Geodesic-owned Chandamama has stepped up its online presence by adding more language interfaces. The site can now be viewed in 5 Indian languages - Marathi (named Chandoba), Kannada ,Tamil (Ambulimama), Hindi and Telugu versions. The launch of stand-alone language sites is expected to attract rural users who are catching up to the online phenomenon, the company said. While we are skeptical about how many are really there, considering that there are barely 13.54 million Internet (dial up, not broadband) users in India as of March 2009, it will benefit those in cities read comics in their native languages online. If Digital Chandamama does want to tap new readers in rural markets, it may have to launch more mobile-focused services - growth of wireless connections in C-class cities grew 71.3% year on year in July 2009 compared to July 2008. While the language interface is not nearly a blanket, with words such as "shopping" and "contests", "free SMS", "archive" etc standing out in English, it suffices. User's Area, Fun Zone, Explore, Contests Though poorly named, this section allows users to send their contributions to Chandamama via an SMS to 54646. These are called posts and the ten latest contributors are displayed on the homepage. The posts themselves are not directly accessible. Fun Zone has craft projects and an online contest section allows users to write in posts or submit their drawings online. There is no provision for transliteration, which should be introduced to make the website a more complete Indic language…
