The Canadian communications giant Research In Motion (RIM), better known for its flagship smart phone brand BlackBerry, is betting big on the flavour of Indian regional languages to expand its base beyond metros and Tier-I cities.
It believes localised service offerings like push e-mail facility in regional languages such as Marathi, Tamil, Telugu, Malayalam and Hindi would help rope in customers.
“Till recently we were present in just six cities; within a span of 12 months BlackBerry is now available in 69 cities yet we feel we have just scratched the surface,” RIM’s managing director for India, Frenny Bawa, told Hindustan Times.
Bawa, however, refused to give any timeframe for roll out of such services. “We have the expertise so wherever there is large enough demand and large enough opportunity we will localise. It is definitely in the pipeline.”
Using a local language-enabled handset, a user can access or send emails in languages other than English. The inbuilt software would translate a Hindi sentence written in Roman script, for instance, into Devnagri script.
“We already offer these facilities in around 40 different languages like Arabic, Persian, Korean and French across the world and have the technological capability,” Bawa said.
{{/usCountry}}“We already offer these facilities in around 40 different languages like Arabic, Persian, Korean and French across the world and have the technological capability,” Bawa said.
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