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Today, the Participatory Culture Foundation (PCF) has launched Miro 4, an updated version of its desktop media player which now introduces a notable new feature: the ability to sync with Android phones and tablets.

Previously, the software was used for finding, viewing, downloading and sharing digital media discovered through a variety of channels including YouTube and BitTorrent. It was simply a browser-less way to access online media.  But with this new release, Miro has positioned itself as the open source alternative to DoubleTwist, currently Android users' go-to desktop program of choice for duplicating the iTunes experience. And while, at present, Miro lacks some of DoubleTwist's polish, it makes up for it in a rich, and ever-expanding feature set, including, at long last, podcast subscriptions for Mac users.

The browser wars are back with a vengeance. In no small part thanks to the efforts of Google Chrome, we have seen a resurgence in browser inovation and a new emphasis on speed over the last year and a half. Today, Opera is launching its newest weapon against Chrome, Firefox and Internet Explorer. Billed as the "world's fastest browser," Opera 10.50 for Windows - which also sports a new user interface - might just be Opera's best browser to date. The question, though, is if this new release will be enough to help Opera gain new users and market share.

Gladinet, a desktop software program aimed at connecting users to their online storage, is fast becoming the go-to program for Windows users looking to map desktop drives to their favorite web services. Already, users of the software have been able to add network drives that connect to Amazon's S3, Box.net, and Windows Live SkyDrive, among others. Additionally, the program makes cloud to cloud backup and migration between services as easy as drag-and-drop.

Today, the company is announcing the addition of Google Storage, a service nicknamed "GDrive" among Internet users, to its lineup of supported options.

BumpTop released the Windows version of BumpTop's 3D desktop in April 2009. Today, BumpTop finally released a version for the Mac. BumpTop turns your desktop into a 3D experience, where documents are organized in stacks and you can pin often-used files, folders or images onto the walls. BumpTop also incorporates a physics simulations, so interactions with your files on the 3D desktop feel extremely lifelike.

We had almost forgotten about Orb, the media-sharing software that lets you stream video from your home computer to your iPhone or any other internet-connected device. In fact, the last time we had even looked at the application was November of 2008 when the company announced an update to their iPhone application which allowed you to stream live TV over the 3G network. At that time though, the desktop software portion of the Orb product was PC-only. As in Windows PC-only. Today, that has changed. Orb for Macintosh has finally been released so Mac OS X users can now stream their media over the net, too.

Thanks to mobile devices like the iPhone and recent efforts by numerous hardware manufacturers like HP, touch and multi-touch enabled devices are slowly becoming more ubiquitous. While Apple users have the mythical iTablet to look forward to, Windows users didn't really have a similar project to latch on to, except maybe for Microsoft's large and costly Surface table. Now, however, BumpTop has released the latest version of its innovative 3D desktop environment with support for multi-touch gestures.

Think desktop email is dead? Not so says the latest entrant to this field, San Francisco-based startup Postbox, who is today revealing the final release of their desktop email application based on Mozilla technology. Originally launched into beta a year ago, Postbox has a heavy focus on search and organization with a primary goal of addressing email users' information overload issues. Like Mozilla's own Thunderbird email application, Postbox exists only as downloadable software. However, unlike other desktop programs, Postbox natively integrates web services into its interface, including Facebook, Twitter, and FriendFeed.

A newly released feature from "cloud desktop" software maker Gladinet lets you perform a new kind of backup procedure: cloud-to-cloud. Usually, when you think of cloud backup programs, you think of applications that take your computer's files and upload them to the web for safekeeping. Or perhaps you think of apps that take your files in the cloud and back them up safely to your PC or external hard drive. What's not as common is finding a way to backup your online files from one cloud storage application to another. There simply aren't many good tools out there for doing so. However, with Gladinet's new cloud backup feature, currently only available for Google Docs, you can backup your files from Google's cloud to someone else's, whether that's Amazon, Box.net, EMC, or whatever else you choose.