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Get ready for the inaugural UX Colombo Conference

March 7, 2015
TechWire
Events, News
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2 min read

There are numerous definitions for User Experience, but without going too deep, we can define it as the holistic experience for the customer who uses a product or a service. Now when designing & developing software products, providing a good user experience is often overlooked in Sri Lanka. However there is a growing interest in the UX field, which was ignited by the UXColombo meetups which started back in 2013. We are finally realizing the importance of good UX.

Now it is being taken a step further, as the first ever UX conference is going to be held this month, on the 19th of March. The conference would be taking place at the BMICH and will feature the following 8 sessions.

Keynote Speech by Linda Speldewinde – Founder/Managing Director of AOD International Design Campus & Sri Lanka Design Festival

Bare Basics of UX by Rasika Mahindasiri – UX Architect @ 99XTechnology

Visual Communication by Alain Parizeau- Programme Head of Visual Communication @ AOD International Design Campus

UX and the love for your e-commerce customer by Adnan Issadeen – Former head of production @Anything.lk

Replacing sales people with great UX by Chandika Jayasundara – Co-Founder & CEO @ Cinergix/Creately

How design makes everything better by Yudhanjaya Wijeratne – Editor @ Readme.lk

Shortcuts to Deliver Delight by Hasanga Abeyrathne – UX Architect @ 99xTechnology

UX in Enterprise by Hasitha Yaggahavita – Technology Manager @99xTechnology

This conference would be valuable for anyone in the software industry, especially for UX/UI engineers, business analysts and product managers. The investment would be Rs 4500 and for more information visit http://www.colombouxconference.com/

Ideamart and EzCash wins at GSMA Global Mobile Awards 2015

March 3, 2015
TechWire
News
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1 min read

The Mobile World Congress (MWC) held in Barcelona, is the place where most of the new technology related to telco and mobile phones are unveiled. It is also the place where the best of telco applications and devices are recognized at the Global Mobile Awards.

The awards for 2015 was concluded a few hours ago and we are proud to announce that our local mobile operator Dialog Axiata was able to bag two awards. Dialog Ideamart, the developer platform won the award for Best Technology Enabler, while the mobile money offering EzCash won the NFC/Mobile Money Award. It is great to see Sri Lanka making a mark on the global stage beating competition from telco giants across the globe. Kudos to the teams involved with the products! Well Done!!!

The entire list of award winners can be viewed here.

Are you a mobile phone enthusiast?

January 26, 2015
TechWire
Gadgets
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2 min read

Are you a fan of all the newly arriving mobile phones? Are you interested in cutting edge mobile trends? Does knowing about new mobile phones excite you? Then this article is surely for you.

Imagine you want to search the spec of the newest member of Lumia series or Samsung new mobile or new iPhone. Like all the other phone enthusiasts in the world your first choice would be gsmareana. Sure, this site is a great place to explore your phone craze. But when you want to get the local market price of that phone, gsmarena can’t offer you much help with that. Well that is why ideambeam.com can be the best news that a Sri Lankan phone enthusiasts can hear.

So what’s up with ideabeam.com? Ideabeam can offer you the newest phone models that are available in Sri Lanka along with their local market prices. Its filled with leading mobile brands like Apple,BlackBerry,E-tel,Google,HTC,Huawei,LG,Nokia,Samsung,Sony,Microsoft that are widely available in the world market. Not only that, Ideabeam can show you the leading mobile  phone stores in Sri Lanka and their respective products as well. And when you want to find a mobile phones price it can show you a comparative analysis of the shops where you can buy it along with the price comparison which is surely a very handy tool for you. Not only for mobile phones,  these rich features are also available for tablets also. Pretty cool right?

What makes Ideabeam more cooler is that it’s not just a mobile phone. If you want to buy a vehicle you can even compare vehicle leasing rates in Sri Lanka via Ideabeam and make the right choice because these comparisons are pretty much descriptive. If you want to checkout housing loans or try out a pension scheme, Ideabeam can guide you to the right path. It doesn’t stop here. You can also fine new employment opportunities available via jobs.ideabeam.com which has wide variety of jobs listed. And books.ideabeam.com is also a good place to find newly arrived books with the shops they are sold and prices without setting foot away from your home.

Ideabeam is a place where you should definitely checkout.

3 websites you should follow post election

January 17, 2015
TechWire
News, Uncategorized
2 Comments
2 min read

Since 1982 there have been 7 presidential elections in the Sri Lankan history and the 2015 presidential election was undoubtedly one of the more tense and eventful election of all times. This time introducing a new tech trend, a lot of new campaign mediums such as online ads, Facebook, twitter, YouTube were used in the election arena alongside with old campaign mediums like newspaper ads, TV ads and posters. With Honorable Excellency Maithripala Sirisena being elected as the president, the spotlight is on him and his activities, to see if he delivers his promises. Given below are three important websites that are recommended for you to follow and to keep track of the political scene during the next few months.

