Established in October 1999, with a $5 million funding from General Atlantic Partners LLC., which also took a 40 per cent equity in the company, i-DNS.net, now offers domain name registration in 55 languages all over the world. The company's result of over two years of research and development at the National University of Singapore conducted under the auspices of the Asia Pacific Networking Group.
Continuing with the global strategy of collaborating with government bodies, local Internet authorities, Internet Service Providers amongst others i-DNS.net is currently in the process of offering a bundles multilingual access package to browsers who uses the Satyam ISP. "We won't be charging for the package," S. Maniam, director, business development at i-DNS.net said, speaking to ZDNet India.
The company plans to launch e-mail services in eight regional languages in India namely, Tamil, Telegu, Hindi, Kannada, Marathi, Gujarati, Urdu and Malayalam. "We are not offering Web-based services for the regional services, rather a software will be used to create a keyboard and a standard scripting for the multilingual programme, which can be accessed in the browser."
While maintaining a single, global, universal and consistent hierarchical namespace because, i-DNS will produce the same IP address everytime the domain name is called. It totally complements the current Internet domain naming conventions. The software that the company plans to bundle along with the ISPs, complements the browsers choice of language, unlike other Web-based regional channels.
The standard scripting and the keyboard development project was undertaken jointly with the C-DAC. While the multilingual ISP bundling package will be offered to the market by the end of this year along with Satyam, i-DNS.net hopes to launch the e-mail service by the second quarter next year. "The service is already launched in China."
Not only that, the company is also planning a unique directory search programme in the regional languages in the country by the last quarter next year.
While the alliance with Satyam contains no monetary transaction, both the companies tend to gain tremendously from it. With VSNL's days of monopoly becoming numbered, Satyam tends to gain tremendous value addition with the tie-up that can help it grow in numbers not only among the English speaking browsers, but also among the non-English speaking ones. On the other hand, as the numbers grow with Satyam, i-DNS, will be helped both in terms of revenue as well as users. While the strategy is not to charge the customers for the first three months, Rs 300 will be charged per customers there after. The e-mail service will also be following the same revenue model.
"We are investing $3 million in India over the next one year. We hope to generate a $50 million revenue within the next two years from India if we can add 500,000 users to our service." The company, however, is not planning to set up a subsidiary in India. Instead the company will be setting up its representative office in Mumbai.
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