Alex Hopmann’s Blog

I’ve seen several mentions of people speculating how much of a cut Google takes on ad-sense. Part of the amazing thing is that they actually manage to keep it pretty secret, and we have almost no way of telling what the rate is and whether they change it to make earnings, etc.

This morning I noticed that the first click I got on CalendarData.com was worth 1 cent to me. 1 cent. Now, given that the minimum bids are supposed to be 10 cents, that seems like a pretty bleak picture of what the payouts are. The amazing thing is that the total ad revenue has been up quite a bit the past week- I wonder what it would have been if Google wasn’t taking a 90% cut?

One of my favorite places to eat in the world is Vij’s in Vancouver. It is pretty amazing how rare it is to find higher-end Indian food, especially given how wonderful it can be when it is done well. The NY Times has a write-up on 5 places in London- I can’t wait to try some of them out. Now if only someone would open a good one in Seattle…

I’ve never been a pro photography type. I’m very impressed by some of my friends who are just amazing photographers but I’ve never been willing to be bothered with carrying large cameras, lenses and all that junk. Having said that I’m always eager to get better results as long as my camera can fit in my pocket easily. Given that criteria I’ve had a pretty steady line of the Canon Elph models- pretty much a new one every other year for the past decade they have been making them.

My biggest frustrating with the Elph series has been the lack of more than 3x optical zoom (followed by poor low-light shooting and more recently lack of image stabalization). Last year’s models were very frustrating because they had no camera that was clearly the top of the category- there was the SD800 that had image stabalization or the SD900 that had better video and faster shooting. I’ve seen this mistake many times- for example Windows used to not have any clear “top” sku, or routers where you had to choose between either better performing router or better wireless. Its a really important concept that you need to have a “this is the best we make” model, and the bonus is you get to charge premium pricing for it. Microsoft really figured this out with Windows Vista Ultra- some focus accuse them of charging too much of a premium for it, but the mindset is that this is the version for the guys paying $500 for a video card, an extra $200 for the OS shouldn’t kill them.

A week or two ago Canon came out with their new spring line and this time they have what I’m hoping is the perfect camera for me. The Canon TX1 is small enough to fit in your pocket, but you flip open the screen and its got 10X optical zoom, optical image stabalization, and supports HD video. Plus the vertical way to hold it is probably more stable to begin with. I haven’t actually gotten my hands on one but this looks like a winner- and at $499 its priced right in the mainstream range. Of course i’m going to have to invest in an 8gb SD card now so that I can store enough video (8gb should net you about 40 minutes which is plenty for me).

Last week Scoble wrote a piece about the developer ecosystems, Microsoft vs. Adobe and the role of Macs. From my perspective he is half right.

His observation that Macs are everywhere is dead on. I bought my MacBook a couple of months ago and on most client visits I’d rather bring my MacBook, both because its lighter than my Dell, but also because its the “cool” machine to have and you see them all over now.

But Robert goes on to say that “WPF/E and Expression and the fun workflow that Manuel and John show off won’t matter one bit if you develop Web sites on a Mac”. I think this misses one of the key angles on the recent Mac phenomena- many of those Macs are running Windows, at least partially. The inflection point when the developer community shifted from a few mostly isolated designers running Macs to everyone carrying them around is pretty clearly the Intel Macs, Bootcamp and Parallels. This means that Expression, etc, run great on those Macs.

Of course part of the sad thing is that both Microsoft and Apple are so ambivalent about this shift that neither is really capitalizing on it. Apple is the closest, but I get the vibe (I hope I’m wrong) that Apple doesn’t really want Windows to kick-ass on their machines. If all the drivers for Vista were 100% and Apple added right mouse buttons and/or a couple of keys to the keyboard, Vista on my MacBook would be a killer experience rather than a “nice but somewhat annoying” one. But Apple is conflicted because they fear that might diminish the MacOS.

So, while it would be nice if Expression ran on the MacOS, the fact that WPF/E runs great there, and you can run Expression on your Mac hardware I think gets Microsoft 80% of the way there. Most of the Mac-developers and designers that I’ve worked with lately all run Windows for various tools and IE testing and as long as they can run the results of their efforts on the MacOS, they are willing to work in both environments.