LIVING THE DREAM: Meet The American Poker Exiles Who Gamble All Day And Party All Night In Playa Del Carmen

Mike Nudelman/Business Insider

PLAYA DEL CARMEN, MEXICO - When Matt Block walks into Big Al & Redneck Steve's Beer Bucket on 10th Street on a brilliant sunny Sunday afternoon with a tan and the tropics-approved outfit of light polo, simple shorts, and low tops with no socks, he looks like the thousands of people who flock to the vacation paradise 45 minutes south of Cancun.

Except unlike the tourists hemorrhaging cash on watered-down margaritas and overpriced beach chairs, the New Yorker is here to work. On this Sunday, he makes $7,100 in a few hours sitting in front of his computer, playing online poker. He arrived a month ago and has no plans to leave anytime soon. Life is too good, cheap and easy, with an endless string of women "actively looking to make bad decisions,"as he puts it.

The 28-year-old - "ancient for poker," he says - is a new addition to the informal brotherhood of about 150 mostly young men, the majority American, who have flocked to this beach resort on the so-called Riviera Maya to make their fortunes at online poker, spending their spare time partying, hitting on women, and living large. Members of the loosely connected group span more than a dozen years in age and varying degrees of card-playing talent. Some bonds are tighter than others. People come and go, but together they make up what you could call the Poker Frat of Playa del Carmen.

The life sounds like a dream. And for the most part it is.

* * *

On April 15, 2011 - "Black Friday" in the poker world - the Department of Justice shut down access to PokerStars, Absolute Poker, and Full Tilt Poker for users in the U.S., freezing players' accounts in the process. Thousands of professional players, mostly young men who knew nothing other than poker, had a choice: Find gainful employment at a real job or move abroad and continue plying their trade. Many chose the latter option, alighting to Canada, Costa Rica, Malta, and elsewhere. A few found their way to Playa.

Life is too good, cheap and easy, with an endless string of women 'actively looking to make bad decisions.'

It's a manageable, walkable place, where it's possible to pay $700 a month to live five minutes from the famous Mimitas Beach Club. Life centers around Fifth Avenue, just two blocks up from the ocean, where cars are banned on a stretch of the road, turning the avenue over to tourists. Haagen-Dazs is big, as are, for some reason, the Montreal Canadiens. Five Starbucks dot the streets around the center of town. (Block credits the chain's dominance for his mother's willingness to support his move.) A shiny new mall, a sign of the coming Cancunification, has a Forever 21, Aldo, and Victoria's Secret. On the next block, a novelty T-shirt shop sells shirts reading "I [Heart] Justin Bieber" and "I'm in Cancun, Bitch."

When Gus Voelzel arrived in 2011, he was one of the first 30 or so poker players here. A lawyer turned cash-game maestro, he was planning on staying three weeks and still hasn't left. He made a few friends, but the group wasn't tight. Shaun Deeb changed that a few months later when he won four tournaments during the 2012 PokerStars Spring Championship of Online Poker (SCOOP), totaling more than $160,000. Deeb invited everyone to a local bar, Coco Maya, to celebrate. The gang got along famously, bonding over booze, women, and cards. The Poker Frat of Playa del Carmen was born.

Each day they would wake up late, shake off a hangover, and log on. Most of the online players are in Europe, and the easiest way to make money is take it off the casual player who signs on after work. The seven-hour time difference between Mexico and Central Europe makes Playa the holy grail, says Seth Davies. So they'd play 10, 12, 16 tables at once for between four and eight hours, grab a six-pack per person, meet on the beach, and then head to a bar or club. They'd cut lines and skip cover charges, since managers and doormen soon came to understand that the group had money to spend. The boys would dance, drink, hook up with tourists, then go home and do it again the next day, reliving the highlights on a group Skype chat.

Noah Davis

Gus Voelzel at work. He arrived in Playa at 2011.

Word quickly spread around the expat poker community. Playa was cheaper than Canada, safer and more convenient than Costa Rica, and more fun than Rosarito on the west coast of Mexico. There's fishing, snorkeling, scuba diving, golf, paintball, beach volleyball, soccer, and other activities within easy access. Living on $1,000 a month isn't difficult, and $2,000 is more than enough. Block rents a two-bedroom apartment with a pool and a security guard for $1,150. Voelzel's three-bedroom place, which he shares with an ever-rotating cast of roommates, sets him back $1,800. And there's no need to learn Spanish. Playa Now, a service started by two non-poker-playing expats, will deliver food for 25 pesos (about $2). The delivery charge for other items - use your imagination here - is 50 pesos.

The lifestyle is badass. We're not playboy gangster helicopter guys, but we have freedom.

Thirty players doubled, then tripled, and they now sit at more than 150. The population peaks for SCOOP, the second-biggest online poker tournament of the year with $40,000,000 in guaranteed payouts, when another 50 or so players arrive. Being an online poker player is a transient profession. All you need is an internet connection, and most players in Playa have backup service.

"The lifestyle is badass," Seth's older brother, Nick, says. "We're not playboy gangster helicopter guys, but we have freedom.There are kids who I think could run Fortune 500 companies and there are kids who I wouldn't want watching my dog." Players of all sorts are welcome in Playa.

A Big Win

Seth Davies does not look like a guy who won $243,437.17 less than three days ago. He's "grinding," a term the players use reverentially to signify how diligently they work and how fastidious they are in their approach. Davies is shirtless, wearing only University of Oregon basketball shorts, his Luke 14:11 tattoo clearly visible on the inside of his right bicep, staring intently at the Apple monitor that displays the four tournaments he's playing concurrently. He spends at least 50 hours a week here - more during SCOOP - sitting in a leather chair at the kitchen table in the large, open apartment with purple walls and hideous modern art that he shares with Voelzel and another roommate, Drew. (He and Drew are Voelzel's 11th and 12th roommates in the past two years.) His roommates' laptops with huge auxiliary monitors are also on the table, and they're grinding away, too, looking to score.

Noah Davis

A player's screen as he plays a hand.

Davies had a big win Thursday morning. The two-day No Limit Hold 'Em tournament he dominated began at 4 p.m. on Tuesday. It ran for 12 hours, then started up again at 4 on Wednesday afternoon. Davies was also playing in other tournaments, splitting his attention and attempting to maximize the opportunities to cash. About 8 p.m. Wednesday, he decided to focus, "one-tabling" as opponents busted and he began to think he had a real shot to win. Evening became night became daybreak. "I never felt really tired," he says. "It was adrenaline-fueled. All of a sudden I looked up and the sun was up."

At 8:16 Thursday morning Davies won. Voelzel, who had been watching the live stream in his room upstairs while simultaneously catching up on "How I Met Your Mother," walked into the kitchen, high-fived his roommate, then passed out from exhaustion. Davies was too amped to sleep. "I took a shot of warm vodka," he says, laughing. "I just hung out here for awhile. No one was awake. I felt like a fucking crackhead. I was so hopped up on adrenaline. I needed to do something, so I walked to the store and bought deodorant." Then, he took a nap, woke up, went to his friend's to start drinking, partied, went to sleep, and started playing all over again.

Tales of poker marathons are common. The guys like to tell the story of a high-stakes player who had such horrible food poisoning he wound up lying on the tile floor in his bathroom while continuing a game. He was playing heads-up against a "fish" (a rich guy with cash to lose), and couldn't afford to step away. Eventually he made $220,000 while leaning on the porcelain, hurling into the toilet.

* * *

Online poker moves at a remarkable velocity. I watched Voelzel for an hour and a half. He played roughly 1,200 hands, with 15 seconds to make a move on each turn. He rarely took that long, though, glancing at his cards, processing his decision, then acting. He sat at 16 tables at once, 12 on his large Samsung monitor and another four a laptop that also ran two programs designed to help maximize winning. One kept the various games organized on his screen. The other tracked every hand Voelzel had sat in with different opponents, reporting the percentage of time that person took a specific action in a given situation.

The volume of data was astonishing. Voelzel had sat in 130,000 hands on one guy, 41,000 with another, and 15,000 with a third. At one point, he had A2 (a "bad hand") but he raised an opponent because the stats told him that the person folded to a raise 81 percent of the time. The opponent folded; Voelzel took the pot. It seems like cheating, but of course there's nothing to stop his opponents from doing it as well.

Voelzel also collects information on the players he sees frequently, taking notes on particular plays and tendencies. Sometimes they help, sometimes not. "Fuck, I have to fold because I don't have time to read all my notes," he says at one point, turning his attention to one of the other 15 hands he's playing. During 90 minutes of low stakes $1 or $2 big blinds, Voelzel made $400. Not bad, but not the $1,000 an hour he tries to earn.

It's getting harder to make money all the time. Black Friday eliminated a huge number of American recreational players, who made up 70 percent of the market. Those people, who played for fun rather than profit, were easy marks. Meanwhile, the velocity of online play allows inexperienced players to gain a decade's worth of experience in a few months, while the proliferation of poker books, TV programs, and the general popularity of the game mean the average player is better. "You'll often have five good players and one bad player at a six-max table, whereas pre-Black Friday the ratio was normally three to three or even two to four," Voelzel says.

The final factor is the Balkanization of the online sites. PokerStars.fr and PokerStars.es force players in France and Spain, respectively, to play only against players in their country; as a result, many of the pros from those nations have moved to nonsegregated places where they can play against a larger player pool. One of the biggest fears of the online poker players in Playa is that Brazil and Russia, two of the countries with the biggest poker playing populations and the most fish, will go the route of France and Spain. That would be a disaster. "It would be very difficult to make more than $50,000 or $60,000 a year," Nick Davies says. "And it's already difficult enough."

