Microimage to revolutionize mobile communications with Sinhala and Tamil SMS

Microimage, the award-winning Sri Lankan software engineering company, is about to revolutionize the mobile telecommunications industry with the launch of an amazingly user-friendly SMS (Short Message Service) in Sinhala and Tamil.

“Sinhala and Tamil SMS will empower millions of people in rural areas throughout the country to use mobile phones to communicate rapidly and at low cost - people who have not been able to use SMS up to now because they can’t read and write English,” said Harsha Purasinghe, CEO of Micromage. “This will drastically reduce the cost of communicating by mobile phone, since an SMS is far less expensive than a mobile phone call. We expect an explosion in sales of mobile phones, as people in the outstations, young and old, rush to avail themselves of this service.”

Although English-language SMS has been in use with all of the country’s four mobile networks for several years, its use is mainly in the main urban areas such as Colombo and Kandy, where the English-speaking population is concentrated. Attempts to introduce Sinhala language SMS services have not been successful as they have been too complicated for practical use. No company has so far developed a successful Sinhala and Tamil SMS service, due to the difficulty of incorporating all of the intricacies of the two languages, which are more complex than English and contain far more letters and many times the number of words.

“One of the main challenges we gave our software designers was that a user should be able to write any word in Sinhala or Tamil using our new technology, which they achieved,” said Purasinghe. “For example, all aspects of the Sinhala alphabet, such as the ispilla, papilla and alapilla, are used.”

“We want the public to derive the maximum benefit from this new technology, and we are currently in discussions with premier mobile operators who are extremely interested in using our product,” added Purasinghe.

Microimage has already moved to obtain an international patent for its Sinhala and Tamil SMS method and mechanism, to safeguard its intellectual property.

“It took us two years of research and development backed by nine years of experience in linguistic and technological skills, to invent this capability,” said Shan Shanmugarajah, Chief Technical Officer of Microimage.

The Sinhala and Tamil SMS can be used in any brand of mobile phone such as Nokia, Samsung, Sony-Ericsson, etc. Handsets need to be Java-enabled to transmit a Sinhala or Tamil SMS, but any MMS-enabled mobile phone can receive and display such a message, whether or not it is Java-enabled. This solution will be soon available for smart phones as well, which use Microsoft technology.

A Sinhala or Tamil SMS could also be sent from a mobile phone to a computer as an email message which could be displayed using any email software or email services such as hotmail, yahoo, etc, without any additional downloads.

The new service is completely user-friendly, and can be typed as fast as one could type an English SMS thanks to the unique key-entry and rendering mechanism Microimage invented. The service includes a one-touch Help function, which provides a guide in how to use the standard English and numeric keyboard to type Sinhala or Tamil letters.

Microimage, a 100% Sri Lankan owned company, has been building up an impressive record of accomplishments since its formation nine years ago.

Microimage made a splash at the recent BCS National Best Quality Software Awards 2004 by winning two more prestigious awards – a Gold and a Silver. Microimage had earlier won a Merit Award for Human Capital Software Product at the inaugural BCS Awards in 1998, and last year won a Special Gold Award for Software Localization at the same awards.

Microimage was founded in 1993 by a group of A-level students who were passionate about innovating new technology and software solutions. Incorporated in 1995, it now has a staff of 40 at its Development Center and Corporate Office in Colombo, with its own branch operation in Bangladesh, and business partners in several regional countries, to represent its products. From humble beginnings as a provider of desktop local language software, the company has become a leading technology innovator and enterprise software solutions provider to major corporate and government institutions.

Microimage focuses on providing innovative solutions in key product lines such as Human Capital Management Software Solutions, Enterprise Software Solutions, and Mobile Solutions/Software Localization. Key products include Microimage Human Capital Management 4, mStudio, Workforce, Ontime, Helawadana. Its domain of expertise includes Human Resource Management, Media Stations, the Apparel industry, Software Localization, and mobile solutions. Microimage is a Microsoft Certified partner with competencies in MS Platforms/tools and industry standard technologies.

“The successful development of Sinhala and Tamil SMS heralds Microimage’s move into the mobile application development area, and you can expect many more such innovations in the future,” said Purasinghe.