Each episode features our host sampling custom cocktails with guests at a rotating stable of LA destinations, beginning with the debut round at Harvard and Stone.

The debut episode featuring Burrell is now live on Made Man.  Catch a new episode every other Monday, and on “off” Mondays, Paul will respond to viewer questions from our YouTube audience.

The homepage has undergone a refresh of content with a greater emphasis being placed on highlighting top stories in addition to most-demanded files, as Game Front’s editorial staff and contributing industry experts, will produce more original content exclusive to the site. This new emphasis begins with the homepage but will be rolling out site-wide as other pages are redesigned in subsequent phases.

Additionally, the header has been streamlined down to only a few buttons to enable users to drill down to their desired content more intuitively. Not only does this improve functionality, it offers a cleaner, more aesthetic interface.

Other new element added to the homepage is a “Community” module above the fold, which highlights top comments from users; forum discussion threads, which appear at the bottom of the page and encourage users to interact; and a “Must Have Files” feed, which displays the week’s top gaming files, including maps mods and demos.

Game Front has built a strong heritage with the PC gaming community and will continue to be the top resource for that community but is incorporating elements that will appeal to console gamers as well. Covering both gives Break Media a property that forms an inroad to the gaming market, which one analyst firm has projected to reach $70 billion by 2015.

Stay tuned for more updates as the rest of the site redesign rolls out!

Perhaps you’d heard of Spotify before references to it started showing up in your Facebook feed. That would likely put you in the minority. However, there’s a good possibility that you’ve seen what your friends are listening to via notifications from the online music service appearing in your Facebook feed. Welcome to the power of Facebook’s Open Graph.

While we have integrated our own Spotify-like Open Graph capability, our technical team has gone to great lengths to ensure that we’re done so in a user-friendly manner. In short, we’re not looking to take over users’ feeds and turn them into our own private distribution channel on Facebook. Rather, we started by considering what users want and working from there—even when it resulted in us nixing our first iteration of Open Graph.

We want to provide videos that our fans want to watch, and we want to enable them to be ahead of the curve on discovering content and sharing it with their friends however and whenever they want. Should they choose to share on Facebook, we have made it incredibly easy for them to do so, but we’ve made it equivalently easy for them to opt out. Furthermore, should they rethink sharing a certain video, they can unshare it after the fact.

In total, we put our entire Open Graph integration together with our users squarely in mind. We wanted to give them the ability to control what they share and who they share with as well as give them the ability to unshared at their discretion. We want to make the seamlessly integrate content discovery and sharing, and Facebook is a natural place to start.

This new video ad technology guarantees quality page, incorporates social sharing functionality to maximize viral pass-along and includes a suite of analytics for tracking. The Social Video Accelerator will debut across our entire family of sites and our network, which now reaches more than 120 million unique viewers each month. Additionally, this technology is designed to distribute both advertiser assets such as trailers and videos as well as branded entertainment created in partnership with our award winning in-house Creative Lab.

Among the first customers using the new technology is Rockstar games parent Take-Two Interactive, which runs multiple trailer release campaigns a year.  For more information on the social Video Accelerator, click here.

For more on the Best-Rated Apps of 2011, see our coverage in the Huffington Post and TechCrunch and download the Break.com App, available on iOS, Android, and tablet devices including iPad, Nook and Kindle.

While increased spending in digital video is something the majority of advertisers can agree on, how they buy video inventory, what format they purchase to showcase video assets, in which pricing model and on what device all provide considerable differences of opinion in the marketing community.  This year, we saw a sharp increase in the use of Video Ad Networks.  We also noted an increase in the use of Cost Per View as a model for purchasing video inventory.  While pre-roll is still favored 3:1 by advertisers over the next video format, they expect large gains in placing dollars within mobile video and connected devices.

We hope you find the study useful, and we look forward to hearing your thoughts and feedback.  Congratulations to the team for putting together this years’ report.

Please find the full study at:
Digital Video Advertising Trends

The purpose of Movember is simple: fight men’s health afflictions through awareness and fundraising.  While the moustache thing is a fun gimmick, it’s also an avenue to discussing some of the very real health problems men face.

The statistics are staggering:

• In 2011, more than 240,000 men will be diagnosed with prostate cancer; more than 33,000 will die from it
• One new prostate cancer case occurs every 2.2 minutes
• A man dies from prostate cancer every 15.6 minutes
• 1 in 6 men will be diagnosed with prostate cancer in their lifetime.
• 48% of testicular cancer cases occur in men between the ages of 20 and 34.
• 1 in 271 men will be diagnosed with testicular cancer during their lifetime.
• Men commit suicide four times as often as women.
• An estimated 8.7 million adult men over the age of 20 in the US have diabetes- and a third do not know it.
• Approximately 50 million men and women in the US have high blood pressure- almost 30 percent of them do not know it.

With a network and a fan base made up primarily of men, it made perfect sense for Break to get involved.  In addition to our internal participation, which assembled a network that has raised more than $40 thousand, we produced a number of original videos to support the cause and rally our fans to do the same.  Take a look:

Original Rap Celebrating the Greatest Mo’s in History

PSA for the Movember Foundation

Original Animation: 40 Staches in 100 Seconds

Infographic Discussing Men’s Health Issues

Thanks to all Breakers and fans for supporting such a worthy cause, and we look forward to continuing the effort next year!