I generally agree with Leonard Maltin's movie reviews. He's a fan of ukuleles and old cartoons, too, which makes him A-OK in my book.
So I am going to add every one of his picks from 151 Best Movies You've Never Seen to my Netflix queue, even the ones I've already seen.
Fussy sourpusses will complain about the title, but I have only seen a handful of the movies Maltin recommends: Better Than Sex, Disney's Teacher's Pet, Idiocracy, and Zathura. And I liked those four movies a lot. That leaves 147 titles I have yet to see.
If you are familiar with Maltin's writing, you'll know his writing is accessible and informative. The reviews in 151 Best Movies You've Never Seen are like that. They're one to two pages long, and provide just enough of the plot to get you interesting without spoiling anything.
(I can't believe I never saw The Lookout, or even heard about it until I got this book.)
When it comes to social games, one of the most important keys to success is analytics. Fun gameplay is, of course, a big factor, but tweaking viral loops to boost your userbase can make the difference between a fun game no one plays and a hit. Mixpanel is a startup that’s playing an increasingly bigger role in this space, by offering developers tools to track analytics that go deeper than most other available services, like Google Analytics. Last night, I spoke with co-founder Suhail Doshi about the startup’s latest progress.
The biggest news: Mixpanel recently signed major Chinese social game company Five Minutes, which is behind the hit cross-platform game Happy Farm and has 23 million daily users across all of its games. But Mixpanel doesn’t just do games — other customers include Slide, Justin.tv, and Posterous. Doshi says the amount of data flowing through Mixpanel is rapidly increasing, with “hundreds of millions” of datapoints a month (he declined to give exact figures, but did provide the graph below).
Doshi says that much of Mixpanel’s success stems from its funnel analytics, which allow developers to determine where in their application’s flow users are dropping off, so they can optomize accordingly. Doshi explains that some other services offer funnel analytics as well, but that Mixpanel visualizes it in a way that has struck a chord with developers.
Mixpanel launched out of the Y Combinator program last summer, and got another major vote of confidence in February, when it received seed funding from PayPal and Slide founder Max Levchin and Bebo and Birthday Alarm founder Michael Birch — both of whom have extensive experience in analytics.
Behold, the earliest known Led Zeppelin recording. Part of a December 1968 show that took place three weeks before the band's Led Zeppelin album came out, this version of "Dazed and Confused" is part of a full-show bootleg that's been available to fans for awhile. This is just its first time on YouTube. Apparently, when this was recorded, Led Zeppelin was so obscure that they were listed as "Len Zefflin" on ads for the show. Enjoy!
Groupon’sAndrew Mason is well aware of all the Groupon-esque sites but he says he’s picking his battles:
“At first it was definitely really weird, just because my motivation as an entrepreneur, internet person, is so different from the type of person that would go and copy something exactly… The first couple of times we saw these sites it would be just people copying our exact design…to a tee everything that we were doing. When we made changes, a couple of days later they would make those changes. Like even stupid things we were doing, like we could have run a deal on porn and there probably would have been 80 other sites that would have run a deal on porn the next day. It was strange. After awhile you just shut it out and go on doing what you do.
Mason says he’s focused on growing the company with plans to be in 100 cities by the end of this year. Groupon will also break up larger cities into subareas. For example, the suburbs surrounding Chicago or the smaller cities in the Bay area will soon each have their own daily deal. He did not explain how Groupon will continue to leverage and work with social media tools, but he did mention that he’s very “excited about some of the stuff that Facebook’s announcing later this month.”
You're looking at the first multi-cellular, anaerobic organism known to humans. Anaerobic, of course, means this little critter lives entirely without oxygen. We've long known that single-celled organisms could live this way, but this discovery comes as a bit of surprise. Even more fascinating (to me, at least) is the fact that this organism, part of a species called Loricifera, has no mitochondria. I didn't realize this, but anaerobic organisms have an entirely different organelle, called hydrogenosomes, that power their cells. I'm not sure whether hydrogenosomes have the same sort of origin story as mitochondria—i.e., separate organisms that took up residence in a host cell and became part of its machinery—but that's the first thing I'm researching tonight when I get a chance.
Written by Maggie Koerth-Baker on April 8th, 2010 with comments disabled.
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Glam Media, the distributed media network, is rolling out its mobile publishing platform GlamMobile to the U.S. today. The GlamMobile Publisher Platform for iPad and Mobile Devices gives advertisers the ability to reach the largest audience of women online, now on mobile devices. The network, which has been available to users in Japan, allows 1,500 publishers to optimize their sites for the mobile web and offers advertisers cross-platform reach for campaigns.
For advertisers, Glam is offering engaging ad formats on a variety of devices, including formats customized for the iPad without the use of Flash. For publishers, Glam is helping provide additional waysto connect with audiences on the go. Specifically, Glam sees the iPad as an opportunity to bring magazine-like glossy content to the device (a strategy that many online sites and magazines are taking).
