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  • SES-8 launched successfully; DTH players to benefit

    SES-8 launched successfully; DTH players to benefit

    MUMBAI: When it lifted off with almost perfection from the Cape Canaveral station in Florida in the US, communications satellite SES-8 was a personal victory for the creator of the Tesla vehicle Elon Musk. It was Musk’s company SpaceX’s first successful commercial launch using a Falcon 9 launch vehicle and it helped him break into the duopolistic satellite launch market which is dominated by European firm Arianespace and Russia’s International Launch Services  (which mainly uses Proton rockets). SpaceX has priced its launches in the $55-60 million range.

    While it was a personal landmark for Musk, it was also a victory for the Luxembourg-based SES Satellite management that gleefully watched the $100 million plus 3.1 tonne satellite being hurtled 50,000 miles above the earth into geostationary orbit. Built on a GEO-Star bus by Orbital Sciences, SES-8 is to be co-located with the NSS-6 satellite at 95 degrees east.

    The satellite has 33 Ku-band transponders and is targeting both south Asian and south East Asian clients. “The new satellites will enable improved coverage in fast-growing economies in south Asia and Indo-China,” says a press release from the company.

    In south Asia, it is aimed at providing much needed transmission capacity to India’s DTH and VSat service providers and government. Sources indicated that considering its location at 95 degrees east, one of the potential customers could be India’s first DTH services provider, the Essel group’s Dish TV that is currently beaming off NSS-6 and is also owned by SES. But all the deals will be done through Indian Space Research Organisation’s (ISRO) Antrix arm.

    SES also plans to launch SES-9 in 2015 at 108.2 degree East with extensive Ku-band capacity to give company to the existing SES-7 satellite in order to provide better DTH broadcasting services in South Asia along with north East Asia and Indonesia.

    Although, it was set for launch in early 2013, technical issues pushed the SES-8 to the end of the year.

  • Titanic director’s production firm files for bankruptcy

    Titanic director’s production firm files for bankruptcy

    MUMBAI: Digital Domain Media Group Inc, the production outfit of Titanic director James Cameron has filed for bankruptcy protection and will be selling its operating business to a private investor for $15 million.
    The company, which won Academy Awards for Titanic and has given special effects in films like Transformers and Pirates Of The Caribbean, filed for bankruptcy protection in the US bankruptcy court along with a Canadian court.
    With operations in Florida, California, Canada, India, China and Abu Dhabi, the company has assets of $205 million and debt of $214 million in Chapter 11 papers filed by the company.
    Private investment firm Searchlight Capital Partners has agreed to pay $15 million for Digital Domain Productions, the key operation outfit of Digital Domain Media Group. Currently there are three films in its pipeline that includes Ender‘s Game, The Giant Killer and G.I. Joe: Retaliation.

  • Life! Camera Action to screen at Carmarthen Bay Film Festival

    Life! Camera Action to screen at Carmarthen Bay Film Festival

    MUMBAI: Life! Camera Action, filmmaker Rohit Gupta’s ambitious film, has been officially selected to screen at the Carmarthen Bay Film Festival scheduled to take place from 8 to 11 May in Wales.

    The 89-minute film in English, Hindi and Punjabi is a touching saga of Reina, a young, Indian-American woman who sets off to pursue a career in filmmaking against the wishes of her family. She struggles to complete her annual film project, working double shifts at an Indian restaurant and a DVD store. Reina eventually begins to see the need to reach out to her estranged parents as she begins to discover herself.

    The film has won numerous international awards around the world including bagging top nine most popular awards at the 28th Goldie Film Awards 2012 recently held in Florida, US.

    It is said that the producer is in talks with a major distribution company and gearing up for a worldwide release in 2012.

  • Michael Bay to direct Transformers 4

    Michael Bay to direct Transformers 4

    MUMBAI: After signing a two-film deal with Paramount, Michael Bay will direct the fourth instalment in Paramount‘s Transformers franchise. This would be preceded by a bodybuilding film Pain and Gain.

    Bay will direct the fourth film based on the Hasbro toy line. The third instalment in the franchise, Transformers: Dark of the Moon released last summer in 3D.

    Producer Di Bonaventura has been quoted as saying that the film would be a reboot of the franchise and that none of the cast of the original three movies have been signed for the project. It’s likely that he and Bay would create at least a few new characters for the film, it is understood.

