Netting them young, Webdunia starts its events with Maharashtra

Sept. 10, 2008 - PRLog -- India’s first multi-lingual portal in nine Indian languages, Webdunia.com, has drawn up an ambitious plan to engage with over 10 lakh students with a view to expose them to the amazing world of e-learning as also to let them experience the power of communicating in an Indian language.
In the first phase, Webdunia will engage with Indian youth spread across 20 key cities in Maharashtra in their schools, colleges and places of peer learning. The cities to be covered in Maharashtra include Ahmednagar, Aurangabad, Kolhapur, Mumbai, Nagpur, Nashik, Pune and Sangli.  
Through these lively interactive sessions, Webdunia plans to nurture interest and enhance usage of Indian languages, especially Marathi, among students. The ease of use of quality content like news, sports and literature, including classics will be demonstrated over the next 60 days. Fun, learning and knowledge are the three planks by which the portal hopes to keep the populace of young learners absorbed.  

The pioneering portal will hold live demonstrations to show how easy it is to use Indian language email. Thanks to indigenous technology developed by Webdunia, there’s no longer any need to download fonts. On the contrary, all you need are a standard English computer and a regular keyboard to key in text in the language of choice.

Webdunia will also provide an opportunity to the students to input text in the phonetic way and through different scripts according to their own comfort. Webdunia has developed an engine wherein as the learner start typing, it suggests the text. So, rather than typing the whole text, they can just pick and choose. It is a mix of predictive and auto-complete.

Webdunia’s email service is available in Assamese, Bengali, Gujarati, Hindi, Kannada, Malayalam, Marathi, Oriya, Punjabi, Tamil and Telugu.  The portal has gained enough experience by creating content for Webdunia and several leading multi national portals making it the single largest repository of content creators in 9 Indian languages.

Canvas for self expression on the Web
The Internet offers an unlimited canvas for the young to express themselves. Now they can do so in their native language as India's multi-lingual portal Webdunia unfolds some exciting features especially targeted at young learners.

Online gaming, a blog space, a career forum, an SMS platform, a language email service and a unique question answer section called Quest are all part of Webdunia.

Webdunia teams are working towards ensuring that educators looking for informative, entertaining content for their learners will find the right mix at the portal.  A strong career section can help students decide early in life the job of their choice.

Already, the portal is a preferred site for students as since 2000, it has been making available school board and University exam results on the site as soon as these are announced by the Boards, University.

But what will catch the imagination of the young Internet surfers at these interactive sessions is the free to use blog space at Webdunia, Mywebdunia.com, where they can express their creativity in their own mother tongue.  

MyWebdunia.com makes blogging possible in regional languages. Users can not only use the blog space but create their own portals. The user can decide to open the web pages to a select few friends or to the entire worldwideweb.

All the users are linked so that they can expand their network with other bloggers by setting up their own web pages, using the MyWebdunia platform, in a language of their own choice.

"Features like Blogs give the budding learners the ability to express their creative talent as they upload their writings, paintings, photographs and video content on the Webdunia pages. This allows them to share and engage with an ever growing community of Webdunia users," says Mr. Pankaj Jain, Chief Operating Officer, Webdunia.

Indian Language Portals gain ascendancy as users grow
Numerous studies have revealed that Internet penetration will boom as offerings in Indian language rise. Already, the Indian language portals are on an ascendance with the number of broadband subscribers growing by 56 per cent to 3.9 million in the year ending March 2008.

Industry estimates suggest that nearly 1.8 crore users, representing about one-third of the total Internet users, visit an Indian language site. But this is a fraction of the immense potential that remains to be explored using this powerful medium.

Outlining the objectives of Webdunia’s exercise for massive engagement with learners, Chief Marketing Evangelist Arpan Chatterjee said “By creating awareness and making available relevant offerings in 9 Indian languages simultaneously we plan to empower learners with the magic of Internet in their own native language",

Webdunia, which has a sizeable following in large cities, hopes that as young students get hooked to the site, they in turn will become Net evangelists helping their siblings and grandparents leverage the power of the Internet. For first time non English speaking Internet user, the portal equipped with intuitive interfaces is an easy to navigate learning forum.

Through this engagement, Webdunia will also be able to sensitize many school Principals about how powerful a medium the Internet can be to enhance the learning skills of students. Using the MyWebdunia blog the Principals will be able to set up their own School or College home pages complete with text and visuals in their own language.

So, if you would like to experience the magic of Internet in Marathi, do log into marathi.webdunia.com
Or www.webdunia.com.
 
About Webdunia
Webdunia, the first Hindi language portal, offers quality content to people of different religions, cultures and age groups. Nine Indian language portals offer channels like news from the world of politics, sports and human interest stories, Bollywood, Life-Style, Religion, Science, IT, Career, Astrology, Literature, etc. Live cricket commentary, ticker and Webdunia Poll are some other major highlights of Webdunia language portals.

Email service is available in 11 languages—Assamese, Bengali, Gujarati, Hindi, Kannada, Malayalam, Marathi, Oriya, Punjabi, Tamil and Telugu.

Headquartered in Indore, Webdunia development centres operate from Chennai, Indore and Thiruvananthapuram.

For media queries, please contact:
At Strategic Communications and PR Counsel
Sanjiv Kataria
+91 98100 48095
Email 'sanjiv dot kataria at webdunia dot com'
'Sanjiv.kataria@gmail.com'

At Webdunia.com
Parul Bindra
'Parul.bindra@webdunia.net'

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Webdunia is a CMMI Level-III company and India’s largest language Portal. With more than 70 million page views in India, Webdunia is the Ist Indian Language Portal that emerged as a Web 2.0 revolution in the country by means of regional languages.