The GlamMobile Publisher Platform includes specially formatted mobile sites for content partners, mobile apps for devices like the iPad and iPhone and GlamMobile Display Ads that are optimized for mobile devices and socials adds, using Glam’s Tinker to target social conversions via Facebook and Twitter.
It’s wise for Glam to try to make its publisher network cross platform with a mobile offering. It’s sure to draw even more traffic to Glam’s sites. Today, the Glam Vertical Network has more than 500,000 articles and posts, more than 100,000 videos and upwards of 20 million micro-blog posts.
Glam Media just raised $50 million in funding and announced EBITDA profitability on North American operations and break-even results globally for Q4 2009. The company is also rumoured to be gearing up for an IPO in the next 12 – 18 months.
The FTC is reportedly gearing up to challenge the Google-AdMob deal, due to anti-trust regulations The search giant acquired the popular mobile advertising network for $750 million last Fall. Reports emerged today from Reuters’ sources that the FTC’s lawyers will recommend that the Commission block the deal. We’re not surprised, considering that we heard that Google was taking the unprecedented step of reaching out to AdMob competitors to rally their support around their acquisition of the company, in response to rumors that the FTC could block the deal. Consumer groups have also lobbied to block the deal.
According to a Wall Street Journal report yesterday, the FTC started assembling a legal team to prepare to block the deal. And the FTC is soliciting statements from the same competitors that Google is lobbying, in an effort to get these companies to testify on the regulatory ramifications of the AdMob acquisition.
Of course, Google claims that AdMob is only one of the many ad networks are competing in the arena and the mobile advertising market is still so young that it’s still unclear who the leader is in the space right now. And of course, Google is quick to point to Apple’s recent acquisition of mobile ad network Quattro Wireless.
It appeared that Google had high ambitions for AdMob, which was one of Google’s largest acquisitions since it bought DoubleClick for $3.1 billion in 2008. The rise of mobile advertising attracted Google to this space and with the acquisition of AdMob, the search giant could gain a valuable revenue channel. AdMob, which some say is approaching a $100 million business within the next three years, could be an extremely profitable source, especially when the platform is plugged into AdWords and DoubleClick.
Location-based social network Loopt has just updated its iPhone and BlackBerry applications, adding a hybrid map feature that allows you to view a single map (seen at right) that plots nearby points of interest, friends, and events all at once. The new update also brings LooptPulse, which the company has already launched for the iPhone and iPad, to the BlackBerry.
LooptPulse, which was first announced last fall, is Loopt’s discovery feature. If there are a lot of Loopt users checking in at a nearby event or restaurant, the service will recommend it to you, even if your friends aren’t necessarily there. Loopt generates some of these recommendations using data from its partners like Zagat, CitySearch, Bing, and Tastingtable (recently added partners include SonicLiving, Zvents, and Metromix).
Loopt has been around for much longer than hot location startups like Foursquare and Gowalla, and has more registered users than either of them. But in some senses it’s playing catchup — for years Loopt was a passive service that constantly tracked your location as opposed to the check-in services that have recently caught on. Loopt has now shifted its model to compete more directly with these services, and its Pulse discovery features go beyond what Foursquare currently offers.
Disclosure: Loopt offers a branded TC version of the service here</a.
Last November Google acquired Gizmo5, a VoIP service that competed with Skype by making P2P VoIP calls as well as making and receiving calls with POTS (normal landlines) and mobile phones.
Gizmo5 fills some of the holes in the Google Voice product, particularly providing an endpoint for calls. Currently Google Voice users must assign their Google Voice phone number to an actual phone to make and receive calls.
Google never commented on how they might use Gizmo5’s technology. But we’ve confirmed that they have now built a Google Voice desktop application to make and receive calls. From a user perspective, this will let Google Voice users take calls right from their desktop.
When will the new application launch? Possibly soon. Earlier this week Google started testing the application internally. This “dogfooding” of products (as in “eating your own dog food”) is a step that Google and many other companies take before launching something publicly, to iron out any problems that pop up.
Radon gas may leak out of fault lines in greater quantities prior to an earthquake. In 2009, an Italian man claimed to have used radon monitors to predict a quake near his hometown of L'Aquila. Success with the radon approach has been—like all attempts at predicting quakes—rather hit and miss. But a physics Nobel laureate hopes to change that with a new, improved radon detector that easier to use in the field.
Written by Maggie Koerth-Baker on April 7th, 2010 with comments disabled.
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I generally agree with Leonard Maltin's movie reviews. He's a fan of ukuleles and old cartoons, too, which makes him A-OK in my book.
The FTC is reportedly gearing up to challenge the Google-AdMob deal, due to anti-trust regulations The search giant acquired the popular mobile advertising network for 
Location-based social network 
Last November 
