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Last night I was unable to receive or send emails via my BlackBerry handheld. It turns out that there was a major outage which started Tuesday evening at about 8:00 p.m. eastern time and lasted through at least this morning. So far RIM (Research in Motion), the company that owns and provides the BlackBerry service has not offered an explanation as to what happened. It took RIM more than day to issue a statement, and even then they only said that the “root cause is currently under review.”

That left tech analysts and average BlackBerry users alike speculating about what exactly happened. Message boards were afire today with posters indicating how much they were adversly affected by the outage.

While non BlackBerry users might not quite understand the adoration for the handheld devices that leads to them being dubbed “CrackBerries,” a Internet poll taken Wednesday by telecom expense management firm ProfitLine Inc. found that almost 80% of respondents who work in IT and telecom related fields reported operations were disrupted by the outage, with about 45% saying that the effect was “moderate or substantial.”

Those findings show that “wireless communication has gone from a travel convenience to a mission critical tool,” Randall DeLorenzo, VP of ProfitLine, said in a statement about the web poll.

Although my BlackBerry is now working, it seems to be running much slower than before. Hopefully this will be temporary as devices sync up and services will return to normal. I am sure there will be more developments to this story, so stay tuned.

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Google announced plans today to launch a program that is similar to Microsoft’s PowerPoint program.

Google Chief Executive Eric Schmidt announced the software Today at a Internet entrepreneur conference. Schmidt also took the time to discredit AT&T and Microsoft’s claims that Google has an illegal monopoly in the online advertising market.

Google announced on April 13 that it would pay almost $3 billion to acquire DoubleClick Inc, one of the largest online ad management companies on the Internet. In response Microsoft and AT&T executives said the deal may violate anti-trust regulations.

Schmidt however, noting that both AT&T and Microsoft have had their share of antitrust skirmishes, responded, “Give me a break.”

“They’re wrong,” Schmidt said. “It’s false.”

The rhetoric comes as Microsoft and Google increase the competition to control how people use the Internet. Microsoft already commands the operating system, with an estimated 97% of all personal computers in the world using a version of Windows. But people are increasingly using the internet to determine their entertainment and shopping choices.

Google’s new presentation software will directly compete against Microsoft’s widespread PowerPoint software.

The details so far are sketchy, however it has been said that users will be able to store documents online and let anyone with a free Google account view the documents, spreadsheets or slide-shows online.

The presentation software is going to be a part of Google Docs & Spreadsheets. Google will give away two versions of the presentation software starting this summer, and it will sell a “Premier” version with extra storage for $50 per year.

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Microsoft plans to introduce competitive software to provide similar video sharing capabilities to Adobe System’s Flash.

The program is called Silverlight and will be used by companies such as Universal Music and Netflix. The software will help to create video intensive Web sites that will appear the same on most operating systems.

Microsoft is lauding the program as being more cost effective and easier for Web programmers to use than Adobe’s Flash, which is already on almost 98% of the worlds computers. Microsoft expects the program to encourage Web designers to use more Microsoft tools, a spokesman for Microsoft said.

Perhaps in response to Microsoft’s actions, Adobe announced that they are planning to introduce technologies to lower the cost of encoding Flash videos, said Michele Turner, an Adobe VP.

“Developing for Flash is dead on cheap,” Turner said. “We feel like we are way ahead today.”

Microsofts response? They said there were not enough website designers familiar with Flash.

“The explosion of media on the Web is not happening as fast as it could because Flash isn’t as good as it should be,” a spokesman for Microsoft said.

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Here is an ad from 1984 from Apple announcing the Macintosh computer. The commercial was ahead of its time.

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On April 9th, 2007 Apple delivered its latest software AirPort Extreme base station with 802.11n (Firmware 7.1). This update addresses many security related issues and secures the default configuration of the AirPort Extreme Base Station with 802.11n. The update is available on the company’s website. This update fixes issues with password security, and provides IPv6 support.

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