<div dir="ltr"><div><p class="MsoNormal"><b>A Mobile Developer Looks To Indian Languages</b></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><i>By <a href="http://india.blogs.nytimes.com/author/priyanka-pathak-narain/" title="See all posts by PRIYANKA PATHAK-NARAIN" target="_blank">
PRIYANKA PATHAK-NARAIN</a> </i></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">June 26, 2014 11:51 am </p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><img class="" src="cid:image001.jpg@01CF913D.DE9C6DE0" alt="Men reading a Hindi-language regional newspaper in Bhopal, Madhya Pradesh, on May 27." border="0" height="395" width="592">Sanjeev Gupta/European Pressphoto AgencyMen
reading a Hindi-language regional newspaper in Bhopal, Madhya Pradesh, on May 27.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">MUMBAI — A call center worker far from his native
Hyderabad; a Chennai-based developer checking out e-books in Tamil; and a
young, homesick cab driver in Mumbai who keeps track of comings and
goings in his village in Uttar Pradesh — all
are customers of a mobile news application trying to tap into a growing
market of online Indian-language readers.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">NewsHunt, which can be accessed on smartphones,
delivers 100 newspapers and 10,000 books in 11 Indian languages and
English. It was started in 2009 by its parent company, Verse Innovation,
to serve the growing literate population — 74 percent
of India, according to the latest census.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">In December of 2013, NewsHunt began offering its
readers a selection of 10,000 books, adapted for mobile reading, in nine
Indian languages and English.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">But Virendra Gupta, the chief executive officer of
Verse, said that while 70 percent of its users are bilingual — accessing
newspapers in both English and an Indian language — they tend to read
Indian languages eight to nine times as frequently
as English content.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Umesh Kulkarni, an engineer at NewsHunt, and who
studied Marathi, the language of his native state of Maharashtra, sees
an emotional pull on customers in the product.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">“When you read something in the language you grew
up talking, it’s very appealing,” he said. “Someone asks ‘kasa ahe?’ in
my script, my language, versus ‘how are you’ in English, I respond
differently because there is implied intimacy in
Marathi for me.”</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">NewsHunt has a significant potential customer base
to tap. In India, newspapers are growing, and so is digital media,
according to the Indian Readership Survey. In 2011, Indian media
consumption grew by 3.2 percent, and Indian Internet
users by 46.7 percent, according to the survey. International media
companies have recently <a href="http://india.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/05/25/global-digital-news-brands-see-growth-opportunity-in-india/" target="_blank">lined up</a> to serve the English-speaking readership,
which is a small piece of the population.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">According to a December 2012 report by McKinsey and
Company, India has the third-largest Internet user base in the world —
about 120 million Indians go online every day.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">According to NewsHunt, roughly 50 million people
have NewsHunt on their smartphones. About 11 million are active users,
NewsHunt said. The newspaper content is free for readers. For most
e-books, users have to pay.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Vishal Anand, the chief product officer for
NewsHunt, said NewsHunt users have downloaded 2.5 million books from
December to May. Just 13 percent of those books are in English. Their
best-selling book, “Chanakya Niti,” a treatise written
over two millennia ago by a political economist in the ancient
university of Taxila, in present-day Pakistan, sold 30,000 copies.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">The company behind NewsHunt believes that this
market is ripe. The December 2012 McKinsey survey reported that the
number of Internet users could grow to between 330 and 370 million by
the end of 2015.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Newspapers give full access to their feeds of
stories to NewsHunt for free. The company splits the advertising
revenues with the newspaper.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">NewsHunt receives e-book versions of each book they
sell from the publisher, and when none is available, some of the
roughly 80 developers on staff type the entire book into a
mobile-compatible format by hand.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">While revenues have tripled in the last year for NewsHunt, the business has yet to turn a profit.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">“Everything is put back in the business,” said
Virendra Gupta, the founder and chief executive officer of Verse
Innovation. “We are very focused on penetrating the market.”</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Mr. Gupta said that more that profits right now,
they were looking at gaining users at where the growth in mobile
Internet in India would likely be.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">“Mobile Internet is happening, smartphones are
getting cheap, and your English speaking mobile Internet users will tap
out at 100 million,” said Mr. Gupta. “If mobile Internet grows to 400
million, it will be on local languages. So we
are building up for the future.”</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Piyush Prabhat, the director of Prabhat
Publications, which mostly publishes Hindi books, said that one of his
company’s books, “Master English,” was barely selling, but after being
on NewsHunt, “Suddenly, 7,000 people bought it.”</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Amish Tripathi is the author of a trilogy of
English-language novels based on the imagined mortal life of Shiva, a
Hindu god, that sold two million copies, including many in various
translations, according to Mr. Tripathi’s <a href="http://www.authoramish.com/about.html" target="_blank">website</a>.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">“Distribution is such a challenge, which is why what NewsHunt is doing is so important,” Mr. Tripathi said.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Mr. Anand is careful to qualify the praise — the
100 publishers they use is only a dent in the thousands of publishers
that exist in India.</p>
Chiki Sarkar, editor in chief of Random House
India, said this shift to reading books on mobile phones is inevitable.
“NewsHunt seems to have made an impact on regional literature. E-books
on smartphones is the way it’s going,” she said.<br><br></div>forwarded from <a href="mailto:wfierman@indiana.edu">wfierman@indiana.edu</a><br clear="all"><div><br>-- <br>=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+<br><br> Harold F. Schiffman<br>
<br>Professor Emeritus of <br> Dravidian Linguistics and Culture <br>Dept. of South Asia Studies <br>University of Pennsylvania<br>Philadelphia, PA 19104-6305<br><br>Phone: (215) 898-7475<br>Fax: (215) 573-2138 <br>
<br>Email: <a href="mailto:haroldfs@gmail.com">haroldfs@gmail.com</a><br><a href="http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/~haroldfs/">http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/~haroldfs/</a> <br><br>-------------------------------------------------
</div></div>