WIth its prices generally tracking the national economic exuberance or lack thereof, the fact that Disney raised prices this week for, among other things, its "Magic Your Way" multi-day tickets, appears to reflect expectations for some recovery at least in consumer spending somewhere on the horizon.

With the recession still weighing on family vacations, Disney hiked the resort's most popular multi-day passes by a relatively gentle 2.5 percent to 5.3 percent this week, compared with a rise of more than 16 percent in the boom year of 2006, according to data compiled by Pali Capital analyst Rich Greenfield.

This price hike, whatever its size, may simply be aimed at mitigating a 7 percent lag in hotel bookings at its domestic parks in the current quarter, as well as margin-gouging discounts at its Walt Disney World hotels, which boosted attendance but saw revenue drop by 9 percent last quarter.

Disney CEO Bob Iger himself expressed a glimmer of optimism on a conference call to analysts  last week, saying he say signs of "economic stabilization", but would not commit to ending the hotel discounts that have been propping up park attendance since last year's market crash.

A spokesman for Disney Parks and Resorts said the price increases resulted from the company's "continuous monitoring" of park prices relative to other forms of entertainment like football games, skiiing or concerts -- and by that calculus, a park visit, at $79 for a one-day, one-park adult ticket was still "great value for the money."

So if having fun is getting pricier again, that's a good thing. Right?

    Still not sure about Twitter?
   More than half of Fortune 100 companies are using the wildly popular micro-blogging site, according to a new study, adding to growing buzz in the business world that Twitter hopes to convert into revenue this year.
   

Twitter trumped other social media as the online tool of choice for the Fortune 100 firms, according to the study by public relations firm Burson-Marsteller and its digital media unit Proof.
   

Some 54 percent of them regularly send out "tweets" or messages of 140 characters or less. The companies primarily use Twitter to blast news; for customer service; to announce promotions; or for employee recruitment. 
  

 Blogs hold the No. 2 spot, with 32 percent of the companies regularly posting to a branded blog.
    Social networking site Facebook came in third. Twenty-nine percent of Fortune 100 companies have active, consumer-focused fan pages on Facebook.

That's how many devices Google's vice president of engineering Vic Gundotra has. They make it "very hard to get through the airport," he joked.

We asked him and other executives in the mobile advertising industry what devices they use, after about an hour of a panel discussion on where mobile advertising is going at the Fortune Brainstorm: TECH conference.

Gundotra said he had only a few of his 14 devices with him.

"I have an Android, a BlackBerry and an iPhone with me and another device that I can't talk about," he said, adding his company wants to make sure that consumers have a good Google experience with any device that they choose. His email and calendar are synced on all devices, but he has pictures only on the Android. "If you call Google Voice, all 14 phones ring," he joked.

It's an Apple iPhone and a Blackberry for Omar Hamoui, chief executive of AdMob, one of the largest marketplaces for mobile advertisers. "I carry two because I use them quite differently," he said. The iPhone is for anything involved with data and applications and the Blackberry, for email and calendar.

Anand Chandrasekher, senior vice president and general manager of Intel Corp's Ultra Mobility Group, said he uses a notebook, Blackberry for work-related applications and an iPhone for more personal use like Internet browsing.

"I don't have a phone," deadpanned Marty Beard, president of Sybase 365, a unit of business software maker Sybase Inc. Beard was the only executive on the panel who used only one device: an iPhone, which he chose for heavy Web usage, its text and multimedia capabilities and to get familiar with applications.

-- Laura Isensee also contributed to this post

(Photo: REUTERS/Mike Segar)

Prosecutors and guarantors of Nicholas' $3.3 million bail had no objection to the plan for Nicholas to leave the United States on Friday and return on July 8, the documents showed.

Nicholas' bail conditions bar him from leaving the continental United States without court permission and call for drug testing, home detention and electronic monitoring. His attorney, James Riddet, said Nicholas will not fly "or have possession of his personal airplane during this trip".

Nicholas and Broadcom's former CFO William Ruehle have pleaded not guilty to a 21-count indictment that accuses them of scheming to backdate millions of stock options and to falsify docuemnts to further the fraud from 1999 to 2005.

The case was one of the biggest stock options backdating scandals among many that rocked corporate America when they began surfacing in 2006.

Nicholas has also been accused of keeping a supply of illegal drugs that he used to spike the drinks of industry executives and Broadcom customers at parties held at his home in Southern California and Las Vegas and at a California warehouse.

The federal indictment also alleges that Nicholas hired prostitutes for himself and others and then used payoffs or threatened violence to keep the conduct secret. The indictment also details a 2001 incident in which a pilot flying Nicholas and some friends to Las Vegas had to don an oxygen mask during the flight to avoid marijuana smoke emanating from the cabin.

Nicholas has pleaded not guilty to the allegations.

More bad news for newspapers surfaced on Tuesday at Regal Entertainment Group's investor day.

The No. 1 U.S. movie chain noted that its spending on co-op advertising and movie directories is now about a quarter of what it was in 1999, shrinking from $13,000 per screen average to $3,000 per screen last year.

Dick Westerling, Regal's senior vice president of marketing & advertising, told analysts:

We have conducted a number of surveys and analysis...clearly, customers are getting their movie and showtime information online, and newspaper has become a second or third choice.

Nor is that trend likely to turn around soon. Westerling spent a chunk of his 45-minute presentation extolling the Regal Crown Club, through which the company tracks 14 million moviegoers down to their film and concession preferences.

The program generated an above average 51 million ticket sales for those moviegoers, and costs just $1 million to run each year, Westerling said.

We can reach members on email cheaper than through newspaper advertising.

