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Idea Bash – June 2014 Meetup

Idea Mart has been grown into a popular telco platform, giving the local developer community the reach to access the 8 million subscriber base of Dialog Axiata. Started in 2012, this developer community has grown over the years, with many developers successfully monetizing their apps hosted on the Idea Mart platform.

A couple of weeks back, Idea Bash the meetup where the Idea Mart community gets together was held at the Dialog Future world for the 3rd time. This meetup aims to creates an environment where developers can discuss their ideas and issues while also learning on the new developments on the Platform.

IdeaBash 2014

Roshanth, Manager of the Idea Mart community kicked off the event by welcoming the guests and provided an intro to the IdeaMart Platform and what it has achieved.  He shared the various highlighting the growth in usage as well as growth in earnings by the developers.

The next speech was delivered by Ruwan Liyanage, an Idea Mart Developer and Founder of Extrogene. He explained his experience in creating a telco app in the standard process, and that it is much faster to launch apps with Idea Mart. He went on to discuss the main pitfalls in creating apps and gave the following tips to successfully creating a revenue generating app.

1) Identify the most reachable niche market for you

2) List what are the problems they have

3) Remove what you cannot solve

4) Select the most practical problem that you can solve using a mobile app

5) Ask from a sample of your market  whether they will use the app if you give such a mobile solution

Dr. Kavan Ranathunga then took the stage to deliver a very informative presentation on the Evolution of the Internet. He highlighted the key milestones of the internet and also key milestones of the adoption of the internet in Sri Lanka.

IdeaBash 2014

Afterwards another Idemart developer Sheddrick Rodrigo shared his experiences. He gave details on how he spent close to Rs. 90,000 on popular paper advertisements with not much success, while getting good conversion by posting a low cost ad on a targeted newspaper. This emphasized the importance of target marketing. He also advised developers to keep growing by adding one app at a time. He concluded with a good quote : “Dream Big, Start Small, Act Now”

Dream Big, Start Small, Act Now

A very bubbly Lakshetha ( A Google Student Ambassador) conducted a very entertaining session on tips to give a good presentation. The summary of the tips are given below.

  1. Connect to the Audience – by researching on the audience and topic
  2. Let go of Fear – Identify your fear and learn to disregard it
  3. Practice – Have a thorough practice beforehand
  4. Record & Watch – Record yourself on video and see how you present
  5. Listen – Listen to the feedback from the audience.
  6. Be Honest – Don’t present incorrect information
  7. Attire – Dress accordingly to the event/presentation
  8. Presentation – Dont have a heavy presentation, have a light presentation
  9. Have Faith – Believe in yourself

 

The next presentation “Product as an API” was presented by Sumedha Rupasingha Director of APIs – WSO2. He explained how companies are making money by exposing their core business through APIs. He took Amazon, Expedia and Netflix as examples, showed their API usage and how they have leveraged their APIs. He went on to show the importance of identifying business opportunities in exposing your companies APIs.

IdeaBash5

The final session of Ideabash was an interesting interactive session called Idea Crunch where teams were give a description of a person and were requested to design an app using Ideamart apps to cater his needs. The description of the person given was Gunapala, an antisocial salesperson with a fish tank and a cat. Teams presented their very creative ideas from fully automating his house, to a dating app, to a house maid finder. An external judging panel reviewed the ideas and judged the ‘Gedera’ team the winner of the session.

IdeaBash 2014

Idea Bash June 2014, meetup was full of substance with five informative session, and one good interactive session to roundoff the best Idea Bash so far. Well done to the Idea Mart team, and hoping for an even better meetup in the Future!

Image Credits : Pasindu De Silva

IdeaBash 2014