Olympus has announced a new portable audio recorder, the LS-11, a follow-up to their LS-10 handheld audio recorder.

The LS-11 can record 24-bit/96kHz stereo WAVs, as well as MP3 and WMA format files.

It’s got the same on-board microphones as the LS-10, as well as rear-mounted speakers for auditioning recorded material.

New features include 8GB of internal memory, instead of the 2GB found on the LS-10, and the facility to work with SD cards of up to 32GB in capacity.

What’s more, the two memory drives are viewed as one storage destination, so the LS-11 can address 40GB of data in total (if using a 32GB SD card).

The LS-11 features a Voice Synchronize Recording function, which extends recording time by recording only when the microphone senses sound at the pre-set level. This function saves time by reducing the need to fast-forward past pauses between songs or in conversation. This function allows a musician to set up the LS-11 to start recording a musical performance before it starts. When the recording is played back later, avoid listening to dead air because it has only picked up the performance.

According to Olympus, the LS-11 offers 23 hours of battery life.

The LS-11 will be available in September 2009 at a price of $399.99.

CNet’s Matt Rosoff got a preview of the upcoming Microsoft Zune HD, and came away “thinking that Microsoft might finally have a contender”:

I was surprised and pretty impressed with its small size–without measuring, I’d guess it’s maybe two-thirds the size of an iPod Touch, and quite a bit thinner. In my hands, it felt more like an iPod Nano or perhaps one of the flash-based Zunes, although it’s obviously not that small.

But the real innovation seems to be going on in user interface.

Microsoft has done a solid job, taking the mixture of horizontal and vertical menus used on the current Zunes and adding particular tweaks for the touch screen. You can scroll horizontally or vertically simply by swiping your finger along, and there are multiple “ways in” to and “ways out” of the various menus and screens, which encourages exploration.

There was a bit of a learning curve, but after a couple minutes I was impressed by how much functionality Microsoft was able to pack into such a small screen.

Rosoff’s take is much more positive than the reviews of the 1st and 2nd generation Zunes. With investors calling for Microsoft to kill off the Zune, which has been bypassed by buyers, this could be the company’s last opportunity for a success with the platform.

The Zune HD is expected to be released this Fall.

Microsoft’s weak quarterly earnings report is pushing some to call on the company to abandon its once-hyped “iPod-killer”, the Zune.

According to a Marketwatch story, investors think it’s time to dump the Zune and focus their attention on competing with Apple’s iPhone:

“The market reception for Zune is so disappointing that many retailers have even stopped selling it altogether,” said George Kurian, a vice president at Tradition Capital Management LLC, which owns Microsoft shares.

Kurian said Apple has successfully outflanked Microsoft by shifting its iPod users to higher-margin devices like the iPhone.

“Microsoft should abandon Zune and follow Apple’s strategy to try to make its presence felt in the high-growth smartphone sector,” Kurian said.

The Zune had a lukewarm reception when it was introduced, because the device failed to significantly differentiate itself from both the iPod and other iPod competitors. Marketing blunders, like the PR fiasco of the Zunepocolypse and Microsoft’s inability to generate interest with teens, have caused Microsoft’s Zune revenue to plummet.

What do you think? Is there still hope for the Zune brand? And is there any hope for a Zune phone?

YouTube took credit today for pushing Chris Brown’s Forever, a song that was released over a year ago, to #4 on the iTunes singles chart and #3 on Amazon’s best-selling MP3 list.

YouTube suggests that user-generated video, combined with their rights management tools, packs a powerful marketing punch:

At YouTube, we have sophisticated content management tools in place to help rights holders control their content on our site. The rights holders for “Forever” used these tools to claim and monetize the song, as well as to start running Click-to-Buy links over the video, giving viewers the opportunity to purchase the music track on Amazon and iTunes.

As a result, the rights holders were able to capitalize on the massive wave of popularity generated by “JK Wedding Entrance Dance” — in the last week, searches for “Chris Brown Forever” on YouTube have skyrocketed, making it one of the most popular queries on the site.

Clearly, a viral video hit like the JK Wedding Entrance Dance, which has been viewed over 12 millions times, has the power to sell music.

Viral video hits are few and far between, though, so it could be a mistake to try and draw conclusions from this one. For every JK Wedding Entrance Dance, there are millions of YouTube videos that get only a few views.

What do you think? Is the JK Wedding Entrance Dance video an example of how companies should be capitalizing on user-generated video, or is it just an extreme case?

