Silicon Valley-based startup CollegeFeed, a social network for college students was acquired by Arizona-based AfterCollege. The acquisition announcement was made yesterday, but the terms of the deal were not disclosed. Sanjeev Agarwal, one of the co-founders of CollegeFeed will join the board of AfterCollege that was founded in 1999 by Roberto Angulo. The merger of the… Continue Reading
Dr. Salman Akhtar talks about the 100 year old history of Bollywood or Hindi cinema in this multi-part interview. What is different about Dr. Akhtar’s approach is he brings his trained psychiatrist eyes to the subject and helps us understand what socio-economics factors permeated and colored the narrative and story lines of filmmakers. And how films in turn… Continue Reading
Billie Holiday turns 100 today. The talented jazz and blues singer was born on April 7, 1915 in Philadelphia. “Lady Day” as she was popularly known was 44 years old when she passed away. But, what a life Holiday led filled with joy, happiness, pain, drugs, prison and music. And what a voice Holiday possessed. It was a… Continue Reading
Over 100 years ago a small group of Punjabis from British India made their way to the west coast of America in search of a better life. Many of them eventually moved to Yuba City in California, where they became successful farmers.Because of legal barriers the early settlers from India were not allowed to marry… Continue Reading
Meet Manan Mehta, co-founder of Unshackled, a new angel fund based in Palo Alto. Started in 2014 the company has raised $4.4 million, and they plan to invest their money, effort and time in helping entrepreneurs, especially immigrant entrepreneurs realize their dream of doing a startup. Many immigrant workers are tied to their H1B or “work”… Continue Reading
Noah Cowan is Executive Director of the San Francisco Film Society (SFFS) that hosts the annual San Francisco International Film Festival. Cowan joined SFFS last year, and prior to that he spent a lot of his time at the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF). His last post was as artistic director of the Bell Lightbox… Continue Reading
That is Elon Musk in a 1999 documentary. He had just sold his first company Zip2.com for a little over $300 million, and was working on his second company called X.com which later on became PayPal when they acquired Confinity. Did you notice the last sentence he said in that video? He’d be happy if… Continue Reading
“I have been working with men for a long time,” responds Vijalakshmi Pandit in response to a question if men had modulated their language at the UN after she became the President of the United General Assembly in 1953. This TV interview offers a fascinating portrait of Pandit, who was the sister of Jawaharlal Nehru,… Continue Reading
The verdict is in for the high profile legal case between Ellen Pao vs. Kleiner Caufield Perkins and Byers (KCPB), the famous Silicon Valley venture capital firm. Pao lost the historic gender discrimination case against KCPB that was keenly followed by folks in Silicon Valley and around the world. Pao was a partner at Kleiner Perkins. She sued… Continue Reading
Art and films – that is what we are talking about with our guests in our upcoming interviews. Sherill Ingalls of San Jose Museum of Art talks about their current exhibit “Postdate: Photography and Inherited History in India” that features 9 contemporary artists from India. Actors Tiya Sircar and Kosha Patel talk about their new… Continue Reading
Academy Award winner Danny Boyle of “Slumdog Millionaire,” is busy directing his latest movie in San Francisco bay area. And the new biopic is about Silicon Valley icon Steve Jobs. The shooting of the film started in the beginning of the year. The cast and crew has spent time filming in San Francisco and in locations around South… Continue Reading
Google announced today that it is getting a new Chief Financial Officer (CFO). Ruth Porat is headed to California to become Google’s CFO. She was CFO at Morgan Stanley. Porat grew up in Cambridge, MA and Silicon Valley. She studied at Stanford before heading out to study in London and Wharton. She joined Morgan Stanley in… Continue Reading
San Francisco bay area has a rich history of filmmaking. The tradition goes all the way to the early 20thc when Niles Canyon near Fremont was home to the Silent Film Industry. Many silent films were produced in the studios of Niles Canyon. Fast forward to the late 1960s when Francis Ford Coppolo and George… Continue Reading
Louis Lumiere and Auguste Lumiere, the French inventors showed their first motion picture in Paris on March 22, 1895. They made the film using Cinematographe, which in turn was inspired by Thomas Edison’s invention Kinetascope. “Workers Leaving The Lumiere Factory,” is less than a minute long and to use that hackneyed phrase the rest is history.… Continue Reading
Today is World Water day and naturally there are lots of stories, photo essays and interviews about water and how millions of people around the world have no access to water. The hashtag #worldwaterday is trending on social media and is helping create awareness about water right from paucity of water to how to solve the problem… Continue Reading
