GEORGE WALTON LUCAS, MAY THE FORCE BE WITH YOU!

George Lucas & Master Yoda

Today, The Grandma has decided to stay at home watching George Lucas' films to homage him in his 75th anniversary.

The Grandma loves Star Wars, Indiana Jones, Willow and ET, and it is always a great pleasure watching these films once and once again. Cinema is a beautiful art that explores the best and the worst of the human genre.

George Walton Lucas Jr., born May 14, 1944, is an American filmmaker and entrepreneur. Lucas is known for creating the Star Wars and Indiana Jones franchises and founding Lucasfilm, LucasArts and Industrial Light & Magic. He was the chairman and CEO of Lucasfilm before selling it to The Walt Disney Company in 2012.

After graduating from the University of Southern California in 1967, Lucas co-founded American Zoetrope with filmmaker Francis Ford Coppola. Lucas wrote and directed THX 1138 (1971), based on his earlier student short Electronic Labyrinth: THX 1138 4EB, which was a critical success but a financial failure.

Hamill, Lucas & Ford in Star Wars

His next work as a writer-director was the film American Graffiti (1973), inspired by his youth in early 1960s Modesto, California, and produced through the newly founded Lucasfilm.

Lucas' next film, the epic space opera Star Wars (1977), had a troubled production but was a surprise hit, becoming the highest-grossing film at the time, winning six Academy Awards and sparking a cultural phenomenon. Lucas produced and cowrote the sequels The Empire Strikes Back (1980) and Return of the Jedi (1983).

With director Steven Spielberg, he created the Indiana Jones films Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981), Temple of Doom (1984), and The Last Crusade (1989). He also produced and wrote a variety of films through Lucasfilm in the 1980s and 1990s and during this same period Lucas' LucasArts developed high-impact video games, including Maniac Mansion (1987), The Secret of Monkey Island (1990) and Grim Fandango (1998) alongside many video games based on the Star Wars universe.

More information: Lucasfilm

In 1997, Lucas rereleased the Star Wars trilogy as part of a Special Edition, featuring several alterations; home media versions with further changes were released in 2004 and 2011. He returned to directing with the Star Wars prequel trilogy, comprising The Phantom Menace (1999), Attack of the Clones (2002), and Revenge of the Sith (2005). He later collaborated on served as executive producer for the war film Red Tails (2012) and wrote the CGI film Strange Magic (2015).

George Lucas & Mark Hamill in Star Wars

Lucas is one of the American film industry's most financially successful filmmakers and has been nominated for four Academy Awards. His films are among the 100 highest-grossing movies at the North American box office, adjusted for ticket-price inflation.

Lucas is considered a significant figure in the New Hollywood era. Lucas then set his sights on adapting Flash Gordon, an adventure serial from his childhood that he fondly remembered. When he was unable to obtain the rights, he set out to write an original space adventure that would eventually become Star Wars.

Star Wars quickly became the highest-grossing film of all-time, displaced five years later by Spielberg's E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial. After the success of American Graffiti and prior to the beginning of filming on Star Wars, Lucas was encouraged to renegotiate for a higher fee for writing and directing Star Wars than the $150,000 agreed.

More information: Star Wars

Following the release of the first Star Wars film, Lucas worked extensively as a writer and producer, including on the many Star Wars spinoffs made for film, television, and other media.

Lucas acted as a writer and executive producer for the next two Star Wars films, commissioning Irvin Kershner to direct The Empire Strikes Back, and Richard Marquand to direct Return of the Jedi, while receiving a story credit on the former and sharing a screenwriting credit with Lawrence Kasdan on the latter. He also acted as executive producer and story writer on all four of the Indiana Jones films, which his colleague and good friend Steven Spielberg directed.

The animation studio Pixar was founded in 1979 as the Graphics Group, one third of the Computer Division of Lucasfilm.

Pixar's early computer graphics research resulted in groundbreaking effects in films such as Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan and Young Sherlock Holmes, and the group was purchased in 1986 by Steve Jobs shortly after he left Apple Computer.

