Microsoft today released a free software update that will bring new features to all Zune portable media players.
The new software will allow Zune users to:

wirelessly stream and download music from the Zune Marketplace store on the go;
tag and purchase songs directly from the built-in FM radio; and
tap into new, personalized music recommendations and programming.

Microsoft also announced [...]

Apple’s iTunes 8 introduced a new feature, Genius, designed to help you find new music.
I was unimpressed with Genius - it’s not much more than a recommendation engine, designed to get you to buy more music. In other words, it’s a lot like the recommendation system Amazon has been offering online for a decade. 
Wired has taken [...]

Microsoft today announced Zune updates, timed to upstage iPod/iTunes announcements anticipated from Apple on Tuesday. 
Unfortunately for everybody who owns a portable media player, Microsoft’s announcements are woefully misguided and mistimed. 
You have to give Microsoft credit for releasing another Zune update that brings new features to their existing players. Apple typically saves significant new features for the [...]

Ashley Payne is a design student at College for Creative Studies in Detroit, Michigan. The Zune Bug is her design concept for a Zune-branded nightlight that reacts to your room’s ambient light level. 
It’s also designed to be a wireless remote speaker for your Zune and responds to the frequency and volume of your music with variations to [...]

This demo video from Microsoft demonstrates a new technology, Microsoft Unwrap Mosaics, that can make it easy to do video special effects editing:
The representation has some of the power of a full reconstruction of 3D surface models from video, but is designed to be easy to recover from a priori unseen and uncalibrated footage. By [...]

The New York Times today suggests that the Zune’s sales are mainly coming from people that hate Apple and are anti-iPod:
The most salient feature of the Zune seems to be that it’s not an iPod. Jesse Thorn, host of the public-radio show (and popular podcast) The Sound of Young America, is a Zune proponent, praising, [...]

The Zune’s biggest fan, Steve Smith , aka the Zune tattoo guy, has given up on Microsoft’s portable media player.
“I am done, throwing in the towel due to a lazy offering by Microsoft,” says Smith.
To make it even worse PR for Microsoft, Smith’s bought a new portable media player. “Bought a new PMP today,” [...]

Bad news for Microsoft: its most passionate advocate - mszunefan, aka The Zune Guy - is “done with the Zune” and has vowed to get rid of his Zune tattoos:
“I am done.  I have had the Zune since day 1 and have noticed little improvement.
I have tried my best to support them every step of [...]

MG Siegler at Parislemon has an interesting take on the current state of movie rentals on the XBox 360, suggesting that it’s not ready for prime time:
Last night I sat down to download The Diving Bell and the Butterfly. I figured it would take 5-10 minutes to get enough information to start playing and then go. [...]

There’s a great deal of buzzing today about a few Internet video news items:

Amazon is debuting a streaming video store. The service, Amazon Video on Demand, will offer about 40,000 streaming videos for customers to choose from.
TiVo is adding YouTube support. TiVo’s YouTube support was announced in March, and is available to broadband-connected subscribers [...]