How Billionaires Wives Spend

India’s super-rich billionaires have buckets of money although they spend most of it into business. But have you ever wondered what their better half’s spending habits are? Is it only shopping or fascination of luxurious accessories? Or they like to reinvest their money to make more profit out of it? Let’s have a look at their lifestyles.

1. Nita Ambani

 

Nita Ambani, daughter of senior Birla executive, is often called as the “Empress of India”. She is married to the Reliance Industry’s Chairman and MD, Mukesh Ambani, who is the richest man in the country with an estimated wealth of $22.3 billion. Her husband might have built one of the world’s most expensive houses but she is typical Gujju bargain-hunting wife who love to get hold of the best piece at the best rate.

For her high rise home Antilla, she wanted a crockery set of 25,000 pieces of chinaware. This crockery set was from a 106 years old Japanese brand ‘Noritake’, whose crockery is 22 carat gold/platinum-trimmed porcelain. Surprisingly she didn’t buy it from the Mumbai showroom rather she flew to Sri Lanka to get her piece as the price was 70-80 percent less in Sri Lanka than Mumbai.

2. Tina Ambani

Tina Ambani is married to the seventh richest man in the country, Anil Ambani, who has an estimated wealth of $7.8 billion. She is a shy person, and doesn’t like to disclose her spending habits or her purchases. In a chat with ET, she once said, “I'm a very shy person. Please don't make this interview about me”. She has her own “Harmony Art Foundation”, where she hosts many art shows. She generally peeps out only during her art shows.

She is mostly busy with her Harmony art show, Kokilaben Dhirubhai Ambani Hospital and Research Institute. As quoted by ET, she says, “I want to speak about the art show and my work, but the press seems more interested in my clothes and jewellery”. She buys pieces of upcoming artists to encourage them. She bought a 100-m long yacht worth nearly 200 crore, which can host 20 people apart from the crew. She is also a member of 161 year old Royal Bombay Yacht Club (RBYC) in Mumbai.

3. Savitri Jindal

    

Savitri Jindal is a Industrialist who is also the fifth richest woman in the country with a net worth of $13.2 billion. She is also referred as “Indian Steel Baroness”. She overtook O. P. Jindal Group as Non Executive CEO, after her husband, Om Prakash died in helicopter crash in 2005.

She is a businesswoman but a very down to earth person. She doesn’t boast a luxurious life and she spends sparingly. She believes in reinvesting her money to make profit by buying or investing in stocks and shares.

4. Melinda Gates  

Melinda French Gates is an American businesswoman and wife of Bill Gates, who is the world’s second wealthiest man with a net worth of $61.3 billion. She is the co-founder and co-chair of her foundation called “Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation”. This initiative makes her out of the list and the only reason is ‘Its Selfless’. In 1999, she along with her husband donated $5 billion of their personal wealth to this foundation.

The primary aim of this foundation is to enhance healthcare and reduce extreme poverty globally. This foundation is controlled by three trustees primarily – Bill Gates, Melinda Gates and Warren Buffet. This foundation mainly has three wings under it namely – Global Health, Global Development and United States Program.

5. Gauri Khan

Guari Khan is a film producer and wife of Sharukh khan aka the ‘King Khan’ of Bollywood. She is also the co-founder of ‘Red Chillies Entertainment’, a film production house. Though she is a celebrity’s wife but like to keep a low profile. She is considered as one of the most stylish women in Bollywood. Priya Tanna, Editor of Vogue India says, “That she is stylish, enigmatic, and poised is known, but at the shoot we saw another side of her. Even in the frames she shares with Shah Rukh, she holds her own impressively”, as quoted by Wikipedia.

By profession she is a Fashion Designer and also an interior designer by passion. She bought a house worth 20 million pounds in London and wanted Subodh Gupta to design it for her. She said to NDTV, “When I saw Subhodh's art for the first time it was still coming out and it was very close to my heart… I have just done up my place and in fact we invited him to our place. I wanted to show him our place because I thought if he gets inspired… he would tell us what would look good and what would work. So he called me and invited me to this exhibition to see what he has done and if I like something”.

