The Indigenous light combat aircraft Tejas, for the first time, received fuel mid-air from an IAF tanker aircraft recently, taking a big step towards becoming fully ready for combat in the Indian Air Force.
Within minutes of taking off from Gwalior, the home-made combat jet received 1,900 kg of fuel from the IAF IL78 tanker in a successful air-to-air operation.
The refuelling was carried out at an altitude of 20,000 feet. All the internal tanks and drop tanks were refuelled to enhance the aircraft’s endurance. The aircraft was moving at a speed of 270 knots. The aircraft was piloted by Wg Cdr Siddharth Singh of the National Flight Test Centre.
“The air-to-air refueling capability for LCA is a force multiplier for the IAF, giving the aircraft the potential to stay airborne for much longer periods of time,” tweeted Defence Minister Nirmala Sitharaman.
With this, India joins the elite group of countries that have developed the Air-to-Air (AAR) system for military class of aircraft, says HAL Chairman and Managing Direct, R Madhavan.
The enhanced range and endurance is expected to provide IAF a host of options in exploiting the operational potential of the LCA as well as to participate in international exercises without having to stage through several locations en-route.
The refueling, explained an officer, would allow a take-off with higher payload, which could be extra weapons too. “The maximum take-off weight is maintained by carrying less fuel and topping up once the aircraft is air borne,” he said.
It would enable the Tejas aircraft to undertake multi-role missions, both for air defence and strike, the officer pointed out.
Before the ‘wet contact’ trial, the ‘dry contact trials’ were successfully conducted twice on September 4 and 6, where the Drogue (basket) extended from the IAF tanker aircraft by a fuel hose, was tracked and plugged into using the aircraft refuelling probe without taking fuel.
Hindustan Aeronautics Limited and Aeronautical Development Agency have pushed the target date for the Final Operational Clearance sometimes in the middle of 2019. The deadline is years beyond the original schedule and the last target deadline in June 2018 was missed.
Synechron, a global financial services consulting and technology services provider, today announced that Hareesha Pattaje, Managing Director – Technology was awarded the coveted CIO100 FutureTech Leader Award 2018.
The award recognizes Hareesha’s extensive efforts in formulating and executing reskilling and up-skilling strategies at Synechron. His vision for identifying and deploying relevant future technology skills has been instrumental in creating a future-proof environment at the company. Hareesha also has played an important role in setting up the Synechron Blockchain CoE.
“I am honored to have won the CIO100 FutureTech Leader award. The sheer hard work, dedication and perseverance put in by our team has borne fruit,” said Hareesha Pattaje, Managing Director – Technology at Synechron. “We are committed to reskilling and upskilling our talented specialists to ensure we continue to innovate cutting-edge solutions for our clients.”
Commenting on this, Faisal Husain, Co-founder and CEO of Synechron said, “Hareesha has been a part of the organization for close to 15 years now. His leadership and guidance has nurtured our talent into industry’s best R&D experts. He has been pivotal in bringing some of the best in class innovations at Synechron. Our heartiest congratulations to Hareesha and his team for winning this coveted award.”
The CIO100 Awards honors 100 outstanding organizations and their CIOs for exemplary use of technology while the symposium encourages the exchange of ideas and inspires future transformation through the proactive adoption of technology solutions. It is the most powerful congregation of IT leaders in India with entry exclusive to winners. Adjudicated by an eminent jury comprising of the who’s who of the IT industry, the parameters to judge the FutureTech Leader Award 2018 included strategies that business leaders have formulated and rolled-out to create a balance between the future technology requirements and the current ones in smart and relevant ways.
Minister of State for Skill Development and Entrepreneurship, AnantKumar Hegde has inaugurated a Workshop on Understanding Rare Scripts at the Indira Gandhi National Centre for Arts, Regional Centre (IGNCA), Bengaluru. The workshop is being organised in line with IGNCA’s larger mandate to enable engagement and preservation of India’s heritage and archival resources. The workshop will offer hands on training in deciphering the script, accessing manuscripts and will also cover issues in manuscriptology research.
The objective of the initiative is to document and archive the country’s languages that have been lost or are likely to be lost in the near future. The inauguration was conducted in the august presence of Dr Sachchidanand, Joshi, Member Secretary, IGNCA, Dr Ramesh C Gaur, Head Kalanidhi Division, IGNCA and Dr. K.R. Venugopal, Vice Chancellor, Bangalore University.
Courses will be open to students and scholars who are interested in heritage research. No prior training in manuscriptology is necessary. Participants will also be encouraged to further their training by undertaking translation projects from the microfilm library at the Regional Centre Bengaluru.
