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94.3 Radio One Launches India’s first Music ATM

akanksha — Mon, 07 Jun 2010 07:35:16 +0000

94.3 Radio one has just launched the first of its kind SMS services under the SMS VAS umbrella brand of ‘ANY TIME MUSIC – ATM’. These have been launched in Mumbai first and based on the quality and quantity of listener response these will then be rolled out in other metro cities.

The first ATM service is called SONG GYAAN. All a listener needs to do is SMS ‘SONG’ to 53650. He will get an instant SMS of what song is playing on the station currently with details of music composer and singer.

‘Though all our MJays (music jockeyss) announce this information on songs, it is possible that a listener tunes in between a song and has missed it, so a simple sms will help him know which song is on air and who composed it and who sang it’, said Bavesh Janavlekar, Station head Mumbai

The second ATM service is called ‘SONG CHOICE’. When a listener is listening to a song and he likes it all he has to do is sms ‘MYSONG’ to 53650. He will then get a choice of songs to ‘register as his song’. In the future whenever that song is going to be played on the station, the listener will get an alert a few minutes before, so he can catch the song. The listener can also dedicate the song by forwarding the SMS to a friend and asking them to catch the song on air.

‘People lead busy lives and this service will help them connect to their favourite music on 94.3 Radio One thereby increasing involvement with the station’, added Bavesh

‘Radio one’s ‘maximum music’ proposition is being strengthened by the launch of ATMs using mobiles and the digital space. Our listeners tune into our station for the quantity, and quality of MUSIC primarily. Our research shows they tune into all other stations for ‘generic reasons’. We will continue to deliver innovation in the mobile and digital music space that is instant and consumer centric’, said Shyju Varkey, National marketing head, 94.3 Radio One.

Brookfield Asset Management Appoints Jeff Kendrew as Chief Development Officer

Sumita — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 17:42:54 +0000

Brookfield Asset Management Inc. (TSX: BAM.A)(NYSE: BAM)(EURONEXT: BAMA) is pleased to announce that Jeff Kendrew has joined the firm as Chief Development Officer of its global infrastructure platform. Prior to his appointment, Mr. Kendrew served as Managing Director and Chief Executive Officer of Prime Infrastructure (ASX: PIH), which he oversaw during Brookfield’s sponsorship of its recapitalization and restructuring in November 2009. As of December 31, 2009, Brookfield manages approximately $15 billion of infrastructure assets across multiple sectors, including transportation (ports, rail lines), utilities (electrical and natural gas transmission), and timberlands.

“We are very pleased to welcome Jeff as a senior executive of our infrastructure team,” said Sam Pollock, Senior Managing Partner of Brookfield and head of its infrastructure group. “His extensive operating experience in the infrastructure industry, with particular focus on the power sector, is an excellent fit with the significant opportunities that we see as we continue to grow our infrastructure platform.”

Mr. Kendrew will be based in Brookfield’s offices in Sydney, Australia.

About Brookfield Asset Management

Brookfield Asset Management Inc., focused on property, power and infrastructure assets, has over US$90 billion of assets under management and is listed on the New York and Toronto Stock Exchanges under the symbols BAM and BAM.A, respectively, and on NYSE Euronext under the symbol BAMA. For more information, please visit the Company’s website at www.brookfield.com.

Forward-looking Statements

Note: This news release may contain forward-looking information within the meaning of Canadian provincial securities laws and “forward-looking statements” within the meaning of Section 27A of the U.S. Securities Act of 1933, as amended, Section 21E of the U.S. Securities Exchange Act of 1934, as amended, “safe harbor” provisions of the United States Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995 and in any applicable Canadian securities regulations. The words “focus”, “see”, “grow” and derivations thereof and other expressions are predictions of or indicate future events, trends or prospects or identify forward-looking statements. Forward-looking statements in this news release include statements in regards to the growth opportunities of the company’s infrastructure platform. Although Brookfield Asset Management believes that its anticipated future results, performance or achievements expressed or implied of such assets by the forward-looking statements and information are based upon reasonable assumptions and expectations, the reader should not place undue reliance on forward-looking statements and information as such statements and information involve known and unknown risks, uncertainties and other factors which may cause the actual results, performance or achievements of the company to differ materially from anticipated future results, performance or achievement expressed or implied by such forward-looking statements and information.

Factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from those contemplated or implied by forward-looking statements include: economic and financial conditions in the countries in which we do business; the behaviour of financial markets, including fluctuations in interest and exchange rates; availability of equity and debt financing; strategic actions including dispositions; the ability to complete and effectively integrate acquisitions into existing operations and the ability to attain expected benefits; tenant renewal rates, availability of new tenants to fill office property vacancies, tenant bankruptcies, adverse hydrology conditions; regulatory and political factors within the countries in which the company operates; acts of God, such as earthquakes and hurricanes; the possible impact of international conflicts and other developments including terrorist acts; changes in accounting policies to be adopted under International Financial Reporting Standards and other risks and factors detailed from time to time in the company’s form 40-F filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission as well as other documents filed by the company with the securities regulators in Canada and the United States including the company’s most recent Management’s Discussion and Analysis of Financial Results under the heading “Business Environment and Risks.”

We caution that the foregoing list of factors that may affect future results is not exhaustive. When relying on our forward-looking statements to make decisions with respect to Brookfield Asset Management, investors and others should carefully consider the foregoing factors and other uncertainties and potential events. Except as required by law, the company undertakes no obligation to publicly update or revise any forward-looking statements or information, whether written or oral, as a result of new information, future events or otherwise.

For more information, please visit our web site at www.brookfield.com.

Contacts:

Investors

Brookfield Asset Management Inc.

Katherine Vyse, SVP, Investor Relations and Communication

(416) 369-8246

(416) 363-2856 (FAX)

kvyse@brookfield.com

Gaurav Chiripal awarded “Young Entrepreneur of the Year”

Read it India News Bureau — Fri, 05 Mar 2010 18:25:31 +0000

Gaurav Chiripal, CEO, Quadlabs Technologies was recently awarded “Young Entrepreneur of the Year”, at the “3rd International India Innovation Summit”, held at Taj Lands End, Mumbai on the 11th of February 2010.

The award is in recognition of Quadlabs contribution to Travel Technology in the form of innovative features & functionalities in “XChange ERP” which is the leading Travel Technology used by multiple Large & mid Sized Travel Companies in India & Abroad.

QuadLabs XChange is a successful and proven platform with several deployments across Europe, USA, South America, India & Africa. A Low Cost, High Value Solution, Xchange ERP is highly adapted to each markets specific processes and serves as a turnkey solution to all travel business automation needs.

“We are delighted and honored on being presented this award”, says Gaurav Chiripal, “Quadlabs success as a leader in its field has been purely due to its very strong technology team and the ability to think ahead and introduce innovative functionalities for our customers. This award further strengthens the industry’s belief in us as an innovator and leader in its field. We thank our customers for their support and shall strive to continue innovating and thinking out of the box.”

Quadlabs Technologies accreditations include ISO 9001:2008 certification as well as being a Microsoft Gold Partner since inception. Quadlabs also has strong partnerships in place with GDS, travel content consolidators and global payment gateways.

Organizing An Event Has Never Been Easier!

Anubhav Bharadwaj — Thu, 28 Jan 2010 17:00:11 +0000

Le Méridien St Julians Hotel & Spa just launched its new conference and meetings portal at www.lemeridienmalta.com/meetings.

The portal is an initiative of Starwood Hotels & Resorts Worldwide, in co-operation with web developers WebCanada Inc. Not only is it now easy for event organisers to access all the information they need related to conferences and meetings in a single location, but it also allows Starwood and its hotels to gain exposure on search engines by working on search engine optimisation with meeting and conference related keywords.

“This new portal provides a one-stop shop for event organisers, while pushing up our rankings on the main search engines,” e-Commerce Manager at Le Méridien St Julians Hotel & Spa, Ludivine Bendotti, said.

“Le Méridien St Julians enrolled in the initiative and forwarded all floor plans that were uploaded to the portal. We then uploaded all the rest of the content ourselves and this will be kept constantly updated and enhanced from our end.”

Sculpture of Brookgreen Gardens Showcased in New Book

Anubhav Bharadwaj — Wed, 20 Jan 2010 18:24:44 +0000

Brookgreen Gardens’ expansive property exhibits the finest outdoor collection of American figurative sculpture in the world. It began in 1930 as a winter home for philanthropist Archer Milton Huntington and his wife, sculptor Anna Hyatt Huntington. When the Huntingtons founded Brookgreen Gardens in the following year, they initially placed artworks from their own collection. By 1932, they had begun to actively purchase sculpture and to commission prominent sculptors to create works for the gardens.

In a new pictorial history book by local author and curator Robin R. Salmon, over 200 vintage photographs portray Brookgreen Gardens’ beginnings as the first public sculpture garden in America and its rise as a respected museum of American sculpture.

