Fair bit of interest developing around local language content on the internet. Have been wondering what opportunities will present themselves over next few years as the opportunity unfolds. Some pieces of the puzzle:
1. Authoring tools
2. Standard rendering technology (still see too many floating around)
3. Content creation – Since english remains the main business language, who will create content and what kinds of content will be available in local language
4. The same question as in 3, but applied to applications
5. Tools to do 3,4 easily and without duplicating 100% effort
6. Search
7. Role of user generated content for local language ecosystem (relates to the question of who is going to create content)
Would love to hear back on what you think are the near term opportunities (3-5 years)
- Promoters or Entrepreneurs – A choice for Private Equity players - August 3, 2019
- Startup Marathon Mindset - March 25, 2019
- What’s your Customer Culture? - March 4, 2019
Its kinda a chicken n egg situation I think – u need content to drive broadband growth and broadband growth to drive content. I think broadband/PC penetration is also important bcos most of the next level users might be illitreate and to reach them you might need an audible or Youtube kinda venture in India bcos audio and visuals will still appeal to them. broadband at about 1.7 million connections is still bad.. removal of service tax, though a small % will probably help spur it and appear as an incentive for people to switch to broadband from dial ups.
Madhu
Another seemingly useful resource at http://indic-computing.sourceforge.net/
The range of options mentioned above itself outlines the problem — as a user, I dont want to care about all the options — I want to be able to type and/or read as easily as I am typing this english comment. What is the simplest way of doing it today? On desktop and more importantly, on the web? Desirably cross platform (not limited to Windows or IE; of for that matter to X)
On another note, one way of looking at this is (and i am bringing in personal bias in here) that for the current mass of population on the internet, the ease of adoption and convenience on the local language front flows in the following order:
– Hear
– Speak (mixed with english)
– Read
– Write (hinglish being different from hindi alone, for example)
So I am far more comfortable (perhaps more than in english) with mixed verbal conversations than if I have to write a letter in Hindi. Given this, the early signs of user behavior may come from a few places:
– Voice communication — I am sure a fair bit of skype communication between indians would be local language driven
– Advertising — If I think about it, it is surprising that more of advertising is not adopting local language, or a mix — authoring and rendering is not an issue there, so that should be pretty easy — any views from people who might be experienced in running wide variety of internet campaigns — are significant campaigns using mix of local language, and is the success rate there any better than english only? Notice Ganpati bappa moriya on indiatimes, for example (am including the link since these ads keep rotating)
– Published content usage
– Usage of mixed language using english script on chats etc
There are 2 types of local language users.
People who are fluent in english, but confortable reading in local languages and others who prefer regional language.
Currently, most Internet users in fall under type 1.
Microsoft has a beta version phonetic Input tool for the Ist set of users http://www.bhashaindia.com/phonetictool/ to address these users need.
I know many NRI’s, who read local language newspaper and magazines on the web.
There are many Indian language news site on the web, most do not use unicode encoding. The current search engine like Google, MSN and Yahoo only indexes unicode encoding pages, morover it’s not intutive to enter search query in local language.
In the next 2-3 years, I expect local sites to convert to unicode encoding and in addition we will see increase in the local language user base.
As I indicated I was exploring this issue and a friend informed me on email that some of the issues I are because I have not enabled the right support. More details at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Enabling_complex_text_support_for_Indic_scripts#Viewing_Indic_Text
IndLinux could be found at http://www.indlinux.org.