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| Sunday, 14 November 2004 |
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| News Business Features Editorial
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SMS in Sinhala and Tamil Microimage, will revolutionise the mobile telecommunications industry with the launch of user-friendly SMS (Short Message Service) in Sinhala and Tamil. "Sinhala and Tamil SMS will empower millions of people in rural areas throughout the country to use mobile phones to communicate rapidly and at low cost - people who have not been able to use SMS up to now because they can't read and write English," said Harsha Purasinghe, CEO of Microimage. "This will drastically reduce the cost of communication by mobile, since an SMS is far less expensive than a mobile phone call. We expect an explosion in sales of mobile phones, as people in the outstations, young and old, rush to avail themselves of this service." Although English language SMS has been in use with all of the country's four mobile networks for several years, its use is mainly in the main urban areas such as Colombo and Kandy, where the English-speaking population is concentrated. Attempts to introduce Sinhala language SMS services have not been successful as they have been complicated for practical use. No company has so far developed a successful Sinhala and Tamil SMS service, due to the difficulty of incorporating all of the intricacies of the two languages, which are more complex than English and contain more letters and many times the number of words. "One of the main challenges we gave our software designers was that a user should be able to write any word in Sinhala or Tamil using our new technology, which they achieved," said Purasinghe. "For example, all aspects of the Sinhala alphabet, such as the ispilla, papilla and alapilla, are used." "We want the public to derive the maximum benefit from this new technology, and we are currently in discussion with premier mobile operators who are extremely interested in using our product," added Purasinghe. Microimage has already moved to obtain an international patent for its Sinhala and Tamil SMS method and mechanism, to safeguard its intellectual property. "It took us two years of research and development backed by nine years of experience in linguistic and technological skills, to invent this capability," said Shan Shanmugarajah, Chief Technical Officer of Microimage. The Sinhala and Tamil SMS can be used with any brand of mobile phone. Handsets need to be Java-enabled to transmit a Sinhala or Tamil SMS, but any MMS-enabled mobile phone can receive and display such a message, whether or not it is Java-enabled. |
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