Reports

So, we have been told that Bangaloreans are increasingly travelling to foreign destinations for vacations. And today we have been told that Bangkok is one destination. If one is looking for indicators, one of the best would a low-cost carrier(LCC) launching a direct flight to Bangkok. SpiceJet on Thursday became the first airline to gauge and act on the trend by launching a service that will operates on four days in a week. There's a rationale to it. V Raja, senior vice-president (commercial)...

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 dismissal of petitions seeking quashing of criminal prosecution of senior representatives of the University of Agricultural Sciences, Dharwar (UAS), agri-biotech company Mahyco, and consultants Sathguru has paved the way for proceedings to be initiated against them in the Bt Brinjal biopiracy case wherein they have been accused of criminal conspiracy in using local brinjal varieties to develop the GM vegetable. The ruling by Justice AS Pachhapure came on Friday after an earlier high court...

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...

It doesn't take much of hair-splitting to find faults with projects of the Karnataka government. Many of these are replete with glaring loopholes, and are often done without even token transparency. The Rs8,323 crore Yettinahole diversion project is one such. It may not qualify as a "scam", but prima facie it certainly is one. It was only after the project report was obtained under the Right to Information Act (RTI) by activist Kishore Kumar Hongadhalla that the scale of ecological devastation...

A languid and sunny Sunday, an ostensibly picnic mood, some flashes of brilliance here and there, and a seamier look at literature brought the three-day Bangalore Literature Festival langurously to a close here today. The highlight of closing day was a tête-à-tête – ‘Mera kuchh saman, tumhare paas pada hai’ – between lyricist-filmmaker Gulzar and film writer Bhawana Somaaya. Dressed in his resplendent, trademark white kurta pajama, Gulzar started off from the point that he himself had in the...

The National Green Tribunal (NGT) on Friday directed the Union ministry of environment and forests (MoEF) to respond to applications challenging diversion of 10,000 acres of Amrit Mahal Kavals grassland ecosystems to a variety of public sector and commercial projects by October 30 or face serious consequences. The South Zone bench of the NGT, based in Chennai, warned the ministry that failure to comply, by filing an appropriate response, would attract a fine of Rs1 lakh in each of the two...

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...

Scientists from the US and Cambodia have developed a novel and rapid way to test whether the most common and lethal form of malaria is resistant to artemisinin, the key anti-malarial drug. “In the race against time to stop the spread of artemisinin-resistant malaria, new diagnostic tools are urgently needed to identify and track resistant parasites. These simple in vitro and ex vivo ring-stage survival assays (RSAs) can clearly identify artemisinin-resistant, slow-clearing Plasmodium falciparum...

If you thought the catchphrase “taking it to the next level” was one of the most exasperating corporate clichés you had heard, you might want to do a rethink. Rajiv Chilakalapudi, the man behind the biggest success story of the Indian animation industry – Chhota Bheem, wants to do exactly that: take his story to the next level. He wants to do this by enlarging the 2D animation legend on to a 3D canvas. For one, the next version of Chhota Bheem, reckoned to be a Rs 200 crore brand now, will have...