After a long and earnest conversation, how many times have you heard the voice on the other side of the telephone instruct you to send him or her an email? You thought the deal was in the bag, and here is somebody asking you to repeat the spirit of the conversation in an email. The most alive of American Indian lore is still handed down word-of-mouth, and yet not a detail has gone missing. Are we losing out on the value of our voice? There must be something we could do to transfer the contents of a phone converstion into actionable information without having to repeat it in email form. Any takers?

I remember one of our leadership columns interviewed Ajit Singh at Siemens Medical. The learned President said he strove to read at least 50 good books in a year. That averages to one a week. Now the qualifier he put on this number was the word “good.” This now challenges one to pick more than 50 books to get to reading 50 good ones. Whoa! Which is where I would like to introduce you to Shinu Gupta, founder and CEO, a1books.com, a very successful online retailer of books. Good books.

Since 2001, Gupta has seen his revenues make solid jumps and he has stayed the course. He has built his store and backend process ground up, and stands equal to Michael Dell, Jeff Bezos, and Wal-Mart, people and organizations who spurned packaged software and sought to build their own.

Is wireless viable? Most VCs think it could lead the Valley out of the slump. Which makes me ask the next question: are we out of the slump? Just as we are thinking that the bad times are over, Merrill Lynch downgrades the semiconductor sector. This is surprising, considering the results many giants postes in the last quarter. Why this gloom, then?

The last month’s VC Summit in India was a highlight in siliconindia’s event efforts. The two-day session and the following visits have led to some very good traction for all concerned: the venture firms and the Indian entrepreneurs. The CIO breakfast of the previous month is now followed by another one in Chicago. The signs are: CIOs are buying. The optimism is not false.