செம்மொழியான தமிழ்மொழியாம்! – Zoho’s participation in the World Tamil classic Conference, Coimbatore

Team

We (Myself & 3 of my colleagues) represented ZohoCorp in the recently held World Tamil Classical conference, Coimbatore.
Zoho was one of the (120+) participants in the Tamil Internet conference (along with software companies – HCL, TCS, Wipro, MicroSoft Bhasha, CTS & other language-specific-software-tool-vendors).
We had internationalized five of our services (Writer, Sheet, Mail, Chat & Challenge) in Tamil & have launched it in this conference.
(Check how far the translation is by changing your language )

Overall the response was good.
Visitors included patrons, students who have got used to our services & the remaining 90% being our prospects 🙂

The main concern (for most of the exhibitors) was the diversity of the audience.
The visitors included everyone – Right from people from rural areas who see Computers surprisingly, students who came for the ‘exhibition’, party people (No comments!), Policemen, college students, professors, teachers, govt. staff, house wives, politicians, ministers, you name a category, they were present!

This was the challenge faced by many exhibitors – how we make them understand what we are into!
I inferred this reluctance in many of the stalls (you are not my immediate / near-future prospect. Why should I spend my energy in you?) – I can also be wrong here, Not sure.

Whoever asked about Zoho (or to whomever reading the Zoho name board), we tried to explain what Zoho is.
We started with EMail as an analogy – Just like you use EMail in the Internet without any installation, free of cost, you can also create, store & edit your project reports, documents, balance sheets (to cater the middle-aged people who hear this often), presentations in the Internet for free – This was our main Mantra.

In addition, we highlighted the following:

1. Power of Net (if you  had your online-booked-railway-ticket in your own computer, you cannot print it out from Station if you forgot. Whereas in the Internet its always easy)
2. No installation problems, No CD needed, You can just discard MS Office – I accept this is not true! But we cautiously said most-of-MS-features when we compared this to MS-Office
3. Free for personal use & to share among friends / colleagues / small groups.
4. One id you can access all the 21 services free of cost – You can also use your GMail / Yahoo Id where you need not create a separate id.
5. Once you use in bulk in office / college, you will be paying a minimal price which will be 1/50^th or less when compared to MicroSoft. This also depends on the number & type of services you use

A very few (say 10 people) asked us what is our profit, to which we had said, “once you use it & finds it good, you can recommend it to your manager / SysAdmin people as an alternative to MS Office”
Many Govt. organizations including ELCOT have seen us. Lets hope a good number of people were aware of us!

Some other points not related to Zoho:

1. Do not get frustrated by the media coverage (where only the patti mandram & other kaviyarangams were covered) & decide that the whole thing was CM’s effort to establish his name.
2. There has been a lot more happenings
3. Badri (a stall exhibitor-cum-observer-for-research papers) has been posting about this conference tagged as செம்மொழி
4. Collection of pamphlets – Many secretly consider the pamphlet more worthy than what we explain & they rate themselves high when they get many of them!
5. As Thirumavelan (a journalist) in Vikatan, rightly pointed out, Whether Tamil flourished or not, Coimbatore had developed a lot – atleast it appears so – good roads, good bus-stand toilets, Painted walls, it shows!
6. Mu.Elangovan has got many photos
7. Madhan Karky (s/o Vairamuthu, a paper presenter) had got some photos.
8. Some other blog posts on the conference.

Sujatha was once criticized in IISc, Bangalore for keeping his science related articles too simplistic for which he replied – “Thats not targeted for you people; those are for the auto-drivers, housewives, mostly the common man who reads the weekly magazines“. I could apply the same analogy for this Internet conference – Its the common man who should have got more benefited, his children who witnessed many possibilities for them, learnt many new things (every common word we used – login, EMail, account, internet, online – are all buzz words for them) here.