In the News: Allu Arjun

Allu Arjun to the knot soon

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India's ad spend growth highest in AsiaPac, touches $6.7 billion

Advertising spend in India in the twelve months period ended June this year stood at $6.7 billion (around Rs 29,727 crore) across mainstream media, posting the highest annual growth rate of 28 per cent in the Asia Pacific region, according to a survey.

The Nielsen Company's survey that covered a dozen countries in the region, estimated that ad spends across television, newspaper and magazine in India witnessed 32 per cent growth in the second quarter (ended June) of this calender with total ad spend of $1.92 billion (around Rs 8,520 crore).

"...the largest proportion of India's media spend was garnered by newspapers, growing at 32 per cent year-on-year (Y-O-Y)," the survey said. The newspaper segment grossed a total of $3.9 billion (around Rs 17,300 crore) during the period.

Television followed newspapers in ad spend growth at 24 per cent Y-O-Y in India and stood at USD 2.4 billion (around Rs 10,648 crore). Magazines saw an eight per cent increase YOY at $393 million (about Rs 1740 crore).

Over and above the mainstream media ad spend, other media such as radio, outdoor, pay TV, cinema combined showed a growth of 31 per cent in the twelve months up to June 2010 in India totalling $1.2 billion (about Rs 5,320 crore).
more at economictimes

Young Indian population an asset in taking nation to greater heights: Manmohan Singh

 Describing people as India's biggest asset, visiting Prime Minister, Dr. Manmohan Singh, on Wednesday said at a time when the industrialised world is aging rapidly, India has the advantage of a young population.

Taking part in the Khazanah Global Lecture Series 2010 on "India's Development Experience here, Dr. Singh said the dependency burden in India is expected to keep falling for another 20 years.

"It is expected that, in 2020, the average age of an Indian will be 29 years, compared to 37 for China and 48 for Japan. However, a young population is an asset only if it is educated, skilled and finds productive employment. If this were to happen, our objective of realizing India's potential to grow at ten percent or more per annum for a substantial period of time can become a reality," he added.

During the interaction, Dr. Singh reflected on some key features of the new phase in India's economic development. He highlighted six key elements facilitating India's drive towards development and economic well being.

First, India seeks rapid economic growth that will create wealth for its people and also generate surpluses to fund our ambitious social development programs.
more at sify

U.S. slips to historic low in global corruption index

The United States has dropped out of the "top 20" in a global league table of least corrupt nations, tarnished by financial scandals and the influence of money in politics, Transparency International said on Tuesday.

 

Somalia was judged the most corrupt country, followed by Myanmar and Afghanistan at joint second-worst and then by Iraq, in the Berlin-based watchdog TI's annual corruption perceptions index (CPI).

 

The United States fell to 22nd from 19th last year, with its CPI score dropping to 7.1 from 7.5 in the 178-nation index, which is based on independent surveys on corruption.

 

This was the lowest score awarded to the United States in the index's 15-year history and also the first time it had fallen out of the top 20.

more at reuters 

 

 

 

 

 

Sharing Online, but With More Than 140 Characters

The singer and guitarist John Mayer, whose prolific posts on Twitter drew nearly four million followers, shocked fans in mid-September by closing his account. 

But Mr. Mayer hasn’t gone away. He’s switched from Twitter to Tumblr, a free blogging service that has become a hit among Internet enthusiasts. Tumblr, based in New York, says it is drawing 30,000 new members a day. Mr. Mayer, whose heavy Twitter use was said to have upset his girlfriends, posted that “I have an even larger Tumblr addiction.”

 

The allure of Tumblr and a similar service called Posterous is in their social features and their simplicity. They are only slightly more complicated than Twitter to figure out. Yet they allow you to go well beyond 140 characters of text per post, and to include photos, videos and excerpts from other users’ posts. Mr. Mayer, for example, used Tumblr to share a touching fan letter.

 

Tumblr’s ad hoc community of users includes Robert Reich, the former labor secretary, who is now a professor of public policy at the University of California, Berkeley. “Tumblr is incredibly easy to use, wonderful to navigate,” Mr. Reich said in an e-mail. His Web site, robertreich.org, is actually a Tumblr blog, or “a Tumblr” or “tumblelog” in online jargon. 

But the undisputed king of Tumblr is Anthony De Rosa, who has collected nearly 11,000 followers at his SoupSoup page. Mr. De Rosa, a 34-year-old resident of Hoboken, N.J., posts a hard-to-categorize jumble of other people’s blog posts, photos and videos he finds interesting. A picture of Lady Gaga before she became famous. A news item about Internet wiretaps. A parody of bad science reporting. You could easily imagine Stephen Colbert pawing through SoupSoup for joke fodder.

 

Mr. De Rosa said in an e-mail that when he started using Tumblr in 2007, he saw it as little more than a way to upload photos from his phone.

 

“Not long after that, I discovered following other people on Tumblr, which means you get all their posts sent to you in your Tumblr dashboard,” he said. “And reblogging, which allows you to take posts from other Tumblrs and place them on your own, usually adding your own commentary on the post. It didn’t take long for it to occur to me that there was a lot of depth that other platforms, like WordPress, were lacking.”

 

Well-known publications including Newsweek, The Atlantic and Politico have set up their own Tumblrs. 

more at nytimes 

In the News: Rakta Charitra movie review

Ram Gopal Varma' s Rakta Charitra

 

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telugucinema

Bottom Line:
Rakta Charitra-I is executed well, with not as much violence or controversy as is projected, and makes you look forward to seeing Rakta Charitra-II within the next one month. The first-time experiment of two-part release seems to be worthy a wait on the part of the audience and a confident move on the part of the makers. If you are used to seeing violence on the screen in all recent films where the protagonist goes around carrying ordinary and designer weapons and using them more frequently than the antagonist may use one, this film is probably not very violent for you. Some scenes depicting violence are unsuitable for children! (And, that is, of course, why the film received an 'A' certificate from the Censor Board. Please discourage children from watching any and all such films - it's against the law.) However, given that the film attracts only various pockets of target audience - it's a given that this film may not be suitable for family audience - how it rings the box-office is a wait-and-see affair. Rating 3.5 / 5

 

greatandhra

Rating 3.5 / 5

 

idlebrain

Rating 3.25 / 5

What Makes People Powerful

Why are some people incredibly powerful? Are there certain traits that we can learn from the Steve Jobses of the world?

A new book from Stanford University professor Jeffrey Pfeffer, Ph.D., delves into this very issue. Pfeffer, a professor of organizational behavior at Stanford's Graduate School of Business, released his book, Power: Why Some People Have it and Others Don't last month. Pfeffer's argument is that there's a crucial skill set that separates alphas like as Steve Jobs and Google ( GOOG - news - people ) cofounder Larry Page from the omegas--and that potentially matters more than I.Q., charisma, and even hard work.

more at forbes