Cultural crossover when it comes to commerce

"Japanese philosophy rules Indian ramp"

by

Aditi Caroli

February 16th, 2012

Hindustan Times

Indian fashion being inspired by Japanese philosophy sounds a little absurd. However, designer Anand Kabra made it possible on Day One of the Wills Lifestyle India Fashion Week. Different prints and motifs with zardozi cutwork, beading and dori were used on saris, kurtas and gowns. The colour palette consisted of blue, green, orange, white and black. Cotton, silk, organza, crepe, chiffon and wool were used.

Designer on his collection

“The inspiration was Japanese philosophy which is a cleansing ritual process. What I got of it was new beginnings. I’m proud of the fact that I’m a designer who happens to come out of India. So my muse is Indian women. The clothing which I make is probably which she would wear during all the aspects of her life. She celebrates, works, parties. It’s modern woman versus old world value, a mix of everything. The collection is easy to wear, less fussy”

What is the highpoint of your collection?

“My USP is the way I combine colour. It’s a very Nizami sensibility as I come from Hyderabad. Also, contemporising Indian tradtion.”

Lot of embellishment was seen. You love bling, don’t you?

“It’s not about embellishments. We need to celebrate. Gold and bling is in our DNA. For me, it never goes out of fashion.”

Case of the long paper receipt

"Ridiculously Long CVS Receipts Will Remain Ridiculously Long"

by

Rebecca J. Rosen

August 10th, 2011

The Atlantic

I'm not sure when I first noticed them. I don't remember them as a child or a teenager. Then, one day, walking out of a CVS, I looked down at my hand and there it was ... a two-foot long receipt decorated with coupons and miscellany like the back of an old magazine. What was this so-called receipt? And why was it so long?!

This creeping sign of postmodern malaise, in which the length of one's receipt bears no relationship to the number of items purchased, has been swirling out of printers and control for too long. We are beyond paper, the anguished people cry. But the pharmacy does not hear us.

As the angry proprietor of the Facebook group, "One Million Strong Against Unnecessarily Long CVS Receipts," put it, "I don't care that they use my CVS card to track me across the planet, I just want a receipt that isn't 1/3rd my height."

Last June, it appeared that the madness might end. The Los Angeles Times reported that CVS was doing away with its often yard-long receipts and moving toward a more useful, digitized rewards program.

But now the company is backing away from that plan. LA Times reporter David Lazarus kept digging (that guy deserves a Pulitzer) and found the company "in fact isn't working on doing away with printing rewards on receipts and the goal isn't to store rewards in people's cards." Instead, the "rewards" CVS gives you -- which are what gets printed on that receipt -- will continue to come in paper form unless you opt into an offers-by-email program.

The reason, the company says, is that the receipts are, apparently, exciting to customers. "When you give rewards, you want people to feel excited," a company representative told Lazarus. said. "You want them to know that they've earned the reward." (Finally, I understand the whoops of joy often heard in the self-checkout aisle.)

CVS trumpets its decision in a press release titled "CVS/pharmacy Launches New Digital Savings Option for ExtraCare, the Nation's Largest Retail Rewards Program," which sounds great -- at first.

The release goes on to explain that customers can now get their rewards digitally if they sign up for ExtraCare emails. Easy enough, just sign up for the emails and then create a filter so you never have to see them, or send them to an email address you never check.

Unfortunately, such work-arounds will not help: Customers who want to avoid receipts and still use their coupons will have to read each coupon email and decide whether to send it to their printer or to their CVS card. Which is annoying, almost as annoying as receiving a 25-inch receipt after purchasing a quart of milk.

Wave of the future motivated by commerce...private enterprise in space

A presentation in June by engineers from Carnegie Mellon University, working with a company called Astrobotic Technology, one of the teams in a competition to become the first private venture to land on the Moon.

This is good and more to come.

"Race to the Moon Heats Up for Private Firms"

by

Kenneth Change

July 21st, 2011

The New York Times

Now that the last space shuttle has landed back on Earth, a new generation of space entrepreneurs would like to whip up excitement about the prospect of returning to the Moon.

