Wednesday, April 23, 2008

Josh18 introduces Live Cricket Scorecards in Hindi

Hindi Portal Josh18.com has announced the launch of 'Live Cricket Scorecards' in Hindi, probably the first such feature on the Internet. This Live Cricket Scorecard is available on the 'Cricket section'. India has more than 40-million internet users and PC literacy in India has shown a steady YoY growth of more than 40% since 2004. Youth from Tier-2 and 3 cities and towns are increasingly logging on to the internet. [Read the full story]

Speak Hindi to browse web on your phone

Researchers at IBM's lab in New Delhi have created a pilot program called "Spoken Web" that lets speakers of Hindi surf the Internet using their voice. The feature is targeted at people who are unable to access web through mobile phones. IBM estimates that 1 billion people will surf the Internet on phones by 2011. The company plans to complete the test project in India within three months and have the application rolled out in the country by the end of 2008. [Read the full story]

Tuesday, April 22, 2008

Multilingual dictionary on 7 Indian languages soon

Madras university will soon bring out a multilingual dictionary on seven Indian languages to promote cross-cultural relations. The dictionary is aimed at making languages from the south more accessible in other parts of the country. The Multi-Lingual Dictionary of Indian Languages Project funded by the University Grants Commission (UGC) is a joint venture by the seven language departments of the Oriental Research Institute (ORI), one of the university's premier wings. The five-volume dictionary will comprehensively cover language and literature, art and culture, science and technology, administration and law, and, flora and fauna. [Read the full story]

Friday, April 18, 2008

IPL Cricket Website in Hindi

Noida based Mediaguru has released a new bilingual cricket website to bring the latest news on IPL 2008. The site is in English and Hindi. This probably the first such website in Hindi.

Tuesday, April 15, 2008

Penguin Indian goes to Britain

Penguin India is to launch its 2,000-strong back list into the UK and Europe via Gardners, targeting the UK's Indian population as well as those with an interest in India. An initial 100 titles are to be exported, most of which are English language titles, though a handful will be in the Indian languages of Hindi, Marathi and Urdu. The launch titles will cover fiction, non-fiction and children's apart from other favorites like the Penguin Hindi-English English-Hindi Dictionary and Thesaurus by Arvind Kumar and Kusum Kumar. [Source]

Monday, April 14, 2008

IDNs may debut in early 2009

Edmon Chung, CEO of DotAsia and a member of ICANN working groups believes that Internationalized domain names (IDNs) may debut early next year. He pointed out that the launch of IDNs does not just revolve around technical issues, "It's also a lot to do with policies or even politics...there are many of these issues in different languages to deal with as well and that's why it's taking so long." Chung added that DotAsia intends to provide multilingual domain names, including Chinese, Hindi, Japanese, Korean and Thai. For example, the "asia" in ".asia" would not be the English term but the Chinese equivalent, in Chinese characters. [Read full Story]

Wednesday, April 9, 2008

Advani's autobiography in Hindi soon

NDA’s prime minister-in-waiting LK Advani's autobiography "My Country My Life" is doing very well and the publishers say that a Hindi translation of the book is slated to come out in May, 2008. [Source]

Update: You can get a glimpse of the upcoming Hindi edition of the book (titled "Mera desh, mera jeevan") at the official website of the autobiography. The website features book excerpt, reviews etc.

Monday, April 7, 2008

Free texbooks from NCERT, on web

NCERT LogoImage from WikipediaStian, who blogs on education, was delighted to find free course ware of NCERT on the web in English, Hindi and Urdu. The material is available in PDF format. Stian opines :
There are all kinds of reasons to applaud this. As a student of Hindi, I love reading the readers made for the initial grades (with beautiful illustrations!), and as I move up, I can use the texts in parallel, reading the Hindi and checking with the English that I understood. Just like I suggested that the huge amount of Open Course Ware films of classroom lectures from all around the world, especially China and India, might be a gigantic boon to a comparative curriculum researcher, these text books would also be great for someone studying curriculum and pedagogics in India.

Sunday, April 6, 2008

Yahoo Maps India adds local languages

Yahoo! MapsImage from WikipediaYahoo Maps India has launched recently a novel feature that shows Indian city maps in Indian languages relevant to the region. So if one opens up Yahoo Maps India and goes to Gujarat, s/he can click on the "vernacular" option and can see Yahoo India Maps in Gujarati. Similarly if ones searches for Mumbai, s/he can see the map in Marathi.

Yahoo Maps India had also recently launched its driving directions feature for Indian cities and auto rickshaw fares . [Read full story]

Thursday, April 3, 2008

NDTV launches Hindi news portal "Khabar"

NDTV group has launched a Hindi news portal at NDTV Khabar, a mix of popular portal Webdunia.com and NDTV sophistication, if you will. I recall the April fool spoof I did last year predicting NDTV's entry in Hindi blogging arena and it seems they did create a blogging section, though its unclean whether star Hindi bloggers Avinash and Ravish Kumar, who happen to be NDTV employees as well, will be writing there. Not practicing the high technology gyan NDTV preaches in its own tech shows the portal seems to have decided to stay in the archaic age and refrain from using Unicode on its site and add the clichéd "jyotish" (astrology) section. I wonder if they have heard of Google too ;)

The font "MitraOpen" is designed by Summit and the portal (probably) created by Vishwak.

NDTV Khabar was destined to be launched in January this year, following the launch of mobile portal NDTV active, but there is still no official buzz about its release though the site seems to be active since few days now.

All in all, good for Hindi on the web, but will it spell 'good times' for NDTV as well, time only will tell.