When Google, Yahoo and AOL are courting Indian vernacular languages, can industry pioneer Webdunia be far behind? Indore-based Webdunia, the portal that offers multilingual content, has introduced a service that allows users to post advertisements in nine regional languages.
"Webdunia continues to launch new initiatives to meet the emerging needs of Netizens in the Indian languages and this is first of the several special services to be offered this quarter," Chief Operating Officer Pankaj Jain told Hindustan Times in a statement.
Registered users can choose to post an advertisement and receive responses on the email, phone or even by post. They will maintain an online dashboard for managing the process by either editing the advertisement or changing the price of a commodity advertised for sale. The dashboard also allows one to track how many viewers have viewed an advertisement posted by him/her. Users can access multilingual content on Webdunia without having to install any fonts or software. Webdunia runs on a uniform computing standard called Unicode that enables text to be converted between various language scripts automatically. Webdunia users will be able to search for ads from 500 cities in 30 Indian states.