 

Super-Rich Spiritual Gurus of India

In today’s profane world the Indian gurus or in other words “miracle workers”  who are often referred as “godmen,” have more of a celebrity image with their savvy, powerful figures who control vast business empires and own enormous wealth they also dabble in politics and manipulate the media.

These modern day Gurus are not only renowned but they also possess a lot of wealth through NGO and private funds. Some prominent ones who have passed away cannot be missed, like Sathya Sai Baba who died recently could count more followers than any other Indian guru, and the financial worth of his spiritual empire is several times bigger. Sai Baba reportedly had wealth of over more than Rs 40,000 crore.

Here are 5 super-rich Indian gurus who own vast business empire.

Baba Ramdev

‘Yoga Guru’ Baba Ramdev gained popularity through ventures in yoga, alternative medicine and agriculture, as well as his advocacy on Indian political issues. His life is no less than a typical bollywood movie. He was born in a poor farmer's family in Haryana and until 15 years back Ramdev was a struggling man who was often seen on the streets of Haridwar, peddling his bicycle as he went to temples and people's homes to teach them yajnas. Later through his knowledge of yoga asanas Baba Ramdev went on to build an enviable Rs 1,100 crore empire.

He was also among the first to raise the issue of black money publicly in 2008 and before the assembly elections of 2009 it was during this time he officially announced his wealth of Rs 1,100 crore but according to tehelka.com t is said he controls over Rs 11,000 crore

Wealthy Assests: Patanjali Yogpeeth and Divya Yogi Mandir trusts and other branches, Patanjali Ayurved College, Patanjali Chikitsalaya, Yog Gram, Goshala, Patanjali Food And Herbal Park, etc.  His empire today consists of over three dozen companies.

Mata Amritanandamayi

Sudhamani Idamannel, also known as Mata Amritanandamayi Devi and Amma ("Mother"), the Hindu spiritual leader and teacher, who is revered as a saint by her followers. Amritanandamayi spontaneously embraces people to comfort them in their sorrow and therefore is also referred to as "The Hugging Saint." She has hugged close to 30 million people to date, she is widely respected for her humanitarian activities and is probably by far the richest godwoman in the country.

Main Source of Income: Amrita Viswa Vidyapeetham colleges, Amrita Institute of Medical Science (Kochi), Amrita Schools, TV channel. Amrita Schools are located across Kerala where students are charged the same fee as topnotch private schools. Adding to it are the contributions from her millions of Indian and foreign devotees.

Even by modest estimates, the Amritanandamayi Trust, which presides over, is said to have assets worth over Rs 1,500 crore. Today, her ashram at her native Vallikavu, a small island off Kollam, is a posh five-storey building.

Sri Sri Ravishankar

Sri Sri Ravishankar is a renowned spiritual leader, known worldwide. He is the founder of the very famous Art of Living foundation that has an estimated 300 million followers in 151 countries who donate millions to this foundation. He was born in Tamil Nadu and took up Vedic studies when he was just six years old and by the age of 17, he had completed studies in Vedic literature and science according to indiatoday.in

Main Source of Income: Art of Living Centre (Bangalore), Sri Sri Shankar Vidya Mandir Trust, PU College (Bangalore), Sri Sri Centre for Media Studies (Bangalore), Sri Sri University, Art of Living Health & Educational Trust (US), etc.

It is estimated that, he has built an empire with that has total turnover of approximately Rs 1,000 crore that includes his Art of Living (AOL) institutes, pharmacy and health centres, and a hill 40 km from Bangalore on lease from the Karnataka government for 99 years.

