A Financial Express report quotes Deepak Maheshwari, the Secretary of the Internet Service Providers Assiciation of India, as saying that most Indians who can speak in English are already online, and hence the market is saturated. The numbers have fallen way short of expectations – 9 million broadband users were targeted by 2007 end, and 1.5 million have subscribed to broadband so far.
A Juxtconsult survey found that 44% of respondents preferred sites in Hindi, and 25% want content in other Indian languages. Raftaar.com, a search engine in Hindi will launch a beta version on August 15th and is considering other languages. Google has a Hindi interface, Microsoft has plans for a Hindi edition of MSN.com and Wikipedia already has a Hindi version. SifyMail and Rediffmail are already available in 11 languages, but will their sites go local too? BangaloreLive has video news in Kannada.
“The next big thing,” says the report,”could be a slew of sites in Hindi, Bengali, Tamil and other Indian languages.” I agree.
Related:
– Rediffmail Relaunches With A Host Of New Features; Eyeing Non-metros
– 86% Of Indian Net Users Read Blogs; 41% Prefer Local Language Sites: Survey
– MSN Launches Beta Versions Of Tamil And Hindi Portals-
– Indian Mobile Subscriber Base Reaches 111.23M; Broadband Inches Upto 1.7M
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