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

Wesley Chu has a great, detailed interview with Jazz chanteuse and artist Monday Michiru. Highly recommended. The Masters at Work/Kenny Dope remix of Monday's "Sunshine After the Rain" is one of my favorite songs. I look forward to sampling her new album.

PopMatters Music Interview | The Groove Monday Made: A Legend in the Undertow of Obscurity

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.

It looks like we're shooting for January 10th as the next MetaFilter NYC meet. I'll be there with my MeFi shirt on.

MetaTalk | Community Weblog

I'm off to Tokyo for 8 days to visit family and do a bit of work as well. I'll be checking email, so that's the best way to get ahold of me.

Yahoo! Weather - Tokyo

Tissue-san is the hot new character from downmarket Sanrio competitor San-X. I know it's been covered extensively by everyone already but I wanted to mention him. Koge-pan comes from the same wackos.

Photography at a Crossroads: View from the Window at Le Gras

"It's so easy to lose information," says Stulik. He likens the arrival of digital cameras to the introduction of Gutenberg's moveable-type printing process in 1455. "Everything changed," says Stulik. Wouldn't it have been nice, he suggests, if someone had sat down in 1460 and described the methods used by medieval scribes to create illuminated manuscripts before people forgot how to make them?

Science Times has a very cool article on the very first photograph ever made. I still love printing photographs by hand with chemicals but I don't have the time to do that more than a few times a year, sadly. My best friend Peter is raving about his new Nikon D100 and his new Epson 2200 and while I may try that stuff out someday soon, there's value in NOT sitting in front of the computer to make your photographs.

via Doc Searls' weblog

The Japan Times Online - What are Japan's teens on about?

If you invite a friend to sutabaru, it means to patronize Starbucks. Likewise, you can find teens who makuru over to McDonald's, dotoru at Doutour, deniru at Denny's and misudo at Mister Donut.

Note, however, that to visit Tokyo Disneyland is referred to as nezumi shibaku (literally, to flog the mouse).

Now that last one is brilliant ^_^

Spring Desktop Web Productivity

Looking very cool for OS X. I won't miss not having my thebrain.com software I'll imagine...

Register.com review