 
In 1997, to celebrate the 20th anniversary of Star Wars, Lucas returned to the original trilogy and made numerous modifications using newly available digital technology, releasing them in theaters as the Star Wars Special Edition.

The first Star Wars prequel was finished and released in 1999 as Episode I-The Phantom Menace, which would be the first film Lucas had directed in over two decades. Following the release of the first prequel, Lucas announced that he would also be directing the next two, and began working on Episode II.

More information: VOA-Learning English

The first draft of Episode II was completed just weeks before principal photography, and Lucas hired Jonathan Hales, a writer from The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles, to polish it. It was completed and released in 2002 as Star Wars: Episode II-Attack of the Clones.

The final prequel, Star Wars: Episode III-Revenge of the Sith, began production in 2002 and was released in 2005.

Numerous fans and critics considered the prequels inferior to the original trilogy, though they were box office successes nonetheless.

Harrison Ford, George Lucas & Steven Spielberg

From 2003 to 2005, Lucas also served as an executive producer on Star Wars: Clone Wars, an animated microseries on Cartoon Network created by Genndy Tartakovsky, that bridged the events between Attack of the Clones and Revenge of the Sith.

Lucas collaborated with Jeff Nathanson as a writer of the 2008 film Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, directed by Steven Spielberg.

In January 2012, Lucas announced his retirement from producing large blockbuster films and instead re-focusing his career on smaller, independently budgeted features.

Since 2014, Lucas is working as a creative consultant on the Star Wars sequel trilogy, including work on the first film, Star Wars VII: The Force Awakens.

In 2016, Rogue One: A Star Wars Story, the first film of a Star Wars anthology series was released. It told the story of the rebels who stole the plans for the Death Star featured in the original Star Wars film, and it was reported that Lucas liked it more than The Force Awakens.

In 2017, Episode VIII: The Last Jedi was released, which Lucas described as beautifully made.

Lucas has had cursory involvement with Solo: A Star Wars Story (2018).

More information: British Council

Everybody has talent, it's just a matter

of moving around until you've discovered what it is.

George Lucas

STEVE JOBS, 'THINK DIFFERENT' TO CREATE OUR FUTURE

The Grandma welcomes the MWC2019

Today, the Mobile World Congress returns to Barcelona as every year. The Grandma loves technology and science and this exposition is a great opportunity to know the last proposals in this sector.

Mobile has become one of the most important world markets earning lots and lots of millions, creating thousands of employments and developing incredible applications. It's impossible to stop progress although we must work to grow up respecting environment and labour conditions. Technology helps to improve our lives but destroy thousands of employments and we must arrive to a balance between create and destroy.

The Grandma remembers Noemí Bond and she wants to talk about one of the most important genius of the last century, Steve Jobs, the man who created Apple Inc., a technologic empire which has changed our lives, our present and future. He was born on a day like today in 1955.

Before talking about Steve Jobs, The Grandma has studied a new lesson of her Intermediate Language Practice manual (Grammar 13).

More information: Conditionals 1-I , II & III

Steven Paul Jobs (February 24, 1955-October 5, 2011) was an American business magnate and investor. He was the chairman, chief executive officer (CEO), and co-founder of Apple Inc.; chairman and majority shareholder of Pixar; a member of The Walt Disney Company's board of directors following its acquisition of Pixar; and the founder, chairman, and CEO of NeXT. Jobs is widely recognized as a pioneer of the microcomputer revolution of the 1970s and 1980s, along with Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak.

Steve Jobs

Jobs was born in San Francisco, California, and put up for adoption. He was raised in the San Francisco Bay Area. He attended Reed College in 1972 before dropping out that same year, and traveled through India in 1974 seeking enlightenment and studying Zen Buddhism.

His declassified FBI report states that he used marijuana and LSD while he was in college, and once told a reporter that taking LSD was one of the two or three most important things he had done in his life.

