Speaking the language of success

1998. TWO MANAGEMENT trainees working at HCL, come out with this idea that will help non-internet users to reach out to their NRI relatives and friends in the US.

Scanning the letters, sending the image file to the NRI's e-mail account, and collecting the e-mail reply and posting it back to the non-internet users-that is how it all began.

``We started doing it for friends first. In the beginning, we didn't have a scanner, so we used to get it done outside,'' Mr. Chandramohan, CEO of Bharatplanet.com recalls.

That was how India's first free `scanmail' service started. ``From the bedroom of our house,'' says Mr. P. Sunder, Director of Bharatplanet.com and room-mate of Chandramohan.

2000. The two-friends have come a long way. Bharatplanet.com recently launched its `multi-lingual bharatmail service' that enables users to send and receive e-mails in Tamil, Telugu, Hindi, Marathi and Bengali apart from English.

www.bharatmail.com is just like another mail service but for its unique feature of multi-lingual service.

It has taken the young entrepreneurs about Rs. 15 lakh to come all the way.

``We didn't need a big investment in the beginning. We funded the project through our salaries, and then a little bit of help from friends from the US,'' says Mr. Sunder.

The phonetic transliteration engine developed by the company, now enables people to send and receive e-mails by typing in the English, the phonetic pronunciations in the regional language desired.

The bharatmail service which currently hosts 55,000 registered users, has plans to go public by March 2001.

The launch of the multi- lingual service was done by Mr. Ramaraj, CEO, Satyam Infoway, `collaborative' efforts were the order of the day in the internet business.

``Only our clothes have changed. We don't like to wear shoes,'' a formally attired Mr. Chandramohan, said during the launch.

``And we have a lot of other ideas-Voice mail for example, where people can call us and leave the message, we will make it a file and send it across by e-mail. We are still working on that,'' he adds.

Way to go for Generation Net.

After all, everything began with Hotmail. This hot idea earned the big money for its promoter, and is today a major part of Microsoft's bag of freebies.

Then again, there are so many web-based e-mail services these days, that there are sites that even offer to ``review'' them.

One such review site is www.free-email- address.com.

The new crop of Indian portals are all offering free e-mail and they are getting popular.

Internationally, however, the reviews focus on such mail services as Altavista, Angelfire, ApexMail, Email.com, EmailChoice, MailExcite, Hotmail, NetAddress, Youpy, ZDNet and of course, Yahoo!.

Hotmail has responded to the demand by offering mail in other languages used widely at the global level.

The phonetic transliteration engine of Bharatmail seeks to meet this need head on. Unlike Hotmail, it is home-grown to boot.

Like everything else on the Net, e-mail too is evolving.

By Sudhish Kamath

Send this article to Friends by E-Mail

Section  : Features
Next     : Indian writers in fiction prize list