Linked List: November 1, 2014

Saturday, 1 November 2014

Midroll 

My thanks to Midroll for sponsoring this week’s DF RSS feed. Midroll is an ad network that represents more than 140 podcasts, including The Nerdist, WTF with Marc Maron, Comedy Bang Bang, The iMore Show, Relay.fm, and Neil deGrasse Tyson’s Star Talk Radio. (And yes, that makes this an ad for ads, which sounds funny, but is actually pretty clever if you ask me.)

Midroll’s illustrated whitepaper is full of interesting stats showing how effective podcast advertising is. Here’s one: 63 percent of their surveyed listeners say they bought a product or service after hearing it advertised on a podcast. Here’s another: 97 percent of first-time Midroll advertisers come back again. Podcast ads really do work, and Midroll is a great way to reach a large and diverse audience. Mention Daring Fireball when you contact them, and they’ll take 10 percent off your first campaign.

Jony Ive Talks About Apple Watch at SFMOMA Event 

Nellie Bowles and Dawn Chmielewski, writing for Recode:

“Obviously, you’re not going to read War and Peace on your wrist. But for lightweight interactions, for casual glancing, it’s absolutely fabulous,” he said. “And I think this is the beginning of a very important category. With every bone in my body I know this is an important category, and this is the right place to wear it.”

And because it’s a new product, he said there’s “a childlike awe and curiosity” about what the Apple Watch might do. As an example, he spoke about its alarm-clock function.

“Just yesterday, somebody was saying, ‘Wow, do you know what I just did? I set the alarm in the morning, and it woke just me by tapping my wrist. It didn’t wake my wife or my baby,’” he recounted. “Isn’t that fantastic?”

How exactly is that going to be useful if you need to charge it nightly?

Tim Cook’s Moment 

Lovely piece by Kara Swisher at Recode:

With his CEO status now as firm as it has ever been, and the company pretty unassailable, Cook seemed completely ready, criticizing his home state of Alabama in a speech there about its failures in the civil rights arena. “As a state, we took too long to step toward equality,” he said. “We were too slow on equality for African-Americans. We were too slow on interracial marriage, and we are still too slow for the equality for the LGBT community.”

That was this past Monday. At a dinner I attended earlier this week, what he said came up in conversation, and someone wondered what he was up to. With no idea about what he was about to do, I had only one response: “I think we are finally about to meet the real Tim Cook.”

And, while we might have known it all along about him, it’s nice to finally be able to say hello to the entire man.