Free pancakes at IHOP today

In celebration of National Pancake Day, IHOP restaurants will be giving away a free short stack of buttermilk pancakes from 7am to 10pm today. They do suggest that you make a donation to the Children’s Miracle Network or other local charities depending on where you are. Pancakes!

Facebook Connect

Facebook Connect, which allows third-party sites to add users through the Facebook friending feature, launched a Comments Box social widget to allow users to post comments that can be spread to other sites. More than 6,000 sites have integrated Facebook Connect so far and the feature continued to win converts leading up to the Oscars:

• WorldTV teamed with India’s ZoomTV to create an embeddable player and Facebook widget to allow users to watch the telecast and post comments to their friends in realtime
• Jaman.com launched a live status feed over the weekend using Facebook Connect, enabling viewers around the globe to share comments about the Oscars on the web
• CNN.com is teaming up with Facebook once again to offer live streaming and concurrent commenting during President Obama’s State of the Union Address at 9pm ET tomorrow

Source: Cynopsis: DIGITAL

Do Video Games Cost Too Much?

Valve’s Gabe Newell gave the keynote address at this year’s Design, Innovate, Communicate, Entertain (DICE) Summit about the cost of games, the effect of piracy, and how to reach new players. Valve undertook an experiment recently to test how price affected the sales of their popular survival-horror FPS, Left 4 Dead. They Reduced the price by 50% on Steam, which “resulted in a 3000% increase in sales of the game, posting overall sales that beat the title’s original launch performance.” They also tested various other price drops over the holidays, seeing spikes in sales that corresponded well to the size of the discount.

See the full article at Slashdot.

U2’s New Album Debuts on MySpace Music

It’s nothing new for albums to premiere online before hitting record stores (do those still exist?), but the debut of U2’s album on MySpace Music marks a big moment for the service. The latest release from arguably the biggest band in the world, the “No Line On The Horizon” album will be available exclusively on U2’s MySpace profile until March 3rd.

There are no embeds allowed, and you can’t even purchase the tracks yet through MySpace’s digital download partner, Amazon MP3. But you can stream the entire album for free and add any of the tracks to a MySpace playlist, perhaps giving you a reason to open up your MySpace account again if you’re a U2 fan.

See the full article at Mashable.

High Definition to Crash the Voice Party

The iPhone and the Apple App Store may have set a new standard for design and availability of mobile apps, but the iPhone operates within the same decades-old voice quality constraints as other handsets. Indeed, the rapid pace of handset innovation does not change the fact that AT&T, BT, Telefonica et al cannot improve voice quality. But a new generation of VoIP devices supporting G.722 and other wideband codecs threatens to disrupt a telcom industry built on mediocre voice quality.

On one hand, the analog infrastructure between the end user and the telco central office limits landline voice quality; on the other hand, the network equipment cell phone companies deploy sacrifices voice quality in order to make more efficient use of spectrum. While overcoming these limitations requires a complete overhaul of the telephone network, Internet-connected devices, represent the only practical means to build a High Definition Voice Network (HDVN). This is especially true when it comes to landlines; a G.722 wideband codec doubles landline frequency response and pushes fidelity toward an FM broadcast signal. (See a demo created by Siemens Gigaset.)

As with any technology rollout, there are identifiable obstacles ahead. Improving voice quality requires compatible devices at both ends of the connection, for example, and the specific communication contexts or content that require voice quality improvements remain uncertain. Notably, an emergent HDVN will not immediately enjoy the reliability and ubiquity of the traditional telephone network. And since it will require reliable broadband access, the early focus will be on fixed locations.

A similar list of issues did not, however, prevent the introduction FM, color TV, CDs, DVDs or HDTV.

See the full article at GigaOM.

Yelp and the Business of Extortion 2.0

The phone calls came almost daily. It started to get creepy.

"Hi, this is Mike from Yelp," the voice would say. "You’ve had three hundred visitors to your site this month. You’ve had a really good response. But you have a few bad ones at the top. I could do something about those."