Jobs and Wozniak co-founded Apple in 1976 to sell Wozniak's Apple I personal computer. Together the duo gained fame and wealth a year later for the Apple II, one of the first highly successful mass-produced personal computers.

Jobs saw the commercial potential of the Xerox Alto in 1979, which was mouse-driven and had a graphical user interface (GUI). This led to development of the unsuccessful Apple Lisa in 1983, followed by the breakthrough Macintosh in 1984, the first mass-produced computer with a GUI.

More information: GQ

The Macintosh introduced the desktop publishing industry in 1985 with the addition of the Apple LaserWriter, the first laser printer to feature vector graphics. Jobs was forced out of Apple in 1985 after a long power struggle with the company's board and its then-CEO John Sculley.

That same year, Jobs took a few of Apple's members with him to found NeXT, a computer platform development company that specialized in computers for higher-education and business markets. In addition, he helped to develop the visual effects industry when he funded the computer graphics division of George Lucas's Lucasfilm in 1986. The new company was Pixar, which produced Toy Story, the first fully computer-animated film.

Apple merged with NeXT in 1997, and Jobs became CEO of his former company within a few months.

He was largely responsible for helping revive Apple, which had been at the verge of bankruptcy.

He worked closely with designer Jony Ive to develop a line of products that had larger cultural ramifications, beginning in 1997 with the Think different advertising campaign and leading to the iMac, iTunes, iTunes Store, Apple Store, iPod, iPhone, App Store, and the iPad.

In 2001, the original Mac OS was replaced with a completely new Mac OS X, based on NeXT's NeXTSTEP platform, giving the OS a modern Unix-based foundation for the first time.

Jobs was diagnosed with a pancreatic neuroendocrine tumor in 2003. He died of respiratory arrest related to the tumor at age 56 on October 5, 2011.

More information: Famous People Lessons

Apple Inc. is an American multinational technology company headquartered in Cupertino, California, that designs, develops, and sells consumer electronics, computer software, and online services. It is considered one of the Big Four of technology along with Amazon, Google, and Facebook.

The company's hardware products include the iPhone smartphone, the iPad tablet computer, the Mac personal computer, the iPod portable media player, the Apple Watch smartwatch, the Apple TV digital media player, and the HomePod smart speaker. Apple's software includes the macOS and iOS operating systems, the iTunes media player, the Safari web browser, and the iLife and iWork creativity and productivity suites, as well as professional applications like Final Cut Pro, Logic Pro, and Xcode. Its online services include the iTunes Store, the iOS App Store and Mac App Store, Apple Music, and iCloud.

Steve Jobs & Steve Wozniak

Apple was founded by Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, and Ronald Wayne in April 1976 to develop and sell Wozniak's Apple I personal computer.

It was incorporated as Apple Computer, Inc., in January 1977, and sales of its computers, including the Apple II, grew quickly. Within a few years, Jobs and Wozniak had hired a staff of computer designers and had a production line. Apple went public in 1980 to instant financial success.

Over the next few years, Apple shipped new computers featuring innovative graphical user interfaces, such as the original Macintosh in 1984, and Apple's marketing advertisements for its products received widespread critical acclaim. However, the high price tag of its products and limited software titles caused problems, as did power struggles between executives at the company.

More information: Apple Inc.

In 1985, Wozniak stepped away from Apple, while Jobs resigned and founded a new company—NeXT—with former Apple employees.

As the market for personal computers increased, Apple's computers lost share to lower-priced products, particularly ones that ran the Microsoft Windows operating system, and the company was financially on the brink. After more executive job shuffles, CEO Gil Amelio in 1997 bought NeXT to bring Jobs back. 

Steve Jobs shows iPhone Smartphone

Jobs regained leadership within the company and became the new CEO shortly after. He began to rebuild Apple's status, opening Apple's own retail stores in 2001, acquiring numerous companies to create a portfolio of software titles, and changing some of the hardware used in its computers. The company returned to profitability.

In January 2007, Jobs renamed the company Apple Inc., reflecting its shifted focus toward consumer electronics, and announced the iPhone, which saw critical acclaim and significant financial success.

