Scaling: 1, 4, millions

Beating Inflation through better money awareness

It is said that there is no escape from death and taxes. While we reel under tax burden, there is inflation eroding what ever is left in hand. Badri at Mind Your Money Blog offers a sensible approach to combat inflation: Become mindful about your expenses. Simple – easier said than done. But help is around!

In yoga they say, if you can watch(observe) something keenly, you can gain mastery over it. Much of yoga is about gaining mastery over death itself! Or fear of death to be precise. Similarly, if you watch your expenses and review them systematically often, you can gain mastery over your personal finance. And money worries vanish in the process. With some money mindfulness, you will find that your overall quality of life improving.

To make it easy to Mind your Money, NrichSoft released the version 2 of Enrich personal finance software. Enrich is easy to use, targeted towards common folks who are not accounting savvy.

Full Disclosure: Nrichsoft featured in this post is my consulting customer.

[Aside: In the age of web2.0 and widespread broadband, should a personal finance software be a hosted free service? Well, going by Enrich's experience, it seems there is a huge market for shrink-wrap offline software in India. Non-techie folks are paying hot cash( Rs 995) and lapping Enrich up! I'm surprised, I'm sure you will be too.

Aside2: Google Ad based impulse buyers accounted for the most number of Enrich VPP returns. VPP is a Cash-On-Delivery method of posting a package. Not surprising on hindsight!]

Making money with Amazon DevPay: Getting Started

One thing that differentiates AWS is how money is figured out neatly. Recently I was getting my hands dirty with AWS DevPay to learn how the premium EC2 AMIs really work. Before that, if you wish to use DevPay, you need an invitation to the limited beta. You also need a US bank account to make use of the service.

Once you have signed up for DevPay, You will be able to register your offering( Called Product) through the ‘Your Web Services Account’ drop down at aws.amazon.com.

After collecting basic details about the Product, you will be allowed to set pricing. Once you confirm all the details, the product will be given a Product Code( 9E6D5AB5 in my Product’s case) and a purchase URL( https://aws-portal.amazon.com/gp/aws/user/subscription/index.html?offeringCode=0B3B6745) It takes 2-3 biz days to get the manual approval of the product. If there are DevPay signup issues like Bank account and such, it will get delayed further.

Now this product code is to be incorporated into the EC2 AMI to make it a premium AMI. Just build your AMI with your offering the usual way you build an ordinary AMI. Incorporate the Product Code from DevPay product registration using

ec2-describe-image-attribute <ami-id> -p <product-code>

Now verify the product code associated with the AMI using:

ec2-describe-images <ami-id>

Now if the product code is set, the AMI has become premium AMI. It can be run only by EC2 account holders that has signed up for the product code.

In the next blog post, I’ll describe the small app I cooked up using opensource software. The pain point I’m solving is keeping up with rapidly changing opensource project. Opensim being the case in point.