Music startup doubleTwist today launched a new application, available for Mac and PC, that wants to replace the proprietary world of Apple’s iTunes with one where you can download music and sync it to any player.

Here’s how doubleTwist explains what they do:

Our vision is simple: to create a unifying media platform that connects consumers with all their media and all their devices, regardless of whether they are online or offline.Just like you don’t use a different browser for every web site you visit (Firefox to read the NY Times, IE to stream Hulu, Chrome to browse YouTube, etc) you shouldn’t have to use iTunes for Apple products, Nokia software for Nokia phones, Sony software for Sony products, etc. The typical household today has many such devices and there is a need for a simple and powerful software that connects them.

There’s a lot to like about doubleTwist. It’s an easy to use app and it could make life a lot easier for people with multiple portable media players. It’s built on Amazon, so most people will find it easy to purchase music.

doubleTwist doesn’t offer anything compelling for iPod/iPhone users, though, and the Music Store is only available on the Mac. Also, the store is currently US-only.

All-in-all, doubleTwist holds a lot of promise, but it currently has more promise than purpose.

It’s a free download, though, so check it out and let me know what you think!

There’s still hope for the Microsoft Zune, based on a new teen survey on portable media players.

• 13% of the teens surveyed that plan to buy a portable media player plan to buy a Zune in the next 12 months, up from 0% a year ago.
• 73% plan to buy an iPod, down from 100% a year ago.

It’s clear that, a year ago, the Year Zunethousand fiasco had effectively killed the Zune’s buzz.

While we wrote earlier that Microsoft struck out with the Zune HD, many teens now have a different opinion.

Microsoft is considering bringing the Zune software to Apple’s Macintosh OS X, according to an article at via ZDNet:

Microsoft is considering whether it should port the Zune software and services to other platforms, including Apple’s. There’s no guarantee that the Redmondians will end up doing this — or timetable as to when this could happen — but it’s one of many strategies under active consideration.

“We are evaluating a lot of options in terms of platforms,” says Microsoft’s Jose Pinero, when asked about this scenario.He noted that with the addition of the ability to stream music from a browser that is part of the new Zune 4.0 experience, Mac and Linux users already can stream music to their systems if they have a ZunePass subscription. The streaming capability isn’t limited to Internet Explorer; it works with any browser, he said.

Microsoft’s decision not to support Mac OS X has always seemed like a strategic blunder.

Lawyers working on a $1 billion copyright lawsuit, filed by Viacom against Google’s YouTube, may have found evidence that YouTube employees uploaded pirated videos to the site, in order to bump up traffic.

According to a CNET News article:

Internal YouTube e-mails indicate that YouTube managers knew and discussed the existence of unauthorized content on the site with employees but chose not to remove the material.

The e-mails, according to the sources who asked for anonymity because of the ongoing litigation, surfaced during an exchange of information between the two sides of the legal dispute. They are one of the cornerstones of Viacom’s case, as well as that of a separate class action lawsuit filed against Google and YouTube by a group of content owners, the sources said.

“If the facts are accurate, Google will have a very difficult time claiming that its staff members don’t undermine its protection,” notes entertainment attorney Roger Goff.

If YouTube was actively encouraging copyright violations, it could lead to a rush of similar lawsuits against Google.

Check out this demo of the Livestream Livepack – described as “a satellite television truck in a backpack.”

Plug in a camera and you can stream HD video to the web, wirelessly.

There’s a lot of discussion today about Adobe’s plan to bring Flash to Research In Motion, Windows Mobile, Palm and Google phones.

To bring Flash to all the major cell phone platforms, it seems, except for Apple’s iPhone.

“This is bringing the full Flash capabilities to these devices, it hasn’t been available before,” said Adrian Ludwig, Adobe’s group product marketing manager for the Flash Platform. “There will be a lot of content that just works on the devices, and then some will have to be tailored. If you have a great mobile idea, go ahead and build it and put it on a mobile device.”

As phones get more and more powerful, Flash becomes less of a liability, slowing down your web browsing, and more of a potentially useful tool.

Is Apple big enough to make Flash irrelevant on mobile devices?

Unfortunately for Adobe, it already has.

Want to know how to make money podcasting?

You could do worse than to look at the example of Leo Laporte, the creator of This Week in Tech and the TWiT podcast network.

He spoke before the Online News Association this week and discussed his experiences with making money with podcasting and new media. According to Laporte, he has revenue of $1.5 million/year, on expenses of $350,000/year, and expects the revenue to double annually. And, though, podcasting is what’s paying the bills, he’s thinking beyond it – looking at establishing TWiT as an an online tech destination site and getting on Roku and other Internet TV devices.

Along the way, Laporte shares some great anecdotes about his experiences trying to put technology coverage onto the Internet.

via Jeff Jarvis

Mashable has published an interesting post that looks at 9 ways to make money with podcasting.

Here are the options they suggest:

9 Ways To Make Money Podcasting

1. Sign up with a podcast network such as Mevio, Podtrac, and Wizzard Media
2. Get your own sponsors
3. Be like public TV and beg for donations
4. Tease people with freebies and then charge for the good stuff
5. Give away partial shows for free and charge for unedited shows
6. Build your own media network of programming and sell ads against it
7. Use podcasting to build your brand, and then sell your services
8. Use your podcast to sell iPhone aps
9. Incorporate sponsored content into your podcast

The post doesn’t offer any new models for making money with podcasting, but it does highlight the ways real podcasters are doing it.

Mashable’s latest post on podcasting is another sign that podcasting is being adopted by the mainstream as a valuable tool for both communication and marketing.

Just last year, Mashable was publishing doom and gloom stories about the future of podcasting, and arguing that “we cannot make reliable money from monetizing these downloads“. Now they’ve done a 180 degree turn, and are enumerating the possibilities.

Image: Susan Bratton via Mashable

Can you podcast physical things?

Most people think of podcasting in a fairly limited sense. – for example, radio shows that you can download automatically.

We’ve always had a broader view, that podcasting was the publishing of downloadable files with an RSS 2.0 news feed. With that in mind, you can use podcasting to automatically stay current with all types of files, through audio podcasting, video podcasting and, more generically, document casting.

In each case, podcasting is being used to make it easy to get the latest version of something – whether it’s a radio show, a song download, a new video or some other file.

Why not podcast physical things, though?

Good news for new media publishers – Internet media is rapidly becoming the biggest channel for advertising.

The Guardian reports that the UK has become the first major economy where advertisers spend more on internet advertising than on television advertising, with a record £1.75bn online spend in the first six months of the year.

This overturns nearly half a century of dominance by the television broadcast industry:

UK advertisers spent £1.75bn on internet advertising in the six months to the end of June, a 4.6% year-on-year increase, according to a report by the Internet Advertising Bureau and PricewaterhouseCoopers. To put this in perspective, in 1998, when the IAB first measured internet advertising, just £19.4m was spent online.The internet now accounts for 23.5% of all advertising money spent in the UK, while TV ad spend accounts for 21.9% of marketing budgets.

The IAB originally predicted that internet ad spend would overtake TV at the end of 2009; however, the crippling advertising recession accelerated this by six months. TV advertising fell about 17% year on year in the first half, to about £1.6bn, according to the report.

This is an inevitable trend, but this switch is a milestone for online advertising.

One possible threat to the growth of online advertising an online media is concern over tracking. The New York Times reports that 2 out of 3 object to online tracking. Any changes to regulations around online ad tracking could delay migration to online ads.

Image: sh1mmer