In 1997, when not many Indians had a taste of TCP/IP dial up Internet connection, the policy makers were debating how to proliferate the new technology. On the other hand the industry debated ways to deal with unreliable dial up connections, dreadfully scarce bandwidth and costs that few could afford.

That time I and a few colleagues thought of overcoming a challenge that only a few had raised. Making Internet accessible to every Indian in their own language was agenda out of which Webdunia was born. We firmly believed that for Internet to become pervasive Indians had to bridge the English language barrier. Only then could we think of connecting a billion people.

As pioneers who conceived of India’s first multi-language Internet portal in 1999, we found that very few tools were available to help us accomplish our mission. That is when we decided to invest in building a strong team that could not only overcome the initial hiccups but build from scratch a technology we could call our own.

We identified Hindi and 10 other Indian languages in which to offer a reliable email service. While one set of committed members tackled the Internet technologies another mastered the languages, scripts, fonts and input technologies that could work on the regular keyboards.

Giving digital access to 800 million Indians in own language
The biggest challenge was to attract curious but hesitant users, those who wanted to experience the digital magic in their own language. While we drew upon our background of the Hindi language we had to tune ourselves to the finer nuances of the other languages. To attract the best language talent we set up the development centres in diverse locations--Indore, Chennai and Trivandrum. The idea was to attract among the best writers and editors who could bring in the well rounded flavour of native with the authenticity that each language deserved.

As the internet penetration improved, the word spread in the deep interiors of the country about the magic of Internet quickly. Early signs of success became visible with growing traffic. We were pleasantly surprised at having connected Webdunia users--from Ludhiana to those in London at one end and those from Perambadur to the far away Pennsylvania. We had met with the basic need of the users to connect to their roots in their own native language. At the same time it opened up an opportunity for fellow Indians to get a peep into the global world. In the years that followed we set up Internet portals in 11 languages.

Extensive user feedback told us that we had a lot of work to do to make the search engine stronger, content richer, user interfaces more intuitive. Once again we were on the drawing boards to improve our technology and user experience.

Some of the leading technology developers like Microsoft and Oracle heard about the work we were doing and roped us in to partner their initiatives to localize their world class software into Indian languages. The increased penetration of mobile telephony opened up opportunities to work in creation and dissemination of mobile content. We were delighted as this gave us newer technology challenges to overcome. We used this experience to bring about exponential improvement in features. Soon our language content and technology expertise was sought by Yahoo and MSN for creating and growing their Indian language portals.

We recently completed an investment of over 1200 man months of effort and unveiled the next version of 9 language portals and email in 11 languages thus becoming the only ones from India with this formidable presence. Based on the advice of global branding experts and feedback from customers we adopted a unified look and feel for all portals

Leveraging Technology to reach the last Indian
Early this year we achieved a major technology breakthrough by migrating to Unicode. As a result all our Indian language portals can be accessed on any computer without downloading the language fonts. The company’s software R&D teams are further strengthening the search engine backbone so that users can search in their own language on both Webdunia.com and the World Wide Web.

Some of the distinctive services like legends behind festivals, religion and useful tips from the world of science and health have already endeared us to our users. We hope to delight our users with the complete launch of the beta version of the portals in the ensuing festival season.

Being early creators of language content and technology for global software majors has given us the unmatched expertise to strengthen our email service. The email service has now built in ease of input in 11 Indian languages, seamless transmission and display on a recipient’s computer screen. I must admit that our indigenous state-of-the art technology has made us one of the finest language emails not only in India but the world over.

While we have moved ahead from the days of TCP/IP connectivity, internet access is still the biggest hurdle for us to reach out to every one. The country needs to offer enhanced Internet access by devising inexpensive broadband packages. And from the PC makers we need technology breakthroughs to bring down the prices of hardware so that it can step up its efforts of ensuring that every Indian is information rich.

And for fellow Indians we will continue to do our bit to make Indian language portals as educative, entertaining and intuitive as possible.

Did you know that?
• You can email in Assamese, Bengali, Gujarati, Hindi, Kannada, Malayalam, Marathi, Oriya, Punjabi, Tamil and Telugu languages
• The user and the recipient do not need a language key board or language software.
• Offerings include news from the world of politics, sports, business and human interest stories, Bollywood, Dharam Yatra under Religion, Science, IT, Career, Astrology, Live cricket commentary and a daily user poll.

*Vinay Chhajlani is the founder and CEO of Webdunia.com