If you own an iPhone 5, you probably use it to stay in touch with all of your international contacts. International texting on iPhone 5 is easy and inexpensive, and so is international calling on iPhone 5 if you know which apps to use.
Apps for International Calling and Texting on iPhone 5
Google voice has good rates for international calling on iPhone 5. You can have your voicemails transcribed, and there are other features that make this a nice, well rounded app. Call Voice Changer. Unfortunately, it doesn’t work outside the US.
Rebtel allows extremely inexpensive international texting on iPhone 5 as well as cheap international calls. You can even communicate for free over wifi if the person you are calling also has the Rebtel app, Call Voice Changer, even if they have a different type of device.
MilliTalk is an app that basically adds an extra line to your iPhone 5 by creating a special number for you, and allows cheap international calling and texting. You can buy credits or sign up for a plan using the app. Call Voice Changer
TextNow + Voice is another app that allows international calling and texting and is ad supported instead of requiring a monthly commitment or credits, although you can skip ads by paying $5.99 a month for unlimited texting and calls. It also has a dedicated phone number and voicemail.
Textie Messaging works differently from other iTouch texting apps; instead of assigning you a phone number, the app uses your email address so when your recipient receives a text, your email address will be displayed in the "from" line. You can still receive messages right to the app, use push notifications, and send one text to multiple recipients. Call Voice Changer
iMessage - Perfect for iProduct Families
A lot of people love that iPhone has stepped up their game and provided a feature that used to be available only to Blackberry users - an internal messaging system! iMessage allows you to send unlimited texts over wifi for free using iMessage, and is built into the messages app, so there’s no need to purchase or activate this feature.
Of course, iMessage is only free if using wifi and sending messages to other iPhone users with iMessage on their phones. If you have access to wifi and both you and the person you are wishing to text have iMessage, this is a great option. If you want to engage in international texting on iPhone 5 with someone who does not have an iPhone, however, an app like Rebtel that works on iPhones, Android devices and Windows phones is a better choice.
2 | Southwestern Slot Canyons, United States Narrow fissures carved into rock by millenia of wind and water erosion. The longest, Bucksin Gulch, stretches for 12 miles. Wikipedia. 
3 | Tsingy of Bemaraha, Madagascar A forest made from limestone needles. It's so dense that it's virtually impenetrable to humans. Wikipedia. 
4 | Belize Barrier Reef, Belize The largest Barrier Reef in the Western hemisphere. It's thought 90% of its species remain undiscovered. Wikipedia. 
5 | Grand Prismatic Spring, United States The third-largest hot spring in the world. Its remarkable colors are produced by algae and bacteria. Wikipedia. 
6 | Wulingyuan National Park, China Home to over 3.000 gigantic sandstone columns, many over 200m high. Used to be an ancient tropical sea floor. Wikipedia. 
7 | Namib Desert, Namibia Thought to be the oldest desert in the world. It's home to huge sand dunes, some measured 380m high. Wikipedia. 
8 | Salar de Uyuni, Bolivia Measuring 4000 square miles, this is the world's biggest salt flat. Difficult to reach, it sits 3.7km high in the Andes. When it rains, it becomes the earth's largest mirror. Wikipedia. 
9 | Richat Structure, Mauritania A mysterious 50km-wide geological feature in the Sahara desert. Believed to be caused by uplift and erosion rather than a meteor. It's known as the "Eye of the Sahara." Wikipedia. 
10 | Socotra Archipelago, Yemen An extremely isolated landform- around 33% of its plant life is found nowhere else on earth. Wikipedia. 