Speaking at the ceremony, AnantKumar Hegde said, “In recent years the language diversity is under threat as speakers of diverse languages are becoming rare. Scripts and languages are important aspect of our culture. There are plenty of things one can do to contribute towards documenting a language, depending on the skill-set. Besides the preservation of the neglected archival records, the initiative is also aimed at compiling the local history of state. The problem needs to be addressed at societal level, in which the communities have to take part in conservation of language diversity that is part of cultural wealth.”
India is home to priceless manuscript collections which are a source of invaluable knowledge. IGNCA seeks to create opportunities that results in skill development and also foster engagement with our culture.
Regional Center Bengaluru houses a niche library with 14,000 books which cover subjects such as arts, culture and history. The manuscript microfilms library has been aggregated from over 52 centres across the country with about 22,000 microfilms rolls covering 2,85,000 manuscripts. One lakh vintage and contemporary colour slides are available for research scholars and academicians.
The Modi script was used to write the Marathi language spoken in the current state of Maharashtra. It originated as a cursive script during the 17th century CE. Modi was used until the 1950's when Devanagari replaced it as the written medium of the Marathi language. The script is used all over Canara and Western Hilly regions of Karnataka. Many manuscripts written in these scripts are also found in erstwhile districts of Mumbai, Uttara Kannada, Udupi, Dakshina Kannada, Shimoga and Kasaragod district of Kerala. Most government records in the region prior to 1950 are in Modi Script.
About 20 million people are expected to shop on various e-commerce platforms during the festive sale next month, translating into sales of around $3 billion for players like Amazon and Flipkart, says a report.
The report by RedSeer Consulting stated that about 13-24 million shoppers had transacted on e-commerce sites during the five-day festive sale last year and 10 million in 2016 around the same time frame.
The festive sale not only brings in discounts and deals for customers but is also an annual showdown of sorts between the two largest players - Flipkart and Amazon India.
While the two companies are yet to announce the sale dates for this year, it is likely to be held in October. According to RedSeer, the daily gross merchandise value (GMV) during the five-day sale period is expected to be around $527 million. GMV refers to the total sales value of merchandise sold through the platform over a certain period of time.
During May-July 2018 period, the GMV was around $62 million, while it was about $280-300 million during last year’s five-day festive sale.
The report also said the share of items like electronics and furniture during the sale could be higher this year due to “affordability” initiatives being undertaken by the e-commerce players. Also, while mobile phones would continue to be the bulk of the sales (52%), categories like fashion are expected to be about 15%, RedSeer said.
Like in offline retail, e-commerce companies see a major bump up in sales during Dussehra and Diwali.
DLF Shopping Malls, the country’s biggest and largest physical market place today announced the launch of India’s first ever retail Phygital application ‘Lukout’. The initiative is part of the brand’s New Retail journey to redefine the shopping experience in India. With the launch of Lukout, DLF Shopping Malls will enter a new realm of digitization, thereby strengthen its foothold in new cutting-edge technologies and retail solutions. This will empower DLF’s vision to reengineer the very definition of ‘New Retail’ experience, diminishing the boundaries between online and offline retail world.
The Lukout app is a one stop solution that offers highly personalized proximity based engaging content in terms of latest looks, latest trends, real time location based offers while providing conveniences like One touch Parking payment, one touch valet, one touch concierge along with having its own social network for millions of consumers. For Retailers, the app provides a disruptive platform to enable channel-based consumer targeting and further allow brands to host their virtual stores fronts on Lukout to enhance discoverability & device proximity campaigns to target consumers via big-data powered analytics dashboards.
DLF Shopping Malls has been focusing on strategic partnerships and has gravitated this approach to become first movers in the industry to enable seamless integration of the online and offline shopping culture in the country, which is christened as The New Retail Phygital era. Some of these partnerships include – Global e-commerce and technology giant, Alibaba Could for providing big data, artificial intelligence and high-powered computing capabilities and Firefly (a JV of Airtel & Vodafone) for providing ‘We Connect’ – one of country’s best in-mall Wi-Fi experience compliant under the most recent future ready GDPR regulations. In addition to this, the brand has also partnered with the German IOT major Minodes – a Telephonica Next company to deploy big- data powered deep consumer analytics across all the retail properties of DLF Shopping Malls, building data rich analytics for highly granular user behavior, heat maps, dwell times, life time repeats & real time in-store conversions. To realize a unified interconnected ecosystem for retailers & consumers, DLF Shopping Malls has associated with Hogarth WorldWide to develop the first ever Phygital application ‘Lukout’ for providing real time personalized hyper-local experiences for its millions of consumers.
Pushpa Bector, EVP and Head, DLF Shopping Malls, said, “At DLF Shopping Malls we are constantly innovating to meet and exceed the expectations of the evolved consumer. We have pioneered and embarked upon our ‘New Retail’ journey based on the premise of our Phygital strategy, spearheaded by our endeavors of collaborating with strategic partners. This initiative will be instrumental in creating new benchmarks for Indian retail industry while offering unprecedented experience for our consumers”.