(Photo: Flikr)

 Disney reacquired the 225 stores after Children's Place fell behind on a pledge to invest millions to fix up the outlets. Disney had a tough time making the stores profitable before it handed them off to Children's Place, but Fielding said he just completed the chain's five-year plan and is "optimistic" about its prospects, even in one of the worst retail environments in living memory.

In addition to a new store design to be rolled out over the next year, the chain is looking for new digs in cities where bankruptcies and foreclosures have reshaped communities and the commercial real estate surrounding them.  "We are still repositioning that portfolio to make sure we are in the right malls, in the right cities, and the right states," Fielding said.

As its first global initiative, Disney Stores launched a global Earth Day effort organized around an offering of recycled products, conservation-themed games for kids, and a giveway of reusable bottles that had families lining up at the stores on Wednesday.  The global celebration also includes a tree planting initiative linked to sales of recyclable shopping bags, and Disney is working on signing up U.S. partners for more charitable endeavors like it frequently sponsors at its 106 European stores, Fielding said.

The worldwide do-gooderism is aimed at reminding kids -- most of whom come to the stores for the latest Princess dress, Buzz Lightyear or stuffed Mickey -- that "they are part of a bigger world and to be conscious of what's going on around them," Fielding said.

Yay, Earth Day ... Now hand over the Pooh Bear before my kid starts screaming.

The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that the controversial law violated free speech protections that prevent the government from forcing its opinions on citizens -- in this case by requiring video game makers to label games the state describes as violent. The court said lawmakers also failed to show a link between virtual violence and real acts among children who play the ultra-violent games.

The judges sided with the video game industry in finding that  the industry's voluntary ratings system and stepped up parental controls were the best way to keep inappropriate games from kids.

But the law's author, state Sen. Leland Yee, said letting the industry police itself is "like letting kids sign their own report cards."

"You don't have the individuals who are going to reap the rewards of these ultra-violent video games controlling the ratings," Yee told Reuters in an interview on Friday. Yee pointed to a Federal Trade Commission study that he said shows that the voluntary ratings system "simply does not work" to prevent kids from getting "Mature" rated games.

Yee said he will press California Attorney General Jerry Brown to take the case to the U.S. Supreme Court, where he hopes to show "the growing body of knowledge" that shows  "a short skip and a hop" between game violence and the real thing.

The unit, made up of its console, mobile and online gaming operations and Disney.com, turned in an 18 percent revenue increase but operating profit dropped after the soft retail environment, competition for consumers' time and Disney's "substantial" investment in the product lines were factored in.

The decision to break out the unit's results -- it comprises just 3 percent of Disney's total revenue, according to one analyst -- came in the same quarter in which Disney CEO Bob Iger warned investors that its older media businesses -- DVD sales and broadcast television -- face "secular changes" from which they may never recover.

Disney CFO Tom Staggs said the company plans to invest upwards of $200 million in video games development in 2009, and a more "modest" increase in spending on Disney.com and in virtual worlds like Club Penguin.

The new transparency by the often tactiturn Disney management struck Barclays Capital analyst Anthony DiClemente as a good thing in a "modestly disappointing" first quarter earnings report.

"As an analyst I love to see that because it gives some more transparency into the digital businesses and the profitability of those digital businesses," DiClemente said.

The online DVD rental company is aiming for "at least" 12 percent net earnings growth in 2009 and will invest any "surplus profit" -- terms not heard much on Wall Street these days -- in growing its subscriber base and streaming content, Chief Executive Reed Hastings told investors on Monday.

The comments, made amid a storm of bad news from other U.S. media companies, came as the Los Gatos, California company posted a 45 percent rise in quarterly profit that even its own executives weren't expecting.

"Our October forecast of slowing growth turned out to be wrong," Netflix CFO Barry McCarthy admitted on a conference call with analysts. "We continue to see strong momentum in our business, quarter to date."

And then there was this: McCarthy said so many Netflix users are streaming content to their PCs and set-top boxes that they aren't ordering as many DVDs online. This equals fewer costs and more profits if this streaming thing takes off.

The relentlessly cheerful news continued: Netflix is still hiring! It is testing weekend shipping in some markets to speed service! It is within 0.4 percent of the 10 percent improvement it sought in its movie recommendation algorhythm!

On and on: More subscribers are upgrading to more costly plans than are cutting to cheaper plans! Free cash flow and gross subscriber additions hit a new record! "We will reach 10 million subscribers this quarter!" Hastings said.

The company says no data supports the idea that its growth is due to "cocooning" consumers who are trading expensive trips to the movies for DVDs -- so rivals can't even feel the satisfying schadenfraude of knowing that Netflix is profiting from misery.

What's with this company? Don't they know there's a recession on?

A California appellate opinion filed on Monday showed that a Honda customer service representative told Gaetano Paduano, the dissatisfied owner of a 2004 Honda hybrid, that the company had received "a high number of complaints" that the sedan achieves significantly less than its promised mileage of 47-plus miles per gallon.

The rep also told Paduano that the company and rival Toyota have approached the U.S. EPA to change the mileage rating on their hybrid cars, the opinion said.

Another Honda rep told Paduano that he probably couldn't achieve the advertised mileage by driving the vehicle like a conventional car, despite claims to the contrary in a Honda brochure advertising the vehicle, the opinion said. 

A Honda spokesman would not comment on the pending litigation. 

Paduano's lawsuit, filed in 2005, follows at least one other legal action over low mileage complaints for the Honda Civic Hybrid, the other filed in U.S. District Court and decided last year.

The San Diego based appeals court ruled that Paduano can go ahead with his false advertising lawsuit against Honda in a California state court.