The Borrowers

Surprisingly, most tournament poker players prefer not to gamble with their own money. The majority are staked - given a bankroll to pay for buy-ins. Staking provides a hedge against the ups and downs of tournament poker, and a way for the "stable" owner to diversify his investments. These staked "horses" split any winnings 50-50 with the person who stakes them, but only after they have paid back the original money. If they haven't, 100% of the earnout goes toward getting the "makeup" back to zero. As a result, it's possible to win a tournament and see no money. One player in Playa earned $81,000 in one tournament but had had such a bad run of luck that he was still $19,000 in makeup after the victory.

Noah Davis

Seth Davies playing several games at once.

Seth Davies is staked in part by Nick, who started a staking business with a friend in March 2009 with $3,000 and ran it up to $300,000 before Black Friday. Almost all their money was frozen when the feds descended on the sites, but Nick has slowly built his bankroll back. The elder Davies, who has about 20 horses, made $50,000 when his brother won his SCOOP.

When staking works, it pays off. But it's based on trust. "This morning I had to deal with a kid who stole $8,800 from me last fall," Nick Davies says, sipping a glass of water with a shot of vodka in it. (He is trying to cut a few pounds; a $5,000 bet is riding on the outcome.) "He kept giving me excuses, saying his girlfriend had a nine-month miscarriage, and then changing it to an abortion. That's the downside, Makeup can be zero or 100 cents. I used to value my makeup at about 95 cents on the dollar but Black Friday changed the moral compass of our industry. People got very shady."

For Block, getting staked helps with the emotions of the game. "Last week I lost $25,000. This week I made $25,000. The swings are a little tough sometimes," he tells me at Big Al's while C+C Music Factory's "Gonna Make You Sweat (Everybody Dance Now)" played over the speakers. "If you think of it as money, you're fucked."

The downside to being staked is that you don't win as much. Seth Davies took home roughly $90,000 of the $250,000 he won. His brother got some and another guy earned $80,000. Seth had to pay back makeup, too, the result of a year spent treading water. And even when he earned the payout, he needed to be careful. Another long dry spell could be coming. "As a tournament player, it's all about being smart with your real-life money," the younger Davies says. "It's about being able to get a $50,000 paycheck and not go spend it. It's funny as I'm telling you this while we're talking about planning a yacht party."

The Davies boys, Voelzel, and some of their closer friends made a deal that if anyone won $100,000 or more in a SCOOP event, they would pay for a yacht party. The question now was when to hold it. One faction hoped to rent the 56-foot boat the week after SCOOP but another group wanted to wait until they could recruit some girls. Negotiations on the Skype "Yacht Party" chat were tense, dozens of messages popping up every hour.

Ultimately, the decision would come down to the Davies duo, who were paying, and Voelzel, one of the few poker players who speaks Spanish, who would order the boat. (There was a 100-foot one to rent, but it was limited to 22 people instead of 30, apparently because the owners were wary of letting too many drunk 20-somethings on their vessel at one time.) If the Playa gang has a social chair, it's Voelzel.

"He's going to be governor of this place," Nick told me about his friend. Voelzel, skinny with a shaved head and a vague resemblance to Steve Nash, previously worked as an entertainment and sports lawyer in Austin, playing poker on the side. He's affable and easy-going, the type of guy who would go out until 4 a.m., pick up the backpack he left with the owners of a nearby bodega, jump in a cab to the airport, and take the redeye to Austin, where he'd tailgate before the University of Texas football game, go to the game, go out to party, and then take the redeye back to Cancun, arriving home in time to play the big Sunday Million tournament. "It was a lot," he admits with a smile as we took a shot of coconut-flavored mescal chased by a Corona at La Mezcalinna, the closest thing to a dive bar on 12th Street. A girl walked by wearing only her bra and a skirt. No one seemed phased.

Noah Davis

After a day of nonstop play, the poker contingent the local bars.

Playa is a non-stop circus of vacationers from all around the world, beautiful women looking to party. The Norwegian University Colleges has an exchange program in Playa (offering Spanish and Personal Training among other courses), meaning there's another group of tall, blonde Norwegian exchange students arriving every few months. The general consensus of the poker players is that you could pretty much take home a girl any night you wanted.

We have a skill set that's immeasurable but kind of unadaptable to the real world.

The transient nature of life in Playa can be a blessing but also a curse. "The first lesson I learned down here is that tourists are great, but they are bad for you," says Block, who's hooked up with half a dozen girls during his first month in Playa. "The first 12 days I was here, I got absolutely nothing done. You meet people who are on vacation and you end up going on vacation with them. They are here for four days and you go out for four days with them. You know that feeling you get when your vacation is over and you're sad? You feel that."

"It sounds cliche," he adds later, "but when it comes to women here, it's pretty limitless. I've calmed down now, though. I've been living with a really amazing girl from the Netherlands for the past two weeks. In one more week she leaves, though. Fuck, that's going to be weird."

Far From Home

There's a terrible movie called "Runner Runner" starring Ben Affleck as a shady entrepreneur who runs an online poker empire from Costa Rica. At one point, he's sitting in a hot tub, lamenting about his situation. "It's not that I'm homesick. I'm not away at camp. It's an issue of freedom," he says. "I can't walk down Michigan Avenue. I can't walked down Broadway. I can't walk down Art Rooney Avenue and have Primanti's kielbasa and cheese. You know what that's like for a lifelong Steelers fan?"

Noah Davis

Marco Johnson.

The players in Playa can return to the U.S. - and many of them do, some to play live events like the World Series of Poker, and others to visit family - but they can't play there legally. States such as New Jersey have legalized online poker, but the player pool is so small that there's no money to be made. For many of them, this is the only career they know. "About 80% to 90% of the people here are going to have a very difficult time post-poker," Nick Davies says. "That's the nature of the beast."

He continues: "We have a skill set that's immeasurable but kind of unadaptable to the real world.I think that if you put me in a room with the right i-banking guy, we could get on. But then you have to be a bitch for six years, and then maybe be a VP, and maybe make 300 or 400k and still be a slave. I can hustle that in my own and live in Playa. If I want to go to the beach I can. If I want to go diving in Cozumel on a Monday with Gus, we do it."

And they do. Play poker, go diving, go clubbing, go drinking. Repeat. There's a saying down in Playa that there are two days: Sundays, when the weekly PokerStars Million tournament happens, and Fridays, which is every other day.

The night I arrive, around 2 in the morning, Voelzel and I are talking at the Blue Parrot, a club just off the beach at the end of North 12th Street, when the music stops and a group of people start breakdancing. The crowd circles around them, cheering aggressively. Voelzel glances over, looks away, then takes a sip of his Tecate Light. "It's the same breakdancing show every night," he says.

"It's like 'Groundhog Day,'" he adds with a resigned sigh.

If he could he'd return to Austin. He misses the family ranch near Laredo, Texas. Marco Johnson, who owns a condo in Walnut Creek, California, would go home, too. Nick Davies might not, but more because of the profits he makes from sports betting. If that were legal, he'd probably return. Block isn't sure, but he'd like to have the option.

As the group grows, the connections between the players weaken. They used to role 30 at a time; now it's a little more fractured. "We can't go out and party then Skype each other the next morning anymore," Johnson says. The poker frat still exists, but it's never going to be the same as it was those first 12 months.

'Stay Away From The Foam'

The night SCOOP ends, Voelzel, the Davies brothers, and a few of the other poker boys stand watching a "foam party," albeit from a safe distance.

A crowd of women in miniskirts frolic in a bubbly cascade that pours from a machine strung 15 feet in the air.

"Stay away from the foam," Kevin Killeen, a 24-year-old from Dublin who earned more than $120,000 in March for winning a tournament while wearing a fuzzy ski hat bedazzled by a monster, advises with the gravitas of someone who has been there before. "I've lived in Greece and Spain and that's what I've learned." He buys another round of mojitos for himself and a few friends and the night marches onward.

The foam inches ever closer to our spot by the "Ladies Bar" where women are served sugary rum drinks for free. Block walks by and says hello. Then he bounds off toward the dance floor, looking for the pretty blonde bartender he's planned to meet.

Noah Davis

Seth and Gus 'grinding' away.

Another hour passes before Voelzel and the gang tire of the Parrot. We move to another club just down 12th Street. The bouncers at La Vaquita let our group of 10 through without charging a cover. Voelzel talks to one of the waitresses, who gives us a table overlooking the dance floor where 150 coeds dance. Someone buys a round of Tecate, then another, and another. The poker players yell back and forth to one another, voices rising and falling above the ear-splitting dance music.

The bar closed at 5:30. Three couples peel off. Voelzel and I walk up the street to a taco joint, where we sit in white plastic chairs, eating perfectly fried fish tacos topped with fresh pico de gallo, talking optimistically about our hopes and dreams in that way you do when you're a bit buzzed and the dawn is breaking over the beach. The bill comes to less than $10. We part ways at 10th and 26th. Voelzel ambles toward his house, shaved head bouncing. There's another yacht party to plan and thousands of poker hands to play.

Is There A Keyboard Shortcut That Can Be Used In Place Of The Context Menu Key?

 

 

When you get used to having access to an awesome (and often used) key on your keyboard, you are not going to be happy when a different keyboard is missing that particular key. So what do you do? Today’s SuperUser Q&A post helps a frustrated reader get satisfaction once again with a quick and easy keyboard shortcut.

Today’s Question & Answer session comes to us courtesy of SuperUser—a subdivision of Stack Exchange, a community-driven grouping of Q&A web sites.

Photo courtesy of Peter M (Flickr).

