The Road, opening this week, might well be the big Academy Award winner of 2009. It’s based on a novel by Cormac McCarthy, who also wrote No Country for Old Men, which became the major winner in 2007. The novel was recently named “book of the decade” by the Times magazine. Starring acclaimed Oscar-nominee Viggo Mortensen and 2004 Oscar winner Charlize Theron, The Road deals with compelling themes of survival, human nature and parenthood in a dystopian futuristic world. We’... Read Full Story

Open nominations are now being held for the 2009 Crunchies Awards. Jinni is in the running for Best New StartUp of 2009 - and we’d really appreciate your help! Click the image to nominate Jinni: Technorati Tags: Crunchies awards 2009 Read Full Story

Vampires and zombies are two of the hottest trends in TV and movies in recent years. Now imagine a hungry zombie chewing on your arm and a thirsty vampire sucking at your neck, both asking you to choose: Will you go to the next zombie movie or the next vampire movie? It’s time to confront the living dead with the sun-hating blood-suckers, and decide which rules! To that end, here are the ten best contemporary titles under both themes plus the bottom line – which is better: 10. TV series vs. T... Read Full Story

This week Pirate Radio is releasing to US cinemas. It’s a cool new movie about a group of rebellious DJs playing pop and rock music (god forbid!) on an illegal radio station on a boat, back in 60s Britain… In fact, it sounds very similar to a movie I saw four month ago in Europe called The Boat That Rocked. Same actors too (check the interesting interviews with Talulah Riley and Tom Sturridge over on Gordon and the Whale). Yes, it’s the same movie! Americans dictate world politic... Read Full Story

The Men Who Stare at Goats, starring George Clooney, Kevin Spacey, Jeff Bridges and Ewan McGregor, is about a secret, psychic military unit. Just a few things this unit does: Attempt to kill goats by staring at them and examine the use of Barney the Dinosaur’s theme tune on Iraqi POWs. Oh, and it’s based on a true story. Wait, what? Yes, this is not a mistake, this movie is based on a true story. It does make you think: maybe other movies are also based on true stories. Here are ten mo... Read Full Story

An intriguing aspect of how Google presents their new music search in their blog is the premise that a search engine for music should include discovery: “a search engine should also be able to help you discover music you’ll like.” A crucial limitation of standard, keyword-based search is that people discover based on more nuanced, personal criteria. Google compensates by partnering with Pandora, imeem, and Rhapsody to link to their discovery services. Interestingly, while t... Read Full Story

We’re honored to have President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad among Jinni’s early adopters. He’s been busy rating movies - based on which Jinni displays his Movie Personality Sketch. He’s also following some users whose taste in movies interests him, and several others are following him. Check out his example of how to make the most of Jinni. * Movie Ratings Movie Personality Sketch Following: Follow people inviting them to Jinni, adding them from your Neighbors (people with compatible taste) , or v... Read Full Story

After Microsoft announced deals last week with Twitter and Facebook to include real-time feeds from both social sites in Bing’s results, Wired published an article “The Future is Social, Not Search, Facebook COO Says.” COO Sheryl Sandberg is quoted at the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco: “We believe in the wisdom of friends.” Interestingly, the example Sandberg gave to support her point came from the world of movies. When trying to decide whether Where the Wild Things Are would be too scary ... Read Full Story

Amelia – the story of Amelia Earhart, the legendary American pilot – is opening this week. Why do we still find her story so appealing today, more than 70 years after her disappearance over the Pacific Ocean? I think it’s because she dared to do what was considered impossible and even outrageous for women at that time. Even today female pilots are quite uncommon. This made me wonder – what if we combine our “strong female role” gene on Jinni with other genes that are usually relat... Read Full Story

“The Song Decoders,” a very intriguing article by Rob Walker in the New York Times (with some smart reactions based on personal experience listed on his Murketing blog, including William Weir and Steve Sailer), looks at Pandora via an interview with founder Tim Westergren. One question the article raises is how Pandora, with a “puny” library of only 700,000 songs, competes with services like Slacker and Spotify. I think the answer is Pandora’s powerful recommendation system: the subject of t... Read Full Story