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)
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Addressing #3 (Content creation – who will create content and what kinds of content will be available in local language):
I am aware of vibrant Indic blogging communities which have seen significant growth (in terms of contributors as well as readers) over the years. I guess people latch on to something if it offers them the opportunity to have their say. There should be more ways (apps, if i may) to tap this ‘need to be heard’, and blogging I guess, is just one of them. Another commendable effort that is worth mentioning is the Wikipedia initiative being undertaken in many Indic languages.
That said, I am also aware of the pain and hardship that people have to go thru (technologically) to have their say. How do you input in one language (say, Hindi) using the keyboard of another language (English)? Transliteration – a short-cut approach that is normally followed, might serve the English-aware Indic users only. Still, it is painful to hit 3-4 keys to get one Indic letter. Other option is to have custom indic layouts and have the users to memorize a look-up table full of english and corresponding indic charectors – not an easy job again. The solution I can think of is to come up with an auxilliary keyboard which can plug on to a USB port (say, using a USB to PS/2 adaptor) and whose keys are labelled with indic glyphs, and not english letters. The reason I suggest an auxilliary USB keyboard is so that the primary english keyboard is not disturbed and can still be used to input engish. (And the reason for suggesting Indic labelling of keys is obvious, I suppose). When inputting in Indian languages becomes as easy as it is in the case of english, the usage will reach critical mass.
#6 – Search: Google searches work like a marvel as long as the content is in Unicode. The solution is in evangelising users and sites to switch to unicode. Meanwhile, issues persist with regard to unicode encoding schemes (esp. ordering of charectors etc.) that need to be resolved in parallel as well.
Adopting unicode (and reforming it to fit our needs) also resolves many other issues mentioned such as ‘authoring’ etc., as I can just open MS Word or OpenOffice or Notepad and input unicoded Indic text.
Krish, Ramesh
I think 10 sec is a bit unfair — 10 minutes is more like it and in that time you can understand which 50% of the proposals/teams do not fly at all — partially because you already have taken a look at the space and have a view on what works and what doesn’t
Things that pass this 10 minute hurdle, then have, maybe, a 1 hour span, and so on.
Proposals which get most of the time are perhaps 5% of the inflow.