Spurred by a $30 million purse put up by Google, 29 teams have signed up for a competition to become the first private venture to land on the Moon. Most of them are unlikely to overcome the financial and technical challenges to meet the contest deadline of December 2015, but several teams think they have a good shot to win — and to take an early lead in a race to take commercial advantage of our celestial neighbor.

At the very least, a flotilla of unmanned spacecraft could be headed Moonward within the next few years, with goals that range from lofty to goofy.

One Silicon Valley venture, Moon Express, is positioning itself as a future FedEx for Moon deliveries: if you have something to send there, they would like to bring it. The company is throwing a party on Thursday night to show off the flight capabilities of its lunar lander, a prototype it bought from NASA, and “to begin the next era of the private commercial race to the Moon,” as the invitation put it.

“In the near future, the Moon Express lunar lander will be mining the Moon for precious resources that we need here on Earth,” the invitation promised. “Years from now, we will all remember we were there.”

Naveen Jain, an Internet billionaire and a founder of Moon Express, says the company will spend $70 million to $100 million to try to win the Google Lunar X Prize, but could recoup its investment on its first flight. He envisions selling exclusive broadcast rights for video from the Moon, as well as sponsorships, á la Nascar, for companies to put their logos on the lander.

Or, perhaps, a tie-in to reality television.

“Wouldn’t it be nice if you could have a ‘Moon Idol,’ just like ‘American Idol?’ ” suggested Mr. Jain, who previously founded Infospace and Intelius. “You take the top 10 contestants and play their voices on the moon, record it and see who sounds the best.”

(There is no air on the Moon to transmit sound waves, but “you could play it through the dust and see what it sounds like when you play it right on the surface,” Mr. Jain said.)

Another competitor, Astrobotic Technology, intends to sell berths on its lunar lander to space agencies and scientific institutions, which would pay $820,000 a pound to send up their experiments. The company, a spinoff from Carnegie Mellon University, is building a large craft — much bigger than Moon Express’s — capable of carrying 240 pounds of payload (read: $200 million of cargo) and hopes to be ready to launch in December, 2013.

“We can make a lot of money even if we do not win the prize,” said David Gump, president of Astrobotic, which is based in Pittsburgh. “We will be making substantial profit on the first flight. Basically, we’ll break even by selling a third of the payload.”

The X Prize competitors might all be beaten by landers and rovers that China, Russia and India plan to send up over the next couple of years. But those fall more in the mold of traditional, government-built science probes.

While NASA had wanted to send astronauts back to the Moon, its program was canceled last year, a victim of budget cuts and shifting priorities. But it has awarded $500,000 each to Moon Express, Astrobotic and a third competitor, Rocket City Space Pioneers, the first installments of up to $30 million that it will contribute to the X Prize efforts.

George Xenofos, manager of NASA’s Innovative Lunar Demonstrations Data program, said he expected one or more teams to make it to the Moon. “It’s definitely not the technical issues that’s stopping them,” he said.

The contestants’ goals do not appear to face legal hurdles. The Outer Space Treaty of 1967, ratified by 100 nations including the United States, bars countries from claiming sovereignty over any part of the Moon, but does not prevent private companies from setting up shop. As for mining the Moon, it could fall under similar legal parameters as fishing in international waters.

Although some orbiting spacecraft have crashed into the Moon in recent years, 35 years have passed since anything from Earth made a soft landing there. To some people, this looks like an overdue invitation.

“It’s probably the biggest wealth creation opportunity in modern history,” said Barney Pell, a former NASA computer scientist turned entrepreneur and now a co-founder of Moon Express. While Moon Express might initially make money by sending small payloads, the big fortune would come from bringing back platinum and other rare metals, Dr. Pell said.

“Long term, the market is massive, no doubt,” he said. “This is not a question of if. It’s a question of who and when. We hope it’s us and soon.”

