Rajesh Jain’s MyToday, the SMS based content publishing service (alerts and messages) is expanding its services to include five local languages – Hindi, Tamil, Telugu, Kannada and Malayalam, reports Agencyfaqs. The company has tied up with the portal OneIndia.in, which is providing them News and Entertainment content (more here).
The deal remains within Rajesh Jain’s ecosystem of companies – Jain is an angel investor in Greynium Information Technologies which runs OneIndia, and he’s on the board of directors. I confirmed this from BG Mahesh, CEO of Greynium. Mahesh also mentioned the content has been live for 2 weeks now, and among the languages – Kannada and Hindi are doing better than the rest.
An interesting point came up in my discussion with Mahesh: unless the phone one uses has the font for the language pre-installed, one won’t be able to view the language, and interestingly, phones sold in different parts of the country by Nokia (NYSE: NOK) have different languages installed. So a phone bought in Delhi will not have support Kannada. More details on handsets and languages supported here. Why can’t handset manufacturers provide language support for all languages, across the country? For example – wouldn’t a Bengali who buys a phone in Chennai like to read Bengali content?
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