The Question

SuperUser reader ppittle wants to know if there is a keyboard shortcut that can be used in place of theContext Menu Key:

The Context Menu Key on Windows PCs is awesome! But on some keyboards, mainly laptops, they have stopped including a dedicated Context Menu Key. Is there a keyboard shortcut that will bring up the Context Menu?

Is there a keyboard shortcut that can be used in place of the Context Menu Key?

The Answer

SuperUser contributors Adam Prescott, PTwr, and simbabque have the answer for us. First up, Adam Prescott:

Just hit Shift + F10! This is one of my favorite shortcuts!

Followed by the answer from PTwr:

This is awesome, but in some apps it does not work. For example, the Context Menu of web page elements in Google Chrome and Opera (a possible WebKit issue).

With our final answer from simbabque:

It also works on Ubuntu in some applications (i.e. Google Chrome).

Microsoft Thinks The Smartphone Is Over. It's Wrong

 

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella announced that the company would be scaling down its mobile phone hardware business. Nadella called the company’s dramatic course change a “restructuring.” He used phrases like “effective and focused” and “long-term reinvention and mobility.” But make no mistake: Today’s announcement (7,800 layoffs and a $7.6 billion write-off, mostly related to Microsoft’s phone business and its purchase of Nokia last year) is a letter of surrender.

The battle for smartphone supremacy is over. Actually, it’s been over for a while. It should surprise no one that the smartphone market is all but set in stone. Give Nadella some credit for seeing the writing on the wall, though to be fair it was basically written in huge letters and lit by floodlights.

Microsoft is hoping the age of the smartphone is over, and it's almost certainly wrong.

And give him yet more credit for working swiftly to bring the company’s most indispensable services, like Outlook and Word, to the devices people already use—devices like the iPhone, which now stands virtually alone at the top of the smartphone heap. As Samsung, HTC, and others have found, competing with the iPhone on its own turf is pointless; even if you make a phone as good, it won’t sell. Most people who want that sort of phone just buy iPhones. You can go big like the Galaxy Note 4, or you can go different like the Galaxy S6 Edge, but the default answer to the question, “which phone should I buy?” is the iPhone. It just keeps winning.

The rest of the world—and the dramatic majority of the market—has been completely overtaken by Android phones, which have somehow managed to get both cheaper and better, simultaneously and at ridiculous speeds. The Moto E is terrific, and it’s $129 unlocked. Companies most people have never heard of, like Alcatel, OnePlus, and Blu, make excellent phones almost anyone would like. Microsoft makes a few phones that are even cheaper, like the Lumia 520, which Microsoft has said before was the best-selling Windows product on the planet, period. But all you have to do is look at the chart of price and quality of Android devices, and you can’t help but think we’re weeks or months away from a kickass, $50 Android phone that no Lumia can hang with.

The Future of Surface

To be fair, Microsoft isn’t totally out of the phone game. Microsoft will probably make a Surface Phone, or something like it. Nadella even teases the idea in his memo, mentioning giving “Windows fans the flagship devices they’ll love.” And Surface, by all accounts, is still important to Microsoft. But whatever flagship device does come out of Redmond is almost certainly going to be something like Google’s Nexus program, made not to sell in any volume but to give developers something to build with. And, hopefully, to inspire just enough envy in its hardware partners that they build something awesome. Don’t expect huge marketing campaigns or gigantic global carrier rollouts. Microsoft wants its partners to build hardware that runs its software. That’s what it’s always wanted.

It’s different now, though, than it was with PCs in the ’90s. Android is free to use, it’s a technically and aesthetically excellent operating system, and it has unstoppable momentum around the world. The same partners Microsoft would need—HTC, Sony, Samsung, and LG—have until now showed almost zero interest in the platform, and this announcement doesn’t exactly make it sound like there’s been closed-door progress.

Even with the full force of Microsoft’s resources behind making a dent in the market so thoroughly sewn up by Android and iOS, Windows managed only low-single-digit smartphone market share. Now that it has so ruthlessly and completely stripped away those resources, how can it even pretend to compete?

It can’t, and soon enough, it won’t. That’s a huge problem for Microsoft, whose whole case for Windows 10 hinges on its ability to be a single platform across many devices—including, critically, devices that fit in your pocket. If no one builds Windows phones, and it now seems safe to say no one is going to, then that whole idea collapses.

What Nadella’s memo implies is that the smartphone war may be over, but Microsoft sees many more, equally disruptive revolutions upon us. The company is also focused on the Internet of Things, augmented reality, cloud processing, and virtual assistants. Those things are the future after phones, and Microsoft is positioning itself well in all of those places.

Unless, of course, your phone isn’t about to go away, but is instead about to become the centerpiece of everything—the remote for your lights and coffeepot, the engine for your virtual reality experiences, and the microphone in your pocket you use to talk to your assistant. That looks more and more like the future that’s just around the corner. And that’s a future without much room for Microsoft.

Siebel Business Services

 

 

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How Pluto Got Its Name | Smart News

 

The New Horizons probe is currently approaching Pluto. The mission's images and data will reveal new landmarks on the tiny, icy body along with important information about its moons. There's even a public and scientific debates over what to name those moons going on right now. 

But, how did the enigmatic dwarf planet get its own name?

Clyde Tombaugh first captured snapshots of Pluto in February of 1930 at Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona. At the time, the planetary body was known only as “Planet X,” but it quickly became a topic of lively discussion among the public and the astronomy community.

On the morning of March 14, 1930, Falconer Madan, a former librarian at the University of Oxford’s library, was reading a newspaper article about the discovery to his 11-year-old granddaughter, Venetia Burney, over breakfast, David Hiskey explained for Mental Floss in 2012.  Madan mused that he wondered what the planet might be called, and Venetia chimed in, “Why not call it Pluto?” The name of an underworld god seemed appropriate for a celestial body orbiting the cold, dark reaches of space.

Burney recalled her inspiration in 2006 interview with NASA:

I was fairly familiar with Greek and Roman legends from various children's books that I had read, and of course I did know about the solar system and the names the other planets have. And so I suppose I just thought that this was a name that hadn't been used. And there it was. The rest was entirely my grandfather's work.

Madan mentioned the suggestion in a letter to his friend Herbert Hall Turner, an Oxford astronomer. Turner happened to be attending a meeting of the Royal Astronomical Society, where many speculated about the naming of “Planet X.” Turner thought that Burney’s choice was fitting, so he telegraphed colleagues at Lowell Observatory with the following message:

Naming new planet, please consider PLUTO, suggested by small girl Venetia Burney for dark and gloomy planet.

Other potential names included Kronos, Minerva, Zeus, Atas and Persephone. Upon Burney’s death at the age of 90 in 2009, William Grimes wrote for the New York Times, “Unbeknownst to Venetia, a spirited battle ensued, with suggestions flying thick and fast. Minerva looked like the front runner, until it was pointed out that the name already belonged to an asteroid.” In May 1930, Burney’s suggestion won a vote among astronomers at Lowell Observatory, and from then on, the far-flung “Planet X” was known as Pluto.

Burney’s story has been well documented in the popular press, so it’s probably not too surprising that New Horizon carries an instrument named in Burney’s honor—a camera designed by students at the University of Colorado, as Chris Crockett reports for Science News for Students. As the probe flies through space, the camera measures dust particles to help scientists learn about the mysterious environment beyond Neptune.

image: http://thumbs.media.smithsonianmag.com//filer/78/45/7845bdf4-9b4b-42de-9400-1d3222794d12/new_horizons_sdc_edit.jpg__800x450_q85_crop_upscale.jpg

New Horizons carries an instrument called the Venetia Burney Student Dust Counter.(NASA/LASP )

 

NASA - Transcript: The Girl Who Named Pluto

Interview With Venetia Burney Phair

 

Hi, this is Edward Goldstein with NASA Public Affairs. I'm talking to Venetia Phair, the lady who 76 years ago had the distinction of suggesting the name for Pluto, the newly discovered ninth planet. Venetia is currently a retired school teacher in Epsom, England.

At NASA we're very excited because next Tuesday, hopefully, we're going to launch the first robotic mission to Pluto. And given that you had the historic role of naming the planet, I wonder if you are quite excited about that?

Yes I certainly am.

Venetia, can you tell us a little bit about the circumstances that happened in 1930 that brought you to suggest the name of Pluto?

Yes, I don't quite know why I suggested it. I think it was on March the 14th, 1930 and I was having breakfast with my mother and my grandfather. And my grandfather read out at breakfast the great news and said he wondered what it would be called. And for some reason, I after a short pause, said, "Why not call it Pluto?" I did know, I was fairly familiar with Greek and Roman legends from various children's books that I had read, and of course I did know about the solar system and the names the other planets have. And so I suppose I just thought that this was a name that hadn't been used. And there it was. The rest was entirely my grandfather's work.

And your grandfather (Falconer Madan) was a librarian I understand who had a lot of friends who were astronomers.

That's exactly right. He was retired He had been Bodleian's Librarian, which is the head librarian in the Bodleian at Oxford, which is the university library of course.

And he suggested the name to the astronomer Herbert Hall Turner, who then in turn cabled the idea to the American astronomers at the Lowell Observatory. Is that correct?

That is correct, yes. Professor Turner had been Astronomer Royal in the past and was a professor at Oxford. On the day it was suggested-my grandfather dropped a note to him-he was, on that day, attending a meeting in London of the Royal Astronomical Society. They were all thinking about names, but for some reason, none of them thought of Pluto.

And you thought about it because of the Greek and Roman mythology about Pluto being the god of the underworld?

I don't think…I doubt if I was as subtle as that. I just thought it was a name that hadn't been used so far, and might be an obvious one to have.

And was it also because the first two letters PL have a connection with Percival Lowell?