VoloMedia, a provider of advertising and reporting solutions for portable media, today announced that it was awarded U.S. Patent 7,568,213, titled Method for Providing Episodic Media yesterday.

The company says it expects companies creating products relating to podcasting and media synchronization to enter into partnerships with VoloMedia.

Founder Murgesh Navar has this to say about the patent:

The relative breadth of the issued claims under this patent has given rise to many questions. I’d like to take this opportunity to provide some context to our announcement: “VoloMedia Awarded U.S. Patent for Podcasting”.

Over the years, I have heard arguments, pro and con, to the utility and necessity of an intellectual property (IP) system. One one hand, there are arguments that say exclusive rights to ideas awarded on a patent excludes others from doing what they want to do and, therefore, IP systems close down access to knowledge. On the other hand, patents and intellectual property rights do drive innovation, as well as investments in new ideas. I do not wish to debate the merits of the U.S. patent system, but just acknowledge there are two sides to the issue of patent awards. VoloMedia has filed a dozen U.S. patent applications since 2003. Patent no. 7,568,213 is the first in the pipeline to issue. We expect the others to follow suit.

With specific reference to our newly issued 7,568,213 patent, it was filed in November 2003, almost a year before the start of podcasting. This helps underscore the point, that for nearly six years, VoloMedia has been focused on helping publishers monetize portable media…. and has continued these efforts with the addition of a wide array of smartphone-based applications. The patent that issued yesterday helps to tie together and reinforce the value of the various technologies and services that VoloMedia has developed to help accomplish this objective. VoloMedia’s intent is to continue to work collaboratively with key participants in the industry, leveraging its unique range of products to further grow and accelerate the market. Today, podcasting is 100% RSS-based. However, the patent is not RSS-dependent. Rather, it covers all episodic media downloads. It just so happens that, today, the majority of episodic media downloads are RSS-based podcasts, which is why we titled our announcement the way we did.

The episodic media download industry is still in its infancy. There will come a day when all the content on Hulu is available as an episodic download. Consumers will then have legitimate choices in how they consume their media: on a downloaded and portable basis, or by visiting a content aggregation website. As the medium matures, one would expect to see new entrants into the episodic download arena. The impact of a strong growing IP portfolio is such that we would expect new entrants into the podcasting arena to have a collaborative relationship with VoloMedia, just as do many of the current players.

This patent raises all sorts of questions:

• Is there really anything unique technologically about podcasting? Is the publish and subscribe mechanism that podcasting is based on different than other data synchronization systems?.
• Will this promote the development of podcasting or reward those that have developed it?
• Is this going to kill off new developments in the world of podcasting and new media?

What do you think of VoloMedia’s patent on podcasting?

For reference, below are the claims, per VoloMedia, issued under U.S. patent 7,568,213:

Chicago’s Horizon Realty, a property management company, filed a $50,000 libel lawsuit Monday against a former tenant, Amanda Bonnen, over one of her alleged Twitter posts.

Horizon argues that Bonnen libeled the company with her May 12th tweet, which read in part “Who said sleeping in a moldy apartment was bad for you? Horizon Realty thinks it’s okay.”

Bonnen’s alleged twitter account, abonnen, is no longer active. But, based on information in Google’s cache, it appears that Bonnen had 22 followers.

“The statements are obviously false, and it’s our intention to prove that,” said Horizon’s Jeffrey Michael. “We’re a sue first, ask questions later kind of an organization.” Michael added that the company has a “good reputation it wants to preserve.”

The Apple Tablet is still complete vaporware – but it’s looking more and more likely that Apple is developing a large-scale version of the iPod touch.

While some think the idea of an Apple Tablet is a train wreck, Apple hasn’t released many train wrecks recently.

With that in mind, here are five reasons that the Apple Tablet will rock:

