Cyber Czars From The Orient

No wonder then that Indian minds are behind some of the most innovative new technologies which could revolutionise Internet and two-way communication in the near future. Technology that could make blur the distinction between the real world and the virtual world even more. At the recent three-day India Internet World exhibition in New Delhi, a slew of such hot new ideas from Indian or Indian-promoted companies were on evidence.

Receiving e-mail messages, for instance, is one thing, but to receive them in the sender's actual voice or having the sender come on screen and read out his message is a totally different experience. Net Media India (P) Ltd is offering such services in India. Its site www. BroadcastIndia.com enables people without any computer hardware to send voice and video e-mails to anyone around the world. Says Sukaran Singh, ceo of Net Media: 'It's India's first rich media site which integrates TV, audio and print onto the Internet. This will allow people with no contact with the computer to tap into the genius of the Internet.'
in, say, Honolulu.

Briefly, the company allows anyone to call a telephone number (3353322 & 3355522 in New Delhi) and record e-mail messages in his voice which is then sent to an e-mail address specified by him. Similarly, video images of the sender speaking out his e-mail can also be sent over the Internet and the recipient can access it through the basic Real Player software available easily with Windows. This service, now free, is available in New Delhi only, but will soon go to the other metros and big cities in India. Says Singh: 'We are already being approached by several people and companies who wish to become our franchisees in other cities.'

For an Indian web surfer, it would have been bliss to have an Indian or Hindi website or receive e-mails in his mother tongue. But this had remained only a dream in the absence of technology. No longer. Indore-based Suvi Information Systems has cracked the jinx and started the world's first Hindi portal named www.webdunia.com which promises to be the Yahoo or Infoseek in Hindi. The portal is totally customised for Indian use and has a dedicated website that offers news and services for Indians.

The portal supports six other Indian languages too. It has an e-mail engine E-patra which can send e-mails and even an Indian language chat site E-varta where one can chat in these languages. Says Parvinder S. Gujral, marketing manager, Suvi Systems: 'Russia, China, France, Spain and Japan have already gone lingual on the Net to popularise it amongst its people. This is one area India was getting left out of and we are forced to use English as our Net language. Webdunia will change all that.'The user has to key in his Hindi e-mail messages in Roman script and the Webdunia software will write it out in Hindi.

While webdunia offers a website for the vernacular-minded, Hyderabad-based Umesh Tibrewal's Vsplash.com wants to create websites for just about everybody. A Vsplash site is built with Flash a technology that compresses large files in such small space that one can literally carry one's multimedia website on a floppy diskette. A website created under this technology takes only about 250-300 KB as opposed to a standard website, which takes at least 2-3 MB. This apart, the site is totally designed by the customer who holds the right to alter the design whenever he wants. And the company wants to beat everyone else on price. A standard website at Vsplash costs between Rs 2,000 and Rs 3,500 only. Says Tibrewal: 'In the Internet age, no one has time. Running around to buy webspace and then getting it designed are passe. Here you do everything in just 15 minutes.'He believes that this new technology will bring the Internet closer to the people in India and enable the masses to have their own websites.

For Rohit Chandra, the Internet was basically a place to sell ideas. Last year, this US-based Delhi College of Engineering alumnus founded eCode.com, an Internet-based 'identity maintenance programme'. The company basically maintains personal and professional details of people on the Net and gives people an e-code or a personalised address much like the social security number in the US. The website throws in personal aids like roadmaps to the holder's home or office for convenience. Chandra feels that in the modern age, one's personal particulars are constantly changing as a result of which communication is hampered. E-Code seeks to change all this as people will be able to change their personal details as and when they change so that people accessing it will always have latest information.

A Philips Tarifica study says that the number of Internet users the world over will cross the 500-million mark by the millennium and with Internet exchanges turning bandwidth into a freely tradeable commodity, the value of minutes traded will be close to touching $10 billion in the next few years. And India perhaps is the place to be in. With liberalisation of Internet service and opening up of more gateways, immense numbers of people are expected to get hooked up to the Net. And with India being the favourite to host the second Asian Internet exchange after Hong Kong, there is no end in sight for the continuing revolution.