The 4GB RAM variant of the Nokia 6 (2018)/Nokia 6.1 is all set for launch in India later this week. Sales will open May 13, with Amazon India being the exclusive retail partner.
While there’s no confirmation on pricing yet, rumors say the model will set you back around INR 18,999 ($280). For comparison, this is INR 2,000 ($30) more than what the 3GB RAM model costs.
[“Source-gsmarena”]
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Wearing a bright maroon printed dress and white Nikes, Sarina Grewal, 25, looks extremely comfortable sitting on the carpet in her office, talking animatedly to her colleague, Akhil Thakur, about a new design they are working on. Grewal and Thakur can often be found working together in the library area—even if it means sitting on the floor—to escape the noise and chatter near their desks. This jells well with the casual comfort vibe of Wieden+Kennedy’s (W+K’s) Delhi office. “I joined right after college because I didn’t want to waste time. This place made me want to stick around. It has been three years already!” says Grewal, an art director at the creative agency.
The mascot : The vibrant office in Saket, Delhi, is quite a hit. “I have often seen random people walking past and pointing out to the red horse at the entrance of our office. As a matter of fact, the red horse is the most popular selfie destination too,” she laughs. It has turned into a sort of mascot for the office, with official paraphernalia like coasters and tote bags bearing its picture.
This is not the only thing that makes the Delhi office stand out. On one side of the lounge is a ceiling full of illustrations. “These are all illustrations of my colleagues. When someone joins, we get their photos clicked, send it to a Pichwai artist, Mahendra Kumar in Ajmer, and get these illustrations made. It is a W+K tradition,” she says. The entrance also has a wall to showcase exemplary art/creative work by employees. For now, it also serves as a noticeboard announcing the next movie for their Thursday movie evenings.
“We have these fun things every week. Our Amsterdam office has wine Thursdays, so we decided to do movies instead. Some days we are at work till 2-3am and these things help us to de-stress,” adds Grewal.
The nomadic life: The W+K office is flexible about who sits where. By lunchtime, Grewal says, most people are sitting somewhere other than their usual seats, discussing projects. A round table near her work desk serves as an informal meeting space, as do couches in the lounge-cum-library area. The library is the most popular venue though, both for meetings and video-game sessions.
The studio has recently moved to the main office space. This, Grewal believes, is less alienating for the people working on the final product. The erstwhile studio is right opposite the main entrance, with a large Make In India lion standing proudly within. Make In India was one of the campaigns W+K worked on. Around the office are signs of other campaigns—posters from Nike’s last print campaign and miniature IndiGo aeroplane models.
The thinking spot: The library houses magazines and books on design and art. There are a few yearbooks as well. A table next to it serves as a standing desk—its height is adjustable. There are witty posters too. One such poster declares, “Be mediocre. You will sleep better.”
“The office is always very casual. You will see us joking and laughing. But then again, everyone here is passionate about the brands they get to handle. Which makes it a wonderful place to begin your career with,” Grewal says.
The Work Tour is a series which looks at how people are engaging with office design and how it impacts their productivity and positivity at work.
[“Source-livemint”]
Single-family offices serving the financial and wealth management interests of rich families have become a growing force in global markets as wealth has boomed.
In the last 10 years, the number of single-family offices managing wealth management, investing and philanthropic needs for families with at least $200 million has doubled to as many as 15,000, according to Citi Private Bank. Yet little is known about how many of these offices—managing several trillion dollars of assets—operate. Even executives who run single-family offices are often in the dark about what their peers do.
One way the veil can be lifted is by getting family office executives together, which private banks and wealth managers that serve them as advisors and bankers, try to do. In fact, many single-family office practitioners, once happy to work alone, are now eager for insights they can gain from their peers and will seek out opportunities to network with the right people, Campbell says.
“We’ve seen a significant pick up in interest in (learning) what’s working, what’s not working and how they can learn from the mistakes of others,” he says.
A familiar adage in financial services is that, “if you’ve seen one family office, you’ve seen one family office,” meaning, no two are alike. But the truth is, the operations of most family offices are very much the same, he says. Most of them have to manage investment portfolios, estate planning and philanthropy, as well as paying bills and handling legal affairs.
“Where they differ is in areas of culture and values, and in the governance biases and practices of the family,” he says.
Campbell’s insights are well-founded: Citi works with 1,100 family offices, most of them serving a single family. Most also use Citi as their primary bank, he says.
