PCAudioLabs has released Impact, a new case option its line of studio/music computers.

The case, a modular rack-mount design with acoustic foam insulation, was designed from the ground up taking into account how computers are used during the process of recording and mixing audio.

Prices for configured Impact audio workstations start at US $2,675. Details at the PCAudiolabs site.

The first iPhone reviews are in, and it looks like the innovative device may actually live up to its hype:

• The Wall Street Journal’s Walt Mossberg says “Expectations for the iPhone have been so high that it can’t possibly meet them all. It isn’t for the average person who just wants a cheap, small phone for calling and texting. But, despite its network limitations, the iPhone is a whole new experience and a pleasure to use.”
• USA Today says “Apple’s iPhone isn’t perfect, but it’s worthy of the hype.”
• In the New York Times, David Pogue writes that “the iPhone is still the most sophisticated, outlook-changing piece of electronics to come along in years. It does so many things so well, and so pleasurably, that you tend to forgive its foibles. In other words, maybe all the iPhone hype isn‚Äôt hype at all. As the ball player Dizzy Dean once said, ‚ÄúIt ain‚Äôt bragging if you done it.‚Äù
• Newsweek’s Steven Levy says “Even those who never buy one will benefit from its advances, as competitors have already taken Apple‚Äôs achievements as a wake-up call to improve their own products.”

Maybe it’s time to go get in line…..

It’s worth noting, though, that Apple appears to have blown off the blogosphere in courting positive reviews from its usual stable of mainstream media journalists. It will be more informative to find out how this thing ticks once tech blogs get their hands on it.

Apple and AT&T today announced that iPhone users will be able to activate their new phones using iTunes software running on a PC or Mac computer, without having to wait in a store.

According to Apple, activating an iPhone takes only minutes as iTunes guides the user through simple steps to choose their service plan, authorize their credit and activate their iPhone. Based on the company’s past record with handling high traffic loads, buyers may expect to spend some time online waiting for the process to complete.

Once the iPhone is activated, users can then easily sync all of their phone numbers and other contact information, calendars, email accounts, web browser bookmarks, music, photos, podcasts, TV shows and movies just like they do when they sync their iPods with iTunes.

“Users will be able to activate their new iPhone in the comfort and privacy of their own home or office, without having to wait in a store while their phone is activated,” said Steve Jobs, Apple’s CEO. “There are tens of millions of people in the US who already know how to sync their iPods with iTunes, and syncing their new iPhone with iTunes works the same way.”

AT&T Inc. and Apple today announced pricing for three service plans for the iPhone, starting at $59.99 per month. All three plans include unlimited data, Visual Voicemail, 200 SMS text messages, roll-over minutes and unlimited mobile-to-mobile calling. iPhone customers can also choose from any of AT&T’s standard service plans.

Here are the details:

• All iPhone monthly service plans are available for individuals and families and are based on a new two-year service agreement with AT&T.
• Individual plans are priced at $59.99 for 450 minutes, $79.99 for 900 minutes and $99.99 for 1,350 minutes.
• All plans include unlimited data (email and web), Visual Voicemail, 200 SMS text messages, roll over minutes and unlimited mobile-to-mobile
• There’s a one-time activation fee of $36.
• Family plans are also available.

“We want to make choosing a service plan simple and easy, so every plan includes unlimited data with direct Internet access, along with Visual Voicemail and a host of other goodies,” said Steve Jobs, Apple‚Äôs CEO. “We think these three plans give customers the flexibility to experience all of iPhone‚Äôs revolutionary features at affordable and competitive prices.”

Hundreds of U.S. commercial webcasters are going silent today, June 26, to protest to an impending royalty rate increase that could threaten their ability to make money broadcasting mainstream music.

Yahoo! is one of the Internet radio broadcasters that has announced that it is going silent: “Apologies to anyone who was hoping to listen to free LAUNCHcast today. We‚Äôre shutting down the Internet‚Äôs #1 radio service for the day to draw attention to the outrageous rates recently set by the Copyright Royalty Board in Washington, D.C.”

