Apple today added new models of the iPhone and iPod touch which have double the memory.

The iPhone now comes in a new 16GB model for $499, joining the 8GB model for $399. iPod touch now comes in a 32GB model for $499, joining the 16GB model for $399 and the 8GB model for $299.

“For some users, there’s never enough memory,” said Greg Joswiak, Apple’s vice president of Worldwide iPod and iPhone Product Marketing. “Now people can enjoy even more of their music, photos and videos on the most revolutionary mobile phone and best Wi-Fi mobile device in the world.”

All iPhone and iPod touch models include the software enhancements announced last month, including the ability to automatically find your location using the new Maps application; create Web Clips for your favorite websites; customize your home screen and watch movies from the new iTunes Movie Rentals.

Pricing & Availability

The new 16GB iPhone is available immediately for a suggested retail price of $499 (US) through the Apple Store, Apple’s retail stores and AT&T retail and online stores. The 32GB iPod touch is available worldwide immediately for a suggested retail price of $499 (US) through the Apple Store, Apple’s retail stores and Apple Authorized Resellers.

We’ve been fans of SkinnyCorp for several years now. We saw their founders on a panel at South by Southwest in 2006, and they wowed us with their corporate philosophy.

We were already fans of the funky t-shirts they sell at Threadless (the punny “communist party” and “hypotamoose” t-shirts are in heavy rotation in the PodcastMama shirt drawer). Plus they have a regular podcast, which always wins brownie points from us.

But last month, when looking through their weekly shirt flyer, we clicked on a link that took us to the coolest. podcast. recording. rig. ever.

We got in touch with Charlie Festa, Threadless’ Podcasting Liaison. Here’s what he had to say about his future-retro-podcast studio:

“When we first moved into the office, we started building a studio, then we came to the conclusion that we should buy something mobile in case we wanted to take it to the road.

What we have here in the pictures is a 1962 Airstream Bambi. We picked it up in Minnesota off eBay. Once we brought it home (to Chicago) we gutted it out, and built it all out ourselves, and equipped it with some awesome technology.

Every week we do a podcast in here, and let people know what is going on in the office and what is going on in the warehouse.

When outsiders come into our office the first thing they gravitate to is the Airstream, Flying Cloud, Silver Bullet or whatever you want to call it. We have a very relaxed atmosphere in our office. It is definitely a pleasure to come to work everyday and work in this piece of history.”

Photos of the studio interior below the fold…

The US audience for podcasts will more than double in the next two years, growing from 6.5 million (active weekly downloaders) in 2007 to 14 million in 2009.

According to a new report by eMarketer

• The total US podcast audience reached 18.5 million in 2007;
• The total audience will increase by 251% to 65 million in 2012;
• There are currently 6.5 million people that download one or more podcasts per week; and
• In five years, there will be 25 million active podcast downloaders.

As The Podcast Audience Grows, Advertisers Will Follow

”As the US podcasting industry matures it is unquestionably creating a listening audience,” says Paul Verna, eMarketer Senior Analyst. “Along with a larger audience comes increases in advertising spending tied to podcasts.”

US spending on podcast-related advertising (including sponsorships) will rise to $435 million in 2012, up from $165 million in 2007:

Music subscription services have, by and large, bombed. The idea of renting music hasn’t taken off and, even worse, customers have to worry about the services’ futures.

The latest example of this comes with Yahoo’s subscription music service. On Monday, the company announced that it will discontinue its Yahoo Music Unlimited subscription service and has instead struck a deal with RealNetworks’ Rhapsody service:

Beginning in the middle of 2008, Yahoo Music Unlimited subscribers will be guided through an in-browser process to convert their music libraries to Rhapsody’s service. For a limited time (length unknown), they’ll be able to keep paying Yahoo’s subscription fees, which cap out at $8.99 per month, before being required to start paying Rhapsody’s $12.99.