This wasn’t your average sales pitch. At least, not the kind that John, an East Bay restaurateur, was used to. He was familiar with Yelp.com, the popular San Francisco-based web site in which any person can write a review about nearly any business. John’s restaurant has more than one hundred reviews, and averages a healthy 3.5-star rating. But when John asked Mike what he could do about his bad reviews, he recalls the sales rep responding: "We can move them. Well, for $299 a month." John couldn’t believe what the guy was offering. It seemed wrong.

In fact, something seemed shady about the state of his restaurant’s negative reviews. "When you do get a call from Yelp, and you go to the site, it looks like they have been moved," John said. "You don’t know if they happen to be at the top legitimately or if the rep moved them to the top. You don’t even know if this is someone who legitimately doesn’t like your restaurant. … Almost all the time when they call you, the bad ones will be at the top."

Read the full story at East Bay Express.

The Presidents of the United States of America Unleash Multiple-Album iPhone App

Dave Dederer, former frontman of nineties hitmakers The Presidents of the United States of America, has fashioned quite a second career for himself as the vice president of business development for Melodeo, which makes nuTsie, a software application that can stream your iTunes playlists to any web-connected PC, your Blackberry and your Facebook profile.

Dederer has neatly dovetailed his past and present with Melodeo’s release of a $3 app for iPhone and iPod Touch (iTunes link), which contains the four Presidents of the United States of America albums whose rights are owned by the band. The app includes rare, exclusive material that can be updated from the server side.

"IPhone apps are exploding, including for musical artists, but nobody’s done anything like this," stated Dederer. For a mere three bucks, fans and interested parties new to the band will get four albums, "lost" recordings, live tracks, demos, and whatever else the band can think of to put in there.

Read the full article at Wired.

MySpace Music v. YouTube: Who Really Drives More Impressions…

The music video is enjoying a newfound renaissance, thanks largely to YouTube.  Once upon a time, music videos were played on MTV, VH1, and BET, and that was that.  Now, music fans are calling the shots online, and the music video is arguably bigger than ever before in its history.

But how many views are we talking here?  Universal Music Group is the most viewed channel in the history of YouTube, with 3.4 billion views on a stock of more than 9,200 clips.  Sony Music and Hollywood Records own the second and third-place slots, respectively, and ChrisBrownTV, JonasBrothersMusic, RCARecords, and even michaeljackson are not far behind.

Suddenly, the brouhaha between Warner Music Group and YouTube makes more sense.  People love music, and even a diversified site like YouTube draws serious traffic from music-related clips.  But take a look at MySpace Music, and something interesting emerges.  Because it turns out that listening levels on MySpace Music eclipse comparable viewing levels on YouTube, often by a factor of 7-to-1.

Full story at DigitalNews

Promoters wary of Live Nation/Ticketmaster merger

Live Nation Inc’s rivals in the rock concert business worry that its planned merger with Ticketmaster Entertainment Inc would mean they would lose control over business secrets — an issue that could complicate chances of antitrust approval.

These complaints by Live Nation’s competitors add to the woes piling up on the proposed merger. There are also calls for a federal investigation into Ticketmaster’s relationship with subsidiary TicketsNow because of incidents where fans were told by Ticketmaster that concerts were sold out but then were offered tickets on its subsidiary — for considerably more money.

The Senate Judiciary Committee’s antitrust subcommittee will hold hearings on the merger next Tuesday.

The latest concern is that the shrinking number of independent promoters, many of which use Ticketmaster for selling seats, fear that the company’s deal with the world’s biggest promoting company, Live Nation, would hurt the independents.

See the full article at Yahoo! News.

Survey Of Insular Social Media Elite Says: Twitter Is Better Than Facebook For Businesses

If you were to ask “over 200 social media leaders” which social media site they would pay for if they had to, as Abrams Research recently did, Facebook would come out on top, with 32.2 percent saying they would pay for it. (Yeah, right). LinkedIn was second, Twitter was third, and MySpace and Digg tied for last place (with only 1.5 percent of respondents saying they’d pay for those services).

But if you ask, which one would they recommend for businesses to pay for (if they had to), Twitter beats Facebook by more than two to one (39.6 percent vs. 15.3 percent). LinkedIn again comes in second. Why did Twitter come out on top. It is seen as an efficient way for companies to get their marketing messages out there.

For the full story visit TechCrunch