Ali Mackani has made a career out of developing potential. As a computer science engineer at Intel, people came to him with ideas and asked how to make them work. Mackani usually found a way. In 2002, the Folsom resident and partners brought Sacramento a bit of high-tech fame by creating the first large-scale outdoor wireless fidelity or "wi-fi" network. He created a buzz on Capitol Mall, where he opened his first restaurant, 55 Degrees. He then opened a bar, Lounge on 20, that anchors one of the trendiest corners in Midtown, 20th and K streets. Now a team led by this ambitious 40-year-old entrepreneur is a top contender to develop a new arena in Sacramento. That possibility has left s

An Indian film company spent some time in Sacramento recently shooting scenes for a love story, with Capitol Mall standing in for the streets of San Francisco and Placerville standing in for Brazil. Wide Angle Creations is a production company based in South India, whose film industry, Tollywood, is the counterpart to North India's Bollywood. The company came to Sacramento to work on the film "180," which features Siddharth and Priya Anand. Siddharth, who goes only by his first name, is also in Disney's first Southern Indian movie "Once Upon a Warrior." In "180," he stars as a successful San Francisco-area doctor who falls in love, marries and encounters trials and tribulations in life.

It’s one thing to read in the local paper about the outsourcing of jobs abroad, to India, to the Philippines, and it’s quite another thing to have it happen to you. And if you happen to work for the local paper, well... The Sacramento Bee, under enormous fiscal pressure, is finding some unique ways to cut costs, from offering buy-outs to a hefty percentage of the people who write and edit the paper, to outsourcing the work of the people who design advertising, and currently, to the people who have, for decades, kept track of where the money goes. The money is going to India. That’s the big story. It doesn’t seem right, but it adds up for The Bee’s parent company, McClatchy, which is