San Francisco bay area has a rich history of filmmaking going back to the late 19th when Eadweard Muybridge demonstrated the moving picture of a horse to Leland Stanford, founder of Stanford University. In the early 20th the bay area was home to the Silent Film industry and Niles Canyon near Fremont was home to Essanay… Continue Reading
Meet Lawrence Kasdan – writer, director and producer. He co-wrote the screenplay for George Lucas’s “Star Wars” trilogy, He worked with JJ Abrams on the latest Star Wars film “The Force Awakens,” that releases in December 2015. Kasdan was honored with a Maverick Spirit Award at the recent Cinequest Film Festival, which is where… Continue Reading
How is sound designed for a film? Ever wondered about it? We did and spoke with Academy Award winner Resul Pookutty to find out how he and his team worked on Shonali Bose’s “Margarita With A Straw.” Pookutty won an Oscar for his work in Danny Boyle’s “Slumdog Millionaire.” “Margarita With A Straw,” is about… Continue Reading
Facebook unveiled a new feature today that lets you send and receive money through Facebook messenger.”It is easy and free,” is how the the Menlo Park-based company described this new feature that will be available to users in the US in the coming months. Facebook introduced Messenger in 2011 that is used by millions of… Continue Reading
San Francisco-based Pinterest, a visual bookmarking company has raised $367 million at a valuation of $11 billion according to the Wall Street Journal. This is Series G round reports the Financial Times on the company’s latest round of funding. In 2004 Pinterest raised $200 million at a valuation of $5 billion per NYT DealBook. The company is not done… Continue Reading
American fruits and nuts in Bangalore you ask? Yes, you can find California pistachios, Washington apples and Oregon pears from big grocery stores to the corner mom and pop shops. According to one report California almonds rank fifth in the list of American exports to India.
“Miss India America” had its world premiere at the recently concluded Cinequest film festival in Silicon Valley. This humorous film examines the notion of ambition and the lengths to which we go to achieve our dreams. The film and the cast members got standing ovation from the audience. We spoke with Meera Simhan and Ravi Kapoor, the husband… Continue Reading
Award-winning filmmaker Robert Kenner’s new documentary “Merchants of Doubt,” is inspired by the book by the same name by Naomi Orsekes and Eric Conway. Kennar’s previous film is the award-winning “Food Inc.” that takes you behind the scenes of how the food industry operates. In this new film “Merchants of Doubt,” Kennar takes you behind the scene and shows… Continue Reading
Shonali Bose’s “Margarita With A Straw,” is the centerpiece of this year’s Center for Asian American Media (CAAM) Festival at San Francisco’s Castro Theatre on March 15, 2015. We spoke to Bose about “Margarita With A Straw,” a coming-of-age film, which she describes as a deeply personal film. The story is about a differently abled person’s… Continue Reading
Food is the centerpiece of many Asian-American communities in the USA.There is absolutely no question about that and I can vouch for it. What are we eating today is a daily conversation in my family, and we cook everyday. And there are many memories and stories woven around food in my family. And food is… Continue Reading
India – that is subject of the latest edition of Granta, a British literary magazine founded in 1899 in Cambridge University. The India special has stories, poems, photos and artwork by new and well-known folks like Upamanyu Chatterjee, Neel Mukerjee, Kalpana Narayanan, Aman Sethi, Hari Kunzru, Anjali Joseph, Gauri Gill, Rajesh Vangad and others. A… Continue Reading
Wedding brass bands are a big part of Indian weddings. These bands grew out of the military brass bands in British India as ethnomusicologist Prof. Greg Booth explains. Imagine my surprise when a few years ago I stumbled upon Red Baarat, a brass band from New York. This 8-piece band was started by Sunny Jain… Continue Reading
Anne Thompson lives, breathes, talks and writes about films. She is the founder and editor-in-chief of Thompson on Hollywood at Indiewire. She is the author of the book “The $11 Billion Dollar Year.” She teaches a course on films at UCLA. A prolific writer Thompson has written for Variety, Entertainment Weekly, New York Times, Washington… Continue Reading
Apple Watch was not the only thing that CEO Tim Cook and his team announced yesterday at their much anticipated March Spring Forward event in San Francisco. They announced a clutch of new products and services like an all-new MacBook, MacBook Pro, ResearchKit and HBO NOW on Apple TV. In case you missed here are… Continue Reading
Really sorry to see Gigaom shut down. If someone knew how to do things in style it was Om Malik, the founder of the influential technology website based in San Francisco. Earlier this evening this is what Om wrote: “There will be time for postmortems, but not today. Today, I want to thank all the people… Continue Reading
The Kamla Show 