MEVIO has announced the launch of TeXtraTV, a new technology entertainment channel that combines the best technology shows, reviews and video clips with some of the top celebrity hosts in technology.

The company hopes to make TeXtraTV the MTV of technology video.

According to Ron Bloom, co-founder and chief executive officer of MEVIO, “In the same way that MTV created a new category of entertainment with music video, we are doing it with technology. I call it techertainment.”

TeXtraTV is hosted by former MTV VJ, podcasting pioneer and MEVIO co-founder Adam Curry and features other internet and traditional media tech personalities such as columnist and author, John C. Dvorak; former MarketWatch reporter, Bambi Francisco; co-founder of Girls in Tech, Adriana F. Gascoigne and GeekBrief.TV host, Cali Lewis.

MEVIO is planning on launching a full-scale technology network, combining TeXtra’s rich video and audio programming with a headline-driven editorial content.

Shows include John Dvorak’s Tech 5 Report, GeekBrief.TV, Games Weasel, Lab Rats and Root Access, as well as new content from MEVIO producers in San Francisco, Los Angeles, New York and London.

TeXtraTV is the first of several, premium online channels MEVIO plans to unveil in the coming weeks.

Lasonic has introduced its I931 High Performance Portable Music System – aka, The iPod Boombox. 

It’s a lot like the boomboxes from back in the days – except that it’s Made For iPod, it’s got USB support, it reads from SD/MMC cards, it’s got a remote and it can send video out to a TV. 

The iPod Boombox is $169.99 direct from Lasonic.

Marketing Vox reports that NPR’s site traffic is up 78% over the last year, thanks in large part to podcasting and social networking features. NPR.org had 2.6 million unique visitors in August, a 78 percent increase from a year earlier, according to comScore data.

Public radio audiences and contributions went up, too.

NPR is also planning new social networking and podcasting features:

• Listeners can create personal profiles containing photos, and list their favorite books, movies, NPR programs, and local stations. Like Facebook and MySpace, they’ll be able to declare themselves “friends” with other users, including NPR staffers.
• The station is also expanding its API library so local radio stations, and ordinary people, can incorporate its content into their own applications. One tool plots the subjects of NPR stories on a world map. Another lets people listen to stories on iPhone.
• NPR also plans to increase the flexibility of its podcast downloads, which have tripled in use over the past two years.

i.TV has launched a free movie and TV guide service (App Store link) for the iPhone and iPod touch.

In a nutshell, it’s an interactive, mobile TV Guide. 

Here’s a rundown on i.TV’s features:

• TV and movie listings based on your current location and other customizable profile settings. The service provides rich background information for most programs, including celebrity photos, biographies, show synopses, ratings, and reviews.
• Advanced sort options that make it easy to organize television listings according to categories such as channel, show, and genre. Additionally, customers can use built-in filtering capabilities to exclude information from their listings, such as adult content.
• View a large selection of movie trailers and television previews that can be streamed directly to their device.

i.TV is a free download for the iPhone and iPod touch, available in the US and Canada.

YouTube has announced another option that it plans to use to make money off of its video library – “click-to-buy” links:

Today, we’re taking our first steps to providing YouTube users with this kind of instant gratification, by adding “click-to-buy” links to the watch pages of thousands of YouTube partner videos. Click-to-buy links are non-obtrusive retail links, placed on the watch page beneath the video with the other community features. Just as YouTube users can share, favorite, comment on, and respond to videos quickly and easily, now users can click-to-buy products — like songs, books, and movies — related to the content they’re watching on the site. We’re getting started by embedding iTunes and Amazon.com links on videos from companies like EMI Music, and providing Amazon.com product links to the newly released video game Spore(TM) on videos from Electronic Arts.

This is just the beginning of building a broad, viable eCommerce platform for users and partners on YouTube. Our vision is to help partners across all industries — from music, to film, to print, to TV — offer useful and relevant products to a large, yet targeted audience, and generate additional revenue from their content on YouTube beyond the advertising we serve against their videos. And those partners who use our content identification and management system can also enable these links on user-generated content, by using Content ID to claim videos and choose to leave them up on the site.

There’s nothing revolutionary here – in fact, most people will wonder why it took them this long to include contextual sales links. 

However, the move will raise some new questions for the site.

Remember Stephanie Lenz, the woman that got sued because she filmed her baby dancing to His Royal Purple Badness’s Let’s Go Crazy? Will she, and others making fair use of copyrighted content, want to see their videos turned into advertisements?

Aristarkh Chernyshev & Alexei Shulgin’s wowPod is an interactive multimedia sculpture based on the iPod. 

It features a giant, distorted version of the iconic Apple iPod, which is actually functional.

Pollster is using the 2008 election as an opportunity to raise awareness of its embeddable maps, like the one above. The maps are automatically updated with current information.

WordPress creator Matt Mullenweg demos the upcoming update to the popular open source blogging/podcasting content management system. WordPress 2.7 is expected to be available in November.

via CenterNetworks

Michael Moore appears to be using bootlegging to ensure distribution of his latest film, Slacker Uprising, outside the US and Canada. 

Torrentfreak reports that the film is actively being shared on bitTorrent around the world, despite only being freely available from the official source to people in the US and Canada.

“What do you think I’m up to? I know it may not be obvious to most, but I think you guys get it,” said Moore. “I only own the US and Canadian rights. So my hands are tied. But this is the 21st century. What are ‘geographical rights’ ?”

“If I buy a book and read it, and then give you the book to read, I have broken no laws,” adds Moore. “Why is that not true for all media?”

“Is it wrong for someone who’s bought a film on DVD to let a friend watch it for free? Of course it’s not. It never has been and never will be. I think information, art and ideas should be shared.”

Internet TV site Current TV and microblogging platform Twitter are teaming up for interactive coverage of the Oct 7 presidential debate.

The project overlays real-time Twitter posts over a live broadcast of the debate.

Here’s how it works:

• Tune in on October 7th at 9pm EST/ 6pm PST for the Live Presidential Debate. Find Current TV on your local cable/satellite provider or watch it at the Current site.
• Make sure you’ve registered with Twitter to participate.
• During the debates, chime in by including “#current” in your tweet. Example:
  “This discussion about universal healthcare makes me want to pop some pills! #current”
• Current plans to display as many “tweets” as it can. You can see all of the #current tweets by searching #current on Twitter search.
• Questions? tweet @current.