Pyramid Saimira to invest Rs. 400 crore this fiscal

Bollywood Trade News Network

Chennai-based Pyramid Saimira Group, the world's fastest growing entertainment conglomerate has signed a Memorandum of Understanding with the China Society Music Research Board, which is under the Ministry of Culture of the People's Republic of China. The Jiangsu Pyramid Longzhe Group has been formed as a follow up of this MoU. As per the details of the Joint Venture, the Jiangsu Pyramid Longzhe Group will operate theatres, distribute films and engage in other entertainment, arts and cultural activities in China. The new entity plans to launch one screen per day in Mainland China and further generate non-box office revenues also.

Speaking about the MoU and the newly formed venture, Mr. P S Saminathan, Managing Director, Pyramid Saimira Group, said, "It is a proud moment for the Pyramid Saimira Group to become the first Indian entertainment company to foray into China. This is a landmark deal for us, given that the entertainment sector in China is highly regulated. We see great potential for the entertainment sector in China as there is a significant increase in the disposable incomes of the entire population, as well as the willingness of new generation to avail multi faceted entertainment product & services."

Further speaking about the newly formed venture, Mr. Saminathan added, "We are looking to invest close to Rs. 400 crore in the Jiangsu Pyramid Longzhe Group in the first year of operation itself which will be deployed in exhibition / distribution / television content / music and production infrastructure seeding. Through this venture, we will create a huge theatre chain network / food courts / gaming parlours and offer other entertainment services. We will bring international content to China and will also showcase and market local Chinese content across the world. This entry will strengthen the growing exhibition & content business of our group and will, in a very short time, make us the largest exhibitor in the world. "

Mr. Venkatakrishnan, COO, Jiangsu Pyramid Longzhe Group, said "We are extremely happy to partner with the China Society Music Research Board to bring in international entertainment content into China. We already have an established track record in operating multiplexes and stand-alone theatres in India, USA, Singapore and Malaysia. We are confident that we will now be able to leverage and extrapolate our expertise in the larger market of China."

Commenting about the cultural cooperation agreement Mr Luo Shi Zheng Assitant- Secretary General Assistant, The Association of Social Music Research in China (ASMRC) said "China is actively pursuing strong cultural ties and would like to strengthen Sino - India people to people cultural exchange & cooperation. Ultimately cultural communication will play a significant role in helping china and India to work together. We are extremely happy to partner with Pyramid Saimira Group in this endeavour."

Expressing her happiness about the formation of the new venture with Pyramid Saimira, Ms. Li, Chairperson, Longzhe Group, said "Relations between China and India have undergone a sea change in the last few years. Pyramid Saimira is one of the fastest growing companies in the world today and we are extremely happy to partner with them to grow and nurture the entertainment sector in China."

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Al Gore Caught Warming Globe To Increase Box Office Profits

This is quite an old one but a good one......

With due apologies Al

Dozens of eyewitness reports indicated that former vice president Al Gore deliberately attempted to raise the earth's temperature in order to boost box office receipts for An Inconvenient Truth, his documentary film about global warming that was released in May.

DESPERATE MEASURES




Former vice president Al Gore takes a flamethrower to the Ross Ice Shelf in Antarctica to boost weekend ticket sales for An Inconvenient Truth.

"We have accounts from concerned citizens that Mr. Gore purchased a Cadillac Escalade SUV several months before [his film] opened in theaters," said Kimberly Blume, spokeswoman for the California-based environmental group Friends Of The Earth. "Not only did Mr. Gore use his new gas-guzzler to make short trips to the grocery store, he also left the vehicle running 24 hours a day in the driveway of his Tennessee home with the air-conditioning on full-blast."

In the weeks following the film's release, witnesses reported additional sightings of Gore engaging in activities such as discharging can after can of 1980s-era, CFC-laden aerosol into the air, and single-handedly clear-cutting over 6,000 acres of Amazon rain forest.

Gore is also rumored to have set a four-acre tire fire outside Akron, OH, and ordered his Secret Service detail to shoot on sight anyone who attempts to put it out.

"It's sad to see a man we thought was a passionate defender of the environment despoiling it for his own monetary gain," Blume said.

