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R&P Management communications win IPRA Golden World Awards 2003
MUMBAI: India-based R&P Management Communications is among 33 global winners of the Golden World Awards 2003 at the International Public Relations Association (IPRA) in New York.
Organised by the International Public Relations Association and sponsored by Dai Nippon Printing Co Ltd, awards received entries from Australia, Canada, India, Indonesia, Italy, Japan, Poland, Republic of Korea, Singapore, South Africa, Sweden, Turkey, UK and the USA. Thirty three programmes from 14 different countries have won top prizes for excellence in public relations.
R&P Management Communications won the award for a four year awareness campaign on plant biotechnology. Catering to agriculture, the campaign is designed to make farmers aware of the benefits of plant biotechnology, create an environment to make the biotech option available to them and promote acceptance through the spread of science-based information about plant biotechnology through multiple channels.
The campaign used the country’s focus on IT and software to highlight biotechnology’s potential in India with the positioning: IT Today, Biotechnology Tomorrow.
Says R&P Management Communications, managing director Roger C.B. Pereira, “I am delighted that our entry ‘Biotechnology in Agriculture – Generating Public Support & Acceptance” has won an award in the IPRA Golden World Awards. This is the second time we have been honoured with this prestigious award. We had earlier won the award for our social communications TV serial Humraahi, which also went on to win the UN Award.”
The competition’s international jury, composed of 43 senior practitioners from 20 countries, adjudicated 219 entries in London on 5 September 2003. Criteria used by the jury to examine each entry included the competence and quality demonstrated in terms of research, planning, execution and evaluation, the clarity and coherence of messages, creativity and ethics, as well as local conditions in the country of origin.
Each year the jury votes for one of the Category Awards winners to go forward as overall winner. The Grand Prize for Excellence will be announced and presented by Dai Nippon Printing Co Ltd chief executive Yoshitoshi Kitajima, at a gala GWA dinner in New York in February 2004.
MUMBAI: Apple just folded a photonics startup into its empire because when you’re building the future of light, sometimes you need to acquire the blueprint. Apple has quietly acquired key assets from invrs.io, a small AI-focused photonics startup, and brought its founder and sole employee, Martin Schubert, on board, according to a regulatory filing submitted to the European Union in October 2025.
The filing reveals that Apple would take over certain assets from invrs.io while hiring Schubert, a research scientist with prior stints at Meta, Google, and Micron Technology, where he worked on advanced display, semiconductor, and optical technologies.
Invrs.io specialised in open-source frameworks for photonics research, the science of controlling and manipulating light, critical to cameras, sensors, LiDAR, and displays across Apple’s ecosystem. The startup’s tools used AI-guided design to accelerate optical system simulation, optimisation, and benchmarking, aiming to make complex engineering more accessible to AI researchers and hardware developers.
Apple has not disclosed specific plans for integrating the technology, but the acquisition points to deeper ambitions in hardware-level AI. Enhanced light-based modelling could refine camera performance in iPhones and iPads, boost sensor accuracy in wearables, optimise spatial computing in Vision Pro, and advance next-generation displays and LiDAR systems.
Though modest compared with Apple’s blockbuster deals, the move underscores the company’s push to embed AI not just in software but in the physical foundations of its devices. As custom silicon and on-device AI accelerate, photonics expertise at the intersection of light and intelligence could prove a key differentiator.
For a company that once revolutionised screens with Retina displays, quietly snapping up a photonics innovator feels like the next logical step ensuring the light inside Apple’s world shines brighter, sharper, and smarter than ever.
