MAM
Mohit Hira appointed as IBT Media President & Country Head of India
MUMBAI: IBT Media India has appointed Mohit Hira as President & Country Head of its India operations.
IBT Media’s Indian edition (www.ibtimes.co.in) is headquarted in Bengaluru and led by Chandra Mohan, Managing Director, has been operational since 2011.
“Hira’s mandate is to create a brand out of a well-built product with market-facing initiatives and content reinforcement” added Mohan. The site claims that it is engineered by IB Times’ global team, and has seen rapid growth in recent years. It is also well supported by advertisers. Apart from business news, technology, entertainment, sports and politics from India and the world constitute the news lineup in the India edition.
IB Times MD Dev Pragad said, “We were very impressed by Mohit’s deep understanding of digital publishing. His background from advertising to publishing puts him in the perfect position to take IBT Media in India to the next level. We look forward to working very closely with him”.
“IB Times presents a unique opportunity to take a popular digital destination to the next level. In my interactions with Dev and Mohan, their infectious start-up attitude convinced me of the opportunity to leverage my experience. The website is rich in content and is engineered for on-the-go readers who need credible updates on business news through the day. Now it’s time to turn it into a consumer-facing brand and socialise it,” said Mohit Hira.
In his last assignment, Mohit Hira was Chief Executive & Publisher of the RP-Sanjiv Goenka owned Open Media Network which publishes Open Magazine. Hira was also responsible for re launching Open’s website, strengthening its sales team and repositioning the brand.Before joining Open, he was CEO at Hungama Digital Services (HDS) and Digital Head at J. Walter Thompson India, as well as Regional Business Head on the Airtel account. Hira had joined JWT from NIIT, where he was President of its B2C global online learning business that he had started. He was also the Chief Marketing Officer for NIIT’s retail individual training businesses and helped in the founding years of the NIIT University.
As Director-Times Internet Ltd where he was the brand custodian for the group’s website, www.indiatimes.com, he was responsible for incubation, marketing and usability of its portals.Before this, he was the Brand Head of The Economic Times (Delhi) and Navbharat Times at Bennett Coleman. Originally, a copywriter at Contract Advertising’s Kolkata office, Mohit Hira grew to take charge first as Creative Director and then the head of its Kolkata and Delhi offices.
An English (Hons.) graduate of Jadavpur University, Kolkata, Mohit is also an alumnus of Executive Development Programmes at ISB Hyderabad, IIM Ahmedabad and INSEAD Singapore where he was nominated to the Google Academy.
He will continue to be based in Delhi NCR and will work closely with the India and EMEA Managing Directors of IB Times.
Brands
IICT partners with Gativedhi to bring studio production tools to students
New MoU lets students explore AI-driven production pipelines for AVGC-XR
MUMBAI: The Indian Institute of Creative Technologies (IICT) has teamed up with Gativedhi Technologies to give students a front-row seat to modern studio production. The collaboration will integrate Gativedhi’s AI-powered production intelligence platform, Shotrack, into academic programmes, letting students experience the workflow systems used by animation, VFX and gaming studios.
Under the MoU, faculty, students and researchers will get hands-on access to Shotrack through beta programmes, pilot deployments and academic evaluations. This will allow them to explore simulated production pipelines, understand asset management, track tasks and monitor schedules, essentially seeing how complex projects come together behind the scenes.
Shotrack is designed to tackle a key industry challenge: when multiple studios work on the same project, differing internal systems often create bottlenecks, slow approvals and complicate version control. The platform provides a unified production environment, enabling smoother collaboration across distributed teams while generating operational insights and predictive analytics to optimise crew allocation, forecast schedule risks and manage costs.
The collaboration also opens doors to Gativedhi’s wider ecosystem. Upcoming tools include StudioTrack, for studio operations management covering budgeting, recruitment and IT infrastructure, and WorkTrack, which measures workflow efficiency and team productivity across industries.
IICT plans to embed these tools into programmes covering animation pipelines, VFX workflows, gaming production and media project management. Students will also benefit from guest lectures, masterclasses, workshops, internships and research projects that connect academic learning with real-world studio practices.
IICT CEO Vishwas Deoskar, said the partnership provides “An environment where production pipeline tools can be explored, tested and refined while students gain insight into how large-scale productions are organised.”
Gativedhi Technologies founder & CEO Senthil Kumar added, “This collaboration introduces students to real-world studio management tools and helps us improve our platform with academic feedback.”
With Shotrack in classrooms, India’s future animators, VFX artists and gaming producers will get a taste of studio life long before they step into one.
