Online marketplace company Amazon has agreed to invest $100 million more on their facility here, according to Mr Ponnala Lakshmaiah, Andhra Pradesh Minister for Information Technology. The Minister, who is touring the US to meet top executives of multinational companies and attend a global meet on Unicode, said Cisco and Deloitte, too, have agreed to increase their investments in Andhra Pradesh.
According to an IT Ministry statement here, the Minister said there was a plan to make entire Hyderabad a Wi-Fi zone to make the city more investment-friendly and to provide wireless broadband for all citizens. “This will be a good selling point to attract investments, and non-resident Telugus who have expertise in the field have come forward to assist the Government in the process,” he said.
Meanwhile, Telugu has become a full-fledged member of the US-based Unicode Consortium to popularise the language in the World Wide Web. The Minister attended the first ever International Telugu Internet Conference (ITIC) held at Milpitas in California last week.
“Telugu is the first Indian language to join the consortium as a full permanent member although two other Indian languages — Hindi and Tamil — are already institutional members,” the Minister said.
Extensive use of Unicode fonts will address severe shortage for content in Telugu and hence, bring more people on to the Web. The Government is planning to put develop more Government Web sites, facilitating quicker interaction between the State and the citizen. The number of Telugu-speaking people across the world is put at 11 crore, including 8 crore in Andhra Pradesh.
The California conference was attended by scientists and language experts, among others, from across the globe. Siliconandhra, which hosted the first edition of ITIC, has plans to make this an annual event.