It is the author’s hope that “if the reader already has a relationship with Brookgreen Gardens…he will enjoy the photographs, remembering favorite sculptures and scenes from his visits over the years. If the reader is new to Brookgreen Gardens, I hope he will develop an appreciation for the sculpture collection and its magnificent history.”

Highlights of Sculpture of Brookgreen Gardens:
• Photographic images ranging from 1930 to 2009
• Includes photographs taken by important regional and national photographers Bayard Wootten of North Carolina and Tebbs-Knell Photographers of New York City
• The Brookgreen medal series
• The Gardens’ designation as a National Historic Landmark in 1922

All proceeds from the book are being donated to help support Brookgreen Gardens.

Author Robin R. Salmon is a graduate of the University of South Carolina and is vice president for collections and curator of sculpture at Brookgreen Gardens. She is the author of Images of America: Brookgreen Gardens, Brookgreen Gardens Sculpture: Volume II, and several other publications. The author’s proceeds from this title benefit Brookgreen Gardens.

Available at area bookstores, independent retailers, and online retailers, or through Arcadia Publishing at 888.313.2665 or www.arcadiapublishing.com.

Arcadia Publishing is the leading publisher of local and regional history in the United States. Our mission is to make history accessible and meaningful through the publication of books on the heritage of America’s people and places. Have we done a book on your town? Visit www.arcadiapublishing.com.

Downtown Scotty Brown

Anubhav Bharadwaj — Wed, 20 Jan 2010 14:46:39 +0000

If every Republican in Massachusetts wasn’t inside the ballroom of the Park Plaza Hotel on Tuesday night, it was only because the city’s fire marshal is a Democrat.
Ayla Brown, the “American Idol” daughter of Sen.-elect Scott Brown, was rocking the capacity crowd to the tune of “Some Kind of Wonderful” when it was announced that Democrat Martha Coakley had conceded. The crowd began to chant: “John Kerry’s next! John Kerry’s next!”
Like the 2004 Boston Red Sox who broke an eight-decade curse by winning the World Series, Brown’s victorious surge has inspired Republicans in Massachusetts and nationwide to believe that anything is possible.
While Brown’s supporters chanted inside the ballroom, the candidate’s sister Lee Ann was outside the hotel on the sidewalk beside Arlington Street.
“What kind of guy is he?” she said of her older brother, who was a surrogate father in their single-mom home. “When there was a father-daughter event at my school, Scott took me. When there was a parent-teacher conference and our mom couldn’t make it because she had to work, Scott was there.”
At Tuesday’s victory celebration, Brown was there for every member of the American majority who, according to polls, believe that Obama and the Democrats have been taking the nation in the wrong direction. Brown’s victory in Massachusetts was celebrated by Republicans and conservatives nationwide.
Many contributed, many volunteered, but the lion’s share of the credit belongs to Lee Ann’s big brother — a candidate who ran a nearly flawless campaign and showed that a conservative message can appeal to independent voters.
“Tonight, the independent majority has delivered a great victory,” Brown said in his victory speech.
“Forty-one! Forty-one!” the crowd chanted in response. And when the crowded quieted slightly, the candidate struck a populist theme.
“While the honor is mine…this is the people’s seat,” Brown said, adding that he had spoken by phone to interim Sen. Paul Kirk, whose career in Washington can’t end soon enough for Brown’s supporters.
“Seat him now! Seat him now!” the crowd chanted.
This wasn’t the first long shot Brown has made. As a high school basketball star, his skill at hitting long-range jump shots earned him the nickname “Downtown Scotty Brown.”
For weeks, Brown had described his quest to win this Senate seat — occupied by Ted Kennedy for more than four decades — as a battle against “the machine.” Tuesday night, he turned that phrase around, telling his supporters: “Tonight we have shown everyone — you are the machine!”
For a Republican to win here in Massachusetts required a convergence of several forces, including a conservative grassroots hungry for a winner and a Democratic opponent so spectacularly inept as to alienate many of her own party’s constituencies. During the course of her campaign, Coakley insulted Catholics, Red Sox Fans and pickup truck drivers.
After the balloons had dropped and the confetti cannons had covered the ballroom floor with red, white and blue paper, Rob Eno of the Massachusetts conservative blog Red Mass Group sat down and said, “I can’t begin to say how huge this is.”

