This is according to a new report from Rebtel, a Stockholm-based VoIP company and Skype competitor.

Of all the participants in Rebtel’s recent survey, 79 percent said they planned to celebrate Valentine’s Day in some way, with 56.8 percent indicating their significant other will be away from home today. A full 86.6 percent of those people said they planned to get in touch with their long-distance lover — which left us scratching our heads a bit about the remaining 13.4 percent who wouldn’t be getting in touch at all. But, hey, not everyone’s into hearts-and-flowers day.

When told they had to choose just one method for communicating with their S.O. away from home, here’s how respondents ranked them:

Mobile phone: 64.3 percent

VoIP calling: 15.4 percent

Landline call: 6.4 percent

Video chat: 4.6 percent

Email: 3.9 percent

SMS: 2.5 percent

Social networks: 1.8 percent

Instant Messenger: 1.1 percent

With lots of free or cheap VoIP calling options out there — Skype, Rebtel and Viber, to name a few — it’s somewhat surprising that VoIP service and video chats ranked so far below mobile phone calling, but many consumers might find it easier just to punch in a number, or simply might not be aware of some of the VoIP apps.

And it’s nice to see that face-to-face video chatting ranks somewhere above SMS text messaging, scribbling on a Facebook wall or sending an IM.

For those of you reading this with sinking stomachs — having just now realized that today is Valentine’s Day — there are a slew of last-minute applications to bail you out, or buy you some time while you search for real, live, analog gift ideas. Like Tom’s Love Letters, or Lovestagram, an Instagram plugin created by the girlfriend of the one of the founders of the popular photo app. You could also send a love-themed playlist from Spotify or Rdio.

There’s also a super-nerdy but fun Web application from Desmos that can draw personalized Valentines with an HTML5 graphing calculator. According to its creator, Eli Luberoff, anyone can choose a romantically-themed graph, add a caption, and then email or tweet it to their significant other. The premise: Math and love are the two universal languages — combined, who knows the power?

Lastly, you can always turn to 1-800-Flowers.com. Which, despite what its name suggests, doesn’t even require a smartphone. Have at it, dudes.

(Photo courtesy of Flickr/Gawen947)

And I want you all to give a hand to someone that you know whose health is very bad at this time. … His company took the challenge in making his technology accessible to everyone. In the spirit of caring and moving the world forward: Steve Jobs. Because there’s nothing on the iPhone or the iPad that you can do that I can’t do.

— Stevie Wonder, at a recent performance, thanks Steve Jobs for Apple’s work in making technology accessible to people with disabilities

If you wanted to get into it, you could have an interesting debate in which someone argues that caring about music isn’t always analogous to paying for recorded music. But whatever. For now, let’s stipulate that the “don’t take stuff that isn’t yours” sentiment is a good one.

That said: Not to be too be churlish, but if the Beatles and the people who control their music don’t want you to steal, shouldn’t they make their music widely available online?

As you may recall, last fall the band’s music finally became available in legal digital form, via an iTunes exclusive. And now, 10 months later, Apple’s store remains the only place you can buy Abbey Road, Let I Be, Revolver, etc. You can’t buy them via Amazon, and you can’t hear them via subscription services like Spotify, MOG, etc.

Online music exclusives aren’t unusual, but they’re usually very short. I’ve never heard of an act locking itself to one digital outlet for this long. And if you don’t want people to steal stuff, it would make sense to make it as easy to buy as possible, no?

If the Apple exclusive lasts a year, then it should expire in mid-November. But I wouldn’t be surprised if it lasts through the end of 2011 and possibly beyond, so that Steve Jobs and company can wring the benefits of another Christmas sales cycle: Remember that lots of iTunes content gets purchased right after the holidays, when people have new gadgets to play with/fill up.

Meanwhile, the Music Matters clips have some great animation, at the very least. You can see a collection of them at this YouTube channel. Here’s a sampling featuring the Jam, Stevie Wonder and Jay-Z (couple NSFW swears on that last one).

What prompted the change? Here’s the site’s explanation, via product manager Joshua Siegel:

Well, we’ve spent significant resources on creating and improving our state-of-the-art Content ID system and many other powerful tools for copyright owners. Now, all of the major U.S. movie studios, music labels and over 1,000 other global partners use Content ID to manage their content on YouTube. Because of the success of these ongoing technological efforts, we are able to increase the upload limit today.

I’m not sure I understand that. And perhaps someone from YouTube will take another crack at it down the line. But here’s my best guess at translating: We used to cap videos at 10 minutes in part because it made it harder for people to upload entire movies or TV shows to the site, and that made copyright owners less mad at us. Now they like us a lot more, so we’re bumping up the limit by 50 percent.

Bumping up that limit also increases bandwidth and storage costs; theoretically the longer clips will also give the site more chances to sell more ads. Wonder how this impacts Google sales chief Nikesh Arora’s recent pronouncement that YouTube “is on the verge of imminent profitability.”

Meanwhile, I don’t think I watch many clips on YouTube that approach the 10-minute limit, anyway. But I do like this long clip (so much that I think I’ve embedded it twice before): Six minutes and 27 seconds of Stevie Wonder jamming on “Sesame Street”:

Today, Yahoo is turning 15, which makes it approximately 105 in Internet years.

All joking aside–especially since that makes BoomTown 134 years old–reaching this mark is both an accomplishment and a burden, with Yahoo (YHOO) CEO Carol Bartz pushing forward a very deliberate transformation and employing a fix-it management style in her tenure at Yahoo of just over a year.

While the seasoned exec has most certainly gotten the trains running better, sliced off underperforming assets, mounted a new marketing and image campaign and struck several social networking deals–as well as putting an end to Yahoo’s painful turmoil with Microsoft (MSFT) by striking an online advertising and search partnership–some are now wondering if there needs to be a more dramatic facelift at Yahoo to hurl it forward at even greater speed.

