Sameer Gandhi of Sequoia Capital has joined Accel Partners as partner in their Palo Alto office.

At Accel, Sameer will help develop companies in the consumer Internet and software segments.

At Sequoia Capital, Sameer had been a partner leading several investments including Barracuda Networks, eHarmony, Gracenote (acquired by Sony), Marketlive and Sourcefire (FIRE) among others during his decade-long stint at the firm.

Sameer previously worked as a technology banker at Broadview and a sales engineer at Oracle.

Sameer holds an MBA from Stanford University and a BSEE and MSEE from MIT.

Web domain name registrar Network Solutions has named Kamalesh Dwivedi its Chief Information Officer.

At Network Solutions, Kamalesh will be responsible for overseeing operations, engineering, enterprise data services and program management.

Before joining Network Solutions, Kamalesh worked as Executive VP and CIO of BPO TeleTech Holdings.

Kamalesh previously worked for broadband equipment company ADC Telecommunications and set-top boxes manufacturer Scientific-Atlanta.

Besides graduating from the Harvard Business School’s Program for Management Development, Kamalesh earned BS and MS degrees in engineering from IIT Kanpur and Carleton University, Ottawa respectively.

Karan Bhatia has been named a GE Officer, a prestigious position in the diversified multinational corporation.

Worldwide, GE has just 197 GE Officers, who lead large revenue generating businesses or occupy critical functional roles.

The 39-year-old Bhatia was named GE’s new VP and senior counsel, international government relations and policy recently.

Before joining GE, Bhatia was the Deputy U.S. Trade Representative at the Office of the United States Trade Department in Washington D.C.

Previously, Bhatia held several key positions in Washington Continue Reading…

A pretty Indian-American girl Shivani Sud won the top prize at the prestigious Intel Science Talent Search competition in the U.S. on Tuesday.

As the grand prize winner, Shivani Sud gets a $100,000 scholarship from the Intel Foundation.

This is the first time that an Indian-American student has won the top prize, which is often referred to as the Junior Nobel Prize.

Nine other students won lesser prizes.

Desi Genius Shivani Sud

Shivani Sud, a 17-year-old girl from Durham (North Carolina), submitted a bioinformatics and genomics project to Intel Science Talent Search that focused on identifying stage II colon cancer patients at high risk for recurrence and the best therapeutic agents for treating their tumors.

Shivani developed an interest in cancer research after an immediate family member diagnosed with brain tumor was saved by the doctors.

This is what the Society for Science & the Public (organizers of the competition since its inception in 1942) had to say about Shivani’s work:

The standard method of characterizing tumors relies on visual information, including size, degree of metastasis and microscopic structure. Shivani’s 50-gene model for predicting the recurrence of colon cancer instead uses gene expression profiles to link multiple genetic events that characterize various tumor types. She created her model using two public data sets containing 125 patient samples and coupled it with clinical data to plot statistically significant survival curves. She then used her model to identify drugs that may be effective in treating stage II colon cancer.

Intel and Society for Science & the Public awarded the top 10 college scholarship awards for the Intel Science Talent Search to Shivani Sud

Continue Reading…

Greedy desi butcher and Citigroup CEO Vikram Pandit may fire more employees than previously reported.

Soon after taking over as CEO of struggling Citigroup, Vikram Pandit started sacrificing Citi jobs even as he grabbed about $26.7 million in stock (1.094 million shares) on January 22, 2008, according to the bank’s regulatory filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

New CNBC reports suggest that Vikram Pandit may butcher upto 37,000 Citi jobs over the next 12-18 months, compared to the previous estimate of 24,000.

CNBC also suggests that Vikram Pandit wants to make these upcoming job cuts permanent unlike in the past. This means that Citi will not rehire the laid off employees as consultants.

(Update - Shivani Sud wins Intel Science Talent Search Competition.) 

The fate of the Eight Desi geniuses who made it to the finals of the Intel Science Talent Contest will be decided on March 11, 2008.

The eight desis are competing with 32 others for honor and $500,000 in prize money. The grand prize is $100,000.

The eight desi geniuses who made it to the finals of Intel Science Talent Contest are Avanthi Raghavan, Shravani Continue Reading…

(Update - Shivani Sud wins Intel Science Talent Search Competition.)

Eight Desi students have made it to the finals of the Intel Science Talent contest.

Of the eight students, five are girls and they submitted projects in diverse areas including Bioinformatics, Biochemistry, Mathematics, Medicine, Physics, Zoology, Earth and Planetary Science and Chemistry.

The students are in the age group of 17-18.

The eight Desi students will compete with 32 others for the $100,000 grand prize in scholarships. Each finalist will receive at least $5,000 in scholarships and a new laptop.