Our apologies to Yahoo!, Live365, RealNetworks, MTV, Pandora, and others that seem to think that this is the day that the music dies, but we’d like you to consider that this is also an Internet Radio Day of Freedom:

• It’s a Day of Freedom from hearing Phil Collins singing Sussudio. It’s a Day of Freedom from hearing Paul McCartney and Stevie Wonder’s soulful Ebony and Ivory. It’s a Day of Freedom from hearing Skyrockets in Flight…. Afternoon Delight by the Starland Vocal Band.
• It’s a Day of Freedom from listening to Michael Bolton ask the question we really don’t want him to be asking, Can I Touch You There?
• It’s a Day of Freedom from hearing the Black Eyed Peas singing that immortal line, “My hump, my hump, my hump, my hump, my hump, my hump, my hump, my hump, my hump, my hump, my lovely lady lumps.”
• It’s a Day of Freedom from the Academy Award-Winning Djay f/Shug track It’s Hard Out There For A Pimp. It’s a Day of Freedom from Laffy Taffy by D4L, and She Thinks My Tractor’s Sexy by Kenny Chesney, and I’m In Love With A Stripper by T. Pain with Mike Jones, and the Pina Colada Song by Rupert Holmes.
• It’s a Day of Freedom from hearing Achy Breaky Heart by both Billy Ray Cyrus and the plastic fish.

Fortunately for music fans, there are thousands of free music podcasts that feature great music that you can legally download and share over the Internet. We highlighted a collection of great music podcasts recently with our 31 Days of Free Music project.

It may be too expensive to play Phil Collins on Internet radio, but it’s still free to podcast some of the best music in the world. Here are a few podcasts you might want to check out while Yahoo! sits the day out:

• Free guitar music from Ottmar Liebert
• Flyinshoes Radio‚Äôs free americana music
• Blibb Blobb explores the world of 8-bit music
• The Irish and Celtic Music podcast
• Free jazz music videos from Jon Hammond
• The Acousticity podcast offers free acoustic music from singer/songwriters and folk musicians.
• The Renaissance Festival podcast features free music from Celtic, Irish, Scottish, English and Gypsy folk musicians.
• Free ambient music is featured in the Daily Ambience podcast.
• The Grateful Dead podcast features classic Dead performances that you can download.
• Groove it like Grandma with a free music podcast featuring antique phonograph recordings.
• Punk rock lives with GaragePunk, a podcast of free punk rock music.
• Girls, girls and more girls are featured on Rubyfruit Radio, a podcast of free music from indie female musicians.

There are thousands of other indie podcasters whose shows feature music that you won’t hear on mainstream radio because it’s not music that the music industry thinks it can make a lot of money with. But if you don’t find something you like, today would also be a great day to start your own free music podcast:

• Here’s a quick introduction to how to podcast.
• Here’s a short guide to how podcast feeds work.
• Jamendo, Magnatune, DMusic, Soundclick, Opsound and SectionZ are a few of the places you can get free music to podcast.
• If you have legal questions, check out Colette Vogele’s great Podcasting Legal Guide.

If there’s a terrible song that commercial radio plays to death that we missed, let us know in the comments. And if you have a great free music podcast, feel free to pimp it in the comments, too!

blinkx today unveiled AdHoc, a contextually relevant video advertising platform, aka AdSense for Video, the latest in a stream of recent announcements from the company.

According to blinkx,¬†”Just as Google‚Äôs AdSense transformed advertising on the Text Web, blinkx‚Äôs AdHoc platform will revolutionize video advertising by matching compelling, customized, TV-style ads to your audience on the Video Web.”

AdHoc leverages blinkx‚Äôs speech-to-text transcription and visual analysis technology to “understand” video content and can use the information it parses from the audio to dynamically place relevant advertising against it. According to the company, their platform offers content partners and advertisers video advertising which “combines the emotive power of TV promotion, with the relevance and utility of contextual search advertising.”

The AdHoc platform also offers media companies and advertisers a flexible solution for customizing the timing and appearance of video ads. Options include:

• pre-, post- and mid-roll placement;
• dynamically-selected banners;
• ¬†in-video mini-banners; and
• a¬†unique, post-roll catalog view.