Blume said that she and many environmentalists had momentarily expressed relief in late November when Gore appeared to cease his months-long practice of dismantling old refrigerators in order to release ozone-destroying freon into the atmosphere. Blume soon learned, however, that Gore had resumed the activity in Antarctica, where the earth's ozone layer is most fragile.

Environmental groups have called for the federal government to step in and put a stop to Gore's actions, but officials say they do not have the power to stop him.

"There is no legal recourse anyone can take against the former vice president," Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Stephen L. Johnson said. "Mr. Gore is well within the emissions standards set by the current administration."

By year's end, Gore failed to slow his assault on the planet's delicately balanced climate systems. Satellite surveillance revealed what many believe to be a snowshoed Gore jumping up and down on an ice shelf in Greenland, chainsawing glaciers in the Alaskan wild, and urinating in the Gulf Stream waters off the coast of Newfoundland.

News Clip From Onion.Com [December 18, 2006 | Issue 42•51 ]

Craigslist - From Little Idea Into Big Money

The website devouring the classified industry could hit $100 million in revenue in 2009 with a couple of minor changes, with the old-line newspaper industry helplessly watching from the sidelines.

Craigslist looks like what it is, a site launched years ago as a personal project that never forgot its users.

Though the powers that be at Craigslist, founder and customer service rep Craig Newmark and CEO Jim Buckmaster, aren't commenting on the story from industry analysts Classified Intelligence (CI), they are pulling in an appreciable amount of money on the famously minimalist site. They could do even better.

CI said in its report on Craigslist that the implementation of its $25 job listing fee in three more locations could boost the company's revenue into nine-digit territory. Through assessment of Craigslist postings in January and March, CI pegs 2008 revenue for Craigslist at $81 million.

Take the job recruiting fee of $25 Craigslist charges in a handful of major metropolitan areas. Kick it up to $75 across the board (that's the price in San Francisco), and revenue for 2009 should climb to $150 million for a company based in a Victorian-style house that looks like it saw much better days a half-century ago.

The customer service credo of Craigslist, and its modest appointments both in headquarters and in site design, stand in stark contrast to the glassy offices of the newspapers that bore the brunt of the no frills, no fee approach to classifieds that are a hallmark of the site. Craigslist looks like what it is, a site launched years ago as a personal project that never forgot its users.

Some feel like Craigslist should do more, namely the bombastic VP and general manager of eBay's classifieds competitor, Kijiji, Jacob Aqraou. He doesn't care for the dated look of Craigslist, or the English-only listings that have only branched out into other languages in recent months.

As CI noted, the sniping comes across as odd, since eBay happens to own a 25 percent stake in Craigslist. The competition is real, however, with Kijiji, Freecycle, and the Village Voice's Backpage all trying to present themselves as a better classifieds option.

Although some may dispute Craigslist's real impact on newspaper classified revenue, one publishing professional cited by CI called Craigslist a catalyst that forced newspapers to reconsider their business models.

There isn't one cause for newspaper fortunes to be in decline. Craigslist is a popular target, especially since CI said in 2004 that San Francisco newspapers lost as much as $65 million in recruitment ad revenue alone due to the site.

Craigslist simply found a niche where demand existed, and they make as much money as they care to earn. One can imagine how much they would make if they tossed an AdSense ad unit into their templates. But to Newmark and company, such a prospect looks unfathomable.


News Clip Courtesy : David Utter
David Utter is a staff writer for WebProNews covering technology and business and can be reached at dutter @ webpronews dot com

Bottomline :
Craig Newmark's story is inspiring. He took a little email project and turned it into a multi-million dollar headache for the newspaper industry. Even after all the success, craigslist remains humble, simple, and end-user focused.

Residual Damage

Straight to the point!

Spanish police detain 76 in major Internet fraud probe

Police in Spain have detained 76 people across the country as part of what they described Sunday as their biggest-ever probe into Internet fraud.

The suspects defrauded their victims of over three million euros (four million US dollars), police said in a statement.

Part of the suspects allegedly offered big-ticket items like television sets or cars for sale online and then disappeared with the money without ever delivering the goods. Other suspects are believed to have illegally obtained the codes of online bank accounts and then carried out money transfers in their favour.

