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Hollywood studios to use Indian patented technology

October 13th, 2008 Posted in Arts, Culture and Society, India, Science and Innovation

Hollywood is all set to use Indian technology for the first time. An erstwhile incubatee at the Centre for Innovation, Incubation and Entrepreneurship (CIIE), at Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad (IIM-A), has been approached by prominent Hollywood production houses for his patented technology, which finds its application in the current film technology and also for Digital Intermediate Technology of the future.

Ujwal Nirgudkar, who recently started his own company, Alpha Imaging Systems Pvt Ltd, has developed a unique concept of ‘Online Sensitometric Quality Control’ for motion picture film processing. His innovative technology will bring down the cost of quality control and will be quite helpful to cinematographers, film laboratories, producers and scanner manufacturers across the world.

“I am in talks with some Hollywood post-production companies and one European company to license my patented product. As this new technology will help save cost and time for quality control of motion picture film processing, it has the potential to become the industry standard and has created a lot of interest in Hollywood,” says Ujwal Nirgudkar.

The existing concept in the industry uses separate film strips for controlling the quality of film processing. The old concept is offline and difficult to computerise. “This new technology changes the current offline quality control using sensitometric strips to a new online control system, which will have the sensitometric strip between the perforations of the picture film, which is an area not explored so far,” added Nirgudkar.

Technorati Tags: film

Popularity: 6% [?]

Brazilian film fest in city from Oct 13 in Mumbai

October 13th, 2008 Posted in Arts, Culture and Society, Brazil

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Nice to know that City of God and Central Station are being screened – 2 outstanding films.
Cities-The Times of India

Film lovers can see the best of Brazilian films in the city from October 13 to October 17.
The film festival, to be held at the
Godrej Theatre, National Centre for Performing Arts, is being held to mark the visit of the President of Brazil, H E Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva who will be in New Delhi for the India-Brazil-South Africa Dialogue Forum.

“Through the films that will be exhibited, we are keen to depict the similarities between India and Brazil,” says Jandira Pacheco, Deputy Consul General of Brazil in Mumbai. “Both our countries have similar social issues and countless other similarities. For e.g. in India and Brazil, we take to the streets when our home team wins in cricket or football (as the case may be). Both countries have strong religious beliefs and we have a strong film interest as well.”

Pacheco feels the two countries may be very far from each other on the map, “but the similarities in our culture are amazing”.

Technorati Tags: film

Popularity: 4% [?]

Mexico’s Cinepolis targets Bollywood

October 9th, 2008 Posted in Arts, Culture and Society, India, Mexico

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Hollywood Reporter

Cinepolis, Latin America’s largest theater chain, appears bound for Bollywood.

The Mexican exhibitor is expected to launch its first theater in India by June 2010. About a year ago, the company set up a small office in New Delhi to analyze the market conditions.

Cinepolis chief Alejandro Ramirez said his company has yet to decide whether it will enter the market solo or with an Indian partner.

“We’re thinking it may be advantageous to have an Indian partner, but the laws there do not require us to do so,” he noted. “We’ve been talking with real estate developers and other exhibitors (as potential partners).”

India would mark Cinepolis’ first foray into a non-Spanish-speaking market. The exhibitor has about 1,900 screens in Mexico, numerous theaters in Central America, and it had a recent multiplex opening in Colombia, its first South American territory. Cinepolis also is looking to enter Peru and Brazil.

As for India, Ramirez sees it as an attractive yet complicated market because of high costs and certain regulatory conditions.

“India is a movie-crazy country,” he said. “And since most of the theaters there are single screen, we believe there is a need for multiplexes.”

Popularity: 4% [?]

MNCs must pay attention to middle class to reap benefits

October 8th, 2008 Posted in Arts, Culture and Society, Brazil, China, Economics - Indicators, Policy and Trends, India

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Brand Equity-Specials-The Economic Times

A new global middle class is rising up from poverty in emerging economies around the world, providing competition for labour and resources, but
also enormous promise for multinationals that tailor products and services to the burgeoning ranks of first-time consumers, according to Wharton faculty and analysts.

Coca-Cola’s newly appointed chief executive Muhtar Kent sees this market as critical to his company’s future, and describes the scale of the opportunity as equivalent to adding a city the size of New York to the world every three months. The World Bank estimates that the global middle class is likely to grow from 430 million in 2000 to 1.15 billion in 2030. The bank defines the middle class as earners making between $10 and $20 a day — adjusted for local prices — which is roughly the range of average incomes between Brazil ($10) and Italy ($20).

The McKinsey Global Institute, the consulting firm’s independent economic research arm, projects India’s middle class will grow from 50 million to 583 million people in the next two decades.
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Popularity: 5% [?]

