April WebInno Meeting: Yamli

I went to the Web Innovators meeting in Boston last night (April 2nd, 2008). I made these recordings after looking at a number of the demonstrations. I'd originally planned on writing them up, but given time constraints, I'm going to leave it with the original audio. Sorry About the quality, it was a *very* crowded ballroom.
http://www.webinnovatorsgroup.com/
http://www.yamli.com/

Yamli provides a simple, straightforward service. Arabic (and Persian) speakers are often not comfortable (or have available) keyboards or software that support their languages. So an adhoc communication mechanism has sprung up. They send their posts using the English character set, but phonetically in their language. Yamli translates the phonetic into the actual script. That means that someone without an Arabic keyboard can do Arabic searches on sites like Google. Or they can type email messages in their web mail client and send them to their friends. That's a big bonus, because this phonetic Arabic is a lot easier for a human to type than it is for a human to read.

The concept is simple. The implementation is straightforward, and Yamli provides a set of Javascript routines that let you embed the functionality on your own web site.

I don't know what their business model is, but I suspect that the concept will gain widespread acceptance.

I asked them about a Farsi version, since the problem is very similar, and the language scripts are essentially the same (same character set, slightly different display styles). All they really need is a different set of phonetic lookup tables. They claim it would be straightforward to do (and Urdo as well), they just need a native speaker to work with them. Given that Farsi has a major presence on the web, particularly in blogs (certainly more than Arabic) I hope they make a move in that direction, I think it would gain them a lot of support.

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