rediff.com buys stake in Tachyon Technologies

Rediff.com India Limited, one of the leading worldwide online providers of news, information, communication, entertainment and shopping services, announced on Tuesday that it has acquired a minority stake in Tachyon Technologies, a Bangalore-based software company, for an undisclosed sum.

The announcement is a part of rediff.com's efforts to boost its competitiveness by investing in start-up companies with innovative technologies that allow rediff.com to provide better services for its customers.

Ajit Balakrishnan, chief executive officer and founder of rediff.com, said: "We aspire to encourage promising start-ups to develop innovative world class products that support our business.  As a part of such efforts, we are delighted to have an opportunity to invest in a promising start-up company, such as Tachyon Technologies."

Venki Nishtala, chief technology officer, rediff.com, added: "As a leading Internet portal of the country, we believe enhanced Indian language use capability through Tachyon's innovative software can help fuel product innovation and is consistent with our strategy of promoting growth by introducing innovative technologies. The predictive text input technology developed by Tachyon is based on sophisticated machine learning techniques and is an improvement on simple phonetic maps and specialised language keyboards, thus enabling millions of Indians to benefit from the Internet."

Tachyon Technologies has built a world class product named 'Quillpad', which enables users to type in English alphabets to input words in other languages (in the respective scripts) with ease on the basis of phonetics, allowing them to communicate in their language of choice.

rediff.com has adopted this technology in its 'Rediffmail' email and 'Rediff Bol' messenger service.

Commenting on the rediff.com's investment in Tachyon, Ram Prakash H, CEO of Tachyon Technologies , said: "rediff.com's investment in Tachyon Technologies should provide us with the capital we need to enhance our development infrastructure. Hopefully, this will help us to realise our ultimate goal of developing great products "

K S Sreeram, co-founder of Tachyon Technologies, added: "Tachyon, as one of the technologically innovative companies in India, welcomes this opportunity to be associated with rediff.com. We know from our experience that people at rediff.com understand the importance of product innovation and development to succeed in this competitive environment."