Here is the list of Indian Americans selected for Intel Science Talent Search Finalists:

1. Avanthi Raghavan, Lake Highland Preparatory School, Orlando Florida

Project Name - Characterization of Novel Protein Trafficking Pathways in Plasmodium falciparum.

Project Area - Biochemistry

Daughter of Chakravarthy and Vasanthy Raghavan, Avanti hopes her Continue Reading…

Rupert Murdoch’s social networking site MySpace has named Amit Kapur Chief Operating Officer.

Kapur will be responsible for leading development and implementation of all global business operations.

Amit Kapur

MySpace is said to have 110 million users worldwide.

Kapur will also oversee growth and expansion of MySpace partnerships across the upcoming Developer Platform and popular features including MySpace Mobile and MySpaceIM with Skype.

Kapur, 26, joined MySpace in 2005 as the company’s first business developer.

Before joining MySpace, Kapur worked at NBC-Universal in the strategic planning and business development group.

Kapur received his BS in Mechanical Engineering from Stanford University.

Sanjay Mehrotra is a co-founder of Silicon Valley-based SanDisk, manufacturer of removable storage cards, flash drives and MP3 players.

SanDisk’s products are used in digital cameras, multi-function mobile phones, USB flash drives, digital audio/video players and other digital consumer devices

Before becoming President and COO of SanDisk in April 2006, Sanjay worked as Director of memory design and product engineering, VP of product development and Senior VP of engineering.

Sanjay Mehrotra

As SanDisk’s President and COO,  Sanjay is responsible for manufacturing operations, engineering, marketing and sales.

Besides SanDisk, Sanjay is also involved in another semiconductor company FlashVision as Executive VP. FlashVision is a joint venture of Toshiba and SanDisk and manufactures advanced NAND flash components.

Sanjay previously worked for Intel, Seeq Technology, Integrated Device Technology and Atmel in the area of design engineering and engineering management, mostly in EPROM and EEPROM product development.

Sanjay has BS and MS degrees in electrical engineering and computer science from the University of California, Berkeley.

Citigroup CEO Vikram Pandit, who just butchered 4,200 jobs the other day for so-called expense management reasons, got about $26.7 million in stock (1.094 million shares) on January 22, 2008, according to the bank’s regulatory filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

Vikram Pandit also received options on three million Citigroup shares, with strike prices ranging from $24.40 to $36.60.

 
Vikram Pandit
Desi Butcher of NYC

On the bank’s Q4 earnings call on January 15, Vikram Pandit blabbered on about expense management, reengineering and rightsizing staffing levels.

So we expect this desi butcher to hack away at several thousand more jobs at Citigroup.

Way to go, Vikram.

But just spare us the bullshit about how people are your most important asset as you did the other day on the earnings call.

Frankly, we think Bobby Jindal stinks.

At least, Jindal’s views on abortion do.

We also think Jindal is a phony, a Christian fanatic (or at least pretends to be in a state where religion is very important to its citizens) and lacks the experience to handle a complex task like governing a backward and corrupt state like Louisiana.

But here in Louisiana, Bobby Jindal has raised very high hopes that he will usher in big changes in this backward state and break the cycle of politics as usual.

Remember when Rajiv Gandhi became Prime Minister of India in 1984. The mood is like that now in Baton Rouge, capital of Louisiana, where Bobby Jindal made history when he took the oath on Monday as the first Indian-American Governor.

Bobby Jindal at his inaugural

At 36, Jindal (son of Indian immigrants) is the youngest sitting governor in the U.S.

In his Kennedyesque inaugural address on Monday, Jindal said:

Under the spotlight of the world, with generosity from many and a clear call to common purpose, we have the opportunity to make lasting and positive change….With clarity of purpose and commitment to our pursuit, we will not fail.

When we expressed our opposition to Jindal, a local American lady,  who works as an bookkeeper in Baton Rouge, loudly voiced her irritation and opposition. “He is a good man. I go to church with him,” she told us.

We hope that we are wrong about Bobby Jindal. But count us among the pessimists.

By the way, we did not meet Bobby Jindal in Baton Rouge but we did have the pleasure of meeting Mike the Tiger, the mascot of the Louisiana State University.

Struggling Citigroup’s new CEO Vikram Pandit has taken out his begging bowl to shore up the bank’s shaky financial foundation, going by today’s front page story in the Wall Street Journal (subscription required).

The Journal piece suggests that Citi is looking to raise up to $10 billion and that Vikram Pandit is looking to the Middle East and Asia for help.

A few weeks back, Citi raised $7.5 billion from Gulf nation Abu Dhabi.