Linked List: November 29, 2012

Thursday, 29 November 2012

Philly’s Best Cocktail 

Local note: My favorite bar, Hop Sing Laundromat, has not one but two cocktails on Eater Philly’s best in town poll. They’re both great, but the Henry “Box” Brown has my vote. I don’t hesitate to call it the best cocktail I’ve ever had anywhere. If you’ve been to Hop Sing, I’m sure you’ll agree. If you haven’t, take my word for it.

A Lion Steals Ed Hetherington’s Camera 

Who wouldn’t take a nice camera like that if they found it just laying there?

iTunes 11 Allows You to Redeem Gift Cards Using Your Computer’s Camera 

Nice catch from 9to5 Mac.

DigiTimes: Microsoft Halves Surface RT Component Orders 

Monica Chen and Joseph Tsai, reporting for DigiTimes:

The upstream supply chain of Microsoft’s Surface RT has recently seen the tablet’s orders reduced by half, and with other Windows RT-based tablet orders also seeing weak performance, sources from the upstream supply chain believe the new operating system may not perform as well as expected in the market.

Microsoft originally expected to ship four million Surface RT devices by the end of 2012, but has recently reduced the orders by half to only two million units.

Take it with a DigiTimes-size grain of salt (and thus maybe some blood pressure medication as well), but this is the sort of thing DigiTimes often gets right: what’s going on in the component industry right now.

iTunes 11 

November it is.

The Strategy Behind Those Obama Campaign Emails 

Joshua Green, Businessweek:

One fascination in a presidential race mostly bereft of intrigue was the strange, incessant, and weirdly overfamiliar e-mails that emanated from the Obama campaign. Anyone who shared an address with the campaign soon started receiving messages from Barack Obama with subject lines such as “Join me for dinner?” “It’s officially over,” “It doesn’t have to be this way,” or just “Wow.” Jon Stewart mocked them on the Daily Show. The women’s website the Hairpin likened them to notes from a stalker.

But they worked. Most of the $690 million Obama raised online came from fundraising e-mails. During the campaign, Obama’s staff wouldn’t answer questions about them or the alchemy that made them so successful. Now, with the election over, they’re opening the black box.

Most successful subject line? “Hey”.