I was at CommunicAsia and BroadcastAsia - it’s one of the exhibitions which I go to every year (except 2003, when it was cancelled due to SARS).

While most of the floorspace of CommunicAsia was occupied by exhibitors showing their back-end technologies and hardware, the booths that draw the most crowds are usually the large mobile phone companies - Sony-Ericsson, LG, Motorola, Samsung, and so on. (Come to think of it, I didn’t see the Nokia booth.) I’m not sure what draws the crowds - is it the barely-dressed girls? or the cool handsets? Probably a combination of both.

But the booth that really impressed me was of this Israeli company Zlango, at Hall 5 booth B3-10. See their blog for a diagram of the booth.

I stopped in my tracks outside their booth - there were cutesy icons all over the booth walls. The only words were the logo and the tagline “Pic. Talk”.

Mystified, I asked the guy in the booth (there were no pretty booth girls) to explain his product.

It’s basically a new kind of universal language (think Esperanto), where concepts are represented by pictures or icons (think Chinese, a long time ago), and Zlango messages could be sent through the mobile phone (using a Java client).

For example, a message with the 3 following icons - person pointing to self; heart; person pointing to you - would translate “me love you”.

Interesting concept.

“Children love it!” he told me.

“So what age group is it targeted at?”

I forgot the lower age target (10? 12?), but it was up to 25 years old, which surprised me (explaining why I forgot the lower age).

Of course I was sceptical.

“It seems fun, but it doesn’t look practical!” I protested. Try chatting with someone using MSN Messenger icons exclusively.

He turned on his mobile phone, and showed me the Zlango messages that he sent to his colleague, like one announcing that he just arrived at the airport.

“But you can’t represent complex ideas with this!”

He grabbed this little booklet, with lots of little icons. It was Little Red Riding Hood in Zlango.

“But I can’t make sense out of it,” I told him.

That’s when he told me that the icons are designed such that after you go through the dictionary, you’d easily be able to remember what they represent.

“How many pictures do you have in the dictionary?”

“Over 200.”

Didn’t seem like much.

“Users can also add their own pictures, or use words if necessary.”

“And how long does it take to learn the vocabulary and get the hang of things?” Can’t be less than a week.

“About 1 hour.”

Ok, seems impressive.

I asked him if the whole concept was linguistically sound. He claimed that it was - they had linguists developing the concept. I did probe him a little more (but not too much) on the liguistic side of things, and he managed to remain quite convincing.

I left the booth very intrigued, but not totally convinced.

Then just now, I took out the Little Red Riding Hood booklet that he gave me. I took a couple of minutes looking through the relevant dictionary (about 50+ icons), then I tested myself by reading the story.

Damn. It works. I can actually comprehend it quite easily.

Take a look at their online Little Red Riding Hood. The story starts with something like “much much time before mother say little redridinghood…”, or “a long time ago, mother says to little red riding hood…”.
Click on the ‘#’ near the bottom right for the translation.

And check out their booth if you’re there.

(See also a blog mention of Zlango.)