In the area of education, numerous universities and cultural organisations around the world have launched initiatives to develop tools for multilingual publishing and give grants to local content publishers. The drive for multilingual publishing is also coming from non-traditional media organisations like online search engine services, Web directories, and new media companies. For instance, the popular Web index Yahoo now has incarnations in French and Japanese as well, with online news provided by news organisations in those countries. The Altavista search engine can handle search queries in over a dozen languages. Pointcast is obtaining revenues for its online services from global and regional players like IBM and Acer.
Web is the lack of standards for representation, fonts and keyboards for many Asian languages.
As a result, content often has to be published in multiple versions. Governments in Indian states like Tamil Nadu have only recently agreed upon standards for computer representation of Tamil content, a move which culminated at the recent TamilNet '99 conference in Chennai. The initiative, announced by Tamil Nadu chief minister M. Karunanidhi, includes seed support for a state-level Tamil Internet Research Centre and a World Tamil University. According to Manoj Annadurai, a speaker at the TamilNet '99 conference, less than two per cent of Tamil Nadu's population uses computers, and most of this usage is in English. The government's support for online initiatives and keyboard standardisation drives in the local language is expected to be instrumental for tapping into Tamil-speaking rural and home markets in India and the Tamil diaspora.