    Pain and Gain is based on a true story and centers on a group of bodybuilders engaged in a campaign of kidnapping and murder in Florida is being produced by Bay, Donald De Line and Bryce.

    “Michael has been working on Pain and Gain for a number of years but has patiently waited for the perfect casting to trigger a start,” said Paramount Film Group president Adam Goodman in a statement. “Clearly his patience has paid off as we couldn‘t be more excited about this combo. His passion for this project is just awesome,” he added.

    Transformers 4 will release on 29 June, 2014.

  • IBM launches new software service

    IBM launches new software service

    MUMBAI: IBM in collaboration with Lotus unit introduces a set of social networking services that functions like a MySpace for office workers in a renewed challenge to Microsoft Corp.

    The Lotus pioneered software is a service called Connections that features the latest ways for users to share information via the Web, while giving businesses controls over who sees what data.Lotus Connections offers the business equivalent of Web meeting places like MySpace.com or Yahoo’s Facebook’s bookmark sharing site del.icio.us and blog search tools like Technorati.com — stitched together in one package. Burton Group’s collaboration software expert Peter O’Kelly said the new software from IBM Lotus promises to shake up a market dominated by Microsoft.

    “This is going to rekindle the competition between Microsoft and IBM,” said O’Kelly “I think IBM is playing offense here.”
    The new offering could chip away at Microsoft’s lead in the collaboration and e-mail messaging market, where five years ago Microsoft Outlook e-mail and its newer SharePoint collaboration software began to surge past rival IBM products, O’Kelly said.

    While exact numbers are hard to come by, last year IBM said Lotus Notes had 125 million users. Adding in collaboration software, Lotus users number around 150 million, O’Kelly said. Microsoft has 200 million Outlook users and signed up another 80 million licensed users of SharePoint software, he estimated.

    IBM officials see a shift in focus from the quest for personal productivity that characterized computer advances of the 1990s to the “team productivity” which Web-based collaborative tools have begun to enable in recent years.Connections combines five components: member profiles, activities, blogs, communities and “dogear” — IBM’s word for how users identify and share Web bookmarks with colleagues.

    Connections uses the popular Web navigation technique of “tagging” to help users track popular discussion topics and figure out who may have expertise on any subject. The software provides a way for individuals to quickly set-up ad hoc groups to collaborate on projects, storing relevant documents, e-mails and Web sites together. Each user can publish blogs to share ideas with colleagues.

    “What Web 2.0 has demonstrated is that self-defining communities often do a better job of locating relevant information,” IBM software chief Steve Mills said. “This helps with the rapid identification of expertise and experts.” Lotus Connections will be available in the first half of 2007 although pricing hasn’t been disclosed. O’Kelly said IBM’s Web software could cause many corporate buyers who stopped considering Lotus Notes a decade ago to reconsider their reliance on Microsoft’s rival software suite.

    Revenue in the Lotus division grew 30 percent during the latest quarter compared with the final quarter of 2005, IBM reported last week. The company will demonstrate the service at its annual Lotusphere customer conference in Orlando, Florida.

  • Ten Sports to telecast Players Championship

    Ten Sports to telecast Players Championship

    MUMBAI: Ten Sports will telecast live the Players Championship from 23 March.

    The tournament will be played at the TPC of Sawgrass in Ponte Vedra Beach, Florida. The four-hour long live telecast of the Players Championship will air at 11:30 pm on each of the four days.

    The live telecast of the Championship follows Ten Sports’ recent signing of an exclusive deal with the US PGA Tour, which makes it the home for the world’s biggest golf tour in the sub-continent.

    With Ten Sports also having the exclusive rights for the European PGA Tour, the world’s second biggest tour after the US PGA, and the Indian PGA Tour, the channel has the most complete bouquet of golf for the growing number of fans in the sub-continent.

    All ten players in the top ten of World Rankings, including world number one Tiger Woods, number two Vijay Singh of Fiji and number three Retief Goosen of South Africa, will be in action in the four-round 72-hole tournament, the tickets of which were sold out last week.

    Atwal, who will be playing his first Players Championship, said, “I am eagerly looking forward to playing the Players Championship, which is often referred to as the ‘fifth major’ by most of us. And it is heartening to know that Ten Sports will be telecasting the tournament live back home. I hope to perform well and that many of my friends and fans of the game can see what the tournament is like.”

    Apart from the various tours, Ten Sports also has exclusive rights of the biennial Ryder Cup showdown between the USA and Europe, and also the PGA Championship, the fourth and final major of the year.