Lakme Fashion Week - Part 1

At Lakme Fashion Week Summer Resort 2011, there were more celeb guests than celeb showstoppers. Front rows were dotted with glitzy fashionistas who either proved that they were truly stylish or had just lost the plot.

Celeberities spotted in this segment were Bipasha Basu, Dia Mirza, Sonali Bendre, Suzanne Roshan, Minnissha Lamba and Sonal Chauhan. Check out 7 more images after the jump.

• Lakme Fashion Week - Part 1

Dimon Makes $20 Billion AT&T Loan in Bid to Be ‘Dominant’

March 23 (Bloomberg) -- Three years after Jamie Dimon became the nation’s lender of last resort in the rescues of Bear Stearns Cos. and Washington Mutual Inc., he is leading the industry by financing a $20 billion loan to AT&T Inc.

JPMorgan Chase & Co.’s chief executive officer cemented his firm’s spot as the top U.S. mergers-and-acquisitions bank over Goldman Sachs Group Inc. with the March 20 announcement that it’s advising AT&T on a $39 billion bid for Deutsche Telekom AG’s U.S. wireless unit, T-Mobile USA Inc. New York-based JPMorgan committed to providing $20 billion to AT&T.

“He wants to win, and he doesn’t want to win by a small amount,” Richard Bove, an analyst for Rochdale Securities LLC in Lutz, Florida, said yesterday in an interview. “He wants to win big and dominant. He wants to be known as the next J.P. Morgan.” Bove has a “buy” rating on JPMorgan.

Bove called the AT&T deal a “blockbuster transformational transaction” and said Dimon may be the most powerful U.S. banker since his company’s namesake, John Pierpont Morgan, helped resolve the panic of 1907.

Dimon, 55, flew to Tokyo from Hong Kong today to speak with employees and meet clients affected by the March 11 earthquake and tsunami, said a person with knowledge of the trip who declined to be identified because the travel plans haven’t been made public.

Wielding Assets

Dimon may be the only banker in the U.S. who could complete an unsecured loan as large as the AT&T deal as he wields JPMorgan’s $2.12 trillion in assets, Bove said.

“This is not the first time that they’ve used their balance sheet to gain market share,” said Moshe Orenbuch, an analyst at Credit Suisse Group AG in New York. “They have enough capital that they don’t have to shy away from clients. They can take on a large commitment.” Orenbuch rates JPMorgan “outperform.”

Dimon’s only possible competition on a transaction that large would be Goldman Sachs, led by CEO Lloyd Blankfein, or Morgan Stanley, “and Jamie’s going to feel more comfortable where his capital is,” said Paul Miller, a former examiner for the Federal Reserve bank of Philadelphia and analyst with FBR Capital Markets in Arlington, Virginia. “This gives Jamie Dimon a huge advantage out there.”

Goldman, Citigroup

Goldman Sachs, the fifth-biggest U.S. bank by assets, has less than half the common equity of JPMorgan with $70 billion while Morgan Stanley has about $48 billion, according to Bove. Rivals including Citigroup Inc. and Charlotte, North Carolina- based Bank of America Corp. have been hobbled by soured mortgage investments and losses from other consumer loans, Bove and Miller said.

Stephen Cohen, a spokesman for Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan’s Jennifer Zuccarelli and Pen Pendleton of Morgan Stanley, the sixth-largest U.S. bank, declined to comment.

JPMorgan agreed to buy Bear Stearns amid the credit crisis in March 2008, helping the investment bank avert a bankruptcy that could have further damaged the U.S. economy. Later that year, Dimon bought Washington Mutual for $1.9 billion after the Seattle-based thrift was seized by federal regulators.

Dimon, who’s been CEO since the end of 2005, maintained profits throughout the financial crisis. After graduating from Harvard Business School in 1982, he went to work for family friend and mentor Sanford Weill. Together, the two built the firm that became Citigroup, now the third-largest U.S. bank.

Bank One

Dimon was fired by Weill in 1998 and in 2000 was hired to run Bank One, a regional lender in Ohio that was acquired by JPMorgan in 2004.

JPMorgan, which was third behind Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley in M&A advisory for 2010, is leading the league tables this year. The bank’s North American M&A operation is run by Jim Woolery and Chris Ventresca.

Its investment bank, run by Jes Staley, ranked No. 1 for the third year in a row among the 20 highest-paid investment advisers in 2010, collecting $4.14 billion in fees for M&A as well as debt and equity underwriting, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.

