Webdunia rides vernacular boom

[Rubber Duck]

Webdunia rides vernacular boom

Webdunia, which has nine regional language portals, is investing overRs 25 crore in the next three years on brand building, technology updates and mass media advertising, in an attempt to become the largest Indian portal.

According to Pankaj Jain, president and CEO of the company, "We are planning to tap the Indian language for new portals. We will alsolaunch several new features and applications every month. We will launch one application every month," said Jain.

"Our online e-greetings business is also picking up especially with the NRIs sending regional language e-cards to families back home,"Jain pointed out.

With nine Indian language portals, Webdunia is expecting to be able to address over four-fifth of India's billion plus population.

Given literacy levels of over 60 per cent, this allows Webdunia toshare the latest from the world of news, sports, entertainment and astrology to over 500 million Indians.

The multi-lingual internet media market is estimated to be worth atleast Rs 500 crore.

"The biggest challenge is availability of internet with only 5 percent of the Indian population accessing the internet. But internet penetration is growing, so hopefully the country will mature," Jain said.

Webdunia's email service is available in 11 languages�Assamese, Bengali, Gujarati, Hindi, Kannada, Malayalam, Marathi, Oriya, Punjabi, Tamil and Telugu.

"We have also migrated to Unicode which allows a portal in any of the nine languages to be accessed on virtually any computer without having to download the language fonts. This should be an added conveniencefor our users," Jain pointed out.

The company's software research and development (R&D) teams are alsoin the process to further strengthen the search engine backbone. This will allow users to search information in their own language on both Webdunia.com and the World Wide Web.

Some of the distinctive services like the mythology of festivals, religion and useful tips from the world of science and health, have already given it the necessary pull from registered users whose numberis growing 6-8 per cent per month.