In August 2011, Jobs resigned as CEO due to health complications, and Tim Cook became the new CEO. Two months later, Jobs died, marking the end of an era for the company.

Apple is well known for its size and revenues. Apple is the world's largest information technology company by revenue and the world's third-largest mobile phone manufacturer after Samsung and Huawei.

The company employs 123,000 full-time employees and maintains 504 retail stores in 24 countries as of 2018. It operates the iTunes Store, which is the world's largest music retailer. The company also has a high level of brand loyalty and is ranked as the world's most valuable brand.

However, Apple receives significant criticism regarding the labor practices of its contractors, its environmental practices and unethical business practices, including anti-competitive behavior, as well as the origins of source materials.

More information: The Logo Creative

Great things in business are never done by one person.

They're done by a team of people.

Steve Jobs

NOEMÍ BOND: STAY HUNGRY, STAY FOOLISH

Noemí Bond

I'm sure everybody knows this week is very important for the tecnological sector. The Barcelona Mobile World Congress is an important appointment for many people who work in the world of technology. Day by day, the technology changes very fast. For Barcelona is very important this congress because the impact is very high. The number of visitors grows year after year. It's important for job opportunities and for the tourism sector, mainly.

Barcelona, as a destination, is best known in the world, in fact, thanks to this congress. I'd like to mention that I was at the beginning, in the preliminary of the election of Barcelona as a city to organize this congress when many requirements were necessary.

Hotels were required a commitment to be able to provide acommodation and for that reason was created the agency that works in exclusive for this event.

More information: Barcelona Mobile World Congress

All the tourism sector was euphoric when Barcelona was chosen for this congress in 2006 and will remain here until 2018. We are very lucky and very proud with this congress and I'm going to talk about a person who has a closer relation with it. Does anyone guess it?

I want to talk a little about Steve Jobs, a person who helped to change the technology in the world mobile but he was also more than this. He was a visionary, an American entrepreneur, a business man, an inventor and an industrial designer. He was the cofounder, chairman and chief executive office of Apple, CEO of Pixar, member of the Walt Disney Company's board of directors, following its acquisition of Pixar, and founder, chairman and CEO of Next.

More information: Apple 

Jobs and his friend, Steve Wozniak, are widely recognized as pioneers of the microcomputer revolution of the 1970s and 1980s. He was only 12 years when he saw, for first time, a computer. He was impressed. As you know, Steve Jobs couldn't finish the studies for their high cost. While he was studying, at the same time, he worked very hard and passed for a lot of difficult situations. He travelled to India looking for the inspiration. 

Steve Jobs in 2011

In 1975, he founded Apple working in the garage of his parents. Jobs was diagnosed with a pancreatic tumor in 2003 and died in October 2011 with 48 years.

I think he had a very intensive life until the end of his life. Very few people can say this. One of the most important things applied Steve Jobs along of his life was taking profit of every adversity, every difficult situation. For example, the first time he must go out of Apple, for him was very difficult but thanks to this he could create other companies that became a success.

In 1997, he returned to Apple. He was the real visionary for the Apple brand. In this important period, he was very important for Apple driver, managing, development for innovation and design different products to the market: the Macintosh computer, the Next computer, iMac, iTunes, iPod, iPhone, iPad.

A detail as a curiosity: the origin of the name Apple. One day when Steve Jobs came back from an apple farm and thought the name sounded fun, spirited and not intimidating.

More information: Pixar

As you know, he was sometimes a difficult person with bad manners with some colleagues, workers and partners. After his death, in the interview, all of them also said that he was a genius.

I think his story is really very interesting. I like to share with you a video very inspirational where Steve Jobs appears in the Graduation of Students in the Standford University sending a very impressionant message.

I hope you like it!

Thank you for you attention: "With Apple the spirit of Jobs is alive".

You can't connect the dots looking forward; 
you can only connect them looking backwards. 
So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. 

Steve Jobs