Andrew O’Brien, JPMorgan’s co-head of syndicated and leveraged finance, put together the package for Dallas-based AT&T.

“JPMorgan can now go around to the biggest corporations in the world and say, ‘Look at what I did, look at how I protected my customer,’” Bove said. “They have enormous advantages in the market.”

Label Origins New Collection For Spring 2011

This is a very beautiful spring collection by the label Origins, The colors, the patterns and fabric is beautifull designed. This collection is ready to wear so theres no need for you to get them sewed or even try find a tailor. Which is perfect.

Stock Exchange Market

Several big acquisitions and a strong earnings report from Loews Corp. pushed stocks higher Monday.

Pride International Inc. jumped 16 percent after Ensco PLC, a London-based oil rig operator, said it would buy the offshore driller for $7.3 billion.

Beckman Coulter Inc. gained 10 percent after Danaher Corp. said it plans to buy the manufacturer of medical diagnostic tests for $5.8 billion.

Loews Corp. rose 4 percent. The company, which owns Loews hotels and the property insurer CNA Financial Corp., said falling costs helped earnings rise 16 percent even as revenue slipped slightly. The results were higher than analysts were expecting and helped push financial companies higher.

Joseph Saluzzi, co-head of equity trading at Themis Trading, said that with no major economic reports due out this week, mergers and earnings reports will continue to drive stocks higher. Anything that can be construed as good news is likely to give investors a reason to buy stocks, he said.

“The path of least resistance right now is up,” Saluzzi said. “People are beginning to assume the market is going higher. It’s momentum.”

The Dow Jones industrial average rose 69.48 points, or 0.6 percent, to 12,161.63. The Dow has now risen for six straight days, its longest winning streak since November.

The Standard & Poor’s 500 index rose 8.18, or 0.6 percent, to 1,319.05. The Nasdaq composite gained 14.69, or 0.5 percent, to 2,783.99.

Financial companies rose 1.5 percent, the largest gain of any of the 10 company groups that make up the S&P index.

Lorillard Inc. rose 2 percent after the company, which makes Newport and Maverick cigarettes, said it increased both sales and prices of its products.

AOL Inc. dropped 3.4 percent after saying it would buy the Huffington Post, a news and opinion website, for $315 million. Arianna Huffington, the site’s co-founder and political pundit, will join AOL’s management team.

Toy maker Hasbro Inc. rose 1.8 percent after reporting earnings that were lower but still beat analysts’ expectations.

The yield on the 10-year Treasury note edged down to 3.64 percent from 3.65 percent late Friday.

Monday was the first day of trading since the company that owns the Nasdaq exchange admitted Saturday it had been hacked late last year. The problem did not affect any trades, the company said.

Two stocks rose for every one that fell on the New York Stock Exchange. Consolidated volume came to 4 billion shares.

Oracle buys Sun

Oracle announced Wednesday it completed its acquisition of Sun Microsystems in a deal valued at more than $7 billion, a move that transforms the database and business-software giant into a hardware company as well.

Redwood Shores, Calif.-based Oracle has acquired several large companies in its drive to out-consolidate rivals in the business computing technology market, sometimes launching hostile takeovers and sometimes prevailing over regulatory objections. This time, the difficulty was persuading European antitrust regulators who were concerned about the fate under Oracle of the open-source MySQL database software business that was part of Sun.

But that barrier fell as the European Commission approved Oracle's Sun acquisition plan on January 21. Oracle Chief Executive Larry Ellison and other executives from Sun and Oracle are set to detail plans for Sun on Wednesday during a Webcast event starting at 9 a.m. PST.

"My hat is off to one of the greatest capitalists I have ever met, Larry Ellison," Sun Chairman Scott McNealy said in a bittersweet memo Tuesday, bidding adieu to the company he helped found 28 years earlier. "To be honest, this is not a note this founder wants to write. Sun, in my mind, should have been the great and surviving consolidator. But I love the market economy and capitalism more than I love my company."

By giving it a place in the server, storage, and processor domains, the Sun acquisition means Oracle is a direct competitor to more companies, a complication given that it sells its database and other software for use on servers sold by those competitors. IBM already was Oracle's biggest foe, but others that have survived the consolidation wave include Hewlett-Packard, Cisco Systems, and EMC.

