing out several times that RIM has been gaining market share in recent quarters. When pressed by a financial analyst on whether he sees an overlap with Apple’s customer base, Balsillie emphatically said “Nah, nah,” and you could almost hear him shaking his head over the conference call bridge.

On a day when the stock market continued its race to the bottom, IBM showed resilience by posting a 20 percent gain in its third-quarter net income. Much of the growth and strength derives from “international diversification, especially in emerging markets, and its emphasis on signing long-term services contracts, which account for more than half its revenue.”

It could be, as SAP’s US president suggests in a Wall Street Journal article, that this reflects a momentary stumble for technology as CIOs take a wait-and-see approach to the near-term financial crisis.

Click here for ongoing coverage from CNET News, ‘Tough times for tech’

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Unfortunately, IBM also reported slowing revenue growth, which isn’t a good sign for technology companies. Analysts expected a 10 percent boom to $26.54 billion, but IBM instead delivered a five percent boost to $25.3 billion.

I remain hopeful, however, that this market turmoil will benefit value-driving open-source companies. For the next few weeks we’re going to sputter but I think once we reach some semblance of a bottoming out of the market - no matter how bad or how low it is - CIOs will spend on software that is already proven (that is, download and try before you buy) and comes with no long-term commitments.

Like Red Hat with its growing hoard of deferred revenue, IBM has been thinking long-term and it’s paying off.

Then again, maybe not. According to a recent survey of 1,000 CIOs from the CIO Executive Board, 61 percent indicated that they’re re-evaluating 2009 IT budgets, with 59 percent putting all nonessential projects on hold. Given that these “nonessential projects” may well include SAP’s ERP systems, an IT spending freeze may be broad and deep.

The outage started at 8:48 p.m. PDT Tuesday, according to Microsoft. It followed an earlier scheduled maintenance to both the Zune Marketplace and Xbox Live services that ran through the night Sunday and into Monday.

“Users will not be able to connect or log into Xbox Live,” Microsoft said. “We are aware of the problem and working to resolve the issue. We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause.”

Microsoft said the outage was due to an unexpected issue following the maintenance work. Visitors to Microsoft’s Xbox Live support page have been offered the following status update.

(Credit:
CNET News)

An unplanned outage hit Microsoft’s
Xbox Live service starting Tuesday night, leaving online gamers unable to connect.

Visitors to the Xbox Live support page were offered the following message Wednesday.

At least for me, the
Zune service appears to be working fine. I’ll have more details on the Xbox outage once I get more from Microsoft.

Update, 3:05 PT: Microsoft said Wednesday afternoon that the service is back up.
“Up and running,” Microsoft said. “Users may experience intermittent issues posting TrueSkill statistics on Halo3. We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause.”

A Microsoft representative said that outages, at least intermittent ones, lasted until 1 p.m. PT (initially they said 2:30). Microsoft declined to offer any further information on the cause of the outage.

Dan Fisk, National Security Council senior director for Western hemisphere affairs, told the Associated Press that the new policy, which will take effect in a few weeks, is not an indication that the U.S. will loosen its economic embargo against Cuba. It is simply a policy change that will allow U.S. citizens to send cell phones in care packages to family members.

Even though restrictions on cell phones and computers have been lifted in the communist country, it’s difficult to say how much of an impact it will really have. Most people are still too poor to buy these luxury items. And even those receiving free cell phones from friends and relatives in the U.S. won’t likely be able to afford a service plan so they can actually use their phones.

The changes in U.S. restrictions come as Raul Castro, who took office in February, begins lifting several bans imposed by his brother Fidel Castro, who had ruled the island nation for 49 years. Specifically, he has lifted bans that had prohibited Cubans from owning cell phones and buying DVD players, computers, and kitchen appliances.

President Bush said earlier this week that Americans will soon be able to send family members in Cuba cell phones in a move he hopes will bring more freedom to the communist island nation.