No, I certainly didn't realize that or appreciate that at the time. But I quite see it would be a major factor in their deciding it would be a good name. And it is certainly appropriate.

What happened once the planet was named? I understand it was named in May of 1930. Were you thrilled when you heard that your suggestion was the one; that Pluto would be the name?

Yes, I certainly was thrilled. It was very exciting for a small girl really at the time.

How were you informed about it?

I think my grandfather told me. I'd heard nothing you see. I'd just really forgotten about it for the intervening months. But he was fairly active.

Was there any great fanfare when the name was announced?

Well not…to a limited extent. I think the newspapers were mostly occupied by the exploits of the woman pilot Amy Johnson at the time (Amy Johnson was the pioneering English aviatrix who in May 1930 became the first woman to fly solo from Britain to Australia). Anyway, there was a certain amount…you know a few papers I think. My grandfather collected any information there was through a press agency and put it into two scrapbooks that I have, which I treasure, and from which I can refresh my memory at times.

Well we hope you have that scrapbook out next week when we launch New Horizons.

Yes, I expect so. What I know is, I've just been by the way sent rather a nice little badge by Johns Hopkins University, which I think is probably the badge I would have been wearing if I'd been able to go to the launch. So I think I'll wear it from now until after the launch.

Wonderful. Now I understand your great uncle Henry Madan named the moons of Mars Phobos and Deimos. So you come from a family of people who name heavenly bodies?

Yes, I think that is one of the nicest things about the whole story. I'm so very pleased because he had done that from a much more knowledgeable base that I came upon the name Pluto. It's all been very nice for me really.

I would imagine so. Have you ever seen Pluto through a telescope?

I don't think I have. I've just seen a photograph of Pluto, I think the first photograph that Clyde Tombaugh was looking at, and the next picture showing that the same little pinpoint had moved a certain degree. I have been to Flagstaff, and they were very kind. And they showed us around and they showed us the telescope through which it was first seen.

Did you ever meet Clyde Tombaugh?

No, never, sadly.

Did you ever correspond with him?

No.

I understand that some school kids here in America recently corresponded with you from the St. Mary's Episcopal School in Memphis. That must have been nice.

Yes, it was a great joy. I quite suddenly had 62 letters. I think they all sat down, all the eight and nine year olds, with instructions to write a letter to me. This must have been an English essay or something. But they were very charming letters. And I enjoyed each and every one of them.

Do people in your home town know you have this role in history?

Not to any great extent. Some of them may know because I believe that the BBC when it does it's coverage of the launch, which I'm sure will be fairly thorough, may slip in a bit, a small interview with me. But on the whole, it doesn't arise in conversation and you don't just go around telling people that you named Pluto. But quite a lot of friends know and are interested.

You mean you've never had that temptation at a holiday gathering to tell your friends that?

Well not really, but sometimes it's nice, sometimes I'm glad to have them know.

What if anything would you like to tell all the scientists and engineers and all the people who worked on this New Horizons mission? What would you say to them?

I would say, I think, "The best of luck." And I can only hope that they discover all that they want to discover from this probe which must be one of the most exciting things that has happened astronomically recently.

When you look back at your life, isn't it exciting that there you were an 11 year old school girl who named this planet, and we've come so far technologically that now we can send a spacecraft all this distance in the solar system to this planet Pluto?

Yes, it is absolutely amazing, but it is paralleled by almost everything that has happened in the world, hasn't it. I mean we have stepped so far into the future as it were since the 1920's and 1930's. It leaves one absolutely stunned.

Do you like to look up at the stars?

Very much. Sadly it gets increasingly difficult to (do this). It's so well lit around here that only the brightest stars really get a look-in unless we have a power outage of course. But occasionally if one is in the country, and it is a good clear night, it is absolutely wonderful.

Now I understand you were a teacher. What did you teach?

I taught economics, which had been my subject in university and a little elementary math.

And at no time had you ever told your students that you had named Pluto?

I don't think so. No. It didn't really come to mind much. There had been years and years when I never really thought about it. I think its only since Patrick Moore wrote an article in Sky and Telescope in 1984, and I should think that since then there has been an increasing amount of interest in it, especially in America, which has been delightful for me because as one gets older one's horizons narrow. And it's been very nice have to have say these letters from St. Mary's in Memphis, or this chat right now shall we say.

It's been very nice for you to talk with us too. And on behalf of NASA we really thank you for your enthusiasm and all you've done to help advance the exploration and discovery of the universe around us.

Well that's very nice of you. I have my kind invitation from NASA, and I treasure that too. I shall put it on the mantelpiece, I think, conspicuously, to look at. And I just wish everybody concerned with the launch that the whole thing will be the success that they hope.

The Great Smartphone War: Apple Vs. Samsung

 

For three years, Apple and Samsung have clashed on a scale almost unprecedented in business history, their legal war costing more than a billion dollars and spanning four continents. Beginning with the super-secret project that created the iPhone and the late Steve Jobs’s fury when Samsung—an Apple supplier!—brought out a shockingly similar device, Kurt Eichenwald explores the Korean company’s record of patent infringement, among other ruthless business tactics, and explains why Apple might win the battles but still lose the war.

On August 4, 2010, amid the bustle of downtown Seoul, a small group of executives from Apple Inc. pushed through the revolving door into a blue-tinted, 44-story glass tower, ready to fire the first shot in what would become one of the bloodiest corporate wars in history. The showdown had been brewing since spring, when Samsung launched the Galaxy S, a new entry into the smartphone market. Apple had snagged one early overseas and gave it to the iPhone team at its Cupertino, California, headquarters. The designers studied it with growing disbelief. The Galaxy S, they thought, was pure piracy. The overall appearance of the phone, the screen, the icons, even the box looked the same as the iPhone’s. Patented features such as “rubber-banding,” in which a screen image bounces slightly when a user tries to scroll past the bottom, were identical. Same with “pinch to zoom,” which allows users to manipulate image size by pinching the thumb and forefinger together on the screen. And on and on.

Steve Jobs, Apple’s mercurial chief executive, was furious. His teams had toiled for years creating a breakthrough phone, and now, Jobs fumed, a competitor—an Apple supplier no less!—had stolen the design and many features. Jobs and Tim Cook, his chief operating officer, had spoken with Samsung president Jay Y. Lee in July to express their concern about the similarities of the two phones but received no satisfactory response.

After weeks of delicate dancing, of smiling requests and impatient urgings, Jobs decided to take the gloves off. Hence the meeting in Seoul. The Apple executives were escorted to a conference room high in the Samsung Electronics Building, where they were greeted by about half a dozen Korean engineers and lawyers. Dr. Seungho Ahn, a Samsung vice president, was in charge, according to court records and people who attended the meeting. After some pleasantries, Chip Lutton, then Apple’s associate general counsel for intellectual property, took the floor and put up a PowerPoint slide with the title “Samsung’s Use of Apple Patents in Smartphones.” Then he went into some of the similarities he considered especially outrageous, but the Samsung executives showed no reaction. So Lutton decided to be blunt.

“Galaxy copied the iPhone,” he said.

“What do you mean, copied?” Ahn replied.

“Exactly what I said,” Lutton insisted. “You copied the iPhone. The similarities are completely beyond the possibility of coincidence.”

Ahn would have none of it. “How dare you say that,” he snapped. “How dare you accuse us of that!” He paused, then said, “We’ve been building cell phones forever. We have our own patents, and Apple is probably violating some of those.”

The message was clear. If Apple executives pursued a claim against Samsung for stealing the iPhone, Samsung would come right back at them with a theft claim of its own. The battle lines were drawn. In the months and years that followed, Apple and Samsung would clash on a scale almost unprecedented in the business world, costing the two companies more than a billion dollars and engendering millions of pages of legal papers, multiple verdicts and rulings, and more hearings.

But that may have been Samsung’s intent all along. According to various court records and people who have worked with Samsung, ignoring competitors’ patents is not uncommon for the Korean company. And once it’s caught it launches into the same sort of tactics used in the Apple case: countersue, delay, lose, delay, appeal, and then, when defeat is approaching, settle. “They never met a patent they didn’t think they might like to use, no matter who it belongs to,” says Sam Baxter, a patent lawyer who once handled a case for Samsung. “I represented [the Swedish telecommunications company] Ericsson, and they couldn’t lie if their lives depended on it, and I represented Samsung and they couldn’t tell the truth if their lives depended on it.”

Samsung executives say that the pattern of suit-countersuit criticized by some outsiders misrepresents the reality of the company’s approach to patent issues. Because it is one of the largest patent holders in the world, the company often finds others in the technology industry have taken its intellectual property, but it chooses not to file lawsuits to challenge those actions. However, once Samsung itself is sued, the executives say, it will use countersuits as part of a defense strategy.

With the Apple litigation, the fight isn’t over—opening statements for the most recent patent lawsuit, which asserts that 22 more Samsung products ripped off Apple, were heard in the U.S. District Court in San Jose, California, on April 1. While both sides have grown weary of the litigation, court-ordered settlement talks have failed. The most recent attempt took place in February, but the two sides soon reported to the court that they could not resolve the dispute on their own.

No matter the financial outcome, Apple may well emerge from the legal wrangling as the loser. Two juries have found that Samsung did indeed plot to steal the iPhone’s appearance and technology, which is why a California jury, in 2012, awarded Apple more than a billion dollars in damages from Samsung (reduced to $890 million in late 2013 after the judge found that some of the calculations were faulty). But, as the litigation drags on, Samsung has grabbed an increasing share of the market (currently 31 percent versus Apple’s 15.6 percent), not only by pumping out “Apple-ish, only cheaper” technology but by creating its own innovative features and products.

