Last few weeks, I have been quite busy with exams, some assignments and imagine cup. As I have said earlier, we got selected for two imagine cup projects, AcSO (Web Development) and GeoLink(Software). Unfortunately, we neither projects were got selected for the next round.

AcSO stands for Academic Status Organizer, which helps you to manage your academic life. What it really does is provides a platform for students, share their thoughts to files. What we are mainly focusing on is that avoiding data redundancy. Actually, there are lots of software solutions/ web sites, which provide the functionality to manage/schedule. But here, we allow our users to even share their schedules. So, let’s say, when I enter the “Database” class is at 9 AM on mondays, then others who registered for that class can easily add that to their schedule, of course If I shared that. Other than that, we allow users to create forums, share files, assignments discussion, assignments progress meter, to-do list and much more. And we also have a really nice looking web 2.0 type interface. The basic concept is also web 2.0. Since site is still there I’m not going to talk about all here. Actually, we didn’t have time to complete the site; it was during our exams, so this site is quick wrap up of the things. We didn’t at least have time to put the validations. But, the basic functionality of the site is working fine. Check out the site: http://team4366.webdev07.imaginecup.com/

Then, GeoLink. Speaking of GeoLink, it’s a mobile solution which helps you to get the information you need by just a click of button, without you worrying about finding the right content. What happens here is, let’s say you go on a trip to Anuradhapura, and you have no clue where it is and what to do next. That’s where GoeLinks comes in, you open the GeoLink, then you’ll see a list places near by you. (Sigiriya, Ruwanwalisaya, etc). Then, you can select a place then and there and get the information about that place, even some pictures. But how do we(GeoLink) know the information? No, we don’t. You are the person who knows. Actually, we are introducing a mobile Wiki concept to bridge the gap of the information flow. When you know something which is not in GeoLink, you simply edit the page enters the information. Basically, GeoLinks gives you information about the importance of the places around you.

Well, that’s not all, let’s say, you found Sigiriya as an interesting place, so what you do is go there. Then, you can open up GeoLink, and what you’ll get is you are in sigiriya and by clicking on sigiriya as I mentioned above, you’ll get the basic information about sigiriya. But you might want to go bit deeply. That’s why we provide a search functionality, you goto sigiriya, you see some nice pictures and you can search for “Arts” in the internet using our application. Actually, when you searched something, that search string is recorded along with the location. So, when another person comes to sigiriya, and he can see that someone else has searched for “Arts”. So, GeoLink also provides deep information about a specific place.

We didn’t simply stop from there. As you continue your trip, you might want to do a research on a topic. Let’s say about fish in a wewa. Then, you go there, create your research, and you can easily write notes and upload them. You can also upload pictures, videos and even sound clips(well, uploading videos and sound clips are not implemented yet, others worked fine. Unfortunately, our demo didn’t work in during the presentation due to some problems with Wi-Fi. Actually, it worked fine just before the competition and just after the presentation, I can’t still figure out why. We were using Wi-Fi to connect to web services). So, returning back to researches, your whole research will be stored in our servers. And let’s say someone else comes to the same place, and he is also going to do a research. The lucky guy will quickly see the research done by you, and it’ll be a great help for his research. Now, you might be thinking that what if you should do a research privately and your research materials should not be available for others. It doesn’t matter, just mark your research as private, and we won’t show that in the research list.

That was about researches. Educating people can be also defined as letting the people know about what’s going on his area, what are current news, etc. A farmer in Polonnaruwa certainly isn’t interested in stock market changes, but will be eager to find if there is disease spreading over cultivation. Now, don’t say that farmers don’t use mobile devices. Well guys, you are not the only people who uses mobile devices. Mobile is just a trend now, and lots of people use mobile devices.(But most of the time, not the windows smart phones – What to do, after all that’s the platform Microsoft asked us to develop). Somehow, the farmers can enter the news into GeoLink and others will get alerted about that.

So, where does the innovation comes? First, we take the information from the community. It’s not like one or two person filling in all the data. Imagine the vast amount of data which can be entered by an active community. Look at the wikipedia. Ok, but vast amount of data itself might be a problem, people will get lost within the data. That’s why we have our own unique solution for categorizing the data. We categorize the data by location and the topic. So, we’ll know where you need data, and what you need. Just imagine, you are walking in a zoo, and you went near the bear’s cage. You open up GeoLink, here comes all the information about the bear. That’s what GeoLink is.

