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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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.