“[Samsung] transitioned to a higher level of competition than they were at at that time, and I think part of that was a result of them having to fight this battle with Apple,” a former senior Apple executive says.

It was really just another page from the Samsung playbook, used many times before: When another company introduces a breakthrough technology, muscle in with less expensive versions of the same product. And the strategy had worked, helping the Samsung Group to grow from almost nothing into an international behemoth.

Patents Pending

Samsung was founded in 1938 by Lee Byung-chull, a college dropout and the son of a wealthy Korean landowning family. When Lee was 26, he used his inheritance to open a rice mill, but the business soon failed. So it was on to a new endeavor, a small fish-and-produce exporting concern that Lee named Samsung (Korean for “three stars”). Over the years that followed, Lee expanded into brewing and then, starting in 1953, added a sugar-refining company, a wool-textile subsidiary, and a couple of insurance businesses.

For years, there was nothing in this conglomerate even to hint that Samsung would enter the consumer-electronics business. Then, in 1969, it formed Samsung-Sanyo Electronics, which a year later began manufacturing black-and-white televisions—an outdated product chosen partly because the company didn’t have the technology to make color sets.

By the early 1990s, though, the company seemed like an also-ran, after the economic boom in Japan had pushed that nation’s businesses, such as Sony, to the forefront of the technology world; for those even aware of it, Samsung had the reputation for churning out inferior products and cheap knockoffs.

Still, some Samsung executives saw a path for boosting profits by boldly and illegally fixing prices with competitors in some of their top businesses. The first products known to have been the focus of one of Samsung’s major price-fixing conspiracies were cathode-ray tubes (C.R.T.’s), which were once the technological standard for televisions and computer monitors. According to investigators in the U.S. and Europe, the scheme was quite structured: competitors secretly got together in what they called “Glass Meetings” at hotels and resorts around the world—in South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, Japan, and at least eight other countries. Some of the meetings involved the most senior executives, while others were for lower-level operational managers. The executives sometimes held what they called “Green Meetings,” characterized by rounds of golf, during which the co-conspirators agreed to raise prices and cut production to receive higher profits than would have been possible had they actually competed with one another. The scheme was eventually exposed, and over the course of 2011 and 2012, Samsung was fined $32 million in the U.S., $21.5 million in South Korea, and $197 million by the European Commission.

The success of the C.R.T. conspiracy apparently sparked similar schemes. By 1998 the market for L.C.D.’s—a newer technology that used liquid crystal to create the image and competed directly with the C.R.T.—was taking off. So in November, a Samsung manager spoke with representatives from two of the company’s competitors, Sharp and Hitachi. They all agreed to raise L.C.D. prices, according to investigators. The manager passed the exciting information on to a senior Samsung executive, and the L.C.D. conspiracy grew.

In 2001, the president of Samsung’s semiconductor division, Lee Yoon-woo, proposed to executives at another competitor, Chunghwa Picture Tubes, that they raise the already rigged price for one type of L.C.D. technology, prosecutors said. The scheme was formalized during “Crystal Meetings.” Again, the executives gathered in hotels and on golf courses to set prices illegally. But by 2006 the L.C.D. jig was up. Rumors began circulating among the conspirators that one of the victims of their crime—a company they referred to by the code name NYer—suspected that the suppliers were rigging prices. And Samsung executives presumably feared that NYer could spark a criminal investigation by the U.S. government; after all, NYer—in reality Apple Inc.—was pretty powerful. Samsung ran to the Justice Department under an anti-trust leniency program and ratted out its co-conspirators. But that didn’t lessen the pain much—the company was still forced to pay hundreds of millions of dollars to settle claims against it by state attorneys general and direct purchasers of L.C.D.’s.

The decision to fess up to the L.C.D. scheme may not have been driven just by Apple’s suspicions. Samsung was already in law enforcement’s sights: sometime earlier a co-conspirator in another criminal price-fixing conspiracy had given up Samsung. That scheme, beginning in 1999, involved Samsung’s huge business for dynamic random-access memory, or DRAM, which is used in computer memories. In 2005, after it was caught, Samsung agreed to pay $300 million in fines to the U.S. government. Six of its executives pleaded guilty and agreed to serve sentences of 7 to 14 months in American prisons.

In the years since the price-fixing scandals, Samsung executives claim, the company has adopted major new policies to address potential legal and ethics problems. “Samsung has made tremendous advancements in addressing compliance issues,” says Jaehwan Chi, executive vice president of global legal affairs and compliance. “We now have a strong corporate compliance organization, with a dedicated staff of lawyers, a set of clear policies and procedures, companywide training and reporting systems. As a result, every single one of our employees today, whether they’re in the Americas, Asia, or Africa, are given compliance education on an annual basis.”

Still, the tales of misconduct at Samsung during the years before those changes involved more than price-fixing. In 2007, its former top legal officer, Kim Yong-chul, who made his name as a star prosecutor in South Korea before joining Samsung, blew the whistle on what he said was massive corruption at the company. He accused senior executives of engaging in bribery, money-laundering, evidence tampering, stealing as much as $9 billion, and other crimes. In essence, Kim, who later wrote a book about his allegations, contended that Samsung was one of the most corrupt companies in the world.

A criminal investigation in Korea ensued, at first focusing on Kim’s allegation that Samsung executives maintained a slush fund to bribe politicians, judges, and prosecutors. In January 2008, government investigators raided the home and office of Lee Kun-hee, the chairman of Samsung, who was subsequently convicted of dodging some $37 million in taxes. He was given a three-year suspended sentence and ordered to pay $89 million in fines. A year and a half later, South Korean president Lee Myung-bak pardoned Lee.

And what of the bribery claims? Korean prosecutors declared that they could find no evidence substantiating Kim’s allegations—a determination that stunned the former general counsel, since he had turned over a list of other prosecutors whom he said he personally helped Samsung bribe. Moreover, a Korean lawmaker claimed that Samsung had once offered her a golf bag stuffed with cash, and a former presidential aide said the company had given him a cash gift of $5,400, which he returned. Kim published his book in 2010, saying he wanted to leave a record of his accusations. Samsung responded to the book’s allegations by labeling it nothing but “excrement.”

Then there is Samsung’s countersuing strategy, which is legal but unattractive. At the start of 2010, the shareholder letter from Samsung Electronics’ president and chief executive Geesung Choi glistened with good news. The previous 12 months had been an unprecedented success, Choi said. Despite stiff competition, Samsung had become the first company in the history of Korea to post sales greater than $86 billion, while simultaneously achieving some $9.4 billion in operating profits.

Choi trumpeted Samsung’s commitment to innovation. “We maintained second place in the number of our U.S. registered patents in 2009, exceeding 3,611, and solidified our foundation to strengthen our next generation technology.”

What Choi left out was that Samsung had just suffered a huge defeat, when a court in The Hague ruled that the company illegally copied intellectual property, infringing on patents related to L.C.D. flat-panel technology owned by Sharp, the Japanese electronics concern. In a blow to Samsung, the court ordered that the company halt all European imports of the products that violated the patents. Around the same time as Choi was delivering his upbeat message, the United States International Trade Commission began blocking the importation of Samsung flat-screen products that used the pilfered technology.

Samsung finally settled with Sharp.

It was the same old pattern: when caught red-handed, countersue, claiming Samsung actually owned the patent or another one that the plaintiff company had used. Then, as the litigation dragged on, snap up a greater share of the market and settle when Samsung imports were about to be barred. Sharp had filed its lawsuit in 2007; as the lawsuit played out, Samsung built up its flat-screen business until, by the end of 2009, it held 23.6 percent of the global market in TV sets, while Sharp had only 5.4 percent. All in all, not a bad outcome for Samsung.

The same thing happened with Pioneer, a Japanese multi-national that specializes in digital entertainment products, which holds patents related to plasma televisions. Samsung once again decided to use the technology without bothering to pay for it. In 2006, Pioneer sued in federal court in the Eastern District of Texas, so Samsung countersued. The Samsung claim was thrown out before trial, but one document revealed in the course of the litigation was particularly damaging—a memo from a Samsung engineer stating explicitly that the company was violating the Pioneer patent. A jury awarded Pioneer $59 million in 2008. But with appeals and continued battles looming, the financially troubled Pioneer agreed to settle with Samsung for an undisclosed amount in 2009. By then, it was too late. In 2010, Pioneer shut down its television operations, tossing 10,000 people out of work.

Even when other companies have honored competitors’ patents, Samsung has used the same technology for years without paying royalties. For example, a small Pennsylvania company named InterDigital developed and patented technology and was paid for its use under licensing agreements with such giant corporations as Apple and LG Electronics. But for years Samsung refused to cough up any cash, forcing InterDigital to go to court to enforce its patents. In 2008, shortly before the International Trade Commission was set to make a decision that could have banned the importation of some of Samsung’s most popular phones into the United States, Samsung settled, agreeing to pay $400 million to the tiny American company.

Around the same time, Kodak also got fed up with Samsung’s shenanigans. It filed suit against the Korean company, contending that it was stealing Kodak’s patented digital imaging technology to use in mobile phones. Once again, Samsung countersued and agreed to pay royalties only after the International Trade Commission found for Kodak.

It was a clever business model. But everything changed when Apple introduced the iPhone, because Samsung wasn’t ready for the technology to advance so dramatically, so quickly.

The Purple Dorm

The Purple Dorm smelled like pizza.

Occupying a building at Apple’s headquarters, in Cupertino, the Dorm—so named because the employees were there 24-7 amid the ever present odor of fast food—was the site of the company’s most secretive undertaking, code-named Project Purple. Under way since 2004, the effort constituted one of the biggest gambles in the history of the company: a cell phone with full Internet, e-mail functions, plus a host of unprecedented features.