Harshavardhan Chauhan, Head, Central Marketing & Phygital, DLF Shopping Malls said, “We are excited to launch the industry’s first ever Phygital product, leveraging on cutting edge technology across IOT, big-data, real time analytics & proximity personalized marketing to realize our New Retail vision for seamlessly connecting the physical & digital ecosystems. Lukout will empower India’s top brands across DLF Shopping Malls to embark this New Retail journey while enabling us to disrupt experiences for millions of our consumers as part of our phygital strategy”.
Accenture has been named the top company on the Thomson Reuters Diversity & Inclusion Index, which recognizes the 100 most diverse and inclusive companies in the world, according to Thomson Reuters ESG (Environmental, Social and Governance) data. The Index, established in 2016, is one of the most comprehensive measures of workplace inclusion and diversity practices.
“At Accenture, our commitment starts at the top with our board and extends across every dimension of the company,” said Pierre Nanterme, Accenture’s chairman and CEO. “We embrace our rich diversity as a ‘culture of cultures,’ which is all about our 449,000 people around the world living our shared core values, while bringing our own unique skills and experiences to make the maximum contribution to our clients and our business.”
“Inclusion and diversity are fundamental tenets of our culture, core values and business. We believe that an inclusive environment will make us stronger, smarter and more innovative,” said Rohit Thakur, managing director and lead human resources, Accenture in India. “This award further reaffirms our inclusion leadership, and we are grateful to our people and their rich diverse backgrounds which helps us serve our clients and our communities better.”
Among the actions Accenture has taken to further its progress toward a more inclusive and diverse workplace, which Thomson Reuters considered in the Index, are:
Creating a diverse board of directors. Accenture’s board of directors is diverse in terms of its geographic and gender representation, with people from six countries across four continents and four women, including its lead director.
Advancing workplace equality. The company set a goal of having women comprise 50 percent of its global workforce by 2025. Today, women comprise 41 percent of the company’s workforce and 45 percent of new hires.
Developing talent. The company invested US$935 million in learning and professional development last year, including substantial investments in re-skilling to help its people stay relevant in key areas such as cloud, artificial intelligence and robotics.
Committing to transparency. The company provides its workforce data in many countries. For example, Accenture was the first professional services company to voluntarily publish comprehensive workforce demographics – including gender, ethnicity, persons with disabilities and veterans – in the United States.
To compile the Index, Thomson Reuters assessed publicly available data for more than 7,000 publicly traded companies around the world. The companies were measured on 24 separate metrics across four key categories: Diversity, Inclusion, People Development and News Controversies. The Index was then calculated by weighing each metric based on importance in the market and how each company compares with its peers.
The Thomson Reuters ranking is the latest in a series of inclusion and diversity recognitions for Accenture, which is committed to ensuring that all of its people – regardless of age, ability, ethnicity, gender, gender identity and expression, religion or sexual orientation – have the opportunity to succeed. Among the dozens of lists on which the company has been included in the past year are: Corporate Responsibility Magazine’s 100 Best Corporate Citizens globally; the Disability Equality Index in the U.S.; DiversityInc’s Top 50 Companies for Diversity in the U.S.; the Human Rights Campaign’s Corporate Equality Index; Nikkei Top 100 Companies for Women in Japan; The Times Top 50 Employers for Women in the UK; and Working Mother & AVTAR’s 100 Best Companies for Women in India.
“At Thomson Reuters, we understand that focusing on total societal impact is fundamental to driving long-term financial success,” said Patsy Doerr, global head of corporate responsibility and inclusion at Thomson Reuters. “Creating the workforce of the future means building diverse teams which attract the best and brightest from around the world. The Diversity & Inclusion Index helps investors and analysts identify the companies that are getting this right, helping them to make investment decisions that align with their values and the bottom line.”
Audio Lounge, retailers of the world’s most technically perfect and high-end audio equipment, will open a new store offering pure listening pleasure fordiscerning music lovers in and around Bangalore. The store, located at Taj West End, will range some of the most desirable audio brands available including Avantgarde, Bel Canto, Boulder, Crystal Cable, Nagra, Ortofon, Sennheiser, Siltech, SME, Spendor and YG.
On live demonstration, both unique and elegant,Avantgarde high-end 2-channelhorn loudspeakers will also be unveiled for the first time ever in India.A stunning visual appearance is matched with a convincing sound performance that will radiate effortlessly into a room, handcrafted in the best German tradition. It is sheer magic to the ears. Purists are invited to come exclusively to Audio Lounge to experience this phenomenon for themselves.
Experienced experts will always be on hand at Audio Lounge to tailor bespoke exquisite audio systems for the home to suit every budget and lifestyle, so music enthusiasts can immerse themselves in the most beautiful sound they have ever heard, in the manner they choose.
www.audiolounge.in
