“You have a secret, but you don't want to tell me” – Malcolm Crowe

Amazon (AMZN) is doing a head fake. The company wants us to concentrate on the Kindle hardware while in fact it is cleverly moving into the book publishing and social networking spaces. Taking a page out of the Apple (AAPL) playbook, I predict the Kindle will be to Amazon as the iPod and iPhone are to Apple. It is clear paper-based newspapers are soon becoming a thing of the past. What has not been said or referenced often enough is that books and magazines are soon to follow. Moreover, the shift to platforms like the Kindle will transform book and magazine publishing forever. Due to the disruptive force of the Kindle (and assuming Amazon executes well), there are 5 reasons why Amazon should be high on your list of companies to buy for the long term.

If Seeking Alpha is the search for active return on an investment above a prescribed benchmark then Seeking Omega “Ω” is the quest to create an investment return on a social or business objective. In other words, if Alpha is the beginning then Omega is the end. For our purposes, Seeking Omega is a modern solution to solving issues like India’s innovation problem without waiting for the necessary innovation ecosystem as I described in a previous article. I will also illustrate how it can be used to create investment opportunities for investment participants or help businesses create highly effective and efficient Keiretsus. It is a new virtual innovation ecosystem that leverages the social graph, predictive markets, sentiment engines, and highly networked power brokers.

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Several years ago a power plant in Florida shut down suddenly. That put a sudden shock on the grid and shut down a large baseload plant in Georgia at the same time. The Georgia plant employed around 800 people at the time. Those employees averaged about $35,000 a year or about $10.00 per hour in the mid to late 1970’s. The plant was down for about 8 hours. It produced 8000 megawatts of electricity per hour. The cost of one kilowatt of electricity was about $0.10 (ten cents). Multiplying 1000 kilowatts per megawatt times 8000 megawatts per hour times 10 cents per kilowatt times 8 hours times 800 employees times ten dollars per hour comes out to $7 million. If the Georgia plant had been on Smart Grid Technology, the digital sensors would have protected the plant and it would not have shut down due to the shock placed on the grid by the Florida plant.

If senior executives in the companies you are invested have less than 14 years experience, then they have not managed in a difficult economic period. Equally as challenging, analysts that are covering company stocks with less than 14 years of experience may not have the experience to properly evaluate the activities of senior management. So what clues should investors look for in properly evaluating whether the company they are following is going to survive the downturn?

From my own experience, executives of publicly traded companies are first seeking to reduce costs, closely followed by increasing revenues. My purpose is not to debate those priorities, but to explain the top five initiatives that every best-in-class company (BICC) above $100m should be doing today in order to survive the current down turn as well as come out stronger when the economy recovers. To enact these and other initiatives, BICCs today create a sense of urgency and pursue change relentlessly. They understand how to manage the naysayers who insist change efforts will not work.

India produces some of the brightest minds in technology, science and medicine yet has not demonstrated any truly large scale and breakthrough innovations in those fields. The giant India corporations of Reliance, Tata (TTM), Wipro (WIT), and Infosys (INFY) have huge revenues but produce very little innovative intellectual property [IIP]. Yet, India has critical “Country Development” issues that can only be addressed through the immediate and creative application of technology, which in turn requires massive technology innovations in a variety of fields.

Fields requiring immediate and large scale innovation run the gamut from clean energy (energy independence), housing the burgeoning middle class, providing affordable housing for the vast pool of have-nots, elementary, primary and secondary education, health-care, national infrastructure (water, power, transportation) and finally, equality of opportunity. Solutions developed by India will be uniquely Indian, but potentially applicable to the huge swath of global population mired in poverty and living limited lives, with little or no hope.

I’ve received numerous questions from colleagues and associates asking for my opinion on the U.S. credit crunch and its potential impact on the India economy and specifically the India real estate market. While complicated the short answer is no*, the impact should be minimal. You may have noticed that I added an asterisk and I’ll explain further below. First, we’ll quickly explore how the U.S. and Europe have been impacted, then discuss why Asia has minimal exposure, and finally I’ll explain the potential risks regarding my analysis.

The U.S. is undergoing a massive credit crunch due to the losses by large U.S. and European investment banks in the collateralized debt obligation markets (CDOs). The credit crunch is a result of banks and other financial institutions’ reluctance to buy CDO’s which in turn reduces the credit and loans extended by traditional mortgage lenders. At the same time, the exposure of banks to such non-performing obligations has reduced the willingness of other banks to lend to them and for banks to lend to developers. That in turn has caused property prices to go down (if you can’t get a loan then housing supply increases causing prices to go down) which gives consumers less money to spend which is causing a slow down in the economy. How’s that for a quick snapshot?