Since announcing the Sun acquisition plan in April, Oracle's sales pitch has been one of integrated products--hardware and software built to work together so customers don't have to do the integration work

Microsoft to issue 'Google attack' browser patch

Microsoft Corp said it will issue a patch to fix the old version of its Internet Explorer browser that allowed recent attacks on Google Inc's network in China.

The patch, due out on Thursday, "addresses the vulnerability related to recent attacks against Google and a small subset of corporations," said Jerry Bryant, senior security program manager at Microsoft. "Once applied, customers are protected against the known attacks that have been widely publicized."

Google said last week it had been the target of sophisticated cyber-attacks in China, along with more than 20 other companies. Microsoft acknowledged that the hackers took advantage of a weakness in Internet Explorer 6 to mount the attacks.

Microsoft said it continues to see some attacks, with the only successful attacks against Internet Explorer 6. The most recent version of the software is Internet Explorer 8.

$172,000 The Cost Of An Executive MBA Program At Wharton

$172,000: The Cost Of An Executive MBA Program At Wharton

MBA programs have never been cheap. And as the demand for these courses grows, so too, do the course fees. In fact, if the staggering fees for two-year full-time MBAs astonished you, have a look at the tuition fees being charged by part-time executive MBA programs. The most expensive executive MBA course is currently the one being offered by Wharton in downtown Francisco. The 24-month part-time course costs a whopping $172,000.

Break that figure down and you will find that students are spending about $250 an hour for the course. The per hour figures for full-time MBAs at the same institution is a good $100 less. Some more number crunching and you realise that per hour-long class, Wharton is pocketing some $12,300.

This is not even a stray case. Coming in second on the list of ‘most expensive executive MBA programs’ is Wharton’s Philadelphia campus. Here, students have to shell out $162,300 for the entire course. Compare that with the $108,000 that full-time MBA students pay at the same campus. Thus, some 400 students are contributing $35 million as annual revenue for Wharton’s Executive MBA programs.

The reason for the crushing fees is largely related to Wharton’s brand image. As with other luxury brands, Wharton’s reputation helps justify the high fees. Michael Desiderio, executive director of the Executive MBA Council, calculates that an executive MBA program should cost an average of $65,555. However, Anjani Jain, the vice dean for Wharton’s MBA Program for Executives, claims that what pushes the cost up is that the institute offers a premium learning experience that includes boarding, lodging and some of the world’s best business faculty. Part of the story is also that employed executives are less troubled by the high costs.

Internet Business Tips - Start a Business by Writing Internet Articles

Internet Business Tips - Start a Business by Writing Internet Articles

To start internet business on a limited budget – which many people do – requires some serious thinking about the value of writing articles.

The temptation might be to lace an article with spider-friendly phrases in the hope that this will attract readers and in turn get them to buy what you have to sell.

However, some deep thought needs to go in to the whole process.


First of all, what are "spider-friendly phrases"?

"Spiders" are little digital or electronic robots that race around the web looking for the sort of phrases that people are searching on.

For example, someone in Timbuktu does a Google search on "ebook software" and within a second or so, he or she is presented with page after page of likely web sites where that subject can be researched further.

This happens because millions of people have written the words "ebook software" somewhere on their web site or in an article they have written – and it is the spiders’ job to find where those words can be found, scurry home with the associated URL information, and throw this fuel into the search engine.

Those spiders are busy all day every day, seeking new appearances of words that match the search phrases people are entering into their browsers.

Therefore, the list of available sites where you can research "ebook software" continues to grow like Topsy.

However, the spiders have more than just search phrases and key words to consider. Through the magic and mystery of something called "algorithms" they are also evaluating web sites for Content.

The word deserves Capitalization, because Content is becoming Cing (or should I say Kontent is becoming King?).

Rocket scientists probably understand this better than the average internet business entrepreneur, but the bottom line is that "Content" means that while the spider may have raced home with "ebook software" in its little mandibles, the system is also required to check the web pages any associated links go to – and see if those pages actually do contain relevant Content.

If they follow the URL trail from your article about "ebook software" and only find a page that talks about Star Trek, they’ll put their phasers on full, and you’re fried.

But if your page’s Content is all about the advantages of your software, like the fact that it is rebrandable, can be used with no HTML experience, it’s a much cheaper alternative to Adobe ebook software and PDF files, will let you embed links in images text and pictures, plus it allows you to use a voice over track (which no other software of its kind can do) then you somehow get an advantage in the search ranking process because the content was relevant.

