Rediff.com acquires minority stake in Tachyon Tech

Mumbai, Dec 19: Rediff.com India Ltd (Nasdaq: REDF), one of theleading worldwide online providers of news, information, communication,entertainment and shopping services, today announced that it hasacquired a minority stake in Tachyon Technologies, a Bangalore-basedsoftware company for an undisclosed sum.

Today's announcement is a part of Rediff's efforts to boost itscompetitiveness by investing in start-up companies with innovativetechnologies that allow Rediff to provide better services for itscustomers.

According to Chief Executive Officer and founder of Rediff.comAjit Balakrishnan, ''We aspire to encourage promising start-ups todevelop innovative world class products that support our business.

As a part of such efforts, we are delighted to have an opportunityto invest in a promising start-up company, such as TachyonTechnologies''.

''As a leading Internet portal of the country, we believe inenhanced Indian language use capability through Tachyon's innovativesoftware can help fuel product innovation and is consistent with ourstrategy of promoting growth by introducing innovative technologies'',said Chief Technology Officer of Rediff.com Venki Nishtala.

''The predictive text input technology developed by Tachyon isbased on sophisticated machine learning techniques and is animprovement on simple phonetic maps and specialized language keyboards,thus enabling millions of Indians to benefit from the Internet'', saidMr Nishtala.

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

''Rediff.com's investment in Tachyon Technologies should provideus with the capital we need to enhance our development infrastructure.Hopefully, this will help us to realize our ultimate goal of developinggreat products'', said Tachyon Technologies CEO Ram Prakash.

''Tachyon, as one of the technologically innovative companies inIndia, welcomes this opportunity to be associated with Rediff.com.

We know from our experience that people at Rediff.com understandthe importance of product innovation and development to succeed in thiscompetitive environment'', said Tachyon Technologies co-founder Mr K SSreeram.

UNI