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Blu Dot surpasses 2,000% ROAS with self-serve CTV ads
Home furniture brand Blu Dot blew up on CTV with help from Roku Ads Manager. Here’s how:
After a test campaign reached 211,000 households and achieved 1,010% ROAS, the brand went all in to promote its annual sales event. It removed age and income constraints to expand reach and shifted budget to custom audiences and retargeting, where intent was strongest.
The results speak for themselves. As Blu Dot increased their investment by 10x, ROAS jumped to 2,308% and more page-view conversions surpassed 50,000.
“For CTV campaigns, Roku has been a top performer,” said Claire Folkestad, Paid Media Strategist, Blu Dot. “Comping to our other platforms, we have seen really strong ROAS… and highly efficient CPMs, lower than any other CTV partner we've worked with.”
Using Roku Ads Manager, the campaign moved from a pilot to a permanent performance engine for the brand.
Beginners in AI
Good morning and thank you for joining us again!
Amazon now sells a $75 clip-on that listens to your conversations and hands you back a to-do list. Today I'll walk through what it catches, what Amazon says it deletes, and what to tell the people around you before you switch it on. As always, every story here is human picked and edited.
THE FRONT PAGE
Amazon's $75 Bee Turns Talks Into To-Dos, and Says It Deletes the Audio
TLDR: Amazon's Bee launched two new AI gadgets that record your conversations and turn them into summaries and to-do lists, starting at $74.99.
The Story:
The Bee Frontier ($74.99) clips to your shirt or wrist and runs up to seven days on a charge. The Bee Eclipse ($99.99) is a credit-card-sized device that snaps onto the back of your phone, and Amazon hasn't given it a ship date. Both listen while you talk, then hand back summaries, action items and even calendar invites when you agree on a time.
The free plan keeps 14 days of memory. Bee Pro costs $11.99 a month for unlimited summaries and hooks into Amazon.com, Alexa+, Gmail, Google Calendar and Outlook. That's well under rivals like the $159 Plaud Note.
Its Significance:
A doctor's care plan, a lecture, a promise you made to a coworker: these are the things people forget, and now there's a cheap way to catch them. The trade is a microphone running while you live your life, with everyone near you in the recording too. Bee says it never stores raw audio, deletes it after processing, and encrypts transcripts with keys only your device holds. That's Amazon's promise, not an outside audit, and some states require everyone's consent to record, so tell people when it's on. Amazon’s Alexa has been caught with recordings that it wasn’t supposed to have so take it with a grain of salt. Pebble’s smart ring is an alternative I’ll be testing out soon.
QUICK TAKES
The story: Brandon Thomas released WordCraft, GridCraft and DeckCraft on GitHub less than two weeks after he cloned Photoshop the same way. GridCraft handles 513 of Excel's 523 functions, and WordCraft already has over 12,000 GitHub stars.
Your takeaway: They're free and open source, and Microsoft 365 costs $99.99 a year. Still, his own team rates WordCraft about 60% of the way to replacing Word, so try it for fun and keep important files in your usual app for now.
The story: U.S. users can now save items from different retailers into one cart in Google Search or the Gemini app, then get alerts when a price drops or something's back in stock. Google says it'll also suggest which credit card gives you the best perks and surface promo codes.
Your takeaway: Handy for holiday shopping that's spread across five tabs. Google hasn't said which stores take part, so read the final screen carefully before you let it check out for you.
The story: A machine-learning layer built by MIT's Judah Cohen, Microsoft and others fixes a forecast model's usual mistakes, and it doubled the model's skill two to six weeks ahead, per a study in Nature. It won the European weather center's forecasting contest and, for the first time in that range, beat simple long-term averages.
Your takeaway: More warning gives farmers, power companies and cities extra time before a freeze or drought. It's open source and doesn't need a supercomputer, and Kenya's weather office has already asked about using it for monsoon season.
TOOLS ON OUR RADAR
📚 Calibre Free and Open Source: Organize your e-book library, convert between formats and send books to almost any e-reader.
📲 LocalSend Free and Open Source: Send files between phones and computers over your own Wi-Fi with no cloud or account, an AirDrop for everything.
✅ Super Productivity Free and Open Source: A to-do list with built-in time tracking and focus mode, every feature free, no account needed.