For once, it seemed, the Establishment had been defeated and the people had won. Like the patriot militia whose stand at Concord Bridge turned back the vanguard of the British empire, the Brown Brigades believe they have begun a revolution.
“This really does change everything — you know that?” said Mitt Romney, the state’s former Republican governor and a 2008 presidential candidate. “America belongs to the people. Scott Brown’s victory is a shot heard ’round the world.”
Republican candidates across the country will study this campaign — “template” was a buzzword heard often among the GOP operatives on the Brown team — as an example for the 2010 mid-term election, now slightly more than nine months away. A year after President Obama’s inauguration, Democrats must now contend with a Republican Party reinvigorated by a hard-fought victory.
“Let them take a look at what happened in Massachusetts,” Brown told the cheering crowd in the Park Plaza ballroom, “because what happened here in Massachusetts can happen all over America.”
Then the man who won this breakthrough victory repeated a simple slogan from his campaign.
“I’m Scott Brown. I’m from Wrentham. I drive a truck.”

Sanjay Gupta effect: medical correspondents galore in Haiti

Anubhav Bharadwaj — Wed, 20 Jan 2010 14:43:39 +0000

Following the example of CNN’s star medical correspondent Sanjay Gupta, almost all major US television networks have now deployed doctor-reporters to cover the catastrophic human tragedy that has hit Haiti.
For the first time, all major news networks have sent doctor-reporters to the scene of a natural disaster, producing a dramatic kind of participatory journalism, The Washington Post said today.

“The twin roles — doctor and journalist — might be a reflection of the Gupta Effect, after CNN’s dashing medical correspondent, Sanjay Gupta,” it said.

Gupta, a neurosurgeon who was the first medical correspondent to reach Haiti, helped in providing treatment to the quake-hit people and even conducted a brain surgey on a young girl.

Following him, Jennifer Ashton, the medical correspondent of CBS News and a doctor, assisted with the treatment of a teenage girl whose arm had been amputated.

NBC’s Nancy Snyderman, a surgeon, has also spent days splinting broken bones, while ABC’s Richard Besser, a doctor formerly affiliated with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, helped a woman deliver a premature baby, the daily said.

Gupta has helped save several lives, successfully operating upon badly injured people during his latest reporting assignment for the CNN in Haiti.

Gupta, who last year turned down appointment as surgeon general by President Barack Obama, had played this twin role while covering several natural disasters in the past, be it Iraq or Afghanistan.

Gupta treated a 15-day-old baby with a head laceration, and later operated on a 12-year-old girl who had been taken aboard an American aircraft carrier, the USS Carl Vinson, by helicopter.

“I don’t think our intention is to ever make the story about myself,” Gupta was quoted as saying by The Los Angeles Times.

“I think people innately understand that tremendous medical help is needed down here, and if you can help, you should help,” he said.

The newspaper said reporters usually shy away from direct involvement to avoid affecting the outcome of the news and to maintain the distance necessary to report accurately and fairly.

“When I see a situation where there’s something I could do to help somebody, I’m going to do that,” Besser told The Los Angeles Times.

NBC’s Snyderman said as a doctor, her moral responsibility was to help people and she has to maintain the delicate balance of doing it along with her journalistic duty of telling stories.

Some media ethicists say medical correspondents should consider foregoing their journalistic roles if they’re going to participate in the relief effort.

“I think it’s very hard for an individual who is professionally and emotionally engaged in saving lives to be able to simultaneously step back from the medical work and practice independent journalistic truth-telling,” said Bob Steele, journalism values scholar at the Poynter Institute and journalism professor at DePauw University.

Paul Friedman, executive vice president for CBS News, told LA Times that he normally would agree that a reporter should not wear two hats on a story, “but in this case, I can’t conceive of a conflict we couldn’t figure out and remedy”.

President of CNN/US, Jon Klein told the newspaper the network is telling a compelling part of the story in Haiti by showcasing Gupta’s medical work there.

“His mission is to explain the urgency of the medical situation to the world,” Klein said.

“In addition to the hands-on care he’s providing, Sanjay is providing a unique service most doctors couldn’t,” he said.

Fox News: Right-wing riches

Anubhav Bharadwaj — Wed, 20 Jan 2010 13:41:05 +0000

Republican dynamo Sarah Palin has become a Fox News commentator, taking her natural place among Glenn Beck, Sean Hannity, Bill O’Reilly and Fox’s other militant conservatives.

In her opening session last week, she denounced President Obama and said she’s “so thankful for the Tea Party movement.” She scorned a “60 Minutes” show in which a former John McCain aide quoted her as saying her selection as 2008 GOP running mate was “God’s plan.” Host O’Reilly said Americans who dislike Palin are “pinheads.”