Asaram Bapu

Sant Shri Asharam Ji Bapu is endearingly known as Bapu among all the godmen and self proclaimed saints mentioned above Asaram Bapu is one of the most controversial. He is accused of land grabbing in Gujarat and various other cities and is busy settling the string of cases charged against him. There have also been rumors of "sinister activities" at his ashrams, after four children were found dead at his ashrams a couple of months ago and though it turned out that a student had killed them, it was bad publicity for the Godman nonetheless.

His most popular and well established asharam Motera in  Ahmedabad, is also said to be built on land acquired illegally. The trust headed by the controversial godman owns more than 350 ashrams in the country and abroad, besides 17,000 Bal Sanskar Kendras.

Asaram Bapu’s trust is said to have turnover Rs 350 crore according to official announcement (figures may vary) which includes the multicrore controversial ashram in Delhi’s Ridge area.

Gurmeet Ram Rahim

Gurmeet Ram Rahim Singh Insaan is the current leader of an organization called Dera Sacha Sauda. Since becoming the head of this sect, he has often been involved in controversy, even having criminal cases filed against him. The Dera Sacha Sauda was established by Shah Mastana Ji from Baluchistan in 1948, as a centre for spiritual learning.

Assets: Over 700 acres of agriculture land in Sirsa, a 175- bed hospital in Ganganagar, Rajasthan, gas stations, market complexes and over 250 ashrams across the globe. Although his income isn’t revealed officially but he considered to be one among the richest gurus.

 

Ram Rahim the Dera chief is accused of murder, rape and sexual harassment The most damaging allegation as yet on Baba Ram Rahim is of a female follower's letter anonymously sent to Prime Minister, President which claimed that Baba Ram Rahim had allegedly raped her and at least 50 more female followers in the Dera Sacha Sauda premises. This Baba is currently out on bail, he is being investigated by the CBI and trial is on before a special CBI court at Ambala.

Inside Google's Secret Lab

Google is stepping out of its search engine outfit by diversifying its business into various fields including Operating Systems to patenting automobile technologies. But apparently, two people at the company, Sergey Brin and Larry Page are determined to do something more- change the future of human kind- at company’s secret lab Google X.

The secret laboratory which reportedly runs "as mysteriously as the C.I.A.," has two facilities one in California and other in an undisclosed location within the U.S. runs Google’s secret projects ranging from humanoid robots to space elevators. The lab is filled with robotic engineers and the research conducted for the sci-fi future or even the existence of lab is unknown to most of the company’s employees.

Sergey Brin is reportedly “deeply involved” with the project and the lab is headed by robotics and artificial intelligence expert Sebastian Thrun from Stanford, best known for his work on the world’s first driverless car and Andrew Ng, a Stanford professor and an esteemed A.I. expert. Other people working in the lab include hires from Nokia, Microsoft, Stanford, M.I.T., New York University and Carnegie Mellon.

Here are some of the secret futuristic projects conducted inside the lab.

Space Elevators

The concept, which is common in science fiction movies, is one of the ambitious project of Google. The idea is simple, a long cable anchored at both ends. One to the ground and other to outer space. You can transport materials from earth to the outer orbits or just attach an elevator car, hit the button, and you could climb easily into the sky. The concept seems to be just an “idea”, but there are confident predictions from various parts of the world like the Irish Times predicted last year that space elevator may well replace the rockets within next 50 years. Also according to reports, Japan aims to build a space elevator by 2050.

"Google is collecting the world's data, so now it could be collecting the solar system's data," said Rodney Brooks, a professor at MIT's computer science and artificial intelligence lab and founder of Heartland Robotics.

Humanoid Robots

  Robots are the prominent figures in many Google X ideas. Apparently Sergey Brin had a conference through his representative robot, which moved around, talked and collected information from a group 40 people gathered in the NASA campus last year. The lab is experimenting on developing robots which can replace the human beings and can be destined to offices and homes for assisting in tasks or help people to work remotely.

Best Programming Tools for Multicore Development

Multicore processors rule the modern technology with an outstanding performance and durability which is pushing the single core chips into a near history. But when it comes to programmers, developing for multiple CPU cores on a single chip can be tiresome, considering the difference between both.  According to James Reinders, Intel’s director, "your approach to getting work done can be very different when you want to be able to do it concurrently or in parallel."