🌦️ Breezy Weather Free and Open Source: An Android weather app with forecasts, pollen and alerts from what it says are 50+ sources, fitting today's MIT forecast story.
📄 PDF24 Tools Free: Merge, compress, sign and convert PDFs in your browser at no cost, an ad-supported swap for Adobe Acrobat.
🎨 OpenArt Freemium: Make AI images and videos with many models in one place, starting on a free trial with daily credits.
🧠 Flowith Freemium: An AI workspace for images, video, slides and websites, with 300 one-time free credits before paid plans.
TRENDING
Anthropic Reportedly Made $16.8 Billion in a Single Quarter. Anthropic told investors its July-to-September revenue rose about 45% from the quarter before and that it turned an adjusted profit, according to the Financial Times. It hasn't published the numbers or said what "adjusted" leaves out, and an IPO could come as soon as November.
Over 400 Scientists Want Hacking-Capable AI Cut Off From the Internet. Geoffrey Hinton and Yoshua Bengio signed an open letter asking labs to keep their strongest hacking models offline by default. It points to test runs this summer where models from OpenAI, Anthropic and Meta slipped out and hit real systems.
Rivian Plans to Put Outside AI Agents in Its Cars. CEO RJ Scaringe said future Rivians will run agents from AI companies such as Anthropic, but they won't touch braking or steering. There's no date yet; more is promised at a December event.
Figma Gives AI Agents a Rulebook for Your Brand. A new Specs feature lets teams write down their design rules so agents follow them. Figma says AI has pushed out 17 times more code but only 1.3 times more releases.
TRY THIS PROMPT (copy and paste into Claude, Grok, ChatGPT, or Gemini)
📝 Talk to Tasks: paste a conversation and get the to-do list
Build a single-file HTML app called Talk to Tasks in plain HTML, CSS and JavaScript. It runs entirely in the browser with no API key and no internet calls, so nothing I paste ever leaves the page.
I paste rough notes or a transcript of a conversation, like a meeting, a doctor visit, or a call with family. Using simple built-in word and pattern rules, the app finds action items (phrases like "I'll", "can you", "need to", "follow up", "remind", "don't forget"), figures out who owns each one from the speaker names, and spots dates and deadlines like "by Friday" or "next Tuesday" and turns them into real calendar dates.
Show a checklist I can tick off, edit, and copy as plain text, plus a "said but not assigned" list and an open questions list. Add a Load example button with a sample conversation.
Style: a light paper notebook look with ruled lines, one bold red accent, and Fraunces, Kalam and IBM Plex Mono fonts.What this does: Paste notes from a meeting, a doctor visit or a family call, and this app turns them into a to-do list that shows who's doing what and by when. It also lists the jobs nobody said they'd do and the questions that still need an answer. It all runs on your own device, so nothing you paste gets sent anywhere.
What’s still sitting on your to-do list?
You don’t need an AI team to build an AI agent. With Skydive, the person who knows the work can create the agent to do it.
Start an agent off with a role, teach them how your team operates, connect your tools, and put them to work.
WHERE WE STAND(based on today’s news)
✅ AI Can Now: turn a day of spoken conversation into a to-do list with owners, dates and calendar invites, per Bee.
❌ Still Can't: tell who agreed to be recorded. Getting consent from the people around you is still your job.
✅ AI Can Now: help one developer rebuild 513 of Excel's 523 functions in under two weeks.
❌ Still Can't: match the real thing yet. Its own team rates the Excel clone about 50% ready for real-world files.
FROM THE WEB
RECOMMENDED LISTENING/READING/WATCHING
📖 Total Recall: How the E-Memory Revolution Will Change Everything by Gordon Bell and Jim Gemmell - Book
Long before Bee, Microsoft researcher Gordon Bell spent years recording almost everything in his life, from phone calls to receipts, in a project called MyLifeBits. This 2009 book is what he learned about remembering everything, the good and the strange. Read it next to today's lead and you'll see the questions Amazon is now selling for $75 were asked twenty years ago.
How was today's edition? Tap one below, then tell me what you'd change on the next screen. I read every answer.
How was today's edition?
Thank you for reading. We’re all beginners in something. With that in mind, your questions and feedback are always welcome and I read every single email!
-James
By the way, this is the link if you liked the content and want to share with a friend.
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