NY Times – A High-Tech Fix for One Corner of India

Hyderabad, home to about 6.6 million people, has become a green, prosperous hub for computer programming, telephone call centers and drug manufacturing. But most of the state’s 76 million people still live in rural villages where change has been slow, and where a two-year drought has brought considerable suffering.
Andhra Pradesh is nonetheless becoming an international model for certain public policies. Some involve little details, like using automation to cut the time needed to get a new driver’s license to two hours from two days, or quintupling the number of trees in Hyderabad to make it one of India’s greenest, most livable cities.

One of my Japanese friends is planning to move to India to teach Japanese to Indian programmers and IT service people so that they can extend their market beyond the US to other nations. This will be very interesting to watch.

Joi Ito’s got a good start on a list of resources surrounding mobile blogging and related issues.
Joi Ito’s Moblogging, Blogmapping and Moblogmapping related resources

NY Times – Phone Calls on the Cable Bill

Additional services that take full advantage of digital technology are on the horizon. While it will still be invisible to consumers, a new generation of cable modems will be able to break voice traffic into packets using Internet protocol (IP) technology, just as e-mail messages are handled.

Slowly, steadily, the telcos and Bell company business models are being attacked. If you have the choice between DSL and cable for your broadband, I’d recommend cable for the reason that you can try these new cable-based services and cancel your phone line if you want to. If you go DSL, you’ll always have to keep a phone line.