NEW DELHI: A Mumbai firm founded by three former IIT graduates is giving the smartphone a desi makeover. Firstouch, their made-for-India device, allows users to translate text written in English to Indian languages and vice versa by swiping across the 4-inch screen. Not just that, it has a 48-key virtual keyboard that's designed to accommodate Indian alphabets.
Rakesh Deshmukh, Akash Dongre and Sudhir Bangarambandi, who have developed and patented the virtual keyboard and the predictive text engine that goes along with it, are aiming to break the language barrier with the phone. The target customers are likely rural folks, who may not be comfortable with English or even Hindi, but offer a big growth market for telecom operators and device makers.
The first batch of Firstouch phones will be for Gujarati users and will hit stores in Rajkot this month, priced at Rs 6,000, which is roughly what an entrylevel smartphone costs. Hindi and Marathi are next on the cards, set for a June release, and the three partners want to get the phone to support all Indian languages within a year. If they succeed, Firstouch will be the first device capable of such a feat. Why Gujarat first? "Gujjus are far more experimenting," said 31-year-old Deshmukh.
Deshmukh is the CEO and co-founder of MoFirst Solutions Ltd, the company behind Firstouch. Deshmukh, who graduated from IIT in 2006, founded the company two years after that with 30-year-old Dongre, who finished in 2005, and Sudhir, 27, who did so in 2008.
MoFirst has been making iPhone apps since its launch. It developed the country's first mobile trading platform for Motilal OswalBSE 1.49 % Securities in 2012. Other products include m-commerce and m-ticketing solutions besides apps for Android and BlackBerry operating systems.
Even so, the predictive text and swipe technology that it has developed for Firstouch is far more complex and advanced than anything the company has done before. It's capable of translating messages written in a local language to English with a left swipe, and transliterating it by swiping right.
So, if you want to type the message 'How are you?' in Gujarati, it can be done without changing the overall setting from English to Gujarati — because the default keypad has Gujarati alphabets. This message can be translated into English by swiping right. Swiping left will transliterate the message in English into 'Tame kem cho?'
The phone can also translate messages received in English to Gujarati, again with a finger swipe. "This is something new that I've heard," said Gartner Principal Analyst Vishal Tripathi.
"It's very interesting and will be popular among people who are not comfortable with Hindi (the most common non-English language supported by smartphones in India), even among old people whose kids are overseas. I feel the real target market for this device will be tier-3 and tier-4 cities, or villages," he added.
Other phone makers also offer devices that can support local languages — Samsung recently launched products supporting nine Indian languages, while Sony smartphones support 15. However, their settings need to be changed to switch languages, something that users may not be comfortable doing.
However, no current smartphone allows users to translate a message from English to an Indian language. The company wants to extend its translation technology to email and social networking applications in a year or so, allowing a user to translate an email in Hindi or Marathi to English and vice versa with a single swipe.
The ease of this patented technology, the makers feel, will help people who do not know English, especially in rural India, to use smartphones far more easily. The commercial implications could be substantial, and telecom operators are likely to be interested because they are looking at rural markets to grow at a time user additions in cities have flattened or are expanding at a slower pace than before. That's exactly what the company is looking for with its predictive matra keyboard and swipe technology.
"Firstouch is the first regional smartphone which brings millions of rural and semi-urban customer a perfect smartphone, made in their language," Deshmukh said. In Hindi, or the Devanagiri script, matra symbols are used when consonants and vowels are to be written together, something that doesn't apply to English.
Therefore, creating a vernacular keyboard for mobile phones has always been considered a technological challenge. The company has hired Vaibhav Shastri, former head of mobile phones at Micromax and chief executive of Zen Mobiles, as it gets set to market the device.
With his decadelong experience in mobile handset procurement, supply-chain management and production, Shastri is aiding MoFirst in commercially launching the product. Deshmukh is hopeful about the product's prospects with the smartphone market expected to double over this year from 41 million last year.
For now, the company will have to rely on telecom carriers to sell its devices along with bundled data services. It's talking to two top carriers in India with large customer bases in small cities and towns to sell the device bundled with mobile services.
Talks are also ongoing to link its indigenous App Bazaar with operator billing, so that money will be debited from a customer's prepaid or postpaid account when an application is bought.
Customers can access App Bazaar without having to register on the company's website. Users can also access the Google Play store on Firstouch for downloading apps they may be using already. The company has even created a tool for app translation, allowing those in English to run in Gujarati.