To help developers in ease of transition to multicore development, there is a bunch of powerful tools available now from many companies which are compiled by Infoworld.

Intel Parallel Studio

Intel’s Parallel Studio development suite is exclusively meant for developing programs for parallel computing. The tool features a threading assistant, optimizing compiler, libraries, a memory error and thread checker, and a threading performance profiler. It enables Visual Studio C/C++ developers to take full advantage of multicore processors, enabling Windows application developers to transform legacy serial apps into software meant for multi-core systems.

Intel Threading Building Blocks

It is known as TBB and is essentially a template library consisting of data structures and algorithms which help to build scalable parallel applications. That is it can be scaled to make use of available cores.

C++ AMP (Accelerated Massive Parallelism)

It allows C++ developers to run applications across varied computing environments. It also enables developers to control GPUs for parallel programming. The library is implemented on DiretX 11.

Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 and .Net Framework 4 

It is used to build Graphic User Interface applications and also a good tool assisting developers in building parallel applications. It has a wide support for different programming languages.

Rogue Wave Software ThreadSpotter

Rogue Wave Software provides many cross-platform programming tools. ThreadSpotter is a performance optimization tool, which analyzes the performance issues in multi-threaded applications.

 

Oracle Solaris Studio

 

It’s a software development product for both Solaris and Linux. It offers multithread performance tools, tools for analysis and optimizations and overall simplified multicore development.

Eclipse Parallel Tools Platform

It is an open source platform for developing industrial strength parallel applications. It supports runtime systems and parallel architectures. It also has a parallel debugger and widely support other tools.

5 Things You Did Not Know about Google

Information today has become as available as the internet, literally; but where would the world be without the revolutionary invention that made this happen? Nobody (except maybe Google) knows.

And since Google makes it its business to know all about everybody, have you ever wondered how much you know about the world’s most popular search engine? (If you haven’t, now is probably a good time to start).

Marissa Mayer, the vice president of local, maps, and localization at Google, has been on Google’s team from the second year after the search engine launched. Being on the team for so long has let her see Google’s growth first-hand, and in an interview with Bloomberg Businessweek, she listed out five things you probably didn’t know about the search engine.

Here are the five so-far-unknown insider anecdotes about Google:

1. Why so much of Google’s homepage is white:

Google's dependence on white space on its homepage was one that arose purely out of necessity, and not because it wanted to be minimalist in design. According to Mayer, Sergey Brin, Google co-founder explained “We don’t have a webmaster and I don’t do HTML.”

2. How Google's AdSense happened:

 

Mayer, in the interview, said she almost killed the idea of targeting ads based on users’ e-mails, because she (at first) thought the idea was “creepy”. However, a colleague working an all-nighter overlooked her dismissal of the idea, and thus started ads-in-e-mail.

Today, Google’s AdSense is a multi-billion dollar business.

3. How much would it take to occupy some white space?

 

 

 

According to Google’s calculation, an ad on its home page would cost at least $10 million, if not more, apparently.

If only the space were for sale! (But then again, the only white space humankind knows on the internet would be cluttered with stuff we see everywhere else).

4. Why did the Google homepage have a copyright symbol on it?

 

Talking about the white space on Google—the page had the copyright symbol installed after initial test users did nothing but stare at the home page, “waiting for the rest of it to load,” Mayer said. It’s not necessary, but the symbol served as a sign that the minimal page had finished loading and was ready for a search entry.

5. And about acquiring things...

Mayer once had an extreme fascination for Motorola’s circa-1996 StarTAC mobile phone; she even bought used models of the phone on e-Bay to try and build up a collection.
But any resemblance to the incident, whether from fiction or real-life (read “Google’s acquisition of Motorola Mobility") is like when you happen to hoard a product and then come to a point years later where you buy the company that makes said product— it’spurely coincidental.