Executives had pitched the idea of developing a phone to Jobs for years, but he had remained a skeptic. There were already so many mobile phones on the market, manufactured by companies with a lot of experience in the business—Motorola, Nokia, Samsung, Ericsson—that Apple would have to develop something revolutionary to win a seat at the table. Plus Apple was going to have to deal with carriers such as AT&;T, and Jobs did not want another company dictating what his company could and couldn’t do. And Jobs also doubted the existing phone chips and bandwidth allowed for sufficient speed to give users decent Internet access, which he considered a key to success.

With Apple’s development of multi-touch glass, everything changed. The phone would be revolutionary. Apple design director Jony Ive had come up with cutting-edge mock-ups for future iPods, and they could be used as the springboard for how an iPhone might look. In November 2004, Jobs gave the green light for Apple to set aside the tablet project and go full force into developing the iPhone.

Secrecy, Jobs ordered, was paramount. Apple was already known as a tight-lipped company, but this time the stakes were even higher. No competitor could know that Apple was about to venture into the phone market, because it would then undertake dramatic redesigns of its own phones. Jobs did not want to compete with a moving target. So he issued unusual marching orders: No one could be hired from outside the company for Project Purple. No one inside the company could be told that Apple was developing a mobile phone. All of the work—design, engineering, testing, everything—would have to be conducted in super-secure, locked-down offices. Scott Forstall, a senior vice president named by Jobs to head up software development for the new phone, was forced by the restrictions to persuade Apple employees to join Project Purple without even telling them what it was.

The new team moved into the Purple Dorm, at first a single floor, but the space quickly grew as more employees came on board. To reach certain computer labs, a person had to pass through four locked doors, which opened with badge readers. Cameras kept constant watch. And right on the front door, to remind everyone of the importance of secrecy, they hung a sign that said, FIGHT CLUB—a reference to the 1999 movie Fight Club. The first rule of Fight Club, a character in the film says, is that no one talks about Fight Club.

A group of about 15 employees, many of whom had worked together for more than a dozen years, made up the design team. For brainstorming sessions, they gathered around a kitchen table inside the Dorm, tossing out ideas and then drafting designs in sketchbooks, on loose-leaf paper, on computer printouts. The ideas that survived team-wide critiques were passed on to the computer-aided-design group, which sculpted the sketch data into a computer-based model. Then on to three-dimensional construction, with the rough product turned back over to the design team at their kitchen table.

The process was used hundreds of times; as many as 50 attempts were made on a single button for the phone, according to Christopher Stringer, an industrial designer on the team. They wrestled with the details for the edge of the phone, its corners, its height, its width. One of the earliest models, code-named the M68, had the word “iPod” imprinted on the back, in part to disguise what the product really was.

The software engineering was equally complicated. Forstall and his team were looking to create the illusion that the user could actually reach through the touch-screen glass to manipulate the content behind it. Finally, by January 2007, Jobs was set to announce the new Apple phone in his keynote for the annual Macworld trade conference, in San Francisco, and everyone was anticipating a huge announcement.

Crowds lined up outside the Moscone Center the night before Jobs’s speech and, when the doors finally opened, thousands filed in as music from Gnarls Barkley, Coldplay, and Gorillaz filled the room. At 9:14 A.M., a James Brown song started, and Jobs strode onto the stage, dressed in jeans. “We’re going to make some history together today!” he said enthusiastically amid wild applause. He talked about Macs, iPods, iTunes, and Apple TV, and took a couple of shots at Microsoft. At 9:40 he took a sip of water and cleared his throat. “This is a day I’ve been looking forward to for two and a half years,” he said.

The room grew silent. No one could miss that a big announcement was coming.

“Every once in a while a revolutionary product comes along that changes everything,” Jobs said. “Today, we’re introducing three revolutionary products of this class.” The first, he said, was a wide-screen iPod with touch controls. The second, a mobile phone. And the third, a breakthrough Internet communications device.

“An iPod, a phone, and an Internet communicator. An iPod, a phone … ” he said. “Are you getting it? These are NOT three separate devices—this is one device! And we are calling it iPhone.”

As the crowd cheered, the screen behind Jobs lit up with the word “iPhone.” Beneath that, it read, “Apple reinvents the phone.”

In the weeks that followed, techies around the world joined the hallelujah chorus, singing the praises of Apple’s new device. But that opinion wasn’t shared by many of the longtime cell-phone manufacturers, who scoffed at Apple’s attempts to play with the big boys. “It’s kind of one more entrant into an already very busy space with lots of choice for consumers,” Jim Balsillie, then the co-C.E.O. of the company that manufactures BlackBerry phones, said in a typical comment. Steve Ballmer, the C.E.O. of Microsoft at the time, was even blunter. “There’s no chance that the iPhone is going to get any significant market share. No chance.” And Richard Sprague, then a Microsoft senior marketing director, said that Apple would never meet Jobs’s prediction of 10 million units sold in 2008.

At first, it seemed they were right. In the first nine months of fiscal 2008, sales were under half of what Jobs had predicted. But then—blastoff. In the final quarter Apple introduced the second-generation model, called the iPhone 3G; demand was so huge, it could scarcely restock the shelves fast enough. Apple sold more phones in those three months—6.9 million units—than it had for the previous nine. By the end of the fourth quarter of fiscal 2009, the total number of iPhones sold since its introduction surpassed 30 million units. Apple, which three years before had been nothing, snagged 16 percent of the total market for smartphone sales worldwide in the fourth quarter of 2009, placing it as the third largest company in the business. Meanwhile, at Samsung, no one was popping champagne corks over the company’s smartphone sales. In that quarter, the company wasn’t even in the top five. In a report by I.D.C., an industry research firm, Samsung’s total smartphone sales were bundled under the category “Other.”

Galaxy Quest

Twenty-eight executives from Samsung’s mobile-communications division crowded into the Gold Conference Room on the 10th floor of the company’s headquarters. It was 9:40 A.M. on February 10, 2010, a Wednesday, and the meeting had been called to assess a near-crisis situation at Samsung. The company’s phones were losing favor, the user experience was poor, and the iPhone—after all those months of industry pooh-poohing—was blowing the doors off the barn. Samsung’s cell-phone business was strong, and it was continuing to churn out several designs every year. But the company was simply not competing with its smartphones, and Apple had now set a new direction for that business. According to an internal memo summarizing contemporaneous notes taken during the meeting, the head of the division took the floor. “[Our] quality isn’t good,” the memo quotes him as saying, “perhaps because the designers are chased along by our schedule as they get so many models done.”

Samsung was designing too many phones, the executive said, which simply didn’t make a lot of sense if the goal was to provide customers with top-notch equipment. “The path to improving Quality is to eliminate inefficient models and reduce the number of models overall,” he said. “Quantity isn’t what’s important, what’s important is putting on the market models with a high level of perfection, one to two Excellent ones….

“Influential figures outside the company come across the iPhone, and they point out that ‘Samsung is dozing off,’ ” the executive continued. “All this time, we’ve been paying all our attention to Nokia … yet when our [user experience] is compared to the unexpected competitor Apple’s iPhone, the difference is truly that of Heaven and Earth.”

Samsung was at a crossroads. “It’s a crisis of design,” the executive said.

Across Samsung, the message was heard: the company needed to come out with its own “iPhone”—something beautiful and easy to use with just that dollop of “cool”—and fast. Emergency teams were thrown together, and for three months designers and engineers worked under enormous pressure. For some employees, the work was so demanding they got only two to three hours of sleep a night.

By March 2, the company’s Product Engineering Team had completed a feature-by-feature analysis of the iPhone, comparing it to the Samsung smartphone under construction. The group assembled a 132-page report for their bosses, explaining in detail every way the Samsung phone fell short. A total of 126 instances were found where the Apple phone was better.

No feature was too small for comparison. A calculator image could be made bigger on the iPhone by rotating the device in any direction; not so with Samsung’s. On the iPhone, the calendar function for the day’s schedule was legible, the numbers on the image of the phone keypad were easy to see, ending a call was simple, the number of open Web pages was displayed on-screen, Wi-Fi connection was established on a single screen, new-e-mail notices were obvious, and so on. None of these were true for the Samsung phones, the engineers concluded.

Bit by bit, the new model for a Samsung smartphone began to look—and function—just like the iPhone. Icons on the home screen had similarly rounded corners, size, and false depth created by a reflective shine across the image. The icon for the phone function went from being a drawing of a keypad to a virtually identical reproduction of the iPhone’s image of a handset. The bezel with the rounded corners, the glass spreading out across the entire face of the phone, the home button at the bottom—all of it almost the same.

In fact, some industry executives worried about the similarities. Earlier, on February 15, a senior designer at Samsung told other employees about such observations from Google executives at a meeting with the Korean company—they suggested that changes be made in certain Galaxy devices, which they thought looked too much like Apple’s iPhone and iPad. The next day, a Samsung designer e-mailed others at the company about the Google comments. “Since it is too similar to Apple, make it noticeably different, starting with the front side,” the message said.

By late the following month, Samsung was ready to hold its own version of the Jobs press conference. On March 23, crowds at the Las Vegas Convention Center for the CTIA Wireless trade show gathered in the keynote hall. Lights bathed the stage in a sheet of blue as the attendees found their seats. Then J. K. Shin, the head of Samsung’s mobile-communications unit, came onto the stage. He spent some time talking about the new experiences expected by users of mobile phones—a not-too-subtle reference, it seemed, to the developments brought about by Apple.

“Of course, by now, you are probably thinking I must have a new device to show you that delivers all these new experiences,” Shin said. “And I do.”

