Refresh Colombo - November edition

Yesterday I attended the November edition of Refresh Colombo, which could be roughly classified as a monthly gathering of techies who are willing to share there knowledge and expertise. There were four presentation planned for that day and I was especially interested in the presentation about "Adopting social media in local companies". Unfortunately there wasn't enough time so there were only three presentations, but those were great presentations and you can definitely learn a lot from them.
The first presentation was done by @Chamara of Apramana and it was about "Benefits of web standards to your visitors, clients and you.". The only kind of web designing I have done is changing some CSS in my blog templates and it was fairly easy. So it was amusing to hear how it was done in the old days and how hard it was those days. After hearing those I felt really glad we have web standards now. Then he talked about how to validate your websites and the advantages of doing that. Being an Internet marketer one point that got me thinking was, IT HELPS in Search engine rankings. If you are a web designer then there were some great things to take from this presentation.
The next presentation was done by @Devaka of WSO2 and it was about "Being more than just the Ordinary". Its no wonder this guy is in marketing because he sure knows how to sell a product and to capture an audience. He talked about how we can compete with the rest of the world in terms of quality and showed how much Sri Lanka, as a country has contributed to the creation of different technologies. There were some amazing facts like per capita contribution to open source, how we have consistently performed well in Google summer of code and lot of other facts. He also showed how there business module is sustainable compared to most other outsourcing companies in Asia.
The last presentation was done by @Gihan of GTS and it was about "Creating games in Sri Lanka and Optimistic entrepreneurial spirit".He seems to have money to spare because he gave away Rs.1000, but not to everyone, but to someone who wanted to grab the note from his hand. It sure was a unique way to demonstrate why you should grab your opportunities. His session was entertaining and interactive, which is not surprising since he is into game development. His company created Colombo ride, the first Sinhalese mobile game. Now they are releasing Colombo Ride 3D. He talked about gaming industry in Sri Lanka, History of Colombo Ride, more released coming from there company and challenged faces by his team when developing and marketing games.
If I can summarize this edition of Refresh Colombo in one word, it is "INSPIRATION". Attending this session made me feel proud to be a Sri Lankan, it is amazing to see how much we have achieved in the software and technology field with a relatively low resource pool. Also there were enough examples of how successful you can be if your are willing to take a risk and follow your dreams. If you are looking to do your own thing and looking for advice then this is the place to be, where young entrepreneurs hang out and share there ideas. Looking forward to the next edition :-)

The much talked about visiting card of Gihan, courtesy - @InduNan

Colombo Ride Game



Cool things to have -

How can we improve a great event like Refresh Colombo ? Well one thing I can think of is having there presentations available online. The best place I can think of is there website. This gives the attendees a chance to reference past material and and look up on points they might have missed. Also then the presenters can prepare a more detailed presentation with more points, helpful resources etc as well. So they can go through the presentation quickly and give the audience more resources to follow up.