Now, you might be thinking, there is a system, which might be useful, but gives everything free, but need a lot of resources like high bandwidth servers, etc. Only Bill Gates can certainly run it, others will run out of money. No – We have our own unique business model. If you take a typical product, what they’ll do is, they sell their product to users. The users have to pay for the service etc. But here what we are suggesting is a purely advertising based scenario. Yes, the advertising along is not a new concept, but what we are doing is displaying the advertisements according to area you are currently in. Let’s say, if you are in Hambanthota, there is no point of showing a Pizza Hut advertisement there. You should show an advertisement of a shop in Hambanthota. You go to the Vijitha Yapa, and you’ll see an advertisement of Sarasavi. You go to ODEL and you’ll see an advertisement of Hameedias. Even if you are in middle of nowhere you can show an advertisement from DHL saying, we also do deliveries there

That’s about GeoLink and AcSO. I currently don’t have any screenshots or videos of application right now. I’ll put something soon.

Before I wrap up with post, I should definitely tell something about the short films. All three films shown there were awesome. The concept, how they achieve it, emotions, video quality (Most probably without high-end camera’s etc), every thing was neatly done. Finally, filming industry of Sri Lanka is going somewhere. Keep it up.

I never thought I would have to add something called “Microsoft” in my tag list, but it’s happening. After going through a lot, we our two proposals, one for Software Design(GeoLink) and other for web development(AcSO), went to second round. OMG.. Imagine a doing two imagine cup projects.. damn.. it’ll be hell of a lot of work… let’s see. I’ll keep this up to date.

Google Maps – That’s one of the most useful resources in the web. And a good usage of AJAX. Now, microsoft live team has turn into it; Live Local.

When I first saw the site… mmm.. it’s interesting – focused into colombo. ZOOM IN.. ZOOM IN… I was thinking like… ok. no more than that.. No. It’s going going.. WOW! Yeah! really. Then I realized that they are just rendering a zoomed version of earier images once after you reached level. Since, these are not real images, unlike in google maps, you can easily (err.. i didn’t really mean it.) do it.

Well, they have a traffic detials which is working and not going to work in Sri Lanka for at least for next few more years and a driving directions feature. I though that it’ll give the same result saying that this service not enabled in your area. No.. It’s not.. they are providing it. Well, it’s not realistic. They are just running something like dijktra’s algo and displaying the result, but with traffic detials and so on, I guess it’ll be really cool on some other countries.

I was thinking like, if **someone** can start an open source mapping service like this, so that anyone can enter detials here and there, I mean people can add data into the map such as roads, etc; then it’ll be really cool.

Since the beginning of this year, the most prestigious IT companies in the world focused their attention to one profitable large business, SEARCHING. A lot of companies were trying to be the best, but there was no clue, Google was the best. Few years ago, Microsoft was trying to overcome Google by their MSN searching but wasn’t able to make it success.

So, now they are trying to start over using the popular AJAX technology. Around two weeks ago Microsoft launched their AJAX based search engine, live.com which is a bit of threaten to google. Live.com isn’t only doing searching, but a web portal such as MSN and the most important thing is that you can customize your interface, and everything is AJAX based which means it’s really fast. Even though, it’s a portal, the interface is not overloaded with too much of information as in MSN. With the power of AJAX they have made it really descent and professional. The most amazing thing is that it is not only for IE, it is working fine in firefox under linux

But when we look at the search content and the quality of the search, Google is still ahead. As most people think, the search content might be a matter of time, but we have to remember that Microsoft is a large IT company which mainly focuses at their software, not in search, but the heart of google is searching and they are the first guys who launched a popular AJAX based service, GMAIL. So, their experience is, of course better than Microsoft. Even though most of the people don’t use, Google itself support customizable interface(Google News, etc).

As Sri Lankans, we saw a big step in google, they launched google.lk and their interface using Unicode. Earlier it was using English letters.But still google doesn’t support searching inside sinhala Unicode range. When we look at the live.com, there is no sinhala interface but the important thing is you can search using the sinhala Unicode characters.

I wonder why google doesn’t support sinhala Unicode characters, whenever it is not hard to implement. They are supporting almost every other Unicode character sets.

But still, no one of those giants don’t support ASCII sinhala searching using Unicode, so, still sinhalasearch.com rocks!!!