What's Sam Morgan's next move?

It was widely expected that once Trade Me founder Sam Morgan met his earnings targets associated with the $700 million sale of the business to newspaper publisher Fairfax, he'd withdraw from the hands-on running of the business.
Just two weeks ago Computerworld quoted Morgan, who was speaking at the Webstock conference in Wellington, suggesting he was still involved in the low-level details of the business.
But as the same publication has now pointed out, (Morgan has stepped aside as chief executive to make way for Jon McDonald, the general manager of the company who has been in that role for the best part of a year after serving as Trade Me's technology manager. Morgan becomes Trade Me's chairman and will spend a couple of days in the company each month.
So what will the cashed-up , tech-savvy entrepreneur do with the rest of his time? Well, he could follow the lead of multi-millionaire former Orcon owner Seeby Woodhouse who when he's not checking out green energy investment opportunities is perfecting the art of throwing a pool party.
More likely, Morgan will ramp up investment activity through his company Jasmine Investments, which he has used as a vehicle to put money into a handful of tech companies - iVistra, Sonar6 and Opdo among them. We'll maybe also hear more about his micro-financing ventures.
He's also a shareholder and non-executive director in Xero.com, the accounting software company which last week had its low-key launch in the United Kingdom where there are 4.5 million small businesses.
Numerous people in the IT industry have expressed surprise that Morgan hasn't made a major investment yet. But a big financial commitment requires a big time commitment too. I'm sure we'll be seeing more, larger investments from him - I just hope they're made in this country.
Morgan has said that the next Trade Me won't emerge out of multinationals operating here or the big existing IT players, but in the form of "two students in a scungy flat". One player trying to take on the Trade Me mantle is auction website Zillion, which this week launched a classifieds website under the name Happysheep.
Says Zillion founder Dylan Bland: "It's very much in the style of Craigslist which is a concept that I don't think has ever been properly tried here in NZ. Unlike Zillion/Trade Me etc, Happysheep is purely a classified site, and it's free so there are no rules around contacting each other," he said.
I visited free classifieds giant Craigslist in San Francisco last year and was amused to find it still is run out of a scungy flat, even if its founders have left their student days well behind.
Finally, I was pretty excited to see one of my favourite bands, Nine Inch Nails, which is the industrial rock creation of Trent Reznor, released its new album Ghosts I - IV online, downloadable in full for US$5 or as a cut down sampler of nine tracks for free.
It seems Reznor's venture, like that of Radiohead's has been a major success. I downloaded Ghosts I - IV earlier this week but the load on the site created a few quirks which seems to have resulted in me losing my licence to the music.
The files won't open after my original download timed out and I had to start a new one. So not as successful for me personally as downloading In Rainbows was, but BitTorrent saved the day. I found Ghosts I - IV on there within a few hours of its release on the NIN website. I'm sure Trent won't mind my downloading of it. After all I did pay for the music!