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When India's mobile operator
giant Airtel's business partner approached Microimage last December,
microimage's mobile innovation team was absolutely thrilled as it
was an opening to enter exponentially increasing mobile business in
India. Then on May 18 2006 it just happened. Airtel, the largest GSM
mobile operator in India, officially launched the Tamil SMS solution
covering the entire State of Tamil Nadu, the home for more than 55
Million Tamil speaking community, far more than doubled the size of
Sri Lankan population.
With a population equally
dispersed in urban and rural vast lands, the state's phenomenally
successful SMS usage gave enough impetus to Airtel to search for a
viable Tamil SMS solution. After a rigorous Global search, they
decided it is Microimage's solution that can do their job right in
terms of user friendliness, robust integration capabilities, and
proven results.
Tamil SMS and Sinhala SMS
were launched in early 2005 in Sri Lanka by mobile giant Dialog
Telekom who was the 1st operator in the world to launch such a
service. It was later followed by Celltel Lanka which is Sri Lanka's
2nd largest mobile operator. The product won 3 Gold Awards at the
National Best Quality Software Awards conducted by British Computer
Society in 2005 including the overall best product of the year
award.
An Airtel spokesman speaking
about the launch, "This special service will facilitate easy
communication between Airtel customers in a language that comes most
natural to them. Being very user friendly, it empowers millions of
people across Tamil Nadu to communicate in their mother tongue"
"Sending SMS in one's mother
tongue has more warmth than in any foreign language", observed
Vicky, an Engineering student in a city college. Though well versed
in English, "Many a time, like when I SMS my girl friend or send
some jokes, the impact is greater in my mother tongue" he said.
The service also has a unique
key-entry system enabling a customer to type the SMS as fast as in
English and a one touch function guiding them using the key pad to
type Tamil letters", claims Airtel.
"The subscriber needs to
download the application free of charge from 'Airtel Live' on to
their handsets. Those receiving the Tamil SMS also need to download
the application in order to read it in Tamil. In the event of the
recipient not downloading it, the message is automatically
translated and the Tamil words can be read using English letters."
"This system seems to have
become a hit among college students who relish in using slangs in
the local language" Loganathan, a new college student said, "We can
use Tamil SMS to message jokes. Earlier, we could only forward Tamil
picture messages, but now we can create our own messages and
circulate them."
Harsha Purasinghe, CEO of
Microimage said, "We are absolutely thrilled about this occasion of
Airtel launching the Tamil SMS service where our solution crosses
boarders to help another neighboring country's benefit".
Furthermore, "Sri Lankan tamils who use the Tamil SMS service from
Dialog & Celltel can send SMS messages in their native language to
their relatives in Tamil Nadu who use the same service".
Nalaka Kularatne, the Chief
Operating Officer who was in charge of the project, speaking about
the launch, "Tamil SMS Solution launch in Tamil Nadu is the final
result of untiring work done by Microimage mobile innovation team
and their business partner, Random Infotech of India". Random
InfoTech is in the process of rolling out the service with other
operators and channels soon.
Microimage also successfully
completed development of Telugu, Malayalam, Kannada and Hindi SMS
applications and currently the Indian business partner is planning
the respective roll outs. Microimage is also the provider of Divehi
SMS for Republic of Maldives where the Maldivian telecom giant
Dhiraagu will be launching the service to its customers shortly. | 