Bangalore: A Natural Disaster Information System could have saved a lot more lives when Tsunami struck South Asia in December 2004. Geneva Software Technologies has come up with Geneva NIDS (Natural Disaster Information System), a software that can translate an English message in 14 Indian and 45 foreign languages and beam to any mobile phone across the world.

Ravindra V.V., Inventor and Technical Director says, “Language characters are shown as pictures encrypted in simple binary format that can be seen in any phone. The software is location specific and can be targeted to specific regions or numbers or subscribers in the users own language.”

Citing an example he says, “There’s an underwater earthquake that leads to Tsunami many miles off Mumbai in Arabian Sea. The Indian Meteorological Department detects it and sends an alert in English to server at Geneva Software, which later translates that into languages used in Mumbai like, Marathi, English, Gujarati and Hindi to alert people to stay off sea in less than 30 seconds.”

The multilingual messaging software can be downloaded by most mobile handsets and its size is just 3kb, enough to be stored in most SIM cards used by GSM phones.

Even if people ignore messages, the software has the capability to convert the text to speech and send message as a voice call- even to wire line phones and over wireless public address system, which works on both GSM and satellites.