Amongst various possible script reforms and refinements, there has been a consensus to adopt separate vowel modifiers for the following vowel-consonants: i) i-short and i-long ii) vowel-consonants with u-short and u-long. The form of the modifier may be decided by an expert group constituted for this purpose.

Technology

The Conference recommended that urgent attention be given by the technology development organisations and the private sector to the development of key technologies such as Optical Character Recognition (OCR), voice recognition, browsers, search engines and machine translations involving the Tamil Language. A call has been made for a global repository of open source software and technology in above areas.

Education

Distance education has emerged as the third stage in the evolution of the educational system following the gurukulam and class-room systems. It increases productivity in education and meets the challenges posed by the needs for universal education, equity in educational opportunities and continuing education. Virtual classroom and online education constitute the fourth stage in distance education, the first three being postal system, use of radio and TV and tele-conferencing. In the knowledge society distance education offers immense possibilities and opportunities that must be maximally utilised.

E-Commerce

Best opportunities for Asian entrepreneurs lie in mobile commerce, ebusiness architecture, ASP enablers and language portals.

Entrepreneurs should be more focussed (than they are currently), develop a single business plan and mileposts for IPO's mergers or other forms of growth. They should use independent means of assessing the value of any specific VC to their particular goals.

VCs have a better chance of realizing their objectives through as much diverse supports (HR, Marketing, strategy) they can provide to entrepreneurs besides finance.

Tamil Content on Internet

The conference noted enormous growth on the availability of Tamil materials in digital form on the net in recent years but they are in different font encoding. Efforts should be made to reduce the font encoding used so that search engines can locate them easily.

Organisation

The Conference was the occasion for the inauguration of the International Forum for Information Technology in Tamil (INFITT), the first global organisation dedicated to the development and promotion of Tamil Internet and Tamil Computing. The Constitution of INFITT was approved at a special meeting convened for the purpose on 23 July 2000. The duly constituted first General Council elected the first Executive Committee on 24 July 2000.

The conference also discussed and agreed upon the formation of five INFITT Working Groups to examine in detail the following key issues on Tamil Computing: Glossary of technical terms for Tamil (WG1), Unicode Tamil Segment (WG2), Tamil Domain Names for Internet (WG3), Glyph Encoding Standards (WG4) and Standards for Transliteration format of romanised Tamil (WG5).

Next Tamil Internet Conference

The conference noted with gratitude the offer by the Malaysian Minister Dato Seri S. Samy Vellu for Malaysia to host the next Tamil Inaiyam conference. The conference recommended the newly founded INFITT to take the offer into account in its deliberations on the next conference.

Conclusions

The conference places on record its appreciation to the Tamil Internet Steering Committee for excellent and professional arrangements in the structure and managements of the conference hubs. The conference also wishes to thank the Singapore Government for its generous support for this event.

The conference was particularly impressed by the overwhelming interest of the general public, teachers and students of the Singapore Community in Tamil computing and Tamil Internet.

This conference structure could be the model for future conferences in involving public and the business community participation.