There’s an interesting discussion on local language internet in India by Mahesh following IAMAI report on the same. Some perspectives on the same:
- Should there be local language internet – Absolutely! The power of internet lies in micro-segmentation, and there is no “need to dump Kannada” as Mahesh puts it.
- Is there a market on local language internet in India – honestly, I don’t see it. Economic Times and Google launching local language sites is not an evidence of a market being there – it is a strategy to cover bases. Regardless of whether one takes the IAMAI numbers or Mahesh’s numbers of number of blogs, the numbers are very small to create any decent sized business.
- UGC and Mobile – both very preliminary on local language. Imho, the experience on mobile would suggest that roman script might get adopted for short format content for local language use. The key reason behind lower usage of sms in lower-ARPU subs is not language, its pricing (as per telcos who have experimented with it).
- Growth curve – again, I fail to see the discontinuity here – there is no sudden jump expected in internet penetration which brings in a large base of non-english users in reach, there is no authoring tools which seem to have the potential to train millions of users in short period of times, the progress on fonts has been slow and steady over past few years.
Would love to get others’ views on the above and where they see the opportunity in the local language internet. Videos, in my mind, is clearly one area where local language internet rules, largely because the experience is seamless and it fits nicely into our consumption patterns. Is there a business opportunity here?
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“Mera to ye maan-na hai ki agar public ke kaam ki cheez (web service) ho to local language fonts aur keyboards naa hone par bhi log usey istemaal karenge. Khaas taur se user-generated-content, collaboration, aur social-networking ke case mein” 🙂
The “killer app” for local language Internet (indeed, local language software) is going to be proliferation of local languauge keyboards.
I fail to understand why as PC prices drop and competition gets cut throat, PC makers, new-age netPC makers, low cost PC makers etc are simply not doing local language enabled PCs (esp. keyboards) that will create a beautiful niche for whoever does it first.
The moment you have the keyboards in large numbers, the software and Internet content will follow.
Nobody likes those “online keyboards”.
There is definitely a “user base” for local language but I agree that a “market” does not exist as the user base for local language is dwindling fast.
Some more points:
a. A study pointed out that by 2010 India will be the largest English speaking nation (Don’t have the link, read it somewhere sometime ago)
b. With Internet reaching the villages now — a new crop of english classes for the masses has sprung up.
c. Hinglish/Kinglish/Bonglish or whatever is the mix is actually allowing people to pickup the language if they don’t have it already.
d. Pick up a local Hindi newspaper (I subscribe to Rajasthan Patrika in Bangalore) and you will find that except for the news, a majority of the adverts are in English.
Moreover, India has a large population under 30 and thats the segment which is topping up their English skills. The local languages are still spoken by the older majority.
Indus
My partner at (now defunct) Moneyoga, Kaushik started a gujarati version of his site at http://www.galatime.com/gujarati/. Given the stock market interest in the Gujarati community, interest has been there, and quillpad (http://quillpad.in/gujarati/) seems to do wonders (with autocomplete!).
Honestly I don’t think there’s a market for anything internet (not just local language) given the volumes – total volumes online are very low for a mass market site too, and local languages are simply niches. What it may call for is the long tail approach, meaning there is interest but not enough to sustain a single site – so the approach could be to consolidate and cross-use (through translation).
It would be interesting to set up an online translation/transcription/writing service which can be take up by part-time enthusiasts for a fee per article (paid by the publisher), using technology to do the workflow, transcription and assessment (sorta like Amazon MTurk). That can fuel the long tail for the mostly English publishers who can use the local language long tail, but need both original and translated content.
How this will be sold to places that have little or no internet usage (not access, usage) is a challenge. I’d say wait till internet penetration improves dramatically, and then hit the language wall.
Scope for an internet opportunity will have to be explored by value based experience. Indian Railways have had enormous success thro its portal http://www.irctc.co.in because of that and I am not sure the millions that flock to it can handle English well. They come to it for sheer convenience and language is certainly not a barrier given the experience they get. Those who find English a barrier, do take help from friends / bystanders to use the site. Since it also obviates the need to occupy high cost physical reservation centers, the Railways may even introduce local language versions as well.
So the decision to go vernacular will depend on user experience and site traffic. IMHO, more than the language, it’s the high cost of hardware that is the biggest obstacle. Mobile interfaces are not only clunky, they are very cumbersome. May be, one can check an occasional cricket score, stock price or some music download, it certainly is not convenient for those who have regular mails to check and reply. Not all can afford a blackberry either. Now that all commodity prices have shrunk, why can’t the cost of computer hardware come down to a fifth of what it is now? I am sure over the years all preliminary fixed costs would have been fully absorbed and now they can very well sell it at marginal cost of manufacture. So should the cost of data transfer and broadband which should ideally be free, as in the case of radios earlier.