Keira Keeley and Colby Chambers ponder the music of the spheres. Photo: Meghan MooreAs a self-appointed high priest in the sacred temple of the theatre, I know I'm supposed to look down my nose at dramatic "vehicles" - but shucks, who doesn't enjoy a spin every now and then in a finely-tuned theatrical machine? Just as there's a secret thrill to the sound of all the doors in a Feydeau farce slamming at precisely the right time, so there's a melodramatic pleasure center at the bottom of every theatre-goer's brain that is forever waiting for a playwright to line his or her dramaturgical ducks all in a row - and then tump them over, one by one, like so many dominoes.And then - oh, yeah, baby, yeah!! The only trouble comes when people confuse the streamlined chassis on a gleaming new vehicle with something more; which has been the case, I'm afraid, with many a Broadway hit - including David Auburn's Proof (now at the Merrimack Rep through April 14) which seems to take on Big Questions, but only uses them to set up finely-crafted conflicts that never even hint at Big Answers. Not that I mind, particularly in a production as smooth and assured as the one up at Merrimack. Well, okay, I mind a little bit. When one of the characters in Proof cries "The machinery! I can feel it working!" (he's talking about his mathematical ability), I always feel like jumping up and shouting, "Yeah, so can I!!" But that would be rude, I know (so I don't do it). But I'm not silly enough to imagine that the various themes - the intellectual thrills (and ruthless competition) of math geekery, the guarded warfare of sibling rivalry, the tortured knots of father-daughter love - around which Auburn has sculpted his script amount to more than so many dramaturgical red herrings.Still, herring makes for a tasty snack if it's done just right, and the cast at Merrimack seems to know precisely how to serve up Proof. Auburn's script focuses on Catherine (Keira Keeley), the damaged daughter of a great mathematician who, in the now clichéd style of A Beautiful Mind, long ago succumbed to madness. Catherine, herself a mathematical talent, became her father's caretaker instead, tending him in their decaying home in Chicago while her elder sister Claire (Megan Byrne) seemingly found fortune, if not fame, in New York. The play opens, however, with the death of their unstable patriarch - and the hint that he may have passed on his curse, along with his other gifts, to his devastated younger daughter.But wait, there's more - through the funeral games Auburn expertly threads a treasure hunt: a mathematical acolyte of the Great Man arrives to hunt through his papers for intellectual gold, and at Catherine's direction, stumbles on a possibly paradigm-shifting thesis on number theory. Catherine immediately claims the "proof" as her own - but as she's already seeing Dad's ghost wandering around the premises, can her honesty, or sanity, be trusted?You can see there's more than enough here for a skilled dramatist to spin a satisfying web of intrigue, and Auburn is more than up to the job. His first act in particular snaps like clockwork; the second, it's true, loses some loft as we realize the playwright isn't going to deeply develop any of the issues he has so expertly raised. But his knack for structure never deserts him - and frankly, this is such an unusual skill for a dramatist to have these days, we can forgive him the rest.This is especially easy given the quality of most of the cast at Merrimack. Keira Keeley seems to heartbreakingly suggest Catherine's instability without any apparent technique at all, and confidently turns on several unlikely emotional dimes without ever missing a beat; it's almost a perfect performance. Hardly a step behind are the reliable Megan Byrne as the gently overbearing Claire, and new face Colby Chambers as the eager post-doc who morphs with agile speed from romantic lead to smooth operator to chief inquisitor (and back) as the gears of the script demand. The one gap in the cast, I'm afraid, is Michael Pemberton, who invests Claire's brilliant father with a kind of bluff heartiness, and hardly a trace of the psychological frailty that haunts his daughter. Director Christian Parker, who clearly knows this play inside and out (he served as dramaturge on its original production) is wise to underplay this issue - still, without even its ghost shadowing the action, Catherine seems slightly untrustworthy in the wrong way. Parker also perhaps misses a subtle dimension to the show's coda - which to my mind is most effective when it suggests that even in matters of "proof," a little faith is sometimes required.Elsewhere the production is strong, but perhaps not in Merrimack's top tier. Lauren Helpern's set gets the job done, for instance, but little more - there's no eccentric specificity to the decay of this quirky homestead. The lighting, by Josh Bradford, and costumes, by Bobby Tilley, are more evocative - but I still sometimes longed for a richer showcase for these extraordinary performances.The Hub Review, the guide to everything that matters in Boston and elsewhere.
Amelia Broome channels the divine Maria.Theatre is about dreaming. Dreaming big.But there are limits. And I think everyone involved in Master Class at the New Rep was dreaming just a little too big. I am certainly a fan of its star, Amelia Broome, and I've generally admired the work of its intelligent director, Antonio Campo-Guzman - but neither seem to have faced the bottom line about Terrence McNally's valentine (or is it a raspberry?) to the great Maria Callas, undeniably the most fascinating diva of the twentieth century.And that bottom line is: this show is nothing without an actress/panther who can prowl the stage with the same ferocity and neediness as Callas herself. The role can't be a stretch. It can't be an exploration. It only exists as an apotheosis. But Amelia Broome, talented as she is, is much more pussycat than panther; indeed, she's known for projecting a gracious, maternal warmth.Now, for all I know, Callas might have projected gracious warmth as well. But that's not what Terrence McNally has written; his Master Class is hardly a portrait of Callas in all her complexity - it's not even an accurate transcript of Callas as pedagogue (there are videos of her classes available which bear no resemblance to McNally's script). It is, instead, a naïve sketch of Callas as drag queen, a kind of gay fantasia on operatic themes in which Callas-the-queer-icon always trumps Callas-the-actual-person. This is, shall we say, rather a narrow perspective, and without a galvanizing presence to animate McNally's puppet diva, his conceits grow repetitive, and long stretches of the script read as vulgar or simplistic.Callas in mid-flight - Norma in 1957.So this is not Terrence McNally's strongest play (yet it still won a Tony - sigh, only in New York!). Still, his conceit has some resonance, because there's a reason gay men revere Callas the way they do Garland - and it all has to do with the braided power and vulnerability that come with self-transformation.Maria Callas was born Sophia Cecelia Kalos (in Manhattan, not Greece) to an overbearing mother and weak-willed father, who adored her older, slimmer sister (check, check and check on the gay-cliché crib sheet, btw). She began her singing career as a somewhat chubby contralto - probably. Frankly, nobody dares classify Callas's voice anymore, because she steadily pushed her range up to mezzo, then soprano, then coloratura territory seemingly through sheer force of will - rather as certain gay men tweeze and corset their way into out-sized visions of femininity. What's more, Callas drove herself into the most punishing vocal territory, mixing and matching roles that would make any voice teacher faint (in one famous season, she swung from Wagner's Brünnhilde to Bellini's Elvira in a matter of days). 
