Sri Lanka's Tigo, a unit of Millicom International Cellular has started short message service (SMS) alerts in Sinhala and Tamil languages, linking up with text news pioneer JNW, officials said.

The service runs with content from JNW News (www.jnw.lk) and software developed by Microimage Mobile Media ( www.mimobimedia.com), a Sri Lanka-based IT firm.

Tigo started English news alerts in earlier this year.

"We wanted to extend the service to our Sinhala and Tamil speakers and the response has been good so far," Chamila Fernando of Tigo said.

"This is the first time in Sri Lanka that news in all three languages has been launched on mobile phones," he said.

JNW news that first launched SMS breaking news in Sri Lanka with Mobitel says launching the service in vernacular fonts took time as the technology was not in place.

"Readers in Sinhala and Tamil languages, which comprise the majority in Sri Lanka, have always been the priority and target audience for JNW's news," Chamath Ariyadasa, its co-founder of JNW said.

"But unfortunately launching SMS news in Sinhala and Tamil took some time as we had to first get the technology in place," he said

Microimage, a mobile software developer has provided Sinhala news and Tamil news reader software to enable customers to read news items on Java enabled phones.

The news reader software can be downloaded from the Tigo's WAP site, (wap.tigo.lk)the company said.