(17 September 2007 3:00 pm)

MUMBAI: Indian multi-language internet portal Webdunia.com plans to invest Rs 250 million over the next three years on brand building and mass media advertising.

Part of this activity, is a bouquet of five portals which it has already launched in languages - Bengali, Gujarati, Kannada, Marathi and Punjabi. This takes the total number of language portals to nine.

According to an official release, Webdunia has invested over 1200 man months to create software for the new portals. It had earlier launched Hindi, Telugu, Tamil and Malayalam portals in late '90s.

With these 9 portals, Webdunia hopes to reach over four-fifth of India's population in genres like news, sports, entertainment and astrology.

The company plans to invest over Rs 250 million in the next three years on brand building and mass media advertising.

Webdunia achieved a major technology breakthrough by migrating to Unicode. As a result all 9 portals can be accessed on virtually any computer without downloading the language fonts. The company is further strengthening the search engine backbone so that users can search in their own language on both Webdunia.com and the world wide web.

Webdunia email service has now build in ease of input in 11 Indian languages including Assamese, Bengali, Gujarati, Hindi, Kannada, Malayalam, Marathi, Oriya, Punjabi, Tamil and Telugu.

"Our indigenous state-of-the art technology makes Webdunia one of the finest language emails not only in India but the world over," said Webdunia founder and CEO Vinay Chhajlani.

For sending an e-mail in any of the 11 languages, the sender does not need a language key board or language software.