Last.fm turned 20 years old over the weekend and users are still tracking their music playback hundreds of thousands of times a day. The Verge’s Jacob Kastrenakes writes: Last.fm felt just a little bit revolutionary when it was first introduced in the early 2000s. The site’s plug-ins — which were originally created for a different service called Audioscrobbler — tapped into your music player, took note of everything you listened to, and then displayed all kinds of statistics about your listening habits. Plus, it could recommend tracks and artists to you based on what other people with similar listening habits were interested in. “If this catches on, a system like this would be a really effective way to discover new artists and find people with similar tastes,” the blogger Andy Baio wrote in February 2003 after first trying it out.

This was very much a precursor to the algorithmic recommendation systems that are built into every music streaming service today. Spotify, Apple Music, Tidal — whatever it is you’re listening to, they’re all tracking your habits and using that to recommend new tracks to you. But on those services, your data is kept hidden behind the scenes. Using Last.fm was like having access to your year-end Spotify Wrapped but available every single day and always updating.

Streaming services’ automated recommendations have largely obviated the need for a platform like Last.fm (I certainly haven’t scrobbled anything in more than a decade). But I poked around, and it turns out there are still corners of the internet building vibrant communities around its features. One of the big uses is on Discord, where third-party developers have built a service called .fmbot that integrates scrobbling data into the popular chat room app. Thom, a backend developer based in the Netherlands, says the bot has more than 400,000 total users, with 40,000 people engaging with the service each day. It’s particularly popular in Discords based around specific musical artists or genres — where people “want to compare their statistics to each other” — and among servers for small friend groups, so they can “dive deeper into what everyone is listening to,” he says. The bot pulls in fun stats that people can brag about: the date of when they first listened to a given song, just how many days’ worth of music they consumed each year, or a list of their top albums. In 2008, we ran a story from Slashdot reader Rob Spengler about Last.fm’s “mountain of data.” Not only did he note how Last.fm was the “largest online radio outlet” at the time, surpassing Pandora and others, but he (hilariously, in hindsight) posed the question: “Does sitting on a mountain of data make Last.FM powerful enough to start making a stand against the record industry?”

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Source: Slashdot – Last.fm Turns 20

Shares of Zoom have tumbled about 90% from their pandemic peak in October 2020 as the former investor darling struggles to adjust to a post-COVID world. Reuters reports: The stock was down nearly 10% on Tuesday after the company cut its annual sales forecast and posted its slowest quarterly growth, prompting at least six brokerages to cut their price targets. The company, which became a household name during lockdowns due to the popularity of its video-conferencing tools, is trying to reinvent itself by focusing on businesses, with products such as cloud-calling service Zoom Phone and conference-hosting offering Zoom Rooms. Analysts, however, say any turnaround in the business is still a few quarters away as growth in its mainstay online unit slows and competition from Microsoft’s Teams and Cisco’s Webex and Salesforce’s Slack gets intense.

“Zoom has a fundamental flaw — it has needed to spend heavily to keep hold of market share. Spending to cling onto, rather than grow, market share is never a good place to be and was a sign of trouble ahead,” Hargreaves Lansdown equity analyst Sophie Lund-Yates said. The company’s operating expenses surged 56% in the third quarter as it spent more on product development and marketing. Its adjusted operating margin shrank to 34.6% from 39.1% a year earlier.

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Source: Slashdot – Zoom Shares Plunge 90% From Peak As Pandemic Boom Fades

Right to Repair website iFixit put up a billboard in Albany, New York, calling for Gov. Kathy Hochul to sign the landmark Right to Repair law, which was passed overwhelmingly nearly six months ago by the state legislature. PIRG reports: Supported by Repair.org, U.S. PIRG and NYPIRG, Consumer Reports, Environment New York, the Story of Stuff Project, Sierra Club Atlantic Chapter, NRDC, Environmental Action and EFF, calls for the governor to sign the bill have increased The legislation must advance to the governor by the end of December and be signed by January 10, 2023.

The Albany Times Union editorialized twice for the governor to sign the bill, recently noting that the bill has come under intense opposition from manufacturers: “Meanwhile, lobbyists, big corporations and a few trade organizations are pressing for a veto … Ms. Hochul must sign the bill, and then lawmakers should get to work passing an expanded version that includes all the products that were needlessly stripped from the original. Big corporations and the lobbyists they hire won’t be happy, but that shouldn’t matter a bit.”

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Source: Slashdot – iFixit Put Up a Right To Repair Billboard Along New York Governor’s Drive To Work

Amazon has set up its second AWS region in India and says the cloud unit will invest more than $4.4 billion in the South Asian market by 2030, part of the company’s attempts to widen its growing cloud tentacles across the globe. TechCrunch reports: The retailer said Tuesday that it has launched an AWS infrastructure region in the city of Hyderabad, its second cloud region in the country. An additional AWS datacenter cluster will allow the firm to offer “greater choice” in the country and support over 48,000 full-time jobs annually, Amazon said. AWS, which leads the cloud market in India, has amassed a number of major clients in the country including Axis Bank, HDFC Bank, Niti Aayog, PhysicsWallah and Acko. “As a part of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s $1 Trillion Digital Economy vision, the ‘India cloud’ is set for big expansion and innovation. Data centers are an important element of the digital ecosystem. The investments by AWS in expanding their data centers in India is a welcome development and would certainly help catalyze India’s digital economy,” said Rajeev Chandrashekhar, Union Minister of State for Electronics and Information Technology and for Skill Development and Entrepreneurship, in a statement.

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Source: Slashdot – Amazon Launches Second Cloud Region In India, Pledges .4 Billion Investment

Computer and printer maker HP said Tuesday it will cut between 4,000 and 6,000 jobs by the end of 2025 as part of a restructuring. Axios reports: HP said the move will save it at least $1.4 billion annually by the end of fiscal 2025. However, it expects to incur $1 billion in costs due to the restructuring, with $600 million in fiscal 2023 and the rest split over the remaining two years. It made the announcement alongside its quarterly earnings report.

As part of that report, HP said to expect per-share earnings of 70 cents to 80 cents, excluding items. That’s below consensus expectations of about 86 cents per share, per CNBC. Further reading: A Host of Tech Companies, Including Coinbase, Robinhood, Lyft, and Stripe, Announce Hiring Freezes and Job Cuts

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Source: Slashdot – HP Will Cut Up To 6,000 Jobs Over Next Three Years