It is a velocity that others have been reaching far more aggressively, from the spate of product releases and frenzy of acquisitions at Google (GOOG) to Facebook’s spectacular global growth to Microsoft’s efforts with its Bing search and mapping services.

That’s why, said several observers I spoke to this week, Yahoo’s stock has stayed squarely in a narrow range from $15 to a little over $17 in recent months–steady but without a lot of spark.

“Everyone understands the message of fixing the company and cleaning up the system,” said one person who does a lot of business with Yahoo. “What I think people want now is something more profound and clear in terms of exactly what the company is going to be in the next 15 years.”

Thus, while Bartz (pictured here) has consistently touted Yahoo as one of the most trafficked sites on the Web and as the “center of people’s online lives,” some, including major investors, think Yahoo needs an even clearer message.

One that most mention is to push its status as the premier premium content delivery site on the Web even further, differentiating it more starkly from Facebook, Google and others.

And one particular suggestion that has come up more and more frequently is for the Silicon Valley icon to dramatically demonstrate that by acquiring AOL (AOL), which is also trying to save itself by drilling down on content.

Under CEO Tim Armstrong, formerly a top ad exec at Google, AOL has been selling Wall Street on a vision of becoming a massive content machine to sell pricey ads against.

While the jury is still out on whether it will work or not, investors have been impressed with the effort.

Because of it, more of them think a melding of Yahoo and AOL is a better idea than it once was.

Yahoo made several failed attempts at merging the pair of Internet icons when AOL was owned by Time Warner (TWX). The company has also previously looked at buying Demand Media, another huge online content play.

Now, as a spinoff, AOL’s market valuation is about $2.7 billion, a little more than one-tenth of Yahoo’s.

One investor who has long been high on the idea said that Armstrong (pictured here) has the more pronounced Internet DNA needed to be CEO of the combined entity, as well as stronger talents in the online ad space, while Bartz has the critical executive discipline needed in what would be a very active chairman.

Interestingly, the combo of the two was a thought I heard yesterday from several people attending a marketing communications conference sponsored by the American Association of Advertising Agencies in San Francisco, where Bartz spoke in a session titled “Transforming Yahoo!”

While I did not attend the Bartz session, reviews were mixed, with attendees noting that they wanted a whole lot more inspiring and innovative vision from Bartz, who did mention Yahoo’s recent content deal with Hollywood player Ben Silverman.

“I kept thinking how Tim Armstrong would sell Yahoo,” said one longtime top ad exec. “I know Carol Bartz can fix Yahoo’s ills, but I want to know what she is going to do after that.”

It’ll be interesting to see if this birthday wish ever comes true or not.

In any case, I hope Yahoo enjoys its special day today–here’s a video of my fave version of “Happy Birthday,” by Stevie Wonder, which is in honor of Martin Luther King Jr.:

All Things Digital is not planning on publishing today, Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthdate holiday.

Until we return tomorrow, please listen to the famous “I Have a Dream” speech that King delivered at the Lincoln Memorial, which is in its entirety below.

As you will see, it is as resonant today as it was when spoken on Aug. 28, 1963, so thank goodness you can see it instantly on the Web.

While there are more famous lines, here’s BoomTown’s favorite:

“We have also come to this hallowed spot to remind America of the fierce urgency of Now. This is no time to engage in the luxury of cooling off or to take the tranquilizing drug of gradualism.”

I also included Stevie Wonder’s ebullient song in tribute to King’s birthday, which is simply wonderful.

Here are the videos:

CES 2010, which starts Thursday, is no exception–as long as you keep your definition of celebrity broad.

One of the boldface names already lighting up the Twitterverse is Lady Gaga. The pop star has her own line of headphones, but she’ll be in Las Vegas with Polaroid to talk about a new line of imaging products in what is likely to be a packed press conference.

Reality television will be represented, with “Real Housewives of New York” star Jill Zarin at fellow photo company Kodak’s (EK) booth.

Soleil Moon Frye, best known for her role as Punky Brewster on the ’80s TV series, will also appear with Kodak. Ms. Frye, now a thirtysomething mom, is listed as the co-founder of the Little Seed, a green children’s boutique.

Read the rest of this post on the original site

Confused? Don’t be. It’s a straightforward explanation: Web video watchers have even twitchier fingers than couch potatoes flipping through 500 channels. Which means that the longer any particular video runs, the less likely they are to watch the whole thing.

Common sense, really. But the folks at video-tracking service TubeMogul are now offering a statistical backstop: A study of how long the average Web video watcher stays with any given clip (click chart below to enlarge).

Answer: Less than one minute. Ten seconds into an average clip, more than 10 percent of viewers have moved on, TubeMogul says. And by 60 seconds, more than half of viewers have bailed out. Anything more than five minutes is heroic: More than 91 percent of viewers are gone by then.

That’s one of the reasons many Web video publishers and advertisers are sticking with “pre-roll” ads that run before any actual content shows up–even Google’s (GOOG) YouTube, which had previously disdained pre-rolls, is now contemplating using them in order to goose revenue. (And yes, this site uses them as well).

That’s a shame. In an ideal world, video sites would give people a good reason to keep watching a clip as soon as they hit play. And they would find a way to get an ad in front of viewers once they’re already engrossed.

Easier said than done, admittedly. But while Web video’s big brains go to work on this problem, let me invite you to stick all the way through the six-minute, 48-second clip below: Stevie Wonder singing “Superstition” on Sesame Street in 1973. If you get all the way through and aren’t satisfied, let me know. I’ll get you your money back.