The majority of those who were detained, 47, were Spaniards. Five Ukrainian nationals, five Guineans, four Romanians, two Russians and two Moroccans were among the remaining detained suspects.

Police said Internet fraud was rising rapidly due to the weak penalties applied and the little equipment that is needed to carry it out and they urged great caution with online transactions and purchases.

News Clip - 1st April, 2008.

Yahoo, Google, MySpace form OpenSocial Foundation

Yahoo said on Tuesday that it is backing a program by rival Google to make software work fluidly across different social networks, and will create a joint foundation to promote the effort.

The normally fierce competitors are working together in the OpenSocial network, which Google formed in November to lure web software developers and other social network sites away from the emerging market leader in social networks, Facebook.

Many social networks — including News Corp's MySpace, Friendster and LinkedIn — support OpenSocial, a set of technical specifications that lets software developers build applications such as games and photo shows that can run on any social network, expanding the audience for such software.

However, neither Facebook nor Microsoft, which gave Facebook $240m (£120m) in backing last year, has signed up to support OpenSocial. Microsoft, which has mounted a $42bn hostile takeover bid for Yahoo, also has an agreement to sell advertising on Facebook's site.

One industry analyst says OpenSocial is in catch-up mode.

"There is only one place developers go right now, and that is Facebook," Forrester Research analyst Charlene Li said.

"OpenSocial makes it easier for everybody else to get in the game," said Li.

The scope of OpenSocial is increasing and OpenSocial applications reach more than 200 million users, Joe Kraus, a Google director of product management, said in a conference call. Supporter MySpace alone counts 110 million active users.

"If you want to go fast, go alone; if you want to go far, go together," Kraus said of the OpenSocial effort, which is currently endorsed by more than 15 companies.

Kraus founded JotSpot, a maker of software for building small group websites, which Google acquired last year.

Yahoo, Google and MySpace also said on Tuesday that they will create the OpenSocial Foundation to maintain a neutral, community-governed forum for developing applications. It will be set up as a not-for-profit entity, with assets to be assigned to the new organisation by 1 July.

In a show of Yahoo's willingness to work with Google, a potential ally in its attempt to fend off Microsoft's unsolicited takeover bid, Yahoo vice president of platforms Wade Chambers took the unprecedented step of posting the news on an official Google corporate blog aimed at developers.

"Openness is in the Internet's DNA and it's also a major aspect of our culture here at Yahoo," Chambers posted on the Google blog.

Chambers declined, on the joint conference call, to give specific examples of how Yahoo plans to use OpenSocial applications.

Yahoo executives have showcased new versions of their flagship email service, Yahoo Mail, and software for using the internet on mobile phones that have deeply integrated social-networking features. A key stated goal of Yahoo is to become a primary starting point for web users, not just to reach Yahoo's own media properties but also other social networks and sites.

Facebook, which has had the greatest momentum among social networks in attracting new users over the past year, has remained aloof from OpenSocial. It offers its own simple set of technical specifications for application developers.

Independent developers have built 19,000 applications that run inside Facebook, which now has 67 million active users.

Yahoo's Chambers said it would welcome Microsoft or any other company that wants to sign on.

"Any large player should be open to participate," Chambers said.

News Clip Courtesy : Reuters, 26 Mar, 2008

Tamil actor Raghuvaran passes away

CHENNAI: Veteran Tamil actor Raghuvaran, who carved a niche for himself in character roles, died on Wednesday after a brief illness.

Raghuvaran, 49, is survived by his wife Rohini, from whom he had separated, and a son. A heavy smoker, he was having health problems for quite sometime and was admitted to a private hospital about a week ago.

Raghuvaran, who had carved a niche for himself in roles that displayed sadism, had acted in more than 80 films in Tamil and Malayalam and had bagged many awards, including the Tamil Nadu government's 'Kalaimamani' (artiste of excellence) and best character artiste awards.

He had acted with top actors, including superstar Rajnikanth and Kamal Hassan. He had also figured in Hindi films Shiva , the first Hindi directorial venture of Ram Gopal Varma, and in Lal Badshah .

His portrayal of the father of a mentally-challenged daughter in Anjali , which was also dubbed in Hindi, earned him critical acclaim.