Ashutosh Nilkanth's Blog

Downtown
waiting
at your
window
strain to
drop by
while you
ask why

You’re reaching
for stars now
try to
hold on
ahead

Can’t
can’t we
can’t we be
can’t we be dreaming?

That’s Menwhopause‘ unreleased track titled “Downtown” (mp3 here, courtesy Shree Mulay). Two other unreleased songs titled “Time” and “Floating” are up for streaming on their MySpace profile. After their gig at SXSW 2007 (the first Indian rock band to do so), this talented bunch is currently on a US tour. While I was in India last year, I heard them live. A tour downunder next?

HackerTV is broadcasting Startup School 2008, an all-day event that covers pretty much everything one would ever want to know about technology startups. A crowd of over 650 developers, writers, and entrepreneurs packed Stanford’s Kresge Auditorium for a chance to pick the mind of tech-industry greats. A streaming video of the entire event (also see schedule of talks) can be found at the HackerTV channel. Update: Omnisio is streaming the SS08 videos, synchronized with slides and questions.

Wealth intrigues me. And, it amuses me, because at times I wonder if there’s anything close to “adequate wealth”, or maybe, “good enough to last long” wealth. We are chasing wealth, but it comes with no guarantee of happiness. So I’ve pondered on one of the simplest ways of making wealth. There’s a more complex, but effective, mechanism as well – a must read article on making wealth by Paul Graham.

But, what is wealth? The most common notion is that its to do with money. Some liberated souls relate it to the amont of happiness in one’s life. Other, practical bodies, relate it to the legacy of their life-time – which is to say the memories, the teachings, and the lessons of life – that they’ve passed down to their grand-children. Happiness, is as subjective as wealth itself, and yet they seem co-related. For a lot of people, money can deter worry, and that can add to their happiness.

The Easterlin paradox, proposed by economist Richard Easterlin, is a classic theory which argues that economic growth doesn’t necessarily lead to more satisfaction. This paradox asserts that happiness is not related to the total amount of money you own, but rather to the amount of money you own compared to those around you. Makes sense in all likelihood.

But this month, Easterlin’s paper has had a rebuttal. A new theory, based on research and surveys extending over 30 years since Mr. Easterlin’s study, now claims that money indeed tends to bring happiness, contrary to the original hypothesis. An accompanying map shows a correlation between a country’s GDP per capita income and average life satisfaction. Quite compelling.

So, its still debatable if economic growth, by itself, is enough to guarantee happiness? To obscure things further, a recent research has also found that some of the things that make people happiest – short commutes, time spent with friends – have little to do with higher incomes. But I think this assumption is flawed, because your short commutes can be a result of your housing affordability near your work place, and your time spent with friends can be a result of you already having enough money not to work too hard and stay busy most of the time.

One sure sign of prosperity and happiness, is that economic growth can pay for investments in scientific research that lead to longer, healthier lives.

Maybe, with the cultural penetration of the Internet, TV, and Radio, in the third world nations, the new paradox is simply the fact that information technology has made it obvious to the poor countries how poor they really are. Imagine, being in a small village in Uganda (for example), and watching BBC’s coverage of the Ugandan food crisis. Maybe, this very projection of poverty has made the poorer nations accept their state of being. They are a little happier now, for the world is contemplating their well being. Maybe, the first step toward social happiness is to desist the intake of mainstream media, much like how China does. But then, are Chinese more (or less) happier than Ugandans?

With oil prices soaring, I wonder how much 35.27 ounces of happiness would cost me today.

If, economist and author, Ben Stein can be taken seriously, he has some sound advice to share about getting rich. Some excerpts:

The top 1 percent (of all wealth-holders in the U.S.) own about 44 percent of the financial assets of the nation. The top 10 percent own about 80 percent of the financial assets.

But the real question it poses is, how did the ones at the top get there? Obviously, some do it through inheritance, and some have spectacular athletic or musical abilities. But what about the others? How did they get to the pinnacle of wealth?

First, as the genius financial planner Ray Lucia would say, the first step is to have a plan to save. Without equilibrating assets and liabilities by accumulating lots of stocks, REITs, and cash, you won’t get there.

But … how do you get the income to start saving meaningful sums?

… experience proves the great advice of Warren Buffett: It’s better to be medium-good in a great field than great in a medium field. There are some fields where a lot of money can be made.

…the most interesting and psychologically rewarding work is rarely the best-paid. So choices must be made.

If your goal is to be in that top 1 percent of wealth-holders, you have to … follow the instructions to where the money is, and to where it isn’t.

My question is what do you do when you don’t have any instructions to read? Just kidding. Instructions are mere directions – course of life, line of thought, area of work etc. – which we’ll have to gauge, and choose, on our own eventually.

In the cloud computing space, there’s the SaaS model, its cousin DaaS, and their distant mate – Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS).

All the “XaaS” platforms exist and operate under the same umbrella, so to speak. The “Comparing Amazon’s and Google’s Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) Offerings” article illustrates a nice graphical overview of the Amazon EC2 and Google App Engine platforms:

The XaaS platforms out there are great for B2C apps, but I still don’t think that they are quite ready for enterprise computing yet. I think Salesforce, with their user base and current platform, has a better chance of leading (and even redefining) the enterprise-level application delivery model.

Update (14th April): In a contrary move, Google and Salesforce have partnered together and announced the launch of “Salesforce for Google Apps” today. Will this alliance benefit the enterprise customer? I still have my doubts. Taking technology to the enterprise consumers depends a lot on the developer community. The size of the Salesforce developers network might be substantial for their own platform, but would the average Salesforce developer branch out to Google’s App Engine for deployment?

Update (15th April): More Details On The Google-Salesforce “Enemy Of My Enemy Is My Friend” Alliance