(more photos here) We had almost 90 people at our #NAMAindic, discussing the future of Indian languages in India from a tech ecosystem perspective. It's an issue that frustrates many people who are passionate about it, and we're thankful for those who came from across the country to participate in the discussions, and to Google India for continuing to support discussions around this topic, which is very important for the growth of Internet usage in India. We'll have notes and videos from the discussion up on MediaNama next week. We're very thankful to our panelists, who shared inputs on two key aspects that still need a lot of work: The monetization of Indic language content with advertising: For this, we had Sandeep Amar (CEO of Indian Express Digital), Amit Duggal (VP, Omnicom Media Group), and Anurag Gupta (CEO, DGM India) sharing their views with us. The challenges of building ecommerce products in Indic languages: For this, we had Apar Sureka, (Director - Products MakeMyTrip), Rohan Khara (Director - Products MobiKwik) and Sumit Tuteja (Senior Director - Supply, Ola) highlight the challenges the companies faced which building Indic language products. Frankly, in the free-wheeling open house discussion, there was little consensus on what needs to be done, and there were disagreements on whether we need government intervention - someone said that we need a "demonetization moment" to mandate Indian languages for all sites and apps, else change will be too slow - and whether we have to leave it to market…
