Moreover, I realized that I pay godaddy for the domain motukuri.com, then I pay WordPress for hosting my blog, and then again I pay WordPress for mapping the domain to the blog. Like everyone else, I’d like to pay less. As the domain mapping is up for renewal, I would love to hear what people think – should I move my blog to another platform or stay put?

I’ll probably get an iPhone 4S soon anyway but jumping through hoops (i.e. firmwares, basebands, sn0ws of all colors) and finally getting my iPhone 3G to work with my Airtel sim was thoroughly satisfying.

I have joined MIH India, the group behind Tradus.in and Ibibo, the popular gaming and social networking site, as the Managing Director of eCommerce. MIH, if you are curious, is itself part of Naspers, a South Africa based group with significant investments in China’s Tencent and Yuri Milner’s Digital Sky Technologies.

It’s only been a few days since I got here but I can feel the excitement and energy in the air. Call it the gold rush or a land grab, all the television and print advertising by the various players is certainly making eCommerce more mainstream in India. I am looking forward to turning Tradus into a preferred destination for online shoppers.

I will leave the question of whether casual blogging will be replaced by twitter and quora, or not, for another day. Today, I can’t find a better place than this blog to post that I will be speaking at the Book Expo America later this week on the Digital Imperative for Publishing, at the behest of my friends over at Ninestars, a leading content transformation company. The talk will be at the IDPF Digital Zone, which is a forum for showcasing new products and services. It features lots of interesting talks on all three days of the conference. I’m on Thursday at 12:30 PM, for 30 minutes.

The last time I spoke at BEA, it was 2008, the venue was Los Angeles, and the title was Social Networking for Authors and Publishers. In the three years since, Social has permeated all aspects of our online lives. Facebook now has over 600 million active users. Websites like Groupon have given a new meaning to Social. Rapid adoption of smartphones is making the online world Social at an even faster rate. After all, we are more likely to have a phone than a regular computer with us when we are with friends. So I’m excited to be talking about Social once again. This time, I plan to narrow the scope of my talk to two of the more relevant subdomains of social – social commerce, using Bookperk.com, and social reading, using Appitude. Bookperk is a group-buying website for book lovers that I helped build, and Appitude is a startup building a social ebook reader that I advise.

If you are planning to attend my talk and have specific questions you’d like me to address, leave me a comment. I’ll try to include them in my slides.

I will be speaking at the Tools of Change in New York. I’m conducting a breakout session on the role of social media as a marketing platform for self-published authors. If you plan to be at the TOC, then please send me an email. It would be good to catch up.

Lehman Brothers announced bankruptcy over the weekend, laid off employees (some of my friends included), and triggered a selloff on the stock markets around the world. So I am shocked to learn that they upped their spend on IT, right through the credit crunch and into the bankruptcy! The subprime mortgage mess and the associated credit crunch first became news in mid-2007. According to Computer World, Lehman’s IT spend for the whole of 2007 was $1.145 billion, an 18% increase over 2006! Since then, there have been bad news after bad news for wall street, and especially Lehman Brothers. In March 08, Bear Stearns, a firm that is similar to Lehman in many ways, had to be rescued by the Fed. Many were quick to point out that Lehman might be next. What does Lehman Brothers management do? They go spend another $309 million on IT in Q2 08, up from $282 million in Q2 07!

Certainly, the Lehman Brothers executive team is responsible for this, but I’m sure they were worried about finding billions of dollars to cover their losses and decided that a few hundred million dollars would be immaterial. Either that, or the left hand at Lehman didn’t know what the right hand was doing The result is that a billion dollars of revenue is at risk for the software industry. Assuming that wall street will tighten its belt now by stopping large investments in newer arcane technology and, hopefully, start shifting to cheaper software services, there will be ripple effects across the financial services industry. We should expect most financial software companies to issue downward guidance in their next investor call, even if they don’t miss their targets this quarter, thanks to the generosity of firms such as Lehman.

I hope, for my savings and investments and not so much for my friends in the financial services sector, that the days of outrageous IT spending by financial firms are behind us.

After that major discovery, for the last 20 years or so, superconductors pretty much disappeared from mainstream attention. But with this announcement by American Superconductor and Long Island Power Authority, commercial superconductor power grids are finally here! And we will be hearing a lot about them in the coming months.

My flight from New York to Raleigh got diverted to Greensboro, NC thanks to a few thunderstorms that are hovering over the RDU airport. We’ve been told it could be another hour before the storms clear and we are allowed to take off for our intended destination. It’s already been two hours since we landed. While I am clearly frustrated at the delay, I figured I’ll make the most of it by blogging about my first impressions of North Carolina and contrasting them with those of Seattle.

About ten days back, I had to take a connecting flight out of Charlotte, NC. We were all boarded up, our flight taxied to the front of the line and was literally seconds away from racing to take off, when I saw an alarming formation of swirling dust and clouds from my window seat. The formation was probably a mile away from where we were parked. I asked the person sitting next to me, who had mentioned a few minutes ago that she lives in Charlotte, whether tornadoes ever touch down there. Her response was “rarely”, which gave me no comfort at all. I started wondering if an amateur storm-chaser is going to soon boast of rare footage of a plane caught in a tornado. Within seconds, there was hail, followed by pouring rain. I had a perverse anticipation brewing in me. Luckily, the swirling winds died down quickly even though the storm stayed on for another 45 minutes grounding the plane for that duration.

While my first impressions of North Carolina are thunderstorms and pouring rain, my first impression of Seattle, my home for five years, is a beautiful, sunny city surrounded by snow-covered mountains and water! It wasn’t even summer when I first visited Seattle to interview with Amazon. It was one of those very rare spring days when the rain gods of the pacific northwest take a break. Of course, by the time I finally packed my bags and moved to Seattle, it was almost fall. Within a month, the sun hid behind the clouds and my first impressions gave way to the more familiar images of gray skies.

Once again, reality may be very different from first impressions. This time, that would be a good thing

I will be speaking on the panel titled Social Networking for Authors and Publishers. It is scheduled for 2:30 – 3:30 on Friday (May 30th) and is being moderated by Jerome Kramer of Rosetta Solutions. I plan to talk about iRead as an efficient and highly-effective marketing platform for authors and publishers. If there are any specific points you’d like me to touch upon, please leave those in comments. I’ll try my best to include them.

For the uninitiated, this ZDNet article explains why SSD is something we should all be excited about. SSDs do not have moving parts, like the conventional hard disks. This translates to faster reads, lower power consumption, thinner profile, and most noticeably, no sound.

So why is it that I still don’t own one? Because of the cost. A 64GB SSD upgrade (on the Apple Macbook Air) costs upwards of $1000! While I am selectively cheap, I have happily paid early-adopter prices for many gadgets in the past – bought the first generation iPod, one of the first hand-held GPS devices, an eBook reader. The SSD is just too expensive. And turns out it doesn’t quite live up to the hype. This Computerworld matchup shows that SSD drives are only marginally better than HDD ones, and only for certain types of use cases.

This much-awaited announcement from Samsung changes the equation. The prices of SSD drives will fall significantly and reads will be twice as fast making them more compelling. Really exciting. What will be even more exciting is to see how the world of desktop software takes advantage of this technology and what types of new, innovative apps it produces.