Percept ties up with Future Group to form Bollywood Retail

Percept, an entertainment, media and communications company, has signed a 50:50 joint venture with Future Group to launch Bollywood Retail.

Bollywood Retail will focus on providing the Bollywood experience and Bollywood merchandising within the Future Group’s retail network. The joint venture will independently source Bollywood intellectual property rights (IPR) and software from Percept’s Bollywood Corporation and use retail infrastructure from Future Group.

In the first phase, with an investment of Rs 50 crore, the Bollywood Retail concept will be operational at about ten destinations including Hyderabad, Ahmedabad, Kolkata, Bengaluru, Indore, Jaipur, Pune, Delhi and Mumbai.

In an issued statement, Future Group CEO Kishore Biyani said: “Bollywood is one of the biggest entertainment phenomena that rules India. Through this partnership with Percept, we hope to bring a unique touch and feel of the Bollywood experience to the consumer.”

Percept joint managing director Shailendra Singh said: “Bollywood merchandise is just the first of many things to result from this partnership. The international market has been exposed to the concept, but the domestic market is nascent. However, I am sure that in due course, the concept of merchandising will be lapped up by the consumers in a big way.”

April is the worst month for UK retailers

Retail sales in the United Kingdom fell by 1.5 per cent in April, compared to the same month last year, when sales were up by 2.4 per cent. From February to April, sales were down at 0.6 per cent against the previous year. The year-on-year decline in March and April were the worst since 2005.

Commenting on the situation, Stephen Robertson, director-general, BRC said: “This is the first time in three years we have had two months in a row of year-on-year falls sales. With higher fuel and utility bills eating away at people’s spare cash, they are concentrating on essentials like food. Despite heavy discounting, clothing and footwear were at their weakest for at least eight years and more expensive housing-related goods continue to struggle.”

Food sales picked up after slowing in March, but clothing and footwear fell further, to their worst for at least eight years. Furniture and home wares also remained down, despite continued discounting and promotions.

KPMG head of retail Helen Dickinson said: “All sectors, with the exception of food, were in negative like-for-like territory for the month. April showed a double-digit decline for clothing and footwear.

London’s West End also experienced a slowdown in April. Shopper footfall was down by 6.3 per cent year-on-year, but was up at 10.3 per cent for the month.

Food orders boost M&B pub group

Pub and restaurant group Mitchells & Butlers (M&B) says “buoyant” food orders have allowed it to successfully offset falling sales of beer.

In a trading statement for the six months to 5 April, the owner of the All Bar One and Harvester chains said like-for-like food sales rose 4.8%.

While the equivalent beer sales fell 1.4%, overall like-for-like sales were ahead by 0.6% across the company.

M&B said the smoking ban had helped to attract more diners.

“The smoking ban has widened the appeal of the pub, especially to consumers who previously did not eat out in pubs due to tobacco smoke,” it said.

Takeover target

M&B had been a takeover target for rival pub chain Punch Taverns, but Punch withdrew its proposal at the end of last month.

Punch said the terms of its offer, made in February, were no longer in the best interests of its shareholders. It had proposed paying M&B’s shareholders £175m for the company.

M&B became vulnerable to takeover after losing £274m through a collapsed attempt to spin off property assets.

In August last year, M&B was planning a joint venture with property tycoon Robert Tchenguiz, involving up to 2,000 pubs.

It set up financial transactions to protect the venture against changes in interest rates and inflation.

But at the last minute, the banks declined to back the venture, leaving M&B with big losses from the transactions.

 

New Net that’s 10K times faster

NEW DELHI: The Internet could soon be made obsolete by “the grid.” The lightning-fast replacement will be capable of downloading entire feature films within seconds.

At speeds about 10,000 times faster than a typical broadband connection, the grid will be able to send the entire Rolling Stones back catalogue from Britain to Japan in less than two seconds.

The latest spinoff from Cern, the particle physics centre that created the Web, could also provide the kind of power needed to transmit holographic images; allow instant online gaming with hundreds of thousands of players, and offer high-definition video telephony for the price of a local call.

David Britton, professor of physics at Glasgow University and a leading figure in the grid project, believes grid technologies “could revolutionize society.”
“With this kind of computing power, future generations can collaborate and communicate in ways older people like me cannot even imagine,” he said.

The power of the grid will become apparent this summer after what scientists at Cern have termed their “red button” day — the switching on of the Large Hadron Collider, the new particle accelerator built to probe the origin of the universe. The grid will be activated at the same time to capture the data it generates.

Cern, based near Geneva, started the grid computing project seven years ago when researchers realized LHC would generate annual data equivalent to 56m CDs — enough to make a stack 50 miles high. Ironically this meant that scientists at Cern — where Tim Berners-Lee invented the internet in 1989 — would no longer be able to use his creation for fear of causing a global collapse.

This is because the internet has evolved by linking together a hotchpotch of cables and routing equipment, much of which was originally designed for telephone calls and which lacks the capacity for high-speed data transmission.

By contrast, the grid has been built with dedicated fibre optic cables and modern routing centres, meaning there are no outdated components to slow the deluge of data. The 55,000 servers already installed are expected to rise to 200,000 in two years.

The Grid
While the Web is a service for sharing information over the Internet, the new system, Grid, is a service for sharing computer power and data storage capacity over the Internet.

It will allow online gaming with hundreds of thousands of players, and offer high-definition video telephony for the price of a local call. In search of new drugs against malaria, it analysed 140m compounds — a task that would have taken an Internet-linked PC 420 years

Source : TNN

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