What is Rediff doing in the vernacular space?
A. Rediff had pioneered language services in India way back in 1999-2000. In 2002, we were offering e-mail in multiple languages eleven languages at that. Our chat messenger is now available in ten languages. Its good for users to be able to type in Hindi. Personally, I think theres a problem with this model. The technology we have now translates English alphabets into say, Hindi. But fundamentally, it still requires you to think and type in English. Hindi keyboards have not been successful. Until we develop a voice recognition technology that can translate everyday conversation into text, this is not going to take off. Still, there are 100 million people who are literate in English and 21-25 million internet users.