She probably is being paid lucratively, because Fox is a gold mine. The far-right network — where commentators like Beck make blunt declarations such as claiming that President Obama has “a deep-seated hatred for white people” — draws bigger audiences and earns bigger profits than all other U.S. news media. This reveals something about the mind-set of many Americans, especially those in the Tea Party movement.

Fox News chief Roger Ailes, a longtime Republican strategist, was paid $23 million last year. The New York Times commented:

“At a time when the broadcast networks are struggling with diminishing audiences and profits in news, he has built Fox News into the profit engine of the News Corporation. Fox News is believed to make more money than CNN, MSNBC and the evening newscasts of NBC, ABC and CBS combined.”

The Fox network is owned by old-line conservative Rupert Murdoch. But Murdoch’s children don’t back hard-right causes. Son-in-law Matthew Freud told the Times:

“I am by no means alone within the family or the company in being ashamed and sickened by Roger Ailes’s horrendous and sustained disregard of the journalistic standards that News Corporation, its founder and every other global media business aspires to.”

In other words, Murdoch’s children are disgusted by political distortions inflicted by the “fair and balanced” network.

Last fall, Fox was the only network that refused to air President Obama’s major speech on universal health care. Instead, Fox showed “So You Think You Can Dance.” A White House news aide remarked:

“Fox News often operates almost as either the research arm or the communications arm of the Republican Party. Let’s not pretend they’re a news network the way CNN is.”

Sarah Palin will fit perfectly, like a pea in a pod.

They are the highways to hell in the country’s most gridlocked cities ?

Anubhav Bharadwaj — Wed, 20 Jan 2010 06:16:00 +0000

Bumper-to-bumper traffic is America’s collective nightmare, and like the movie Groundhog Day it repeats on a daily basis.
Congestion consumes billions of gallons of fuel, wastes hundreds of billions of dollars in productivity and causes billions of stress headaches. Yet over 100 million automobile commuters each day feel like they have little option. “We put so much of our national wealth and our identity into the whole motoring thing,” says James Howard Kunstler, author of Geography of Nowhere, “that we can’t imagine doing something different.”
Anthony Downs, author of Stuck in Traffic has identified four reasons for America’s congestion problem, also applicable to most European and Asian economies: first, most of us work during the same hours of the day; second, the country’s economic success has allowed households to buy multiple cars; third, there are more people now than when most roadways were conceived; fourth, more cars means more accidents which means more delays.
In other words, this problem isn’t going anywhere.
The true Highways to Hell. It was a two-step process, done with data from traffic-tracking firm INRIX, which culls information nationwide from more than 1.5 million GPS units, mostly in freight trucks.
Our first step was ranking the metropolitan areas with the worst rush-hour congestion. The order is based on the peak hour Travel Time Index (TTI) for the metropolitan area each highway is in. TTI is a measure of how much longer it takes to complete a road journey during peak congestion hours compared to free-flow hours. (Peak hours are defined as 6 a.m. to 10a.m., and 3 p.m. to 7 p.m.) Speeds during non-peak hours are used by INRIX to establish this free-flow baseline.
After determining the 75 worst metro areas, we then found the worst highway in each, defined as the most hours of bottleneck congestion, as reported by INRIX. The rankings then provide a still deeper look—at the most congested bottleneck segment for the worst highway in each area.
How does your commute fare? Read on.
#1, Hollywood Freeway, Los Angeles
Weekly hours of bottleneck congestion: 686
Worst bottleneck: Southbound, Vermont Avenue
Length of worst bottleneck: .64 mi
Weekly hours of congestion on worst bottleneck: 77
Speed of worst bottleneck when congested: 14 mph
The expert opinion: “I recall they would say things like it’s a 20-minute trip downtown on the Hollywood Freeway,” Metropolitan Transportation Authority chief executive Art Leahy says on traffic when he was growing up in Los Angeles. “No one anticipated the congestion that would emerge.”

Custom Toll Free 800 Number and Google Voice

Anubhav Bharadwaj — Tue, 19 Jan 2010 19:04:32 +0000

Register for free! Google in his voice and Custom Toll Free and never bother to call somewhere in the list. You can call anyone from unknown numbers that match the text to audio. Although Google will translate the text so you can read messages from your phone or email.

Google voice and Custom Tollfree 800 Number in your calling card instead Phone Number. Private, in your business. Toll-free, you see a more professional with more than a voice for your personal messages. Google number of the voice and Custom Tollfree of the people who do not know. And you will not have to deal with.