So back to writing articles and why.

Let us say you write an article in January 2006 and put it on your own web site – not in an article directory, but just on your own web site.

The spiders will find it, log it, and if the article contains something about "ebook software" with a link to your site (where of course you would be selling such software) then at some time someone is going to see your site mentioned in a search result, and go there.

You Need Maximum Exposure
The caveat however is that you also know you need perhaps 100 visitors specifically looking for your product to get one buyer. Therefore, you need far more exposure for your article than simply your own web site.

Which is why writing articles and submitting them to directories or web sites that will promote your work becomes a very attractive no-cost proposition.

It costs nothing to write something about anything, and provided you follow a few basic rules of style and content (usually spelled out clearly by the site where your work will be published) your exposure to the spiders – which translates to exposure to people searching for your product – goes up exponentially.

This is especially true if your article is picked up for use in someone else’s ezine or newsletter – an avenue which has great merit and benefits for both writer and publisher, provided the author’s resource box remains intact as a post script.

In that regard it is very important to include a primary link to a specific landing page on your web site. (like the one that follows this article for example).

But this link should not automatically be your home page. It should be your product’s sales page with more relevant Content (sales copy) where the product you have written about can be read about in detail. Be sure to include that all-important call-to-action and a buy button, as well as some way to capture your visitors’ name and email address so you can follow up for possible further sales.

And remember, that article you wrote in January 2006 is going to stay around for years to come, living a life of its own and at some time it is going to translate into money in the bank.

About the author: Michael Knight is a professional writer and CEO of www.CuddlySoftware.com, an exclusive outlet for talking ebook software.

China Overseas Land’s Kong Plans $500 Million Real-Estate Fund

March 7 (Bloomberg) -- China Overseas Land & Investment Ltd., the Hong Kong-listed developer controlled by the nation’s construction ministry, plans to set up a real-estate fund of $300 million to $500 million as it bets that government measures won’t curb property demand.

 

The fund, which will invest in commercial and residential properties in China, may be ready in the first half, Chairman Kong Qingping said in an interview in Beijing.

Kong is betting long-term property demand in China, where January home prices rose in all but two of the 70 cities monitored by the state, will outweigh the impact of curbs imposed by a government concerned about an asset bubble. Expansion by Chinese developers into smaller cities may hurt their profit margins as land costs climb faster than home prices, Credit Suisse Group AG said March 2.

“Any company that has a nationwide coverage is certainly stronger than those in single cities,” Kong said when asked about the Credit Suisse report. “They’re emerging markets with low and healthy home prices.”

Cities including Jinan in the north, Nanjing in the east and Kunming in the south have followed the capital Beijing in introducing local curbs on home purchases. The government this year raised down-payment requirements for second-home purchases and imposed taxes on residential properties in Shanghai and Chongqing.

Control Home Prices

China Overseas hasn’t been affected by property curbs imposed by the government yet, Kong said. The government measures will help control home prices in the short term, though long-term demand will continue to be strong, he said.

Vincent Lo, chairman of rival Shui On Land Ltd., said yesterday he expects home sales in China will fall “sharply” this year because of government curbs. China Overseas has fallen 6.4 percent in Hong Kong trading this year, compared with the 1.6 percent gain in the benchmark Hang Seng Index. The Hang Seng Property Index is down 2 percent.

Credit Suisse said developers including China Overseas, which expanded heavily into the smaller cities, will be the most affected by the government measures.

The company wants its commercial property to account for 20 percent of its net income in five years, Kong said. The developer has more than 2 million square meters of commercial property land bank, he said.

Its parent had HK$32 billion ($4.1 billion) in cash at the end of last year, Kong said. Financing plans for the listed company will depend on its business expansion plans, he said.

China State Construction International Holdings Ltd., a sister company, will take part in the government’s call to build more affordable, public housing, including two projects in Chongqing, said Kong, who is also chairman of China State Construction.

The government plans to build 36 million low-income housing units in its 12th Five-Year Plan. The plans won’t have a “big impact” on the private residential market, Kong said.

“The return rates of building social housing is low, but it also has low risks,” Kong said.

--Editors: Tan Hwee Ann, Paul Panckhurst.

To contact Bloomberg News staff for this story: Bonnie Cao in Shanghai at bcao4@bloomberg.net

To contact the editor responsible for this story: Andreea Papuc at apapuc1@bloomberg.net