Firstouch is exploring tie-ups with online retailers while simultaneously asking developers to create more apps for App Bazaar. More than 200 apps have so far been built for the store.
Rakesh Deshmukh, Akash Dongre and Sudhir Bangarambandi, who have developed and patented the virtual keyboard and the predictive text engine that goes along with it, are aiming to break the language barrier with the phone. The target customers are likely rural folks, who may not be comfortable with English or even Hindi, but offer a big growth market for telecom operators and device makers.
The first batch of Firstouch phones will be for Gujarati users and will hit stores in Rajkot this month, priced at Rs 6,000, which is roughly what an entrylevel smartphone costs. Hindi and Marathi are next on the cards, set for a June release, and the three partners want to get the phone to support all Indian languages within a year. If they succeed, Firstouch will be the first device capable of such a feat. Why Gujarat first? "Gujjus are far more experimenting," said 31-year-old Deshmukh.
Deshmukh is the CEO and co-founder of MoFirst Solutions Ltd, the company behind Firstouch. Deshmukh, who graduated from IIT in 2006, founded the company two years after that with 30-year-old Dongre, who finished in 2005, and Sudhir, 27, who did so in 2008.
MoFirst has been making iPhone apps since its launch. It developed the country's first mobile trading platform for Motilal OswalBSE 1.49 % Securities in 2012. Other products include m-commerce and m-ticketing solutions besides apps for Android and BlackBerry operating systems.
Even so, the predictive text and swipe technology that it has developed for Firstouch is far more complex and advanced than anything the company has done before. It's capable of translating messages written in a local language to English with a left swipe, and transliterating it by swiping right.
So, if you want to type the message 'How are you?' in Gujarati, it can be done without changing the overall setting from English to Gujarati — because the default keypad has Gujarati alphabets. This message can be translated into English by swiping right. Swiping left will transliterate the message in English into 'Tame kem cho?'
The phone can also translate messages received in English to Gujarati, again with a finger swipe. "This is something new that I've heard," said Gartner Principal Analyst Vishal Tripathi.
"It's very interesting and will be popular among people who are not comfortable with Hindi (the most common non-English language supported by smartphones in India), even among old people whose kids are overseas. I feel the real target market for this device will be tier-3 and tier-4 cities, or villages," he added.
Other phone makers also offer devices that can support local languages — Samsung recently launched products supporting nine Indian languages, while Sony smartphones support 15. However, their settings need to be changed to switch languages, something that users may not be comfortable doing.
However, no current smartphone allows users to translate a message from English to an Indian language. The company wants to extend its translation technology to email and social networking applications in a year or so, allowing a user to translate an email in Hindi or Marathi to English and vice versa with a single swipe.
The ease of this patented technology, the makers feel, will help people who do not know English, especially in rural India, to use smartphones far more easily. The commercial implications could be substantial, and telecom operators are likely to be interested because they are looking at rural markets to grow at a time user additions in cities have flattened or are expanding at a slower pace than before. That's exactly what the company is looking for with its predictive matra keyboard and swipe technology.
"Firstouch is the first regional smartphone which brings millions of rural and semi-urban customer a perfect smartphone, made in their language," Deshmukh said. In Hindi, or the Devanagiri script, matra symbols are used when consonants and vowels are to be written together, something that doesn't apply to English.
Therefore, creating a vernacular keyboard for mobile phones has always been considered a technological challenge. The company has hired Vaibhav Shastri, former head of mobile phones at Micromax and chief executive of Zen Mobiles, as it gets set to market the device.
With his decadelong experience in mobile handset procurement, supply-chain management and production, Shastri is aiding MoFirst in commercially launching the product. Deshmukh is hopeful about the product's prospects with the smartphone market expected to double over this year from 41 million last year.
For now, the company will have to rely on telecom carriers to sell its devices along with bundled data services. It's talking to two top carriers in India with large customer bases in small cities and towns to sell the device bundled with mobile services.
Talks are also ongoing to link its indigenous App Bazaar with operator billing, so that money will be debited from a customer's prepaid or postpaid account when an application is bought.
Customers can access App Bazaar without having to register on the company's website. Users can also access the Google Play store on Firstouch for downloading apps they may be using already. The company has even created a tool for app translation, allowing those in English to run in Gujarati.
Firstouch is exploring tie-ups with online retailers while simultaneously asking developers to create more apps for App Bazaar. More than 200 apps have so far been built for the store.
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