How families communicate with the offices that run their wealth management needs is one area that can differ wildly. One of the families Citi works with, for example, established a family office in a separate jurisdiction from where they lived, a practice that can provide tax advantages. The office was set up nine years ago with a staff to run it, but as of today, no one in the family has ever been there, Campbell says.
At the other extreme, a principal member of another family that works with Citi goes into his family office every Thursday, sometimes with other family members, and they cook a meal together with the staff. “Oddly enough, those are both models that work,” he says.
Citi has found families are willing to share what’s worked for them on a range of topics if they can exchange ideas with families of a similar wealth level and degree of sophistication. Two years ago, the private bank began a “family office leadership program” in New York, which includes 125 family-office executives serving the world’s “most affluent families,” Campbell says. The event has now spread to programs in Hong Kong and Dubai, and elsewhere to accommodate demand.
Because it’s difficult to cover all the topics families want to discuss, Citi is now rolling out a series of articles and white papers on nitty-gritty topics, like, “why family offices are increasingly relying upon bespoke remuneration packages to attract top executive talent” and “how grooming tomorrow’s family leaders can help preserve family wealth and influence and prevent discord in the family.”
There are a lot of “how-to” manuals on how to set up and run a family office, Campbell says, but “the nuance is in how and when to apply these concepts, and that’s what we’re tackling with these articles.”
[“Source-barrons”]
Facebook is adding a Sleep Mode to its Messenger Kids service to let parents limit when their kids can use it. It’s the latest concession that tech companies are making as critics question whether they should be targeting kids at all. Among their chief concerns: The effects on kids are not yet known, and companies might not have children’s best interests at heart when tech for kids is such a lucrative market.
Rather than kill the services completely, as some critics want, Facebook, Amazon and Google are mostly tinkering at the edges. That leaves open the underlying questions of whether their products truly serve a need for the youngest set and if they are good for them.
Here’s a look at the changes announced this week:
Facebook Messenger Kids
In December, Facebook created a kids-friendly version of its Messenger app. It has no ads and gives parents plenty of controls over whom their children can chat with. The thinking was that while the regular apps are designed for people 13 or over, younger kids were on it anyway. Facebook saw Messenger Kids as a way to give the younger set a safer option.
The changes: Parents can now specify the times kids aren’t allowed on — either as a one-time restriction or something recurring, such as after 9 p.m. every school night. While the app is in Sleep Mode, kids will get a message when they open it telling them so, and they won’t be able to use it.
The shortcomings: Critics say that Messenger Kids isn’t responding to a need, but rather creating one. “It appeals primarily to children who otherwise would not have their own social media accounts,” states a letter signed by 100 child development experts and advocates. Merely offering time controls falls short of killing the app completely.
YouTube Kids
Since 2015, the Google-owned service has had a child-oriented app, YouTube Kids, described as a “safer” experience for finding “Peppa Pig” episodes or user-generated videos of people unboxing toys.
Nonetheless, the company has been under fire for not vetting out computer-generated, sometimes-disturbing video, such as your favorite cartoon characters having painful dental surgery — or worse.
The nonprofit Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood has also asked the Federal Trade Commission to investigate whether YouTube’s data collection and advertising practices violate federal child privacy rules.
The changes: YouTube said this week that it is overhauling its kids app so parents can limit video to those vetted by humans, rather than computers. With this option, kids can watch only a selection of children’s programming such as “Sesame Street” and PBS Kids.
The shortcomings: The old automated system is on by default, meaning parents need to actively choose the human-only option. And YouTube is continuing to show ads on its kid-focused service.
It also doesn’t help that many kids (with or without their parents) use the main YouTube site for video, meaning they miss out on both human and automated controls for kids.
Amazon Alexa
Sure, it’s fun to ask Amazon’s Alexa voice assistant to fart — as many kids have discovered after parents buy an Alexa-enabled Echo speaker. But parents and childhood experts have been wondering what effects smart speakers may have on young kids, who may not quite understand whether Alexa is human and maybe learn from barking orders at her that barking orders is OK.
The changes: Alexa will soon thank kids for shouting out questions “nicely” if they say “please,” the online retail giant announced Wednesday . The new response is part of a kid-friendly update that’s coming next month, giving parents more control over the voice assistant. Adults can also set Alexa to go silent at bedtime or block music with explicit lyrics.
The shortcoming: This may be appeasing parents just enough to buy more Amazon products. After all, the company did not get to where it is today by missing out on new business opportunities. Amazon said it will now sell an $80 Echo Dot aimed at children, complete with colorful cases and a two-year warranty (regular Echo Dots are $50).
[“Source-gadgets.ndtv”]