Anything could happen with the service, though, given Microsoft’s hostile takeover bid for Yahoo.

The Long Now Foundation has made a decision on the five year old bet between podcasting pioneer Dave Winer and the New York Times’ Martin Nisenholtz:

Long Bets has arrived at a decision for Long Bet #2 between blogger Dave Winer and Martin Nisenholtz of the NY Times. At stake is US$2000.00 plus half the interest that has accrued over the last 5 years in the Farsight Fund, all of which will go to the charity of the winner’s choice.

In the bet Winer asserts, “In a Google search of five keywords or phrases representing the top five news stories of 2007, weblogs will rank higher than the ‘New York Times‘ Web site”.

The Long Bets decision on this bet is in favor of Winer’s side; weblog page ranks came out ahead of the NY Times 4 to 1.

Takeaways From The Times Vs Blogs Bet

There are several things we can take away from Winer & Nisenholtz’s bet:

• If blogs now beat the New York Times at Google, it’s probably a safe bet that podcasts and other user-generated video will beat any traditional TV network’s online presence within five years.
• While blogs show up higher in search results at Google, no blog has the authority or visibility of the New York Times yet.
• The New York Times’ “gated community” strategy has been horrible for the site’s search engine rankings.
• The rise of Wikipedia has almost made the bet irrelevant.
• The success of blogs at search sites may reflect as much on the limitations of current search engines as it does on the quality of blog coverage. Is Lesboprof’s take on the Virginia Tech killings especially notable? Not really – but it beats the New York Times’ coverage at Google.

The success of blogs hasn’t brought about an enlightened state of journalism, as many were predicting five years ago. In fact, Google’s reliance on links in determining page rank tends to promote sensational and controversial takes on the news.

More than anything, the fact that blogs beat the New York Times in the bet shows that individual voices have more power than ever in shaping the way we get news and changing how we view the world.

Update: Dave Winer’s take on the outcome.

Microsoft¬†has made an unsolicited $44.6 billion offer for Yahoo! to challenge Google’s dominance in Internet search services and advertising.

According to Bloomberg.com, Microsoft’s $31/share offer is 62 percent more than Yahoo’s closing stock price yesterday. In the months leading up to Microsoft’s offer, Yahoo!’s stock has been declining in value, dropping 18 percent this year on the Nasdaq.

Microsoft’s shares have dropped about 40% since Chief Executive Officer Steve Ballmer took over from Bill Gates in 2000.

The New York Times likens the prospective merger/buyout to “building a spaceship out of spare parts,” (the old Soviet Soyuz and US Skylab, in their humorous example), using old bits and pieces to craft an intricate, complicated machine while hurtling through space, with a high likelihood of catastrophic failure.

Shar van Buskirk at Forrester thinks that this merger would yield much deeper customer data, allowing for “laser target[ing]” of online advertising, a boon for business.

One has to wonder whether two giant technology companies merging will ultimately be good or bad for the end-user, the small businessperson, the student, the blogger.¬† Perhaps they’ll give Google a run for their money.¬† But in a world where more choices = more competition = better prices and wider range of alternatives, one can’t help but feel uneasy about two of the biggest tech companies joining forces to do battle with a third behemoth.

As Twitter founder Evan Williams said (on Twitter), “Has putting two behemoths together ever, in the history of corporations, resulted in greatness?”

Indeed.

During Amazon’s Q4 2007 earnings call on January 30th, CEO Jeff Bezos had some interesting remarks about sales of the company’s Kindle portable book reader:

Kindle is, in terms of demand, outpacing our expectations, which is certainly something that we are very grateful for.

It’s also on the manufacturing side causing us to scramble. We’re working very hard to increase the number of units that we can build and supply per week, so that we can get back — our goal is to get into a situation as quickly as we can where when you order a Kindle, we ship it immediately. That’s the standard we want to hold ourselves to and we are working very hard to get there. We are super-excited by the very strong demand.