President Michelle Bachelet of Chile Receives Top Leadership Award at Opening of Historic Women’s Summit

October 7th, 2008 Posted in Arts, Culture and Society, Chile, Latin America

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MarketWatch

At a gathering of more than 300 women in Buenos Aires, Chair and Co-Founder Melanne Verveer highlighted 10 years of Vital Voices involvement and engagement in Latin America and the Caribbean, opening the Women Leadership Summit. Vital Voices also presented President Michelle Bachelet of the Republic of Chile with its prestigious Global Trailblazer Award.

(Previous recipients include Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, President of Liberia, Mohammed Yunus, Noble Laureate and founder of Grameen Bank and Sheikha Lubna al-Qasima, the first female finance minister in the Middle East.)

Verveer praised women of the region for their hard work in achieving many of the goals they set for themselves 10 years ago. “In the last decade, the increase of female labor participation in Latin America and the Caribbean was the second highest in the world. Women hold almost 25% of minister and cabinet posts in Latin America. Women in the region hold 20% of the seats in Parliament.

Popularity: 4% [?]

Rum and Revolution – Bacardi and the Long Fight for Cuba

October 4th, 2008 Posted in Arts, Culture and Society, Book Review, Caribbean, history

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washingtonpost.com

Drinkers the world round know the name Bacardi means rum, but few non-Cubans know that this global enterprise was founded — and is still owned — by a Cuban family that played an important role in the island’s social, political and economic history. Emilio Bacardi was a prominent activist in Cuba’s fight for independence from Spain, suffering lengthy periods of imprisonment for the cause. Other members of the clan, based in Cuba’s eastern city of Santiago, also stepped forward to oppose the sad parade of corrupt and dictatorial rulers that the island has since known. Longtime NPR correspondent Tom Gjelten writes in this absorbing familial and political history that the Bacardis are still remembered for “their class and their character. While they lived in elegant homes, rode in chauffeured carriages, and sent their children to exclusive private schools, they were also known as good Santiago citizens, generous and warmhearted and fair.”

A Spanish immigrant by the name of Facundo Bacardi founded a mom-and-pop distillery in Santiago in 1862, when the island was the world’s richest colony, thanks to its vast sugarcane plantations and sugar mills. Bacardi realized that, unlike other sugar-producing islands, Cuba was not using the molasses byproduct to make and export rum. Pooling family funds to launch his business, Bacardi pioneered a new technique to produce a light, mixable rum that became a powerhouse in the worldwide spirits business.
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Bacardi and the Long Fight for Cuba (being published next week) is at once a colorful family saga and a carefully researched corrective to caricatures of decadent pre-revolutionary Cuba and the 50-year disaster of Fidel Castro’s rule.

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Popularity: 9% [?]

The Afterlife of American Clothes: Haitian entrepreneurs find value in castoffs

October 4th, 2008 Posted in Arts, Culture and Society, Caribbean, entrepreneurship

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Reason Magazine

When thrifty shoppers in Boston and Miami pick through secondhand shirts at local Salvation Army outlets or estate sales, they are as likely to meet Haitians as hipsters. Some of the immigrants will simply be collecting clothes to mail back to family in Port-au-Prince, but others are part of a large global network trading in used American goods. Haiti’s enormous, informal, and largely unregulated market in pepe—used items imported from abroad—plays an important role in the least developed country in the Americas.

In 2002 The New York Times reported that of the approximately 2.5 billion pounds of clothes donated to charity in America each year, as much as 80 percent is shipped globally. The Times article inspired filmmakers Hanna Rose Shell and Vanessa Bertozzi to research the history of recycled clothing. From 2003 to 2007 they visited rag yards in Miami, dug through archives in London and Washington, D.C., and traveled to Haiti to see the international secondhand markets for themselves. The result is the recent documentary Secondhand (Pepe), which explores the global trade in used clothing.

In the United States, demand for secondhand goods spiked during the Great Depression, but after World War II peddlers found themselves with excess supply. So the business went global. Third World countries arranged deals with U.S. thrift shops for items that otherwise would end up in the trash.

Haiti started receiving shipments in the early 1960s. With the benefit of cheap items came the cost of serving as a dumping ground. Shell has described the city of Miragoane, which receives new pepe nearly every day, as “blanketed, literally, by a downy coat of secondhand clothing. It grows out of the ground and into the street, onto every surface, a sartorial network—buildings, barrows, man and machine-made structures, everywhere.”
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Popularity: 6% [?]