He reached into the inside breast pocket of his jacket and brought out a phone. “Ladies and gentlemen, I present to you the Samsung Galaxy S!” Shin held up the device, displaying it for the applauding crowd.

Despite the previous month’s e-mail to change up the appearance of Samsung’s Galaxy products, it still looked almost identical to the iPhone. Except the name “Samsung” was emblazoned across the top.

‘We’ve been ripped off.”

Christopher Stringer, one of the iPhone designers, looked at the Galaxy S in near disbelief. All that time, he thought, all that effort trying out hundreds of designs, experimenting with the size of the glass, drawing different icons and buttons, and then these guys at Samsung just take it?

But at the time Apple had a lot of balls in the air to distract its executives from their concerns about the Samsung phone. At a San Francisco press conference on January 27, Jobs had introduced the iPad—the tablet that his team had been developing before they put it aside to work on the iPhone—and the product was already selling like gangbusters.

But about a month after the Galaxy S reached the market overseas, Jobs began focusing on what he considered to be the Korean company’s theft of Apple’s ideas. He wanted to play hardball with Samsung’s top executives, but Tim Cook, his chief operating officer and soon-to-be successor, cautioned against being too aggressive just yet. After all, Samsung was one of Apple’s biggest suppliers of processors, display screens, and other items. Alienating it might put Apple in the position of losing parts it needed for its products—including some for the iPhone and the iPad.

But after Samsung’s brush-off led to the tense August 4 meeting in Seoul, Apple attorney Chip Lutton told Ahn that he expected a response from Samsung about Apple’s concerns. “Steve Jobs wants to hear back and wants to hear back quickly,” he said. “And please don’t give us a general thing on patents.”

The Apple team returned to Cupertino. Bruce Sewell, Apple’s general counsel, briefed Jobs on what had happened. But Jobs could barely contain himself as the wait for Samsung’s response wore on.

“Where are they?” Jobs asked Lutton repeatedly as weeks passed without a reply from Samsung. “How is that going?”

Without much progress, new meetings were set up—one in Cupertino, one in Washington, D.C., and one more in Seoul. At the Washington meeting, Apple’s lawyers broached the possibility of a resolution, telling the Samsung team that Jobs would be willing to make a licensing deal under which the Korean company would pay royalties on intellectual property that didn’t play a role in making the iPhone distinctive, and would stop using those patented designs and features that were distinctive.

Conversations eventually broke off, and Jobs grew increasingly eager to take Samsung to court and fight. Cook continued counseling patience, arguing that it would be better to have a negotiated resolution than to duke it out with a company of such importance to Apple’s business.

Then, in late March 2011, Samsung introduced its latest tablet computer, this time with a 10-inch screen. It struck Apple executives as a knockoff of the company’s second version of its tablet, and they weren’t surprised: Samsung had already proclaimed that it would change its own model to rival the iPad 2.

Cook’s caution was shoved aside. On April 15, 2011, the company filed a federal lawsuit in California against Samsung for infringing on the patents of both the iPhone and the iPad. Samsung was apparently ready for Apple’s attack—it countersued days later in Korea, Japan, Germany, and the U.S., alleging that the American company had violated Samsung patents related to mobile-communication technologies. Eventually, a variety of suits and motions were filed by the companies in Britain, France, Italy, Spain, Australia, and the Netherlands, as well as in a federal court in Delaware, and with the U.S. International Trade Commission in Washington, D.C.

Phone Tag

One day in March 2011, cars carrying investigators from Korea’s anti-trust regulator pulled up outside a Samsung facility in Suwon, about 25 miles south of Seoul. They were there ready to raid the building, looking for evidence of possible collusion between the company and wireless operators to fix the prices of mobile phones.

Before the investigators could get inside, security guards approached and refused to let them through the door. A standoff ensued, and the investigators called the police, who finally got them inside after a 30-minute delay. Curious about what had been happening in the plant as they cooled their heels outside, the officials seized video from internal security cameras. What they saw was almost beyond belief.

Upon getting word that investigators were outside, employees at the plant began destroying documents and switching computers, replacing the ones that were being used—and might have damaging material on them—with others.

A year later, Korean newspapers reported that the government had fined Samsung for obstructing the investigation at the facility. At the time, a legal team representing Apple was in Seoul to take depositions in the Samsung case, and they read about the standoff. From what they heard, one of the Samsung employees there had even swallowed documents before the investigators were allowed in. That certainly didn’t bode well for Apple’s case; how, the Apple lawyers said half-jokingly among themselves, could they possibly compete in a legal forum with employees who were so loyal to the company that they were willing to eat incriminating evidence?

By the time they headed to court, Apple had questioned a series of engineers and designers whose names were on Samsung patents. Each confirmed that, yes, they had developed the technical item that was the subject of the patent. But when asked to explain the details of what had been patented, some of the employees couldn’t.

Accusations of deceit and trickery spilled out into the courtroom. Apple submitted a document to the court showing side-by-side versions of the iPhone and Galaxy S; Samsung later showed that the image of the Galaxy S had been resized to make the phones appear even more similar than they already were. After confidential license agreements with Nokia were turned over by Apple in discovery, Samsung used the information in its own negotiations with Nokia—a big no-no.

There have been moments that bordered on the absurd. One of the patents invoked by Apple is a single-sentence claim with diagrams for a rectangular device with rounded corners—not any particular device, just the rectangle itself, the shape used for the iPad. But then that seeming silliness was practically demonstrated to be important by Samsung’s own lawyers when federal judge Lucy Koh held up the iPad and Galaxy Tab 10.1 and asked a Samsung lawyer if she could identify which was which.

“Not at this distance, your honor,” said the lawyer, Kathleen Sullivan, who was standing about 10 feet away.

No one can claim a total victory in the global litigation wars. In South Korea, a court ruled that Apple had infringed two Samsung patents, while Samsung had violated one of Apple’s. In Tokyo, a court rejected an Apple patent claim and ordered it to pay Samsung’s court costs. In Germany, a court ordered a direct sales ban on the Galaxy Tab 10.1, ruling that it too closely resembled Apple’s iPad 2. In Britain, a court ruled in favor of Samsung, declaring that its tablets were “not as cool” as the iPad, and unlikely to confuse consumers. A California jury found that Samsung had violated Apple patents for the iPhone and iPad, awarding more than a billion dollars in damages—an amount that the judge later ruled had been miscalculated by the jury. In the debate over setting the damages, a Samsung lawyer said they were not disputing that the company had indeed taken “some elements of Apple’s property.”

One person close to Apple said that the endless fighting has been a drain on the company, both emotionally and financially.

Meanwhile, as has happened with other cases where Samsung violated a company’s patents, it has continued to develop new and better phones throughout the litigation to the point where even some people who have worked with Apple say the Korean company is now a strong competitor on the technology and not just a copycat anymore.

Despite his role in propelling the lawsuits forward, Jobs, who died in 2011, by now might have looked at the scorched earth left behind by the litigation and followed his own advice about recognizing when it is time to move on. “I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: ‘If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?’ ” Jobs said in a now famous commencement speech he gave at Stanford University, in 2005. “And whenever the answer has been ‘no’ for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.”

After more than 1,000 days of litigation, hopefully one morning soon executives at Samsung and Apple will look at their reflection and, at long last, hit their limit of “no”s.

Plutonium goes to Pluto (How Plutonium got us to Pluto)

 

 

Premam Trivia

 

Somewhere along the Chokkampatti Hills where Periyar starts

Some successes are meant to be, and so it is that ‘Premam’ has become the year’s biggest box office success, catapulting its lead actor NivinPauly into superstardom.

Years ago, when Priyardarshan’s ‘Kilukkam’ became the rage and sensation, an impromptu Ootty trip became a tribute to the movie as ten of us trekked down to every spot in the hill station where the film was shot.
It was 'film madness' at its heights that culminated in a group photo with Disco Shanthi (the then sex-siren), who was shooting with a big Telugu actor, whose name hardly rang a bell for us.

It is therefore with little surprise that I watch hordes of youngsters, a number of them couples or potentials, making a beeline for the aqueduct on which Premam’s superhit song ‘Aluvapuzhayude’ was shot.

For years, the aqueduct was the monstrous ‘good for nothing’ construction that people would curse for every woe. Its mere presence meant a hurdle in widening an increasingly busy road to Alangad (which in a way serves as a fascinating detour if you want to reach Kochi without being bogged down by highway traffic).

A number of stories circulate about the aqueduct, a part of the Periyar Valley Irrigation Project.
Built in the early 1970s, it is described as "an abandoned project, after an engineering design made it flawed and unworkable" in the quest to bring the ‘dead water’ of Periyar river, which has been sucked out of its electricity and lies still as death in the Bhoothathankettu reservoir, to the lower reaches of Ernakulam district. Oldtimers recall how the nearly 12 ft piling (almost the height of the aqueduct) cracked up homes in the vicinity.

The dead water sucked of power carried downstream for irrigation

There has always been a magical charm to the story of Periyar, and in earlier adventures to trace it back to source, a road-trip had taken us to what we believe is the slope of the Chokkampatti hills on the Western Ghats from where it starts as a trickle.

The river makes two significant diversions at the point where it meets the famed Aluva Shivarathri temple.
Gone are the sandy beds of the river now but the reverence you feel for the temple, where a stone idol submerges under river water every monsoon, is palpable.
If surreal is the right word, you feel that here. Under fading sunlight and a starlit sky, you can watch trains ply over a distant bridge and live a similar ambience that MT Vasudevan Nair so vividly describes about his own favourite river, the Nila.

