In a slightly over-hyped announcement, the mKhoj ad network sets its sights on global domination:

BANGALORE, India and PALO ALTO, Calif. May – June, 2009 – Today mKhoj, the leading mobile advertising marketplace for the rest of the world, announced the ability to power relevant mobile advertising tailored to local languages in seventeen different countries. With this announcement, mobile advertisers can leverage mKhoj’s ad network to display ads in hundreds of languages, including Afrikaans, Arabic, Bahasa, Hindi, Tamil, Turkic, and Zulu.

Gomo News even states that the company now ‘tackles local dialects’ with their ‘new mobile advertising service’.  What’s the new service?  Err… they implemented utf-8 character encoding.  It’s pretty much a standard requirement if you want to offer a multi-language internet service.

What actually matters is the ability to target the people that speak these languages – and expect a decent volume of responses.  In India, mKhoj’s home country, there are more than five local languages.  But you can only target by device and operator.  So if you create an ad for Hindi-speaking users, you’re going to get a lot of wasted impressions.

As for targeting Zulus, I’m sure there’s someone out there who wants to, but they’d better not get their hopes up too high yet …