Like the aviation prizes that jump-started airplane technology a century ago, the Google Lunar X Prize is meant to rally the enthusiasm of technologists and entrepreneurs. It is administered by the X Prize Foundation, which handed out $10 million in 2004 to the first private team to build a spacecraft that could carry people 60 miles above the Earth’s surface. (The winner, SpaceShipOne, was built by the aerospace designer Burt Rutan with backing from Paul Allen, the software magnate.)

For the Moon competition, Google put up $30 million. Of that, $20 million will go to the first team to land a spacecraft on the Moon, explore 500 meters and send back high-definition video and photos. The second team will win $5 million, and the remaining $5 million will pay for bonus prizes like surviving a frigid lunar night or traveling more than 5,000 meters on the surface.

Not all the competitors see dollar signs in the Moon. Rocket City Space Pioneers, a consortium of space businesses, is using its Moon effort largely to market technology that will allow multiple payloads to share one rocket, greatly reducing launching costs. (In other words, as the lander headed for the Moon, it could drop off a few satellites in orbit.)

“I think the Moon, it’s so expensive, we don’t know what the market is for sure in its entirety,” said Tim Pickens, chief propulsion engineer at Dynetics, an aerospace company in Huntsville, Ala., that is leading the Rocket City effort.

Meanwhile, at Moon Express, Mr. Jain’s imagination runs wild. A robot could scrawl a marriage proposal in the lunar dust, take a picture and send it to the customer’s beloved back on Earth. A time capsule filled with mementos or a strand of someone’s hair — and DNA — could be sent to the Moon, where it would persist, pristine in the airless environs.

“People become part of moon exploration,” Mr. Jain said, “and that has never been done before.”

Marketing physics

They are everywhere...coffee mugs, posters, pens, T-shirts, panties.

"Got enough physics?"

by

Zoe Macintosh

July 28, 2008

Symmetry

The eyes may be the windows to the soul, but it helps to have other reference points. Celtic dragon knots, Che Guevara headshots, Dilbert cartoons and Shrödinger’s equation all fit the bill in the realm of expressive T-shirts.

If you're one of those people who can never have enough physics in your life, you may enjoy digging around the physics-related shirts, mugs, clocks, and other merchandise available on the Internet.

In the online age, where everybody can participate, ventures like cafepress.com allow users to design their own products and have them made on demand, either for themselves or to sell in their own stores. At the site, a simple search for "physics" returns more than 7000 matches, and even though many of the items available are not really physics-fan desirables, there is a wealth of paraphernalia to explore.

A few ideas turn up often enough to vouch for their secure place in popular consciousness: references to Schrödinger's cat, quotes by Einstein, and quantum mechanics' allotment of a general sort of freakiness.

Other items offer assurances that science is hip: "PHYSICS BABE" shows a slinky cartoon woman in a space suit wielding a ray gun, while another shirt proclaims "Science makes me cool." There are cheat-sheet designs that all but replicate a student's notes onto a shirt; there is self-deprecating humor. "Research…screwing up for fun and profit," one T-shirt cracks. Or maybe it really is the case that "78% of all statistics are made up on the spot" and "Progress is directly proportional to equipment ruined."

Many of these designs are in-jokes, intelligible and interesting primarily to those already in the know. Anyone want a Maxwell’s equations wall clock? How about this message: "Let's put the fun back in wavefunction!"

I prefer designs that communicate through graphics: pictures of archaic physics equipment, the iconic head of Nikolai Tesla with his name all in caps, or "Chillin' with my [ohm]ies." A simple image of a lab-coated man pouring liquid into a vial, labeled "SCIENCE!", appeals to me more than the slogan, "Quantum physics says you'll never find me if I stand still."

One particularly obscure shirt features a kinematic equation purporting to show "the airspeed velocity of an unladen swallow." I didn't get it, but my fellow intern Calla Cofield chuckled, explaining that it was a reference to Monty Python. "Yeah," she said, "you have to be a double nerd to get that."


And I am a sucker too...