Can’t See the Forest for the Trees

October 4th, 2008 Posted in Arts, Culture and Society, Brazil, history

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The University of Chicago Magazine: Features

The Amazon of the Western imagination, they say, is a place hardly touched by history or humanity. For colonists and entrepreneurs of various centuries it was both useful and profitable to see the forests as wilderness and to overlook the people who lived or had lived in them. The idea of pure and untrammeled nature has also served a more spiritual purpose, preserving the image of an unfallen world, untainted by war, industrialism, and other afflictions of civilization. To some an empty land ripe for exploitation, to others a lost Eden, the Amazon has seemed a forest out of time, inhabited, if at all, by Stone Age tribes living in harmony with nature, greeting helicopters with volleys of poison-tipped arrows.

Michael Heckenberger understands the myth’s attraction. An anthropologist from the University of Florida, he has studied indigenous people who live in the forests of the upper Xingu River, in southern Brazil. Here, in what was once among the least accessible regions of the Amazon, a large reserve has been set aside for the use of native tribes. In recent years, mile-wide soybean fields have been encroaching upon the forest. Entering the reserve from the kingdom of soybeans could not be more startling.

“It’s like driving through the gates of Jurassic Park,” Heckenberger said. “You feel like you’re going back into time into some primordial landscape.” A 2007 National Geographic article, “Last of the Amazon,” records a similar reaction. Recounting a trip to the upper Xingu, writer Scott Wallace describes his visit to “the very core of an ancient primeval forest” and “the green cathedral that towered above us.”

Heckenberger and others call such impressions misleading. The forests are not nearly as ancient or primeval as they seem. In fact, before Europeans arrived at the New World’s doorstep, bringing disease and destruction, the Amazon was well settled: “There ain’t no part of it,” he said with folksy emphasis, “that wasn’t touched by human hands in one form or another.”
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Popularity: 3% [?]

The Indian Diaspora

October 1st, 2008 Posted in Arts, Culture and Society, India, Philosophy and Culture

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Esquire

From Silicon Valley to Citigroup, the new face of success is increasingly of a rich caramel-brown color. Vikram Pandit has led the charge to rescue banking behemoth Citi, and Bobby Jindal, the whiz-kid Indian-American governor of Louisiana, could find himself with a new job in a McCain administration . In Washington lobbying circles, Indians are sometimes referred to–not least boastfully by themselves–as the “new Jews.” Today the three million Indian Americans have a higher median income than Jews. What Jews and Indians have in common is that their diasporas are force multipliers, inflating their national image and strategic footprint worldwide. Knowledge, money, networks, and trust–flung ever faster by globalization–have meant that even India, the country with the largest number of destitute people in the world, is considered a global economic powerhouse, even if it isn’t one yet.

Almost every ethnic or national diaspora in the world has some presence in America, but few achieve the scale of social, economic, political, and cultural influence that Jews and Indians have achieved.

Indians are assimilators, maintaining traditional values but adapting to any national context. The British Empire planted Indian migrants around the planet, particularly in the West Indies and Africa–now there are twenty-five million Indians in the diaspora spread across more than one hundred countries. But wherever they are, Indians blend into the mainstream: You won’t find many “Indiatowns” in America.

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Popularity: 5% [?]

Simon Bolivar’s Freedom Fight

September 30th, 2008 Posted in Arts, Culture and Society, Latin America, history

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Financial News – Yahoo! Finance

In 1805, a 21-year-old South American nobleman, Simon Bolivar, traveled through Europe, drowning his sorrows over the death of his wife.

Arriving in Milan with his former tutor, Simon Rodriguez, to see the coronation of Napoleon as king of Italy, Bolivar was repelled by the power-hungry man he had once admired. He also saw that one man could bend history to his will.

On the Continent, Bolivar ingested the democratic ideas of the Enlightenment. He dreamed of bringing his country, which was to become Venezuela, independence.

Traveling on to Rome, Bolivar heard the story of Sicinius, who had led the people to Aventine Hill to protest the rule of abusive patricians. Going to the top of the hill with Rodriguez and another friend, [Bolivar], the young man dropped on his knees and said, “I swear before you, I swear by the God of my fathers, I swear by my fathers, I swear by my honor, I swear by my country that I will not rest body or soul until I have broken the chains with which Spanish power oppresses us.”

The pledge was preposterous. South America’s mines yielded vast amounts of gold and silver that financed Spain’s worldwide empire. To protect that, the Spaniards suppressed 300,000 Indians[indigenous Americans] who had revolted 50 years earlier.

Making his words crazier, Bolivar had never been in a battle. Two decades later, he more than realized his dream.

“[Bolivar] is seen as the George Washington of Venezuela, Colombia, Ecuador, Bolivia and Peru, an area the size of Western Europe,” Marshall Eakin, a history professor at Vanderbilt University and author of the Teaching Co. course “America in the Revolutionary Era,” told IBD. “Like other great figures in history, he had an unshakable belief in himself and the rightness of his cause.”

Popularity: 11% [?]