My first Refresh Colombo

I arrived in Sri Lanka in the early hours of today and hardly pulled my self out of a quick nap to go to office in the morning. For the last few days I had been deprived of my sleep and in total for the 4 days, I would have slept barely 10 hours. So when I walked in to refresh colombo I was praying that I wouldn't fall asleep. I was so concerned about falling asleep I told one of my colleagues to check whether my eyes are closed and if it was, for him to kick my chair. His work was cut out and the session turned out to be interesting or rather refreshing, so that my sleepiness disappeared!

It was nice to see a lot of tech enthusiasts there. For me the session on payment switches was interesting, I wanted to probe with a lot of questions on the mobile wallet guideline from CB and the paypal integration. Unfortunately since I was part of the next session , I didn't feel like asking questions. But being a guy who had worked on payments for a while now. I was happy to listen to what was the plans for SL. Still I wish and pray the regulators will have more sense and deregulate it to allow competitive forces.

 The hackalthon announcement was good, and really happy to see the venture capitalists coming to the Sri Lankan picture. I am curious to find out how some of these VCs can be connected with the Yarl start ups to and business models they work on.

 Right after the session I was glad to meet indi, I have had mail contact with him and but this was the first time I met him in person. A few months back on mail when he mentioned about Refresh Colombo I asked him "what is it" and a couple of months later I myself is at one of those sessions.

The organizers are doing a great job on this and they deserve an accolade for this. May they go from strength to strength and would serve as a launch pad for the techies.