Business

Raja Sonu’s eyes well up when he recollects the trying days and inhuman conditions under which his father would grovel in a dark, dingy room, trying to handcraft pieces of jewellery. His old man couldn’t see the son grow up – and try his own hands at jewellery; he succumbed to the working conditions. Such were the conditions under which artisans worked at jewellery workshops in Kolkata that Raja’s mother never wanted him to follow in his father’s footsteps. But he did, and ended up in far-away...

The Bruhat Bengaluru Mahanagara Palike (BBMP) is in a veritable financial mess, and few have a clue about how to extricate the Palike from it. In spite of available data on municipal finances, little analysis has been done on them, and accountants (even though there is a shortage of them) are the only ones who understand the data. These observations come from a well-known economist who has studied the BBMP’s budgets, and has a number of recommendations to make. Mukul Asher, who specialises in...

When Titan opened its first store at Safina Plaza on Infantry Road in 1988, retail as we know it was in its infancy. And so was the business of watches. Twenty-five years later, the retail landscape has changed. As have the very format of retail outlets, evident when the company launched its 1000th store on 100 ft road in the upmarket Indiranagar area on Monday — a swank big-format store spread over two floors. Harking back to the times when there was nothing glitzy about watch stores, Bhaskar...

India is leaking like a tap. Money is flowing out of the country, and there seems no way of plugging the breach. Crime, corruption, and tax evasion drained US$344 billion from India between 2002 and 2011. Illicit financial flows, in fact, have jumped more than 10 times from $7.9 billion in 2002 to roughly $85 billion in 2011. The findings—which peg cumulative illicit financial outflows from developing countries at US$5.9 trillion —are part of a new study published Thursday by Global Financial...

Just 90 companies have been responsible for almost two-thirds of greenhouse gas emissions generated since the Industrial Revolution began, new research has suggested. It found that 83 of these companies are energy companies producing oil, gas and coal. If that is not worrying enough, the study by Richard Heede of the Colorado-based Climate Accountability Institute has concluded that half of all emissions have been produced in the last 25 years alone. What has got the goat of climate change...

The standard of students entering the IT sector at the entry level in India is well below the industry requirements, especially when it comes to testing of softwares being developed by IT majors. Now, Hewlett-Packard wants to bridge this gap with a software university, one that will make students industry-ready. Explaining the rationale, Michael Garrett, vice-president of WW Software Professional Services, HP, said, "We are seeing a big demand for skills in the application space. Clients are not...

The world’s slimmest smartphone is here, and Bangalore has had a hand in it. The Ascend P6, measuring just 6.18 mm, was launched by Huawei on Thursday. The handset, which has already received a good response from global consumers over the past few months, was introduced into the Indian market, after being conferred the European Consumer Smartphone 2013-14 title recently. The PIM applications (personal information management) for the phone, whose brushed metallic look with a naturally curved base...

The job market is improving. And it s doing so steadily in Bangalore. Over 21,000 new job opportunities were generated in various sectors across Bangalore during the second quarter of this financial year. This is a significant 12 per cent increase over 18,700 new jobs created in the first quarter this year. The figures are from the study ‘Job Trends Across Cities & Sectors’ conducted by the Associated Chambers of Commerce and Industry of India (ASSOCHAM). New jobs are being created all over, but...

Businesses across India can now deploy graphics-accelerated virtual desktops for their employees. And this, they will be able to do cost-effectively anywhere, across platforms and on any device with the adoption of NVIDIA's Grid technology. Servers from IT majors like Dell, Cisco, HP and IBM have started incorporating NVDIA's Grid into their desktop virtualisation solutions. Combined with enterprise virtualisation software from Centrix, Microsoft or VMware, these solutions can deliver GPU...

Every industry has its own singular set of problems. So has the animation industry, fledgling as it is as yet in Bangalore. The animation, visual effects, gaming and comics (or, AVGC for short as it is popularly known in the industry) sector in the city is roughly 10 years old, though the first players had probably started tricking in some 18-20 years back. It took a while for the early explorers to grope around and get a feel of things. It was only around six years ago that industry leaders...