Good to know, finally Indian government removed all the restrictions on Internet telephony. Really great news.

Finally Indian government has removed the restrictions on internet telephony and allows internet service providers to terminate calls to any phone (landline or Mobile).

The telecom regulator has removed restrictions on net telephony which allows internet service providers (ISPs) to terminate voice calls from the net on the phone. Put simply it makes voice calls interoperable between mobile handset (VOIP- voice internet protocol– enabled) and a personal computer (PC).

Consumers would be able to make calls from PCs to fixed line and mobile phones in India. They can also make a call to personal computers from their handsets. Till date, a call from a computer could legally be made only to another computer within the country, and not to a phone. However, one could make international calls to a phone from their computer.

Source: Net Telephony Freed, Long Distance Rates To Go Down

SwarnaAndhra Harivillu v0.1: Technology: No more restrictions on Internet Telephony in India

Faster Web Pages Makes Users Happy
Steve Souders, the creator of YSlow and the author of the book High Performance Web Sites, is one of the most respected experts on website performance in the world. We here at Pingdom are big fans of his work, and decided to probe his mind about the excellent YSlow Firefox add-on for evaluating website performance (which he created while working at Yahoo), his work at Google, and his thoughts around the ever-important issues of website performance and optimization.

The need for speed: Making Basecamp faster
Analysis: We relied heavily on New Relic’s outstanding RPM performance management suite to give us insight about the parts of Basecamp that were accessed the most as well as those that were most in need of improvement.

Caching: We’ve begun using Memcached in a variety of spots. Caching can be tricky with dynamic apps like Basecamp since different people often see different things, but we’ve implemented it carefully where it could be used to its best advantage.

MySQL optimizations: We’ve been working with a MySQL performance consultant to help us optimize our database calls and queries. We’re still early in the process but we’ve learned a lot so far.

Hardware upgrades: We recently made some significant upgrades to our database servers. We went from servers with 2 x Dual Core 2GHz processors, 32GB of RAM, and 6×73GB 15,000 RPM SAS drives to servers with 2 x Quad Core 3GHz processors, 128GB of RAM, and 8×73GB 15,000 RPM SAS drives. We’ve also upgraded our load balancers and have new switches coming soon as well.

Read the interview with YSlow creator Steve Sounder on Web site performance. Everybody knows why Google search engine became so ubiquitous. The Google home page loads in a flash with minimalist interface and take you for a ride with most relevant results.

Faster Web Pages Makes Users Happy
Steve Souders, the creator of YSlow and the author of the book High Performance Web Sites, is one of the most respected experts on website performance in the world. We here at Pingdom are big fans of his work, and decided to probe his mind about the excellent YSlow Firefox add-on for evaluating website performance (which he created while working at Yahoo), his work at Google, and his thoughts around the ever-important issues of website performance and optimization.

“A thought which does not result in an action is nothing much, and an action which does not proceed from a thought is nothing at all” - Anonymous. Few notable thoughts that are worth sharing and spreading.

Forbes misses the point of the 4-day work week
The point of the 4-day work week is about doing less work. It’s not about 4 10-hour days for the magical 40-hour work week. It’s about 4 normalish 8-hour days for the new and improved 32-hour work week. The numbers are just used to illustrate a point. Results, not hours, are what matter, but working longer hours doesn’t translate to better results. The law of diminishing returns kicks in quick when you’re overworked.

NSF Tells The Story of The Birth of The Internet
National Science Foundation has put together a really great web site that tells the story of the birth of the Internet, using videos, presentations and documents from its archives. The history is divided into decades, and there is a special section devoted to Mosaic developed at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications in the early 1990s. It should be on your things to do today. Awesome!

Gearheads don’t get it
It’s not the camera that I use, it’s not the blogging software, it’s not the widgets, it’s not the SEO. It’s the two C’s: content and community…There are so many crap podcasts out there with billion dollar cameras and editing tools for days. It’s about giving from your heart with content you really understand and, more importantly, giving back to the community that supports your show.

Is architect a verb?
Design carries a lot of baggage related to aesthetics. We say something is well-designed if it looks good. There are great designs that don’t look good, certainly, but it’s really easy to get caught up in a bauhaus, white space, font-driven, Ideo-envy way of thinking about design.

iPhone is my dream smart Phone (see my original post Busting the myth of Smart phones posted on  Cellular Lifestyles in October, 2006)  Many critics of iPhone are quite reluctant to accept that iPhone has not only changed the meaning of a smart phone, but also changed the mobile user and hence the market.

My colleague, a great fan of Nokia always argue that Nokia had the best smart phone, well before iPhone ever made into the market. I don’t know much about that device he is talking about, but see what iPhone had done to the user and market.

1. More users are using email on their phones.
2. More users are now browsing web using a mobile phone.
3. More web sites and business applications created iPhone ready websites and applications. I haven’t heard of a single web app that was declared as Nokia ready.
4. Now with introduction of games through apple Appstore, I am pretty sure more people will play games on their mobile phones. 
5. In turn, carriers will see more people buying data services, a dream for a long time for every carrier word wide.

See the following news report at NY Times arguing that that even carriers are changing their game plan, thanks to iPhone, every carrier is trying to open the walled garden. Nokia was a mobile device provider for a long time. Has Nokia made a single carrier open up?

Applications spur open environment
Consumers have long been frustrated with how much control carriers — AT&T, Verizon Wireless, Sprint and the like — have exerted over what they could download to their mobile phones. But in the last nine months, carriers, software developers and cellphone makers have embraced a new attitude of openness toward consumers.

iPhone is the best gadget I have ever seen in my life and iPhone is what I have been dreaming of a smart phone all the while. The touch screen is a full surprise to me, though.