• It will be a great ereader – the Kindle was the first ebook reader to really get people’s attention. But the Kindle’s primary focus is to be a platform for Amazon to sell you proprietary, DRM’d ebooks. That’s looking backwards. Apple will come up with something forward-looking, and make its tablet computer a great platform for reading books, but also for reading anything else that you like. And watching anything you like. And playing anything you like. And doing anything you like. All that, and it will be in color, extra sexy and actually let you touch hyperlinks to open them up.
• It will be open to app developers – Apple’s learned from its insanely popular iPhone app store that people want a dead-simple way to load apps. Apple’s also learned the value of establishing a successful new mobile app platform. That means the App Store is coming to the Tablet. People can quibble about Apple’s screening process, but nobody has done a better app store than Apple. App developers will have no problem working with larger screens, and they’ll love the extra real estate. The platform will have 10,000 apps in a year.
• It will be awesome for video – the iPhone is a great media platform, but a larger screen will crank things up a notch. The Apple Tablet will also have an advantage over any other notebook platform; it will sync with iTunes, making loading and buying media a no-brainer for anyone who’s ever used an iPod.
• It will be a great game platform – The success of games on the Wii and the iPhone show that raw gaming power isn’t as important as making gaming easy and fun. Games that were fiddly on a tiny iPhone screen will be way more fun with a big touchscreen. A larger screen opens the platform up to games with two simultaneous players touching the screen, too.
• It will be a great platform for new media – any Apple Tablet will make it easy to use YouTube and video podcasts. But the Apple Tablet will be great for reading blogs, pdfs and all sorts of Internet media – making it great platform for new media developers, and giving users access to an unprecedented variety of free media. And because of the larger screen, blogging and creating new media will be much more practical.

Add to that bigger versions of Maps and Mail and you’ve got a winner, if Apple gets the price right. And if they don’t, they’ll sell it at a premium to the rich for a year and then cut the price and watch it sell like hotcakes.

The Apple Tablet may be vaporware – but it’s got “hit” written all over it.

What do you think? Is the Apple Tablet speculation out of hand, or are you getting excited about the idea of a new platform from Apple?

Podcasting network Wizzard Media is expanding it program to promote iPhone apps in podcasts with the acquisition of distribution rights to three new iPhone apps: Word Party, Dietician and Yo Mama.

Wizzard plans to continue to acquire the rights for up to 100 already launched and approved iPhone Apps to provide podcast producers with a continuous stream of relevant, paid advertising for their episodic shows, provide app developers with increased sales revenues and provide for profitable App sales for Wizzard.

Blubrry has updated its PowerPress plugin for WordPress to version 0.9.2, adding a large number of new features/options as well as a some bug fixes.

Here’s what’s new:

• Embed player within blog posts with [powerpress] shortcode. (learn more about PowerPress shortcode)
• Add embed code from sites such as YouTube, Viddler and blip.tv
• Custom entry box settings for entering customized iTunes keywords, subtitles and summaries and no player option
• iTunes URL setting for custom and category podcast feeds (These iTunes listings can be pinged as well)

Improvements and Fixes

• iTunes ping logic improved to support scheduled posts
• Latest iTunes ping result displayed below the iTunes URL setting
• Fixed bug with `require_once()` calls on some servers displaying a fatal error
• Fixed scheduled posts deleting podcast episode bug in WordPress 2.8+
• Completely revamped the “on page” and new window players
• Removed the “play in page” option as it was a source of confusion
• Relabeled Redirect Feed URL to FeedBurner Feed URL to clear up confusion
• Added m4b and m4r to list of detected audio formats

Blubrry has also added a function for theme developers to use to display the PowerPress players and links.

The latest version of PowerPress can be downloaded here.

If you’ve used PowerPress 0.9.2, leave a comment with your thoughts!

YouTube today announced updates to the statistics it offers on the videos you publish at the site, giving you the option to make your statistics public:

Uploaders can find even more information about their videos via our free analytics tool, YouTube Insight, including stats about their popularity, geographic audience, and viewer demographics. But most of this information is hidden from the view of the millions and millions of people who’ve never posted a video to the site, and who therefore don’t have access to much of the data we make available to uploaders.

That’s why today we’re giving you the ability to make some information collected in Insight available publicly to anyone watching your videos on YouTube. Now when you watch a video, you can learn even more about it and its audience: on the watch page, under the “Statistics & Data” section, you will be able to see metrics about a video’s views over time, its popularity in different parts of the world, the top drivers of traffic, and the video’s top three audience demographics.

If you’ve uploaded a video, you will be able to choose whether or not you want to make this information public. (You can turn this feature on or off for any or all of the videos you upload, by adjusting the privacy settings for your videos under “My Account.”) But we think that providing your audience with more information about what they’re watching can help you drive views and sustain a more engaged audience. And of course, for those of you who are partners, allowing statistics to be displayed with your videos is actually a great way to attract advertisers.

We hope this feature, like others we’ve launched this year, will help us further open up analytics on the site, making it easy for users to play with YouTube information across different platforms.

YouTube’s statistics announcement is part of a push to get ads on a larger percentage of the user-generated videos on the site.