"Giant waves coming, rush 1,000 meters away from the beach." These 10 words, if sent to mobile phones in the Bahasa, Malay, Sinhala, Tamil, and Telugu languages, might have saved thousands of people from the Indian Ocean tsunami of 2004. But even if South Asia had had a tsunami detection system in place -- which it didn't -- authorities would have had little chance of distributing such a message, given the variety of languages and writing systems used in the region.

Now, Geneva Software Technologies in Bangalore, India, has developed software that will translate English text messages into multiple languages and send a translation to any cellular phone or mobile device in the world, no matter what character set it's programmed to use. India's Ministry of Science and Technology announced in February that it intends to use Geneva's system to deliver disaster alerts.