Business Today Net Special

Mother Tounge Gold Rush?

By Pooja Garg

You are doomed in the Net economy right now if you don't know English. Many sites offer chatpata ethnic flavour in Hindi, Tamil, Telugu, Gujarati, Marathi, etc. But you still need to know English to get there. In other words, you still need to key in English letters.

Not for much longer, though. There are people at work trying to make your life easier in the networked world. For one, domain names in the local languages. So, i-DNS International established in 1999, and headquartered in Silicon Valley has come up with Internationalised Domain Name System (that's where they get their name i-DNS from) which allows people to get their domain names registered in the local language. i-DNS has also located its servers at the same sites as Network Solutions, the company which takes care of domain name registration worldwide. The principal investor in i-DNS.net is General Atlantic Partners who have invested in some 80 companies, including E*Trade and Priceline.com.

Currently, i-DNS technology supports the registration of domain names and email addresses in 55 non-English languages---including Japanese, Korean, Chinese, Spanish, German, French, Arabic, Thai, and Hebrew. "Over 68 per cent of world population is non-English speaking. i-DNS seeks to bridge the gap that has previously hindered Net access by these people. Talk about e-governance and taking infotech to the grassroot level is great, but if you cannot do it without English, then the benefits may not reach as many people.", says S. Subbiah, 37, Vice-President of i-DNS.net International. They are soon launching a separate multi-lingual e-mail service called i-Email.net.

In India, i-DNS has launched Tamil, Telugu, and Hindi domain names; Hindi being launched by Union Information Technology Minister Pramod Mahajan some time back. Interestingly, of the Top 10 languages, four are Indian languages---Bengali, Hindi, Tamil, and Telugu. Says Subbiah, "We have the technology to support most of the Indian languages. However, the problem is that most languages have many different encodings. Tamil, for example, had 28 different encodings being promoted by various vendors. So, it was important for us to reach a standard which could be used by everybody. That was a problem as none of the vendors wanted to change their encodings, each of which already had quite a few customers. We would face the same problem with other languages as well. Since we want to do it with everybody's consensus, the launch of other languages could take a little while, especially with languages like Urdu and Bengali which has cross-border issues. So, we have tied up with C-DAC (Centre for Development of Advanced Computing), and we accept their standards." C-DAC has an R&D centre in Pune, which is working on developing unicode for Indian languages.

Having given away the Tamil, Telugu, and Hindi versions of '.edu' and '.gov' to the respective state governments for free, they intend to generate revenue on '.com' and '.net' domains. Planning to tie-up with Satyam to be their registrar for domain names, they have also tied up with Vishwabharat.com and e-namaskar.com to their registrar partners for the state of Delhi. These two will be responsible for promotion and registration of Hindi domain names. Repeated attempts at getting them to speak have proved futile.

The uptake on the local languages, however, is lukewarm from all accounts. Says Jasjit Singh, 37, Member-Technical, C-DAC, "We are working on all Indian languages which run from left to right". At the same time, he is not aware of any registrations in local languages taking place as yet. Vivek Jalan, 24, CEO for Dotcom Services (www.dotcos.com), a Web hosting and domain name registration company was also not too sure about the uptake of these names. He points out: "This will go a big way in trying to reach out to non-English speaking audience. But how many domain names will be actually taken up remains to be seen."

Issue Contents Write to us Subscriptions Syndication