Azim Premji is a name well known to a lot of Indians.

After all, Premji is the shrewd entrepreneur who inherited a $2 million Vanaspati (hydrogenated cooking oil) company in Mumbai and turned it into a $3 billion IT, BPO and R&D Services organization called Wipro that is today listed on the New York Stock Exchange and serves customers around the world.

Along the way, Premji and his company Wipro also dealt a severe blow to the American middle class by snatching their well paying jobs and shipping them off to low-wage India.

But outside of India, the name Premji rings a bell - if at all - with very few people.

But with The Wall street Journal (subscription required) on Tuesday paying a front-page tribute to this Indian tycoon in a Continue Reading…

Bollywood movies have never made it in any significant way with mainstream American audiences in the U.S.

We have watched dozens of Hindi and Tamil movies in U.S. theaters but seldom see Americans - White, Black or Hispanics - in the movie hall. For the most part, it’s only desis who watch Indian movies in theaters here.

There are plenty of reasons why Indian movies have not found favor with American movie goers - they are way too long, the movies are far too crude with little finesse, mostly mediocre performances by our Bollywood stars, garish costumes, weird songs, poor plots, not enough action, 19th century special effects…the list is endless.

The Chinese, Taiwanese and French have done a better job in attracting mainstream audiences to their movies in the U.S.

Now the Koreans are trying to woo Americans with a new English movie called Dragon Wars that’ll hit theaters this Friday i.e. September 14.

Interestingly, Dragon Wars was made in English and released in South Korea with Korean subtitles.

Today’s New York Times has a piece on Dragon Wars:

The producer, Hyung Rae Shim, is aiming a film squarely at American moviegoers, an ambitious and expensive endeavor called “Dragon Wars.” Hissing, computer-generated dragons terrorize Los Angeles as a television reporter unravels a mystery that will stop them.

Made on a $30 million budget, Dragon Wars is expected to debut on 2,000 screens, according to the NYT story, which also notes that early reviews for the movie have not been favorable.

With significant contribution from its India Design Center in Bangalore, AMD launched its delayed Barcelona chip for computer servers today.

Officially called the Quad-Core AMD Opteron Processor, the new chip intensifies the battle between AMD and rival Intel for dominance in the market for servers that underpin complex tasks such as managing corporate data centers or hosting web sites.

AMD’s new chip took over three years to develop and is the first native x86 quad-core processor on a single piece of silicon.

Intel, which already offers the quad-core Xeon processors, has taken the easier route with its quad-core processors by packaging together two dual-core processors.

Highlights of the quad-core AMD Opteron include Continue Reading…