100days.lk

President Maithripala Sirisena introduced a promise of a 100 day program when he came to power. Have you wondered of the current status of the program? This is a simple site to keep track of the promises made by the President Maithripala Sirisena. In a very minimalistic fashion it shows the completed tasks, pending tasks and delayed tasks with notes and related dates until 23rd of April. Now you don’t have to watch the everyday evening news to keep track of the 100 day program.

Indi.ca

It was good to see Indi Samarajiva active on his blog, and to read his views running up to the election and post election. He provides good analysis through his blog posts and seems to give an unbiased view. He is also keeping a tab on the 100 day plan through his post Maithripala`s 100 days in a user-friendly and time lined fashion. Not to mention you can catch other interesting articles on his blog too.

 

Maithripala.com

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And of course, the official website of the President. This websites is full with the latest news regarding the president, publications such as the 100 day plan and the latest postings on his social media networks. You can also find a full bio of the President in Sinhala, English and Tamil languages and access his gallery and watch official footage online. Here you can find His Excellency’s official twitter page and YouTube channel where you will find more ways of staying up to date with the newest political actions happening in Sri Lanka.

SLT Ramps up the speed of their internet packages

January 5, 2015
TechWire
Communication, News
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1 min read

SLT (Sri Lanka Telecom) is making a habit of changing their broadband packages on the New Year, as a gift. Last year they changed the quota of the packages. This year they increased the capped speed. Basically they doubled the speed of the 2 Mbps , 4 Mbps and 8 Mbps packages. It is good to see the broadband companies in Sri Lanka actively trying to keep up with the customer requirements. However it must be noted that the benefit of this change would be seen in mostly for the customers with the 2 Mbps package. This is due to the fact that for users on the other packages, who were not hitting their top speed, will not see a difference. A quota increase would have been more valuable for the customers, but nonetheless for those who see a speed increase, it would be a good start to the New Year.

2014 with Millennium IT

January 2, 2015
TechWire
Infographic, SW
1 Comment
1 min read

Founded in 1996 by Tony Weerasinghe, MillenniumIT has established itself as one of the leading software companies in Sri Lanka. Starting off as a systems integrator, the company has specialised in delivering high performance capital market software solutions.

2014 was another great year for MillenniumIT, with several key projects going live, the initiation of new deployments and also bagging several esteemed awards in the industry. It is also great to see them giving back to society through various CSR projects, especially the housing project in the north. As we step into 2015, let’s take a look at the many achievements of MillenniumIT for 2014, through the below infographic.

2014-MIT-Edited

Samsung leads global phone sales

December 27, 2014
TechWire
Gadgets, Infographic
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2 min read

Samsung continues to be the leading global phone seller according to the worldwide global phone sales stats by Gartner. Samsung contributed 94 million of the phone sales from the 400+ million smartphone sales in the last quarter. Nokia is somehow holding on to 2nd place while, Apple is not far behind from them. The reason for Samsung having such a large sale over the others is that they have a big stake in the smartphone market as well as the lower end phones. Nokia who are surviving with their feature and lower end phones will soon be overtaken by Apple. Even though Samsung is a clear leader, they will be worried that their YoY sales are dropping while, their major competitor Apple’s sales has grown significantly from last year. (Below infographic via statista.com)

Global-Phone-sales-Q3-2014

If you just consider smartphone sales, Nokia is (for obvious reasons) not be seen. Samsung and Apple are right up there, while Xiaomi is making significant strides in 3rd place. Something to note is that there is a lot of ‘other’ vendors making a large percentage of the sales, meaning the long tail is quite significant. This can be an opportunity for big players to further extend their dominance, or a chance for a smaller player to rise up among the giants. (Below image via idc.com)

Smartphone-vendors

 

 

Google Translation for Sinhala is now available !!!

December 14, 2014
TechWire
Web
4 Comments
1 min read

The most awaited Google Sinhala translation is finally here. Google added Sinhala to its translation supported language list few days back.

With this, you can translate your English scripts to Sinhala language and Sinhala scripts to any other Google supported language easily. You can either type your text in the text box available in translation page or upload a document and get it translated in few seconds.

Enjoy your Sinhala translations and do not forget to share your feedback with us…

Laptop.lk revamps website

November 27, 2014
TechWire
Web
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1 min read

Laptop.lk is one of the more known laptop shops in Unity Plaza. Their website is also frequently browsed to find out their available laptops and also the general prices of laptops in the Sri Lankan market. Quite recently they revamped their site, in order to improve the user experience for users searching for a laptop.

laptop.lk-revamp

Earlier you would have to browse the laptops brandwise, or go through their laptop price list PDF document. In their new site, they have a module to filter and view the available laptops according to the required specification. There is a separate line bar to configure your budget range as well. This makes searching a laptop a breeze. The site is still on beta, and some of the laptop information is yet to be complete. However looks to be a module that will be heavily used, and one which will be very userful for laptop hunters.

University of Moratuwa wins world THIRD at IEEEXtream programming competition

November 16, 2014
TechWire
Programming
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1 min read

IEEEXtreme is a global challenge in which teams of IEEE Student members, supported by an IEEE Student Branch, advised and proctored by an IEEE member, compete in a 24-hour time span against each other to solve a set of programming problems. Competition is conducted by IEEE (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers), which is the world’s largest professional association dedicated to advancing technological innovation and excellence for the benefit of humanity.

