PETALING JAYA, 27 AUGUST - There may have been a time when companies found it difficult to access specific information concerning the halal industry. Those days are long gone, according to the the Halal Industry Development Corporation's (HDC) Global Halal Support Centre (GHSC) with the implementation of its first halal directory widget.

After receiving feedback from various members of the halal industry as well as through its call centres, the GHSC developed the widget as a means for the public to be able to search for information without having to build their own halal directory database.

With the function of a search engine, the directory widget, which derives its information from the HDC's Halal Knowledge Centre database will contain over 1,400 companies and 50,000 products certified by JAKIM.

When queried on why the HDC widget was seemingly lacking in both functionality and form, Mr. Amin Rahim, HDC's General Manager of IT and Corporate Services admitted that the database at the moment was limited, and that the searching criteria was based off the JAKIM application forms.

Miti Nurbaya Zainudin, HDC's Vice-President of Corporate Services then responded that HDC was looking into implementing additional features, as well as having thoughts about expanding the widget's features, although no specific dates were mentioned.

The widget is currently available off the HDC website (www.hdcglobal.com), even though its official launch will be on the 31st of August, 2009. Interested webmasters looking for it will have to search for the 'Halal Zoom' sub-menu, whereby a HTML code snippet will be provided.