Sabeer Bhatia launches free SMS app Jaxtr

Sabeer Bhatia, the founder of Hotmail.com, on Tuesday launched JaxtrSMS, a mobile application that lets users send unlimited free text messages to any other phone anywhere in the world.
He claimed JaxtrSMS is the world's first mobile-based application for sending SMS that is completely open as the recipients do not need to have the app installed

It is already available as a free download for all major mobile operating systems - iOS, Android, Blackberry and J2ME. In fact, users in 197 countries have already downloaded the app within a few weeks since the soft launch, said Bhatia, who is CEO & co-founded Jaxtr with Yogesh Patel in US. JaxtrSMS is unique in that a mobile user can send a text SMS to any mobile phone in the world without requiring the receiver to have the JaxtrSMS application installed on her phone. This "open" facet of JaxtrSMS distinguishes it from other free mobile messaging applications such as Whatsapp where messages can only be sent within a closed network to people who also have the same app installed. JaxtrSMS retains the number of the user and no new number is required while signing up for the JaxtrSMS service.

"15 years ago, we gave you Hotmail.com, the world's first webmail service that freed up e-mail from the confines of the desktop and aided the creation of a global communications network which was completely open and free for users. Today, we present JaxtrSMS which does to SMS what Hotmail did for e-mail. Now, mobile users can leverage our free and open application to send messages to their contacts anywhere across the world without having to pay anything," said Bhatia. "JaxtrSMS was completely developed in India. I am proud to showcase this as an example of Indian innovation and ingenuity," said Yogesh Patel, president & co-founder

Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization 3.0 Beta Available

Red Hat has just announced the availability of its Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization (RHEV) 3.0 public beta. This release, open to all, brings an updated KVM hypervisor based on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 and scales to 128 logical CPUs and 2TB of memory for host machines.

With the latest beta, Red hat has updated its RHEV Manager application to a Java app running on JBoss. RHEV 3.0 now has a 'power user portal' that allows users to provision VMs and define VM templates.

Another important addition to RHEV 3.0 is a RESTful API that can be used to manage and configure 'all aspects' of RHEV 3.0. It also sports a new reporting engine for analysis of usage trends, and to produce utilization reports. For companies using RHEV as part of their virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI), Red Hat has added some optimizations around WAN access that include better compression and automatic tuning for desktop color depth and effects.

The first beta of RHEV 3.0 was announced in August, but was not available to the general public. You needed to have an active RHEV subscription at that time. The evaluation is immediately available to anyone with a Red Hat Network account.

The installation and testing is a bit more complex than just slapping RHEL onto a server. To run the beta with the recommended evaluation, you'll need to have a RHEV manager server, two or more hypervisor servers, and shared storage for the systems. You can run the eval with just a single manager server and a single hypervisor server with local storage, however. The download consists of a RHEL 6 ISO and the RHEV Hypervisor ISO.

If you're getting started with RHEV, you might want to check out a series of posts by Red Hat's Richard W.M. Jones. These were from August when RHEV was first released into beta, but should still prove useful. So, who's downloading the beta tonight?