Bailamos

"Bailamos" (English: "We Dance" or "Let's Dance") is a Latin pop song from singer Enrique Iglesias, sung in Spanglish. It was the debut single of Iglesias in the English-language market, and attained immense success, reaching the No. 1 spot in the Billboard Hot 100. In 1999 the song sold 4.3 million copies worldwide.

Background

"Bailamos" was written by Paul Barry and Mark Taylor and produced by Barry and Brian Rawling, the same team which wrote and produced Cher's hit "Believe". The track first appeared on a limited edition of his Spanish studio album Cosas del Amor and was released as a single in parts of Latin America and Europe. After attending one of Enrique's concerts in March 1999, Will Smith asked Enrique to contribute to the soundtrack of his upcoming movie Wild Wild West and Bailamos was chosen to appear. The song quickly became most requested on pop radio in New York, Los Angeles and Miami. Due to the song's popularity, it was released as a single throughout the world. In English, Bailamos means "We Dance" (We Are Dancing), or in this case, "Let's Dance". In the United States, the song was seen as part of a wave of crossover music from Latin American singers and a general increase in interest in Latin music, which was started by Ricky Martin's release "Livin' la Vida Loca". The single reached number one on the US pop charts, making it Iglesias' first chart topper on Billboard's Hot 100. The Latin song "Smooth" by Carlos Santana released at the end of the year was one of the most successful songs in chart history. Its immense success could, to some extent, be credited to "Bailamos"' and other Latin pop songs during the era. The success of "Bailamos" was a breakthrough for Iglesias, which enabled him to sign a multi-album deal with Interscope. The song would go on to appear on his debut English album Enrique, though slightly altered to fit with the sound of the album. The soundtrack version has a different arrangement in mix from the Album Version.

Kana

Kana (仮名) are syllabic Japanese scripts, a part of the Japanese writing system contrasted with the logographic Chinese characters known in Japan as kanji (漢字). There are three kana scripts: modern cursive hiragana (ひらがな) that in past time known as a women script (women handwriting), modern angular katakana (カタカナ), and the old syllabic use of kanji known as man’yōgana (万葉仮名) that was ancestral to both. Hentaigana (変体仮名, "variant kana") are historical variants of modern standard hiragana. In modern Japanese, hiragana and katakana have directly corresponding character sets (different sets of characters representing the same sounds).

Katakana with a few additions is also used to write Ainu. Kana was used in Taiwanese as a gloss (furigana) for Chinese characters during the Japanese administration of Taiwan. See Taiwanese kana.

Each kana character (syllabogram) corresponds to one sound in the Japanese language. This is always CV (consonant onset with vowel nucleus), such as ka, ki, etc., or V (vowel), such as a, i, etc., with the sole exception of the C grapheme for nasal codas usually romanised as n. This structure had some scholars label the system moraic instead of syllabic, because it requires the combination of two syllabograms to represent a CVC syllable with coda (i.e. CVn, CVm, CVng), a CVV syllable with complex nucleus (i.e. multiple or expressively long vowels), or a CCV syllable with complex onset (i.e. including a glide, CyV, CwV).

Kanał

Kanał (Polish pronunciation: [ˈkanaw], Sewer) is a 1956 Polish film directed by Andrzej Wajda. It was the first film made about the 1944 Warsaw Uprising, telling the story of a company of Home Army resistance fighters escaping the Nazi onslaught through the city's sewers. Kanał is the second film of Wajda's War Trilogy, preceded by A Generation and followed by Ashes and Diamonds.

The film was the winner of the Special Jury Award at the 1957 Cannes Film Festival.

Plot

It is 25 September 1944, during the last days of the Warsaw Uprising. Lieutenant Zadra leads a unit of 43 soldiers and civilians to a new position amidst the ruins of the now isolated southern Mokotów district of Warsaw.

The composer Michał manages to telephone his wife and child in another part of the city that is being overrun by the Germans. After a few words, she tells him that the Germans are clearing the building and that they are coming for her. Then the line goes dead. The next morning, 23-year-old Officer Cadet Korab apologizes after walking into a room to find the second in command, Lieutenant Mądry, and messenger girl Halinka in bed together (Halinka later reveals that Mądry is her first lover). A German attack is beaten off, but Korab is wounded while disabling a Goliath tracked mine.

Kana Software

KANA Software, Inc. is a wholly owned subsidiary of Verint Systems (NASDAQ: VRNT) and provides on-premises and cloud computing hosted customer engagement optimization (CEO) products to many of the Fortune 500, mid-market businesses and government agencies.

History

Mark Gainey founded KANA in 1996 to market a software package designed to help businesses manage email and Web-based communications. It grew around this core offering. In 1999, KANA Communications (as it was then known) acquired Connectify followed by Business Evolution and NetDialog. In 2000, KANA made its then-largest acquisition, Silknet Software. The purchase price was $4.2 billion, despite the fact that both companies were relatively small. Silknet was an early multichannel marketing software company. Industry analysts were generally cool to the purchase though some said it made sense strategically. In 2001, KANA merged with BroadBase software. KANA was a major stock market success during the dot-com bubble, and while it contracted significantly during the following downturn, it remained in business as an independent company through the following decade.