Partners can also select which ad databases to leverage – their own, the blinkx AdHoc platform, or external ad systems, such as Google’s AdWords.

“The AdHoc platform is revolutionary because it was built from the ground up to address rich media, resulting in higher monetization for media companies, more effective marketing for advertisers and, most importantly, a useful, non-disruptive experience for users,” said Suranga Chandratillake, founder and CEO, blinkx.

The AdHoc platform is available effective immediately.

We’ve advocates of an open, Internet-based media environment at Podcasting News. New statistics suggest, though, that Internet access speeds in the US could become a barrier to adoption of new media like podcasts and video podcasts, and could even be a barrier to US competitiveness.

SpeedMatters.org has released a report on Internet access speed (pdf) in the US, and it shows the US to be a laggard at getting high-speed connectivity to its citizens.

According to Speed Matters’ tests, the national median download speed was 1.9 megabits per second (mbps). While 1.9 megabits once sounded fast, now it’s almost an embarassment:

• In France, the median download speed is about 9 times as fast as in the US, 17 mbps.
• In South Korea, the median speed is about 23 times as fast, 45 mbps.
• In Japan, the media download speed is an amazing 32 times as fast as in the US, 61 mbps.

Speed Matters argues that the Internet speeds in the US are even worse than the report shows, because dial-up users were under-represented in their research.

It’s important to note that Speed Matters is a project of the Communications Workers of America (CDW). We’d like to see independent corroboration of their figures.

“Our nation’s current plan of allowing the market to determine who gets true high speed and who doesn’t is bad public policy,” commented CDW President Larry Cohen on the numbers.

Businessweek takes a look today at the fight between Blu-Ray and HD DVD to become the dominant standard for high-definition video delivery:

Time doesn’t appear to be on either side. With hard-drive capacity growing exponentially and prices coming down even more sharply, experts predict most broadband-enabled homes within 10 years will download much of their content off the Internet, store it on terabyte home servers or cable boxes, and shuffle that content around the home or onto portable devices.

While some people may be doing this in 10 years, others are getting high-definition video from the Internet already, in the form of video podcasts delivered to your computer or Apple TV.

Internet TV is plagued by the same problems as Blu-Ray and HD DVD, though: limited content, complex setup and high cost for hardware. Nevertheless, Internet TV is already good enough to make users realize that high definition video discs are a tangent to the real future of video delivery – Internet TV.

Tim Street, Creator and Executive Producer of French Maid TV, sends word that the maids are back at work, this time using their unique brand of softcore edutainment to help people understand how to share photos online with “Tubes“, a new service that lets you create “instant personal networks” for sharing things like music and photos.

Along the way, they manage to work in losing their clothes, sexy French police women, and some slow motion mechanical bull riding.

While the episode is a promotion for Tubes, it also demonstrates how it the technology can be used by podcasters.

“We’re excited to be the first content publisher to use the growing Tubes Network to extend our brand right to our viewers’ desktops and empower our users with the knowledge that they’ll never miss out on the latest escapades of French Maid TV,” said Street. “Tubes allows our subscribers to be the first to receive updated content with absolutely no need to browse the web, search a website, find an RSS feed, or video podcast. Once we drop any new files in our tube, all French Maid TV tube subscribers will receive them automatically.”

FMTV’s extra content, containing the video and photos the French Maids took to solve the mystery, is in the special French Maid Tube.

Dave Winer, who developed one of the standards which podcasting is based on, is excited by the idea of combining audio files with Twitter messages. He calls the combination a “TwitterGram”:

The other day I was thinking about other kinds of Twitters. The thing we like about Twitter is that you can’t post a book-length story about what’s going on right now, you can only do a 140-character synopsis — “I just got on BART” or “Driving to NoobCamp.” It’s one of those Worse Is Better or Less Is More things we like so much about the Internet. So I started making a list of different kinds of Twitter, and immediately gravitated to something I call TwitterGram, where you use the 140 characters to link to a 200K audio message. Think of it as Twitter meets podcasting.

This seems like it could be a good idea to pair with mobilecasting.

Give his message a listen (below) and let him know what you think at his site.