I travelled to US on a personal trip for a few weeks around the New Year.

I explored many new products, and got a chance to see the products I use regularly from a new angle. I will talk about specific experiences which I found interesting.

Booking Flights

While booking international flights, the selection of flights that came on different Online Travel Agencies (OTA) like Expedia, Priceline & MakeMyTrip were not the same. I never saw this happening for domestic flights in India. I found a good combination with KLM & Delta which I booked directly via KLM. …

Amazon launched an impressive demo of their vision for a futuristic offline shopping experience called Amazon Go earlier this week.

The commercial starts with these lines:

Four years ago we started to wonder,
what would shopping look like if you could walk into a store
grab what you want and just go?

Square Wallet

I couldn’t help but think of how close the intent and the claimed development timeline of 4 years point to inspiration from Square Wallet (launched in 2011). The rise and fall of Square Wallet is an important history lesson for anyone interested in mobile payments.

I am…

Review originally written on GoodReads

Playing It My Way
By Sachin Tendulkar & Boria Mazumdar

First, although I don’t think this is a great book, Sachin fans should anyways read it. If you have ever been in Bandstand, Mumbai with a Shahrukh fan, you know that they are going to see his residence from outside. This is what fanboys do.

As a Sachin fan, the problem is that we already know a lot of stories talked about in the book. The Re. 1 coin placed by Sachin’s coach on his wicket which he got if no one could dismiss him…

I was seeing the movie A Time to Kill on TV yesterday. The movie — based on a John Grisham novel — is about a black man (Samuel Jackson in a great performance) and his lawyer (played by Matthew McCounaghey). Jackson’s character kills two white supremacists who rape and try to kill his 1o year old daughter. In a great courtroom climax scene where Jackson is being tried for murder, McCounaghey gives a stellar closing speech to the jury.

McCounaghey describes the attack on Jackson’s daughter in gruesome detail, asking the all-white jury to visualise the incident in their…

Uber has attracted a lot of press coverage in the recent past for their surge pricing rules. State governments in India have been pushing the company hard to comply with licensing requirements and do away with surge pricing.

Seeing the surge price indicator when you open the Uber app is one of the more cringe-worthy moments of our app usage every day, maybe rivalled only by the Google Now notification every morning/evening of heavy traffic on our usual route to work/home. We would all love to not run into traffic or pay surge pricing. Surge pricing, especially in emergency situations…

Book #2 that I read in 2016. Running behind on the 24 books that I want to read this year. Review also on GoodReads

I read Peter Thiel’s Zero to One right after reading Ben Horowitz’s The Hard things about Hard Things.If I go back to classifying books like the way I used to find it at my college’s library, both would be in the Entrepreneurship section. That is where the difference ends.Horowitz is more about the how part of startups — things you need to know when you are in the middle of a startup up in flames. Thiel…

Mobile platforms are spreading beyond apps to become the hub of a diverse set of IoT (Internet of Things) devices — from smart cars to fitness trackers. Apple Watch launched last week, and it will be interesting to see if it becomes a strong factor in bringing and retaining people within the Apple ecosystem.

It is relatively easy to switch between iOS and Android now. Most of the popular services are available on both platforms. Unless you are heavily dependent on iCloud/iTunes, the change should be smooth in terms of the functionality available on either platform. …

If you take a look at Visa’s annual report (pdf) for 2013, there are some interesting numbers. $12 billion in annual revenue, 2.2 billion cards and $4.3 trillion in payments volume — which Visa defines as the total monetary value of transactions for goods and services that are purchased on Visa-branded cards and payment products.

The number of cards on Visa’s network is growing at close to 10% from 1.9 billion in 2011 to 2.0 billion in 2012 and 2.2 billion in 2013. An eMarketer survey shows that the number of smartphones grew at twice that rate in the same…