Making A Splash

This was no dry affair. In an effort to make the world take notice of the very real danger global warming poses to their country, Maldives President Mohamed Nasheed and his Cabinet decided to make a splash. The President, his deputy, 11 ministers and the Cabinet Secretary donned wet suits and held a meeting six metres under the surface of an Indian Ocean lagoon. They passed a resolution calling for concerted global action on climate change, using waterproof markers to sign on a white board. The Maldives, an archipelago of about 1,200 islands off India’s west coast, faces the prospect of being submerged as global warming makes water levels rise. Many of its islands are just 4.9 feet above sea level.

5,000,000,000, And Counting

Twitter has been around for only three years but the micro-blogging site has already become a phenomenon. The reasons aren’t hard to find. It forced people to limit their online chatter to just 140 words—beyond that, the cursor stopped moving. Excess was frowned upon and Internet-age wordsmiths got cracking with their SMS-like warbles. Recently, the site crossed 5 billion tweets. The man who tweeted his way into history was Robin Sloane. A former executive of Current Media, Sloane immortalised his update with a two-word lament: “Oh lord.” Twitter hit the 1 billion tweet mark only in November 2008. But, in just a year’s time, it amassed five times that number of messages.

Now, Venture Capitalist Murthy

Catamaran Investment will be the latest venture capital fund to become operational in the coming months. Founded by NR Narayana Murthy, it will focus on seed and early-stage investments. While the Infosys Chief Mentor has divested Rs 170 crore from his IT-services company to this end, it is not clear what the size of the fund will be. “There is no time frame to spend this, and the focus will initially be on Indian companies before expanding to others,” he said. Although it will focus on entrepreneurs in India, the Bangalore-based VC fund will not be inclined towards any particular set of sectors. Its team, to start with, will have 3-4 people.