Refresh Colombo - July Meetup

Refresh Colombo July edition

The time for Sri Lanka’s only organized and regular tech meetup has rolled around and after an extremely successful June edition, it looks to be lifting the bar again for the July edition. This month’s Refresh Colombo focuses heavily on new technology with one of the talks delving deep into the nitty gritty of the latest in Database management, NoSQL. The other three talks for that day will be along more general lines but with varying scopes, from web to marketing and to mobile evolution thus providing something for everyone. The talks to be given are as follows,

·        First Look at MongoDB by Dinesh Asanka / Susantha Bathige
The session will introduce all the features of MongoDB.

·        Social Media Beyond Marketing by Thushara Hettihamu
The use of Social media as a tool for empowerment, information dissemination and public relations.

·        Future of Web Apps by Lakshan Perera
Dreaming to turn your exciting idea to a usable, scalable & buzz-word compatible web app? Then this talk is for you!

·        Mobile Trends: From Symbian to Androidby Thejo Siva
How a vibrating brick in our pockets became an amazing computing platform.

A quick preamble to each topic

MongoDB – MongoDB is an open sourced document oriented database where document oriented means that it does follow along the principles of NoSQL. NoSQL is a term coined to broadly encompass the Database Management Systems that do not fall under the spectrum or rules of a traditional Relational database while also adhering to a common set of principles such as being document oriented such as MongoDB. To describe NoSQL would be far too large a topic but to sum up the power of this technology, companies such as Twitter and Foursquare which publish a massive amount of data per minute have NoSQL powering their backend to keep up with the data flow. MongoDB also has a page for use cases on when and when not to use their product which would be a similar use case scenario for any other NoSQL DBMS and it can be found here

Social Media Beyond Marketing – As noted in our coverage of Perera & Sons movement to the social media marketing world, this technique has taken the world by storm where many companies want to know how and why they should embrace this medium of marketing. The answers lie in high flexibility, low to zero cost and most importantly, high value engagement with consumers which in addition to this promotes a lot of transparency on the company’s part.

Future of web apps – One of the most commonly misinterpreted terms in today’s online world is the term “web applications”. Many people have not been educated on the differences between web sites, web services and web applications and continue to believe they are one and the same. This unfortunately has led to much confusion which has also in turn created communication gaps between professionals and customers whose expertise lies in entirely different domains. This confusion has further been enhanced by the rise of the web application where nearly every new service that comes up today is a combination of both a web site and a web app. If at this point you have trouble finding the answer for “What then, is Facebook?” this topic would probably be ideal for you.

Mobile Trends – In our enthusiasm of embracing new technologies we tend to forget the world that believes, with good reason, in holding on to stable, trusted and proven technologies, till enough people have proven that the new technology has now reached its stable zenith. In practice this isn’t bad at all since companies depend on their technology for their future. Shifting development teams from technology to technology at the rate at which it changes would see extremely high staff turnover rates and Research and Development costs which would be beyond the company’s ability to handle. Instead of taking on a technology only when it has reached its peak and risking a late entry to the market, companies are now challenged to take it on ahead of the peak so that they may be the front runners in the future. What are the trends however? Is it the right time to embrace? These are probably the questions that will be answered in this discussion on the trends from Symbian to Android.

For more coverage of Refresh Colombo tune into this post again at 5 30 PM as I will be live blogging the event from the Royal College Skills center itself. If you want to find out more about Refresh Colombo you can take a look at our exclusive interview with the team behind it here