Economic Times Launches Gujarati Website

BCCL (The Times of India Group) has launched the website for The Economic Times, Gujarati (ET Gujarati). The domain name ETGujarati.com redirects to the website, though it hasn’t been linked to from the main site EconomicTimes.com. There is no official announcement from ET on the Gujarati site, and perhaps it is still being tested. This follows the launch of the website for ET Hindi in August this year. ET has also put up a page for assisting users who aren’t able to view the font correctly.

The launch of the ET Gujarati website is a welcome development, particularly since Business Standard has stopped updating the website for its Gujarati financial daily, after the publication was shut down. The site doesn’t appear to have been updated since September 10th.

Remember that ET had launched a portfolio tracker earlier this month…I wonder if they intend to launch the same service in Hindi and Gujarati as well. A mobile version of the Hindi and Gujarati sites should also be in the offing. 

Meanwhile, according to a poll we took on Indic languages, most of the respondents feel that we will see mass adoption of Indic languages only after 2013. Hopefully, that shouldn’t deter the proliferation of Indic language content online. The poll is still open, so do cast your vote.

Related:
– Times of India Group To Lay Off Around 5% Staff Across Businesses
– Economic Times Launches Portfolio Manager - Equity, Real Estate, ESOPs 
– Rediff To Allow Users To “Communicate” In 22 Indic Languages
-– @ IGF: “Let Us Not Assume That Users Want Indian Languages” 
– Our Indic/Regional Language segment

Rediff To Allow Users To “Communicate” In 22 Indic Languages

A PTI report states that Rediff will allow customers to communicate in 22 different regional languages, from January 2009. We’re not quite sure of what Rediff means by the term “communicate” - it could mean that they’re expanding the scope of their email service to 22 languages, or even Rediff Bol, their Instant Messenger. Rediff currently offers email in 11 Indic languages. The same report also states that the company is launching two new portals offering the facility to communicate in Gujarati. Looking around, I found two language portals from Rediff - in Tamil and Gujarati. Both are from the  1999-2002 era, and are no longer active. The fonts don’t render properly…doesn’t appear as if they were using unicode.

We’ve written to Rediff, asking for a clarification of their plans. This announcement is surprising, given the context of what Rediff CEO Ajit Balakrishnan had said earlier this month, that 99 percent of Rediff Mail users prefer to use English, and therefore, “Let us not assume that users want Indian languages.” Many of you had commented on that statement, and some had even asked why Rediff has invested in the Indic language space. 

We’ve linked to a few sites above, from as long back as 2001. Almost seven years since, we’re still wondering about mass adoption of the Internet, leave alone the local language Internet. A poll:

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Rediff’s Indic Language initiatives:
– Email in 11 languages
– Investment in Quillpad, an Indic Language transliteration product
– Investment in Eterno Infotech, a mobile application company with a mobile transliteration application
– Indic language search in 8 languages (more on Indic Language Search here)

Related:

– Our Indic/Regional Language segment
– @ IGF: “Let Us Not Assume That Users Want Indian Languages” 

Deshonnati Launches Alerts With One97; Voice Alerts, Subscription vs Free

Marathi language daily Deshonnati has tied up with VAS co One97 Communications to offer daily alerts of local news, information and entertainment in Maharashtra. Among the services are local mandi and bullion rates for rural and semi-urban consumers. These are subscription based services, charged at Rs. 30 for 30 days. However, the content is only available in English, which is a bit of a dampener, given that it targets semi-urban and rural areas. In case of information from a language daily, the lack of indic language support will limit its usage. Reuters Market Light has content available in regional languages, wherever there is handset support.

One97 also plans to launch voice based alert services; perhaps the economics don’t quite work out for the rural population, but Voice Alerts, wherein a user receives an incoming call with the info, instead of an SMS are an interesting option for such a service. In the past One97 has powered Voice Alert services for other media companies like Zee News. In Bihar and Jharkhand, they’ve also tied up with media publication Prabhat Khabar for news and entertainment alerts.

Another interesting point to note is the focus on subscription based paid services. The trend through the last couple of years has been the launch of free SMS services like those from MyToday and SMS GupShup, and monetizing that with advertising. There is greater risk in the latter business model, and I wonder if the burn is worth it.

Related:

– Malayalam Newspaper Mathrubhumi Goes Mobile
– Reuters Market Light To Expand To Haryana In Jan; 9 States By 2009 End
– Vodafone Launches Kirusa’s Voice SMS; Some Thoughts On Voice SMS

Webdunia Shuts Down Trivandrum Ops; Asks Employees To Move To Chennai

This doesn’t augur well for the local language content space: Webdunia, the internet arm of the Nai Dunia Group of publications has asked its employees in Kerala to move to Chennai: T. Sasimohan, Editor of the Malayalam portal was asked alongwith 9 employees to join the Chennai operations on Jan 1st. Pankaj Jain, COO of Webdunia, however, has told IANS that the Malayalam portal will remain operational, and some employees may work from home. 

