Panini Keypad: To Change the Way the World Writes Date:   Monday , January 04, 2010 There are 90 million people in India who understand some English. But there are already 500 million mobile phone users, and 45 million new users are added every quarter. Most of the mobile users in India do not type on the phone, because they are unfamiliar with English and hence they never send an SMS. The whole VAS opportunity and the 3G opportunity in India will have to be confined to the 10 percent of the population if we do not offer a means to comfortably type in our regional languages on the phone. This is the solution that startup Luna Ergonomics in Noida has come up with. Luna Ergonomics has developed technologies that allow the user to type on the existing phone with his existing keypad in many languages of India and the world, without the need of printed characters on the face of the keypad. And this new usability is also faster than the speed at which one would ordinarily type in English on the phone. Therefore, this technology for Indian languages surpasses in efficiency the current one to type in English on the phone. The Panini Keypad is an integrated platform to type in 11 major languages of India on the phone conveniently, ergonomically and very fast. The Panini Keypad supports Hindi, Bengali, Telugu, Marathi, Tamil, Gujarati, Kannada, Malayalam, Oriya, Punjabi, and Assamese. And their CleverTexting suite of global language products already supports typing in English, Spanish, Portuguese, Arabic, French, Russian, Swahili, Hebrew, and Finnish. The products use patented statistical predictive texting to estimate what is the most likely characters you are going to input and places them ergonomically at your fingertips from which you select with a single keypress. A user does not need to multi-tap or shift to dictionary mode for symbols. The products also support SMS compression for the first time in the world, which allows you to send more text in your message for the same cost. In the case of Indian languages, it is over 300 percent savings. Panini Keypad also supports automatic transliteration through which you can write in Bengali and send it in Gujarati, receive in Malayalam, and read in Hindi. The products are offered for free download at PaniniKeypad.com and CleverTexting.com, and work on Nokia java phones. Currently, the company is developing software to make it compatible for other platforms. The technologies are also applicable for regional language input on the Web, PC, and other devices including the ATM. Panini Keypad was the winner of Judges Choice award at NOKIA Global Innovation contest under the section of Mobile Necessities of Emerging Markets. The company is founded by Major Abhijit Bhattacharjee and operates out of a Department of Science and Technology sponsored Science and Tech Park in Noida. Bhattacharjee was earlier in the Signals in the Indian Army and has been a telecom and software engineer since 1990.