Here at the once-sandy river bed, thousands also congregate to bid goodbye to their dear and departed, and come every year for annual tributes.

Where it begins

It could be that the deathly pangs of the mortals and their quest for heavenly salvation  become so unbearable the river divides into two here.
One stream heads down to Mangalapuzha to join Chalakudy river and end in Lakshadweep Sea at Munambam. The other under the now 75-year-old Marthandavarma Bridge and drain into the Arabian Sea at Varappuzha.

And our story starts, rather becomes relevant, with this second branch of the river.

An intricate network of canals and aqueducts, in fact, had been envisaged as part of the massive World Bank funded project; you can see them through the road-trip to Perumbavoor and Kothamangalam. But things get a bit murky when it reaches Aluva.

According to a few old-timers, an underground canal that carries the ‘dead water’ ends near the Aluva fish market, where the ‘Premam Aqueduct’ marks its start. Here the water rises up and continues its journey through the aqueduct for irrigating land further down. Or so, they say. They vouch that the aqueduct is not so useless as it seems and it irrigates farmlands as far away as Koonammavu.

Others claim that no water has passed through it since their early memory, and it is an engineering debacle that profited an ‘engineer from Kottayam’ and the mismanagement was summarily buried by the media. Well, this is all unverified.

What we can, however, see today is an entry point to the aqueduct that is typically messy. The stench from the market is perhaps the first thing that greets you.'

View of the Marthandavarma Bridge from the aqueduct

Realty developers have cashed in on the prospects and you have a number of high rises with ‘river views,’ one right at the start of the aqueduct.

Its first lap gives you a glimpse of Kunjunnikara island, which is home to the famous Uliyanoor Temple associated with Perumthachan.
Ha, the magic of folklore. His envy at his own son outsmarting him in temple architecture led to the man ‘killing’ the youngster, a story reinterpreted with such dignity by MT and enacted with finesse by Thilakan.

The 'Premam' brigade

People fish in Periyar from the aqueduct, and you can now see a steady flow of youngsters in bicycles and bikes on traverse it trying to relive the ‘Premam’ moments.

Walk past the first part, right over Periyar River, watch it take a detour, and you enter land lined by homes. It is almost as if the river just disappears.
Agriculture has long given way to patches of wasteland where buffalos enjoy symbiotic moments with black crows. Rows of nutmeg trees line the path, apart from dead, dying and some fruity coconut trees. As if to remind us of Kerala’s one-time misadventure with cocoa farming, there are a few of them too.

At several points the railings have given way totally leaving wide, danger-prone holes. You also pass exit points to the mainland before you hit the second patch of the aqueduct (the real Premam one) that passes over Periyar again and overlooks the Marthandavarma bridge.

Where it ends

No matter the decay around, the views from here are majestic. Youngsters in packs celebrate ‘selfie’ moments for Facebook posts. The turn where the hero meets with the heroine's dad is postcard perfect with bamboos and verdant green trees.
The aqueduct, however, doesn’t end here. You walk on, and what you see is a microcosm of Kerala – palatial houses that flaunt Gulf and US expat money, small dwellings, dilapidated lamp posts, wastelands of green, marshes and water canals that are still needed to meet daily needs.

It is no more than a 45-minute walk, picturesque at best, before the aqueduct ends as abruptly as it begins.
There is nothing but a ditch, overgrown with vegetation that marks the endpoint. A few steps down the aqueduct and you reach the North Parur road, right by the historic UC College.

Right now, the innard of the aqueduct isbrimming with water – is it from Bhoothathankettu or from the heavy monsoon rains is hard to tell.

When water flows, the aqueduct 'leaks' with the water trickling down to the roads to deepen the potholes. In summer, it still serves as an easy conduit to walk from UC College to the Aluva market.

 

 

 

Alphonse Puthren. The name itself is novel. Just like Premam, the name of its director too grabbed eyeballs.

But come home to the Manjooran house here at Aluva Kalathil Lane, ‘Puthren’ (son) becomes father, and the son becomes Alphonse. Here, there is a ‘Puthri’ (daughter) too – Alphonse’s sister, Dr. Puthri Puthren.

Alphonse was baptized as Alphonse Joseph Paul. But when he was admitted to L.K.G in Ootty, his name was changed to Alphonse Puthren. Alphonse’s father’s name was Puthren Paul, and it was Alphonse’s grandfather, M.C. Paul, who gave this unique name to his son. Yes, there is a story behind that too!

Paul was working at a coffee house in Mumbai during the Second World War, and that is when the story begins. A guy named ‘Puthren’, who hailed from Andhra Pradesh used to work in the coffee shop where Paul worked. One day, he went to one of the ships to give coffee, and he was killed in a bomb blast there. Paul was deeply hurt by that incident. That is how Paul decided to name his next son ‘Puthren’.

As for ‘Puthren’, he decided to lovingly call his daughter ‘Puthri’. If his dad could call him ‘Puthren’, then why not call his own daughter ‘Puthri’?! This is what Puthren thought. Today, Puthri is a dentist and is settled in the U.K with her husband Raphy Paul.

The name Alphonse is the contribution of his mom Daisy who decided to name her son after Saint Alphonsa. Daisy, who had two lovely daughters, prayed for a son when she was pregnant for the third time.

Daisy was three months pregnant when she visited the famous Bharananganam Church to pray for a boy. As she pressed her head on the holy bed of the St. Alphonsa, a breeze passed by her. It seems the breeze told her that she was going to have a boy!

Alphonse was born on February 10, the same day when Saint Chavara was born. It is believed that Saint Chavara came in Saint Alphonse’s dream and cured her illness. Daisy found it a miracle that her son was also born on the same auspicious date. Alphonse has another sister named Mary. She lives with her husband Bejoy in Qatar.

The director of Premam has always been media shy. Unmoved by the brouhaha over his movie, this guy still takes a rickshaw to commute around. Even though he has done two blockbuster movies, Neram andPremam, his interviews have not come out much in the media. He also stays away from the promotions of the film. But the residents of Aluva are not surprised by this. That is how Alphonse is. He loves to travel in an auto than in an AC car!

Alphonse was obsessed about cinema from childhood. That is how he left to Chennai to pursue studies in digital film making. Alphonse has never assisted anyone, and yet took Neram that topped charts. He directed a music album named Yuvvh before Neram. Alphonse believes that the fate of a film is determined by its screenplay, rather than the story.

Due to their hard-core love for cinema, Alphonse and his family would go for movies every week. Daisy used to be a good critic and after watching a movie, she would imagine how the plot-line could have been changed for better.

During her school days, Daisy has won the first prize in a story writing competition held by a bunch of film-makers. But later, she left writing and ventured out to be a beautician. Apparently, Daisy is the first beauty parlour owner in Aluva. She had run a beauty parlour in Kochi also for some time. The first gent’s beauty parlour in Kochi was started by Alphonse's father, Puthren Paul. It was called ‘Gents Beauty Parlour’, and was located at Ammankovil Road. Puthren, who used to work at Premier Tyres in Aluva, had a parlour in TAS road at Aluva as well. Both Puthren and Daisy had completed their beautician course from Singapore.

Alphonse prefers English over Malayalam to write his script and screenplay. The reason being his fluency in the language of course, as he studied in Ootty from L.K.G to sixth standard. He completed his B.Sc in Computer Science from MES College in Marampally before leaving to Chennai for film studies. Most of his close friends from college are seen in his two films.

Alphonse, Nivin, and their bunch of friends used to visit ‘Gopu’s Sarbath Shop’ that was located near Aluva Palace. The shop is shown in ‘Premam’ -- the one where the guys come and ask for Kus Kus in order to cool their soda. It is shown as ‘Gopus Cool Bar’ in the film, and is located at the junction near actor Dileep’s house. Gopu, who runs the real shop, is shown as Unni, who runs the shop in the movie. But the shop shown in the movie is not real. It is a set that was put at Uliyannoor, a small village near Aluva.

After Premam became a hit, the number of youngsters who throng Gopu’s shop has risen. Their latest marketing technique is ‘Premam’ sarbath that is available in the shop, and for that, they have stuck a poster saying the same!

Alphonse, who strongly believes that a film is a director’s complete responsibility, does not let anyone interfere in it. Not even the producer! He is very strict at the film location. After completing his film studies from Chennai, he wrote the script and screenplay for Neram, and waited for seven long years for a producer.

Premam is undoubtedly Aluva’s own film. The pulse is felt not just in the song Aluva Puzhayude Theerathu. Many youngsters from Aluva have been part of this film. Nivin, Anend Chandran who is the cinematographer, Alphonse, Jude Anthany Joseph, who is also a director, Sabareesh Varma who has penned down the songs, Krishnachandran, Saraf and Siju who comes as Nivin’s friends on-screen, are some of the prominent Aluvites who were part of the movie.

 

Alphonse Puthren lights a lamp during the film puja of 'Premam'. Producer Anwar Rasheed, Actors Dulquer Salmaan, Fahadh Faasil and Nivin Pauly look on.

Jude and Alphonse were classmates at Paravoor St. Aloysius High School. Sabareesh and Alphonse are friends from MES College. Nivin, Siju and Alphonse belong to the same church. The story and screenplay for Premam was done in a small house near U.C. College in Aluva. The main locations for the film were Uliyannoor and U.C College, and both were very close.

Most of the actors in the film are their friends from ‘Gopus Cool Bar Association’! In the film, Alphonse has added an incident that he has heard from his mother Daisy. But his mom came to know about this only after watching the movie. In the movie, Nivin’s house is shown as ‘Kalaparambath’, and that is for real. Alphonse’s mother Daisy also belongs to the same family. It is popularly called as Karumaloor Kalaparambath.