Bush said he was changing the policy with regard to cell phones in an effort to encourage the new leadership in Cuba to provide more freedoms to its people.

“It was a decadent show, a speech irrelevant and cynical, an act of ridiculous propaganda,” the AP quoted him as saying at the news conference. “Let him retire and leave the presidency.”

The U.S. trade embargo against Cuba, which has been in effect since the early 1960s, prohibits American companies from doing business there. Americans are also restricted from traveling to Cuba. And there are several restrictions regarding gifts given to people living in Cuba.

“If Cuban rulers will end their restrictions on Internet access, and since Raul is allowing Cubans to own mobile phones for the first time, we’re going to change our regulations to allow Americans to send mobile phones to family members in Cuba,” the president said in a speech. “If Raul is serious about his so-called reforms, he will allow these phones to reach the Cuban people.”

Cell phone service from U.S. operators can be accessed in parts of Cuba, but it’s typically unreliable. The small wireless market that already exists in Cuba is controlled by Empresa de Telecomunicaciones de Cuba S.A., or ETECSA. The company has said it will soon offer prepaid contracts to the general public now that the ban has been lifted. Prepaid services are popular in other poor countries, such as the Philippines, where nearly everyone owns a cell phone. But pricing of the prepaid plans in Cuba is still uncertain.

Bush also said during his speech, given at the White House commemorating the 106th anniversary of Cuban independence this week, that he’d allow faith-based organizations and nonprofit groups working with Cuba to provide computers and Internet access to the Cuban people.

Felipe Perez Roque, Cuba’s foreign minister, called Bush’s remarks “ridiculous” during a press conference on Thursday, according to the Associated Press.

That’s the monetary equivalent of what Google offered to compensate Google Apps Premier Edition customers after Gmail was unavailable for about two and a half hours on Tuesday. And it was being generous: All it had to offer was the equivalent of 41 cents per user.

However, whenever Google is apologizing for outages, the company takes pains to mention it feels the pain acutely given how the company uses Gmail internally. My suspicion is that the company values its employees’ time a bit more highly than what it grants Google Apps Premier customers.

If your business used Gmail and the service went out for two and a half hours, do you think you lost $2.05 per user in productivity?

So how does that math work out exactly? Well, at $50 a year, Google charges a rate of 0.57 cents per hour. So a three-day extension is the equivalent of 41 cents of revenue per user, and a 15-day extension is worth $2.05.

Before you judge, bear in mind some of the factors at play–how essential e-mail is to a company, how common Gmail outages actually are, the time of day of the outage, whether e-mail was available through other software such as Outlook even though Gmail’s Web interface was down. And another relevant comparison is how reliable your own company’s e-mail servers are. You’re in effect valuing your employees’ e-mail productivity lower than Google does if you have worse uptime than Gmail.

(Credit:
CNET Networks / Josh Lowensohn)

For customers who pay the $50 per user per year price for the Google Apps service, Google strives to keep it up and running 99.9 percent of the time each month. According to the Google Apps service level agreement (SLA), Google promises three extra days of service if availability slips down to the 99 to 99.9 percent range.

According to a Gmail outage blog posting by Gmail site reliability manager Acacio Cruz, the outage lasted “approximately two and a half hours.” By my math, assuming there were no other outages in February, that means uptime of 99.63 percent for the month.

“This morning, there was a routine maintenance event in one of our European data centers. This typically causes no disruption because accounts are simply served out of another data center,” Cruz said. “Unexpected side effects of some new code that tries to keep data geographically close to its owner caused another data center in Europe to become overloaded, and that caused cascading problems from one data center to another. It took us about an hour to get it all back under control.”

However, Google decided to extend affected customers’ service more than the 3 days the SLA required. “Given the extent of the outage and as a gesture of goodwill, we are extending their service for 15-days,” spokesman Andrew Kovacs said in a statement. Ordinarily the service has to slip below 95 percent uptime to provide a 15-day extension.

Google also offered an explanation of what happened on another blog post.