We’ve been skeptical about the Kindle, because of the platform’s relatively closed nature. The Internet is where people’s attention is moving, and the Kindle doesn’t make it easier to access Internet content or make it easy to publish content to the device via the Internet.

Nevertheless, demand for the Kindle is apparently more than Amazon was prepared to handle. Because Amazon isn’t providing any sales figures for the device, it’s impossible to tell if there’s large demand for the device or if Amazon is just struggling to ramp up production.

VoIP pioneer Jeff Pulver, host of online tech show PulverTV, announced today the launch of PulverTV, which he is calling “The First 100% “Indie Internet TV” Channel.”

The staff at PulverTV are creating 12-14 hours/week of original programming. In addition, they’ve enlisted several dozen producers of independently created Internet TV to include in the daily program schedule. Their goal is to provide a space for independent video content creators to showcase their work and “get their shows discovered,” and to provide viewers with round-the-clock interesting fare.

Pulver, co founder of VoIP telco Vonage, the publisher of VON magazine, and organizer of Voices on the Net (VON) conferences, says, “I first got the idea to turn pulverTV into a 24/7 operation while appreciating the possibilities of personal broadband broadcasting and thinking about ‘What would [cable mogul] Ted Turner do today if he was just started out in television?’ I started thinking about pushing the limits on the practical and possible.”

Pulver has a hefty task ahead of him. As downloadable and streaming-on-demand video offerings proliferate online, a 24/7 Internet TV station will have lots of competition for viewers’ attention.

Over at PBS’s MediaShift, Jennifer Woodard Maderazo offers her take on why she’s leaving print media behind for digital:

In new media circles, one of the hottest topics of recent years has been the print-to-digital shift. People pundit about it, shout “print is dead” and wallow in the sadness sparked by nostalgia for a day when this wasn’t a question. We’ve also begun speculating on whether a device like the Kindle will really ever take our attention away from ink-on-paper.

I myself have never been too interested in this debate. Perhaps that’s why I’ve done virtually nothing to avoid the switch from print to digital, but rather let it sweep over me naturally. Some people have been fed up with the clutter caused by print media or the fact that the delivery of traditional news is too slow. Others cling to magazines and newspapers out of necessity or because of conviction and dedication to a particular publication. My print-to-digital conversion happened not out of principle but because of a series of mundane circumstances.

I see that series of mundane circumstances now happening not just with the shift from print to Internet media, but with the shift from broadcast television to Internet television, and the shift from mainstream media to user-generated content.

MTV announced today that on Super Tuesday it will have 23 members of its citizen journalist Street Team ’08 covering it:

Our enterprising citizen journalists will be on the ground, at the polling stations, caucus sites and candidate rallies, bringing you up-to-the minute news as it happens. The candidates aren’t going to be stopping on Super Tuesday, and our reporters won’t stop either.

Their real-time reports will be streamed live all day on MTVNews.com and ChooseOrLose.com, and throughout the day, MTV will break into regularly scheduled programming to showcase news featurettes and live reports from our Street Teamers (whom you can meet here).

“Young people are taking hold of the political process like never before, and are clamoring to share and react to the stories as they unfold on the campaign trail in real-time,” said MTV President Christina Norman. “The Street Team’s Super Tuesday coverage will be hyper-focused on the issues and stories that matter most to our audience, empowering them to experience the day’s historic events in a whole new way.”

Armed with Nokia N95 mobile devices, laptops and video cameras, our embedded reporters will be bringing you the action from the 23 states holding primaries and caucuses on Super Tuesday, and you will be able to follow along with an interactive map on MTV News’ and Choose or Lose’s sites. Each Street Teamer will also be blogging throughout the day on ChooseOrLose.com. An innovative application, provided by Flixwagon, powers the mobile-broadcasting technology by allowing anyone with a capable 3G phone to stream live video to the Internet and store it for later viewing.