Broome attempts to cast Callas' spell.In the end, the voice was sui generis - indeed, Callas seemed to have several voices, including, startlingly, a strong baritone (she could sing from F below middle C up almost three octaves). But intriguingly, there was no clear line between any of these modes, and for her, the traditional "break" between head and chest voice likewise didn't really exist (just as binary classifications of gender don't exist in drag). What's more, her voice was somehow inhumanly pure, and yet at the same time subtly unstable; what gave her performances a special thrill was the sense that the whole vocal edifice might topple off its heels at any moment.And indeed, Callas ultimately destroyed her instrument; some claim her dramatic weight loss (she starved herself down to a glamorous sylph) was what, shall we say, tipped the scales; others claim the devastating end of her affair with Aristotle Onassis (who moved on from one trophy "wife" to another, Jacqueline Kennedy) was what sent her into a tailspin personally and vocally. But whatever the reason, her soprano began to collapse when she was in her late 40's (which is what makes the idea of her giving a master class rather ironic).So it's no surprise that McNally couldn't resist sending the divine Callas, musically mute but in eternal high dudgeon, stalking through a heterosexual voice class like some diva-saurus rex. And there's fun to be had for a while, it's true, as she lays waste to the clueless fashion disasters who wander into her lair. But in the end, the vulnerability of her sense of self (and will), and her subsequently cruel "instruction," is all McNally has up his sleeve in dramatic terms - and it's enough for a sharp little one-act, but hardly a full evening.Still, Broome does her best, and is generally diverting, if never entirely convincing (you can almost feel her suppressing her true self); she does fail, however, to make the swooning psychological breaks McNally has written into the play work. But these are really the nadir of the script anyway; indeed, as Callas growls about Onassis' "uncircumcised Greek cock," whatever distance still exists between McNally's fantasies and the diva herself is erased, and we wonder whether she's staggering through memories of La Scala or the Ramrod. But elsewhere in the cast the news is good, and so is the singing. The standout was tenor Darren Anderson's powerful turn, but Lindsay Conrad and Erica Spyres also acquitted themselves well. (Spyres is a known quantity, of course; the surprise was Conrad's bumptiously amusing stage presence.) Meanwhile Brendon Shapiro all but embodied the classic self-effacing rehearsal pianist, while the exasperated Michael Caminiti made every walk-on count. Still, in the end, this was hardly a masterly Master Class - indeed, it made you wonder whether without a diva on hand to match Callas, this script is worth reviving.The Hub Review, the guide to everything that matters in Boston and elsewhere.
Recognizing the need for innovation within healthcare, in 2012, Ennovent, a business accelerator, partnered with the University Impact Fund, one of the world's first student driven impact-investing firms, to research the opportunities available for entrepreneurs, investors, mentors and experts to add value to the Indian healthcare industry.
Vision Spring uses the micro-franchise approach to create vision entrepreneurs that aid in the distribution of affordable reading glasses to BoP customers. Whereas Drishti Eye Care uses a three tier hub and spoke model which offers primary eye care through telemedicine supported vision centers, and screening camps and surgical care at district hospitals. Both models are leveraging technology and unique distribution approaches to improve service quality overall.
Vaatsalya, India's first hospital network operating in remote towns and villages is an example of an innovative enterprise working to reduce the primary care gap. By hiring doctors that live in the local area and focusing less on specialist care, Vaatsalya is able to provide quality primary and tertiary care in remote areas cost-effectively.
