INTERNET chatters in Myanmar may soon find themselves conversing over the internet using their mother tongue through an instant messaging network innovatively titled “M-talk”, a local IT firm announced last week.

U Zaw Min Oo, the chief executive officer of Myanmar Technology Gateway Company, said his firm is negotiating with the state-owned Myanma Post and Telecommunications (MPT) to have the project up and running by the end of this year.

He added that Information Technological Central Services will also be collaborating on M-talk.

A spokesperson for the MPT’s Information and Technology department confirmed that M-talk is under negotiation and is expecting to start when it’s approved.

U Zaw Min Oo said the project will include chat and voice chat services, through a free beta version, and the company is arranging to let MPT and Myanmar Teleport email users access the program without further registration.
“We’re now negotiating to give free usage and instant sign-up to this program to these email users,” he said.

He added that the company is also negotiating to allow non-MPT or Myanmar Teleport users to get their own free-of-charge M-talk accounts simply by signing up at the company’s website.

However, potential users will need to install the M-talk application after downloading it from the company’s website. Once downloaded, users must only log-on using their name and password.

U Zaw Min Oo said that corporate clients with MPT and Myanmar Teleport will even have file sharing options “We’ll allow users to upload files up to 2MB; how we will collect charges for this service is still under discussion,” he said, adding that the company is also working out how to include a dictionary feature.

In the future he said the company will also offer a paid version of the program that will offer better services but pointed out that the free service will remain.

“We will charge monthly fees, probably between FEC5 and FEC10, under a prepaid system,” he said, adding that the prepaid cards will be sold through public access centres, computer shops and mobile phone shops.

Corporate clients will eventually be able to use a video conference service, he added.

U Zaw Min Oo said the M-talk program will offer a number of benefits for users – the most important that it will be quicker because the server will be used only in Myanmar.

Regular G-talker Ko Zayarlynn, 28 said he’s eager to use M-talk but only if it’s free; he insisted that he would not be giving up on G-talk either
“If the service is as good as what they said, I won’t hesitate to pay certain charges to use it,” he said, adding that if the service quality was good enough, it would be worth the cost.

Ko Htike, 23, said that he would like to test whether M-talk is available free of charge and wouldn’t consider using the paid version unless it was noticeably better than G-talk, which is free.