I recently attended the conference on “Mobile Web Initiative in India – Indic in Digital Universe” conducted by IAMAI and W3C India. I rarely come across events which have a focus on Indian languages on the internet, I was excited to see such a niche topic – Indian languages on mobile web! An intro about the event is mentioned below,
With 100 mn+ users already in the country, and the numbers expected to grow phenomenally within the next few years (300 mn+ by 2015) India is set to achieve new heights in the Mobile proliferation. There is a story here – The mobile revolution has been tremendous- from a measly 2% penetration in the early 2000’s.
Today the mobile phone is the single most important device in the lives of over 900 mn Indians, with the numbers rising at a mind boggling 2~3 million mobiles per month. The crucial aspect of the success of the mobile has been due to the fact that people use their own language to communicate over the mobile. Had the mobile been a language specific technology, one wonders if it would be as successful.
Inclusive growth, rural empowerment and proliferation of Internet over mobile will remain just so many phrases unless key issues are addressed urgently. Today, data in Indic is the key to mobile and Internet adoption.
IAMAI, along with W3C India, is holding this daylong event to address some of the issues and challenges being faced by the Digital Industry with regard to Content in Indian Languages being deployed over Mobile Web.
The inaugural session was attended by Minister of State for Information Technology Sachin Pilot. He had come well prepared for his talk, all points were related only to Indic, mobile web (very rare for a politician). An attendee mentioned to me that if even 20% of what he said gets implemented it would be good enough. Few points mentioned by him,
Census 2011 (Housing Index) reports 53% households have mobile phones, a whopping 50% of rural households have a mobile phone. Majority of these can’t read English. Everyone agreed a common framework in India was needed (Unicode) and it is the industry which needs to push for these standards, consumers cannot.
Few suggestions for Sachin Pilot who is a young (age) minister and holding a geeky portfolio
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