Webdunia is also providing language content to Yahoo India, so it is unlikely that they will shut down the Malayalam segment alltogether. This appears to be a cost-cutting move, with the operations being consolidated in Chennai. Apart from Malayalam and English, Webdunia has portals for Hindi, Tamil, Gujarati, Punjabi, Bengali, Kannada, Telugu, Marathi.

Earlier, last month, Zapak had scaled down operations in Bangalore, and asked employees to move to Mumbai.

Update: we’ve modified the headline - as correctly pointed out by the company, Webdunia has closed its Trivandrum ops, not Malayalam ops, since the portal will remain active. 

@ IGF: “Let Us Not Assume That Users Want Indian Languages”; PC Era Ended; Multilingual Standards, Voice Based Internet

Updated Below

At the Internet Governance Forum being held in Hyderabad, Ajit Balakrishnan, CEO of Rediff.com said that there is no evidence from the last ten years of the Internet business that users want Indian languages. Rediff has email in 11 languages, and 99% of the users prefer to use email in English. One of the issues is that “practically all of the 300 million young people who aspire to something in this country aspire to learn English.” Therefore “Let us not assume that users want Indian languages.” He mentioned that Nokia has experimented with Indic language keyboards, and pointed out Eterno’s transliteration app which allows the usage of latin characters for messaging in Indic languages.

During the Q&A, Ram Mohan from the audience put forth a significant point on the requirement of multilingual standards - for the creation of a common set of semantics and terminologies, and the need for a framework and a common structure for script and language-based solutions. “We’re talking about a problem that begins at the core of the Internet, at the domain name system, and goes all the way to Internet navigation. Multilingualism is often confused with Internationalized Domain Names. One is not the same as the other.”

(more…)

Opera Mini 4.2 Launched In 12 Indic Languages

Opera Software has released the final version of its mobile browser Opera Mini 4.2, which is available in 12 Indian languages, apart from 78 other languages. The Indic languages include Assamese, Bengali, Gujarati, Kannada, Marathi, Malayalam, Oriya, Punjabi,  Tamil, Telugu, Urdu, Kashmiri.

According to Opera, in their October 2008 report, more and more Indians now use their phones to access India Rail’s train schedules. India remains consistently amongst the top three countries using Opera Mini. Opera also has a mobile browser Opera Mobile, which it has provided to Tata Indicom in India, for browsing in Hindi.

I tried out Opera Mini 4.2 in Hindi, on my Nokia N95, and noticed that the text doesn’t quite render correctly - there’s overlap between characters in every word. For example, in case of हिन्दी there is an overlap between द and the character after it. This makes it difficult to read text in Hindi. 

Google News Launches Malayalam Channel

Update: Google News Malayalam is indexing Manorama online now.

Google India has launched a Malayalam language channel for Google News, writes BG Mahesh, CEO of Grenynium on his blog. OneIndia’s content is being indexed by Google News, along-with content from Yahoo, Webdunia, Sify, Madhyamam, Veekshanam, Deshabhimani, Mangalam, Deepika, Aswamedham.

Strangely enough, though, Google News doesn’t appear to be indexing Malayala Manorama, believed to be the most widely read Malayalam news portal.

This might be because of a font issue - (see update above) Malayala Manorama uses their own font called Manorama (font-file, TTF), instead of the recommended Unicode fonts. I also came across a post listing tools for blogging in Malayalam, and suggestions regarding fonts, as well as links to Malayalam blog lists and aggregators. These posts are over a year old, though.

Mahesh writes that they’re expecting Google to launch Telugu and Kannada versions of Google News next. This follows the launch of Google News in Tamil and Hindi, and search in Gujarati, Marathi and Bengali earlier this year.

Update: We’ve been told by sources in the know, that this isn’t due to a font issue. Switching to unicode fonts, however, is important. Manorama doesn’t work properly on Firefox unless the specific font is installed.

From our Indic Languages section:
– Google News And Indic Language Initiatives; Launches News In Tamil
– OnMobile Global Inks Exclusive Mobile Music Deals With Around 40 South Indian Labels
– Chandamama Launches Hindi, Tamil And Telugu Portals; Archives Inaccessible
– Google Rolls Out Search In 3 Indian Languages - Gujarati, Marathi and Bengali; Rediff Language Search In Beta
– The Economic Times Launches Hindi Site; Business Standard Gujarati; Jagran.com?
– Bilingual Site Patrika.com To Cover 50 Cities