Best of the Blogs: What Can FourSquare Tell Us About the Super Bowl?

This column highlights the most interesting and useful business and financial commentary from around the Web each day. Feel free to send along your own suggestions for blog content that you've read or written.

Epicenter
Link: The Superbowl, According to FourSquare
In case you hadnt’ heard, the Super Bowl was yesterday. As a country, whether or not we cared who was playing, or even know the rules, we gather en masse to watch football, drink cheap beer and eat things covered in cheese — not necessarily in that order. It’s part of who we are: what better reason than four hours of Patrick Chung tackles, Eli Manning passes, bad touchdown dances, and expensive advertising to bring us together, despite all of our diversity. (For related content, read Infographic: What's Social Media's Marketing Worth?)

Bits
Link: Apple Fights App Makers Who Try to Game the System
For iPhone and iPad owners looking for software in Apple’s App Store, it is easy to be overwhelmed by the hundreds of thousands of available apps. To stand out in the crowd, some app makers have apparently found ways to game the system. On Touch Arcade, a site for iOS game developers, an independent programmer recently shared his conversation with an app promoter who promised to get his app into the store’s Top 25 most-downloaded list in exchange for $5,000. The programmer, Walter Kaman, said the promoter had hired someone to build an army of software “bots” that automatically download apps and drive up their rankings. (Also Read 18 Rules for Submitting to Apple's Mac App Store.) 

Economix
Link: Tilting the Budget Process to the GOP
The House of Representatives voted last week to tilt the budgetary process in favor of the Republican economic agenda. On Feb. 3, the House passed H.R. 3582, the Pro-Growth Budgeting Act of 2012. Innocuous on the surface, its long-term purpose is to institutionalize Republican economic policy into the very fabric of budgetary analysis. The legislation would require that the Congressional Budget Office and Joint Committee on Taxation do a “dynamic” analysis of major legislation – defined as that with a gross budgetary impact greater than 0.25 percent of the gross domestic product. Such an analysis would calculate the impact on real G.D.P. growth, the capital stock and labor supply.

All Things D
Link: Viddy Scores $6M for Social Mobile Video
The category of social mobile video start-ups is going to stick around for a while, if only because it seems to keep attracting investment dollars. But seriously, Viddy — which makes an iOS app that has attracted celebrity users like Snoop Dogg and Linkin Park, and limits video clips to 15 seconds — has now raised a $6 million Series A round led by Battery Ventures and including Greycroft Ventures and Qualcomm. Viddy CEO Brett O’Brien says his company is stronger than the competition, for a few reasons: First, Viddy’s in-app editing effects — which include 99-cent premium promotions for content from partners like the Muppets and Linkin Park — help make compelling, shareable content.

Real Time Economics
Link: China's Road to Becoming a Reserve Currency
In a new Brookings Institution study, Esward Prasad and Lei Ye of Cornell University say China’s currency will become an international reserve currency within the next decade, “eroding but not displacing the dollar’s dominance.” On some key criteria for becoming a reserve currency, such as government debt, China performs well. It’s far behind on others: Its exchange rate doesn’t trade freely (as other reserve currencies do). China still maintains extensive capital controls, limiting the yuan’s trading in global markets. And the country still has “relatively shallow and underdeveloped” bond markets, the study says. (Also Read Currency Market: US Dollar Index Holding at Key 79 Support Level.)