I just gave a talk at the University Of Sri Jayawardenapura along with Reeza Zarook of Anything.lk and Rohan Jayaweera of Google. These are my notes: Devin Jayasundara asked me for a subject for this talk and I told him Internet property. But I talked to my fiancé Shru and she had a better idea. Startups aren’t about creating property at all, not really. They’re about creating territory, about creating land.

I haven’t been blogging much, I know. It’s partly because we’ve been doing a lot of work on YAMU, especially shipping 1.0.1 of the Android app today. It’s on the Google Play Store now. Inosh Perera did the programming (learning Android in the process) and Janith helped out with some design. My main contribution was a bunch of dead-end designs and like 6,000 lines of code we’re not using. The app isn’t perfect but it’s more perfect than it was 10 iterations ago. We think it’s pretty good.

Mashallah, the Central Bank has said they’re going to allow PayPal soon. PayPal (which not ecommerce manna) is nonetheless the global currency for freelancers and small businesses alike. I know freelancers who’ve actually moved places like Singapore simply to be able to accept money – taking both forex and human capital out of the country. Never mind how hard it is to open a payment gateway through local HSBC or Sampath or HNB, not to mention how ugly their interfaces are. I think the HSBC payment gateway still shows an open

Mixed Rice is a new website which collects essays on why we as Sri Lankans shouldn’t mess up our country with racism and bile. There’s a few write-ups there, which are all really good. You should add more. The site is also designed really well. Despite racists and ignorants making the news in the recent past, I do think people are aware that division in an island this small and interconnected is untenable. Mixed Rice is one more step for sane people standing up protecting a united Sri Lanka.

In 2009 this strange character appeared on the Sri Lankan Internet scene, getting angry, flaming, trolling whatever. Then he started naming anonymous bloggers, posting comments as people’s kids, nasty stuff, for which I removed him from Kottu. He also published some plagiarized stuff on Groundviews. He flamed out a bit more then disappeared. Until now. Now he’s back hosting a rather expensive social media event in Colombo, which is a bit ironic, seeing as he was known for being the most anti-social person the blogosphere had seen at the time.

This amazing new technology from MIT lets you see a pulse (for example) by comparing slight changes in color at the pixel level. It’s crazy, but you can see blood flow and whether a baby is breathing. You could also presumably use this to tell if something is human or android. The code is posted online if you have MatLab, or you can upload your own video here and test it out.

Andrew Sullivan is my favorite blogger and I read his page a few times a daily. Honestly, the only things I read are Sullivan, Metafilter, Devour, Slate, and Kottu. If there’s nothing new on those sites I’m like ‘why’s there nothing on the Internet?’ As if the Internet suddenly became a 12 channel TV. But I digress.

The game Colombo Racer is out tomorrow. This follows Colombo Ride 3D, which was a trishaw ride around Colombo. This latest version (for Android phones now) follows the buzz of the Colombo Night Races to let you take proper racing cars around the city, beginning with Fort.

The cabal at the ITU seems to be losing their effort to bring the Internet under UN control. Which is good, because that’s as terrible an idea as it sounds. Now India is opposing the move, leaving Saudi Arabia, China and Russia as its proponents (which should tell you something). What was most interesting about India was their statement, perhaps the most expansive defense of Internet freedom I’ve heard:

Dialog has recently re-launched wow.lk, formerly a Suntel portal, as a sort of e-commerce aggregator. I’m sure it was a Herculean effort to integrate iBuy, anything.lk, Tradenet, etc, but it all sorta comes together. Into something I don’t want to use, admittedly, but something which I’m sure has some appeal.