This is an annual competition IEEE student branch of University of Moratuwa participates each year and surely secures a set of places. This year the competition occurred for the 8th consecutive year, and our budding engineers competed with the world to bring down five places in the first hundred, including the 3rd place which is the highest percentage of any participating university.

‘Team Oops’ from UOM with members Thilina Sameera Ambagahawaththa, Nipuna Randunu Samarasekara and Varuna Jayasiri proudly bagged the global 3rd place competing with 2000+ other teams. ‘Team Ewoks’ from UOM secured the rank 15 as well.

Congratulations all the winners and thanks for bringing the glory to the country.

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Check some example questions of this competition

‘RIYADISI’— Intelligent driver monitoring system

November 15, 2014
TechWire
Gadgets
1 Comment
2 min read

Road accidents cause large number of deaths, injuries and disabilities of people around the world and it has been found that 10%-20% of fatal road accidents are due to driver’s negligence. Further from the researches it has been identified that main causes for this inattention are drowsiness and distraction.

The aim of RIYADISI is to assist drivers to maintain their attention throughout the journey by monitoring and alerting them throughout the journey. RIYADISI is a real time, automated and noninvasive (not involving the introduction of instruments into the body) system which uses computer vision and machine learning techniques to detect driver drowsiness and distraction and alerts the driver. The main distinguishing feature of RIYADISI when compared with other related products in the market that it does not have any instruments attached to the body of the driver.

The monitoring video camera (Height-2 cm X Width-5 cm approx.) is placed on the dashboard near steering wheel which uploads a live video stream of the driver to a central server. The video stream is analyzed from the central server software and it identifies the status of the driver, whether he is sleepy or not concentrating on driving.

RIYADISI system uses decreased eye blinking rate, yawning and nodding off to detect drowsiness whereas it uses eye-gaze movement and head movements to detect distraction. If the central server detects that the driver is drowsy or distracted, the system has the capability to alert the driver on the same. Furthermore the video camera used here is an Infra-Red (IR) camera which facilitates to use the system in the night as well.

The next phase of this invention is to integrate the whole system into a mobile app where the mobile phone will be able to alert the driver by continuously monitoring him.

RIYADISI is an invention by a team of final year undergraduates of Department of Computer Science and Engineering of University of Moratuwa under the guidance of Dr. Chathura Perera. Team members are Dileepa Fernando, Sandareka Wickramanayake, Sadari jayawardena and Sanka Darshana.

DSC_0098

While congratulating the team of inventors on RIYADISI product, we wish them all the best for the next phases of the product and looking forward to see this novel product in the market in near future.

Refer following video for more details – Video credits to live@8

Post by Live at 8.

Welcome the Reload man!

October 31, 2014
TechWire
Gadgets
9 Comments
3 min read

He is dressed in a bright orange coat and carries a point of sales (POS) machine which looks very similar to a mobile credit card machine. You can see him in public places such as bus stands and railway stations and you can get to know his existence by the special sound that his device makes. Pre-paid mobile users gather around him to reload their mobile phones. Welcome the Reload man to town!

According to statistics, while 90% of the country’s mobile users are pre-paid and the majority of reload outlets do not provide reload facilities for all mobile communication networks. Z reload service from Sampath bank which powers the reload man has now enabled a hassle-free top up of prepaid mobile connections belonging to any mobile network.

Sampath Bank along with Imovation Data Solutions (Pvt) Ltd is behind this new service. It support reloading of a connection belongs to any Mobile operator network in Sri Lanka namely Airtel, Dialog, Etisalat, Hutch and Mobitel.

Main technology behind this mobile reload mechanism is Margento DOV (Data over Voice), a patented and proprietary contactless data-over-voice transaction technology. In a nutshell, the POS device modulates transaction data into voice signals and sends them to the processing center through the voice connection established by the customer with his mobile phone. Thus, phone serves as a communication device between the point-of-sale terminal and Application servers. They communicate in the same manner as mobile people do – using speech and a mobile phone. DOV ensures fast, highly secure and cost-effective wireless transmission of the transaction messages from a POS machine to the central application servers for further approval of payments and other transactions.

Advantages of Z reload

  • No more scratch cards, IVR calls, SMS typing or menu browsing required for reload
  • Eliminates the need to reveal mobile phone number therefore secure transaction
  • Reload your phone instantly
  • Receipt issued for the transaction
  • Can opt to pay cash or through account (Sampath bank)
  • Access additional points of sales and save from rebates, discounts or loyalty points.

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How does it work?

It’s a simple process – just few seconds for a real time reload.

  • User hand over cash to the Reload man
  • User dials 8811 from his mobile phone and holds it above the screen of the POS machine.
  • Transaction completed notification appears on machine screen
  • A receipt prints from the machine
  • A SMS notification receives to the user with transaction details
  • process 111