In the early days of Burmese internet, a unique font was invented, but it has resulted in painpoints Bindez wants to fix.

Like in many emerging markets around the world, mass internet adoption in Myanmar began with the arrival of smartphones, and affordable data plans. A reality that started four years ago.

Prior to that, under the strict military junta government, the internet was only accessible to a few privileged individuals. Tech talent in the country was scarce, which meant there was virtually no tech ecosystem in the country.

There was, however, a group of enterprising individuals who, collectively, built Myanmar’s first mainstream font for the Burmese language. That font is called Zawgyi (there was another called Myazedi, but the former won out).

Today, there is another Burmese-language font competing against the Zawgyi — one that is more familiar to folks outside Myanmar, it is called the Unicode. This system assigns each a code to each letter, and by doing so, ensures character encoding is consistent across all platforms, devices and operating systems.

To put it simply, the very fact that you can read this article online is because of the Unicode system.

However, the Burmese language is a lot more complex than Latin alphabets. For example, here is the word “town” in Burmese:

This makes the task of assigning codes to the Burmese characters tricky. Without getting too technical, one has to take into account that one character can have several modifications, and a single element change affects how the character is rendered. Unicode’s intelligent system allows each element to be automatically arranged to correctly reflect the character.

So why do Myanmar netizens still prefer the Zawgyi font? According to Rita Nguyen, Co-founder of two Myanmar startups, social media platform MySquar and rewards platform Jzoo, it is because the Burmese Unicode’s keyboard is not very user-friendly.

“The keyboard for Unicode is incredibly bad for the Burmese language. The best way for me to explain to you is in the Burmese Unicode keyboard, if you want the type the word ‘cat’, you would probably have to type in ‘cta’,” says Nguyen, in an interview with e27.

“There isn’t a logical way; you have to know how to type that word in Unicode right as opposed to the Zawgyi keyboard, which allows you to logically type out this word the way it should be typed out.”

So if the Unicode keyboard is such a pain-in-the-ass, and if most Myanmar users are using Zawgyi to communicate anyway, why not just make Zawgyi the default font and ditch the other?

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Well, because Zawgyi poses its own set of problems. Remember when I said Zawgyi was cobbled together by a bunch of programmers? The project began 10 years ago, and according to Nguyen, each programmer owns little bits of rights to it but no one is actively updating it.

One of Zawgyi’s core limitations is that it cannot be indexed. And if a business or site can’t index its files, then they can’t be archived on the web and they would not be searchable on Google.

So if none of the original programmers are working on fixing this, at least in the near future, Zawgyi users will be in a bit of a pickle, especially when internet usage in the country is starting to pick up rapidly.

For a deep dive into the conflict between Zawgyi and Burmese Unicode, check out the article Battle of the fonts, written by Griffin Hotchkiss of Frontier Myanmar.

An indexing tool to unify the fonts

Indexing files is not sexy technology, but Myanmar is in dire need of such a tool. To this end, Myanmar-based startup Bindez has leveraged on Natural Language Processing (NLP) and machine learning to build an indexing tool that can spider and crawl Burmese fonts both in Unicode and Zawgyi.

CTO and Co-founder Yewint Ko was initially working on a Google search engine clone for Myanmar. He pivoted to an indexing tool because he felt a search engine would have been difficult to monetise.

Ko also found other uses for the machine learning and NLP tool that he built. Bindez went on to launch news aggregator Bindez Thadin and signed partnerships with local news and content providers.

The startup also released Bindez Insights, a social media tool that provides sentiment and buzz tracking to international brands seeking to tap into the Myanmar market. This B2B platform is Bindez’s main monetisation model.

Yesterday, Bindez received a six-figure funding from VIMIC, a Myanmar-focussed investment company managed by Vulpes in Singapore, as well as 500 Startups and other angel and international investors. Nguyen serves at VIMIC as a venture advisor, in addition to running her two startups. The funding round gives her a board seat at Bindez.

Hurdles

Bindez has built an important tool that will solve a lot of headaches but the hurdles do not end at indexing. The mobile-first Myanmar internet users interact with the web differently from, say, users in Singapore.

“Myanmar users don’t really use browsers. The access to browsers is almost zero, very small. Users don’t understand the concept of a URL unless it is Facebook; like if you go on to Facebook and type forward slash,” says Nguyen.

“But if you say triple W, they will figure out that one but they won’t actually use it. No one goes to a web browser. It’s very rare. Most Myanmar users use Facebook and links out of that.”

Social media usage is, however, picking up. Nguyen says Myanmar people are starting to use Twitter and Instagram.

But while international brands are eager to leverage on mainstream social media platforms to reach local audiences, local brands and businesses are slow adopters.

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“The advertising world here up until very recently was only — and I mean literally only — home billboards. And while that is shifting and you are definitely seeing a more maturing advertising market and marketing space, that is lagging behind too,” says Nguyen.

Most Myanmar businesses do not have websites or advertise on apps. They may or may not have Facebook pages. Those that have Facebook pages post information in three blocks, one in Burmese Unicode, one in Zawgyi, and one in English, in each post. As you can see, it is a little clumsy.

Having said that, every nascent tech ecosystem will experience teething pangs. In Myanmar, it is more pronounced because the majority of the population had no exposure to the internet prior to the arrival of smartphones.

And even while smartphone penetration is high in cities like Yangon, Myanmar people in many rural areas have yet to catch up.

These problems will not be solved overnight, but Bindez’s tool will help facilitate sharing and access of Burmese content, and that in turn may spur greater participation in the country’s tech ecosystem.

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Image Credit: Bindez

The post The clash between two Burmese fonts is stalling growth for Myanmar’s ecosystem; one startup wants to fix that appeared first on e27.