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All the world’s an ad, and we are merely watchers

Jennifer Faull writing for The Drum (emphasis mine): Accenture’s R&D division has spent the last year developing breakthrough product placement technology that can seamlessly insert a brand into online video, including the ability to replace existing labelling. And also: “[We wanted] to [be able to] monetise (sic) huge back catalogues of existing video content as well as offer content creators a…

Economics of fake news

Scott Shane for the New York Times: Within a few days, the story, which had taken him 15 minutes to concoct, had earned him about $5,000. That was a sizable share of the $22,000 an accounting statement shows he made during the presidential campaign from ads for shoes, hair gel and web design that Google had placed on his site. He had put in perhaps half an hour a week on the fake news site, he…

Canary in the coal mine

Christopher Glazek writing for The Outline: “The problem is that with Gawker gone there was no one around willing to proudly play the heel and do the wrong thing.” While publishing the full dossier might have been off-brand for Vox, we should be grateful that BuzzFeed is filling some of the vacuum left by Peter Thiel’s vengeful erasure of the political left’s most influential rumor board. The…

It’s been a long journey

The launch of the 24-hour news cycle thanks to cable news The Daily Show showing the government’s spin machine and the news media’s hypocrisy The tea party/conservative radio amplifying the distain and distrust of the media The internet/Facebook flooding users with content (both real and not) with both sides calling the other “fake” Not a single person that can appeal to both sides of this…

Finally getting featured in Fortune Magazine

Elizabeth Dwoskin for the Wall Street Journal: Computer programs that scan facial expressions have been used to detect whether people respond positively to commercials or whether hospital patients are in pain. Can they also read a CEO’s mind? James Cicon thinks they can. A finance professor at University of Central Missouri, Cicon built software that analyzed video of the faces of Fortune 500…

Best music videos ever made, ranked

Best music videos ever made, ranked (many NSFW): 5. Whiskey Shivers – Gimme All Your Lovin’ 4. DYE – Fantasy 3. Major Lazer – Pon De Floor 2. Biting Elbows – Bad Motherfucker 1. Bonnie Tyler – Total Eclipse of the Heart Honorable mentions: DJ Snake & Lil Jon – Turn Down For What, Major Lazer – Bubble Butt, El Guincho – Bombay

Berenst#in Bears hit close to home

Nightmares are much more powerful when you’re younger. I can’t really remember any bad dreams I’ve had over the past five years (although I’m sure that I had them) but I still vividly remember a nightmare I had at age five when a wolf was stalking our family van. I was looking out the back of the car after I thought we lost him, only to have his head appear around the corner of a building and…

The Easyway to quit Beijing

From The Economist’s “Mapping the invisible scourge”: Berkeley Earth’s scientific director, Richard Muller, says breathing Beijing’s air is the equivalent of smoking almost 40 cigarettes a day and calculates that air pollution causes 1.6m deaths a year in China, or 17% of the total. Um, holy crap.

A “simpler” life

The joking/not joking tone of this post really gets me. Rob Rhinehart’s How I Gave Up Alternating Current: With no fridge, no dishes, no microwave, no oven, no range, no dishwasher, no utensils, no pests, no cleaning products nor dirty rags, my life is considerably simpler, lighter and cleaner than before. I think it was a bit presumptuous for the architect to assume I wanted a kitchen with my…

Stefanie Cohen, writing about Robert Askins (playwright, Broadway’s “Hand to God“) for the Wall Street Journal[1. Life hack: to view the full WSJ article for free, paste the full URL into a Google search and click the link in the search results.]:

Mr. Askins wrote “Hand to God” five years ago and it was staged in 2011 at the off-off Broadway Ensemble Studio Theater. The show was critically…

David E. Sanger and Nicole Perlroth, for the New York Times:

President Obama’s newly installed defense secretary, Ashton B. Carter, toured Silicon Valley last week to announce a new military strategy for computer conflict, starting the latest Pentagon effort to invest in promising start-ups and to meet with engineers whose talent he declared the Pentagon desperately needed in fending off the…

David Pierce, writing for Wired:

What does a tweet feel like? What about an important text? To answer these questions, designers and engineers sampled the sounds of everything from bell clappers and birds to lightsabers and then began to turn sounds into physical sensations…Ive was the decider and was hard to please: Too metallic, he’d say. Not organic enough. Getting the sounds and taps to the…

I’m back

I quit my job at The Verge a little over a year ago because it was time for something new. I retired this blog, IAmDann.com, and launched Novice No Longer, a website and podcast dedicated to teaching people how to build apps. I maintained that blog, while consulting full-time, for about a year before a new full-time job literally fell on my lap with an opportunity too good to pass up.

Novice No…

How to raise money to fund your app with Hunter Gray:

In 2011, Hunter Gray turned his app idea into the capital needed in order to get the product built. In this episode of the podcast, he shares exactly how he pitched his idea for the original version of Klutch to investors, and how the venture capital world has changed in just a few short years. Not everyone will be able to turn their ideas into cash, but Hunter explains the methods that worked for him and talks about what might work for you, too.

There's so much discussion of bootstrapping today (and for good reason, it works), but it's nice to have a different perspective on building an app business. If you're dying to get your app idea in front of investors, Hunter explains exactly what you need to do to make that interaction as successful as possible.