Aitken Spence signs BOI deal for new $ 100 m hotel with Spanish chain

Aitken Spence PLC has entered into an agreement with the Board of Investment of Sri Lanka (BOI) to set up a five-star luxury resort in Ahungalla.
This agreement was signed by BOI Chairman Dr. Lakshman Jayaweera and the Directors of Aitken Spence Malin Hapugoda and Vipula Goonathilake.

Aitken Spence PLC will launch the first business model involving the Southern Highway and the Mattala Airport by investing in a $ 100 million beach resort in Ahungalla to be managed by an international hotel chain. The five-storey, 500-roomed, five-star luxury resort, which will be managed by RIU Hotels, Spain, would also be a first for the Spanish chain, being their inaugural project in the Asia Pacific region.
“The timing of the hotel’s opening will be right since the Southern Highway to Hambantota is expected to reach completion by then and we have the Mattala Airport facility already in place, giving us the perfect mix for our business model.  Aitken Spence has always encouraged infrastructure development in the country and our investment is proof of our confidence and support of the Government’s development plans,” said Deputy Chairman of the Group Rajan Brito.
The Aitken Spence management is also of the opinion that the private sector needs to develop business modes of this nature, which are in line with the Government’s vision for the country’s development.
BOI stated: “The BOI is very pleased that this project will be started in Ahungalla. The policy of the Government is to get 2.5 million tourist arrivals by 2016. Hence hotel room capacity needs to be increased to meet growing demand.”
The project will also be unique in its concept, since it will introduce charter flights to the country. The hotel which would cater to high end customers looking for long stay vacations will arrive on Boeing 787 Dreamliner charters which can carry up to 200-300 passengers at a time. RIU Hotels is an all-inclusive model which has seen international success across 107 properties managed by them in 16 countries.

Sinhala numerals in Unicode 7.0

The Unicode Consortium has just announced the release of version 7.0 of the Unicode Standard. Unicode 7.0 includes Sinhala numerals.
“The Unicode Standard supports the interchange, processing, and display of the written texts of the diverse languages of the world and in addition supports classical and historical texts of many written language,” the website www.unicode.org stated.

The ICT Agency of Sri Lanka (ICTA) initiated research in partnership with the University of Colombo, School of Computing. Extensive research was carried out on inscriptions on walls of temples, on numbers in horoscopes, on Ola leaf paging and the historical evolution of Sinhala numerals was studied. Sinhala numerals were also correlated with numerations used in other countries. The research yielded the fact that five different types of numerations were used in Sinhala. Of these numerations, two sets were in use in the 20th century. These are: (1) ‘Lith Ilakkam’ which include a zero and had been used in astrological calculations and in numbering pages of Ola leaf books, and (2) ‘Sinhala Ilakkam’ or Sinhala archaic numerals used to express simple numbers. The latter had been used in the Kandyan convention signed in 1815.
Lith Ilakkam, which includes the zero concept are included in the main Sinhala code page of Unicode 7.0, and Sinhala Ilakkam are included in the supplementary area.

Oracle becomes second largest Cloud SaaS company in the world

• Q4 SaaS and PaaS subscriptions up 25% to $ 322 million, Q4 IaaS subscription revenue up 13% to $ 128 million

Oracle Corporation has announced that fiscal 2014 Q4 total revenues were up 3% to $ 11.3 billion. Software and Cloud revenues were up 4% to $ 8.9 billion.
GAAP Cloud software-as-a-service (SaaS) and platform-as-a-service (PaaS) revenues were up 25% to $ 322 million, while non-GAAP SaaS and PaaS revenues were up 23% to $ 327 million. In addition, Cloud infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) revenues were up 13% to $ 128 million.
New software licenses revenues were unchanged at $ 3.8 billion. Software license updates and product support revenues were up 7% to $ 4.7 billion. Overall hardware systems revenues were up 2% to $ 1.5 billion with hardware systems products up 2% to $ 870 million, and hardware systems support up 2% to $ 596 million.
In Q4, both GAAP and non-GAAP earnings per share were lowered by $ 0.02 due to a non-operating loss caused by exchange rate changes in Venezuela. Furthermore, last year’s Q4 GAAP earnings per share increased $ 0.04 because of a $ 269 million acquisition price reduction.  As a result of these two factors, Q4 GAAP earnings per share were unchanged at $ 0.80 compared with last year, while GAAP net income was down 4% to $ 3.6 billion, and GAAP operating income was down 2% to  $4.9 billion. Q4 GAAP operating margin was 43% in the quarter.

Apple says sold well over 800 m mobile devices

Reuters: Apple Inc Chief Executive Officer Tim Cook, opening the iPhone maker’s annual developers’ conference on Monday, said the iPhone maker has sold more than 800 million mobile devices.
Some 130 million customers bought their first Apple mobile device in the past 12 months, Cook said.
Developers converged on the Moscone Center in downtown San Francisco to watch Cook and his lieutenants outline the latest tweaks and features new to its Macintosh computer and iOS mobile operating software.

How to Create a Attention-grabbing Powerful Presentation -Kadapila

Every entrepreneur, CEO, Manager will definitely have to do a presentation in their career.
But the presentation you did should be attention-grabbing; People should remember your presentation,
Even after months people should be talking about your presentation because it’s so mesmerizing.
The following are five techniques to capture and hold your audience’s attention throughout your presentation.

Cognitive Dissonance.

Carry on your presentation while your audiences guessing what you are really talking about. Hold their brains off balance by feeding bits of information as opposed to revealing your point early. For example you can build a graphic slide by slide like assembling a puzzle. Slowly reveal parts of your graphic briefly speak to each part and build your graphic so your point is revealed in the end.

Prepare a powerful opening –

Start your presentation with an Inspirational quote, intriguing question or a personal story and relate that to your presentation topic Remember the saying, “Facts tell and stories sell.”
Witticism perks up people as well