Hope for poor - Sasrutha Videos for the finals

Hope for poor - Sasrutha :: Video created for World Finals. A full description of the mashup is given here.

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Hope for poor - Sasrutha

for more information please visit: www.sasrutha.uom.lk

“Hope for poor – Sasrutha” is a MashUp application developed to support and to encourage micro finance process.

As women are proven to be the best poverty fighters, capabilities and spare time of women in homes could be utilized in finding ways to generate an extra family income. While doing house chores, they can be self employed in small scale businesses and can use the income generated to purchase nourishing food for children, meet their educational requirements and at the same time making a saving for future.

As many women are reluctant to work outside with family responsibilities and restrictions, finding a way of generating additional income while looking after the family responsibilities at home is important. Lack of capital funds to initiate such income generating businesses and lack of an organized system at micro level is a major constraint to these poor people. Even if they produce items, they find it difficult to sell the items. Also selling items to an intermediary, will only allow these women to get only a pinch from whole profit. They have less bargaining power.

Even the micro finance providing organizations find it difficult to carry out a smooth process with high cost of administration and due to improper management of defaults. It is high costly to employee a high amount of field officers to collect loans each day from people, the monthly installments are due per a particular day. Due to improper management, a higher set of field officers are employed to the same segment, though it could be covered by a single employee.
Microfinance is not only about loans. It also should encourage savings.

In these organisations, most deserving people may not receive the donations. It is important that most deserving people receive the donations. Also the headquarters or the mother company find it difficult to track the progress made.

Blocks we created in www.popfly.com .....

These are the blocks we created:

Sanasa - to perform loan calculations, chart analysis

TSP for Virtual Earth - to display the shortest path based on Travelling Salesman Problem and graph theory

Google Language - to translate and transliterate languages

Date compartor and roundoff .

Try using those blocks in creating your mashups in www.popfly.com

By the way, our mashup is at http://www.popfly.com/users/Supunmali/Hope%20for%20poor%20-%20Sasrutha

Check it. send your valuable comments.

After a long time...........

So happy to start blogging back again.....

These days I am developing a mashup application with one my friends Dasuni, for the Microsoft Imagine Cup competition. Actually, at present we are fine tunning the application and testing it.

The good new is that we are selected to the final 6 under mashUp category and finals will be held in Cairo, Egypt from 3rd july to 7th July. :)

Victory

This is one victory that Colombo will claim on Friday.

For the first time, the world premier of a Hindi movie, Victory, is being held in Colombo on Friday evening after the venue was changed from Dubai to Colombo.

The plush Regal theatre was chosen duel to the India-Sri Lanka one-day series. It is also being seen as one of the biggest events in the entertainment industry to be held in Sri Lanka.

The movie about a boy from Rajasthan making it big in the world of cricket is shot extensively in Sri Lanka, starring Harman Baweja, Amrita Rao, Anupam Kher, Gulshan Grover and 60 Indian and international cricketers.

Indian team and Sri Lankan players will be part of the premier. Australian fast bowler Brett Lee and former team-mate Shane Warne, actress Priyanka Chopra along with several stars are expected to participate.

Slumdog Millionaire

Slumdog Millionaire is a 2008 British drama film directed by Danny Boyle, co-directed by Loveleen Tandan (who began as the film's casting director),and written by Simon Beaufoy. It is based on the novel Q and A by Indian author and diplomat Vikas Swarup.

Set and filmed in India, Slumdog Millionaire tells the story of a young man from the slums of Mumbai who appears on a game show and exceeds people's expectations, arousing the suspicions of the game show host and of law enforcement officials.

After screenings at the Telluride Film Festival and the Toronto International Film Festival, Slumdog Millionaire had a limited North American release on 12 November 2008 to critical acclaim and awards success. It will be released in India on 23 January 2009.

Slumdog Millionaire won five of the six awards it was nominated for at the Critics Choice Awards and all four of the awards it was nominated for at the Golden Globes. It has also been nominated for eleven BAFTA Awards.

Slumdog Millionaire is inspired by another Indian Malayalam Movie released in 2001, "One Man Show" scripted by the director duo Rafi-Mecartin and directed by Shafi."One Man Show", also based on a popular game show similiar to "Slumdog Millionare".The cast included Jayaram,Lal,Samyuktha Varma and Kalabhavan Mani.

Reference: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slumdog_Millionaire

Sports trends

The crunch bites

Tiger Woods has already lost a sponsor to the credit crunch, and if it can happen to The Most Marketable Man On The Planet, everyone else should start to panic. Expect events-based sports such as golf and tennis to shrink their schedules - marginal tournaments with forgettable names will vanish as quickly as they arrived. In F1 it's the teams, rather than the races, that are in danger - we wouldn't be surprised to see others drop off the back of the grid like Honda.

Small clubs are most vulnerable: prepare yourselves for a few sentimental names to go to the wall. Top-flight footy may still be affected however: new stadiums are being put on hold and excessive salaries are, says Downward, likely to come down. We'll believe that when we see it.

The 20/20 effect

Thanks to the success of Twenty20 cricket, more sports are slimming down and sexing up. 'Express Eventing' now squeezes all the parts of three-day eventing into just one, and in June polo follows it with a shortened version of the game to be staged in London's Hurlingham Park.

And it's not just the horsey types trying to make themselves more accessible. By the end of the year, the PGA will have hosted its first PowerPlay Golf World Championship, played over nine holes. 'People are leaving golf because of time,' says Peter McEvoy, the driving force behind PowerPlay golf. 'It takes too long. It's a cultural change - a need for more instant gratification.' Time is particularly important where television is concerned. As long as football, rugby, tennis, Formula One - in their tidy, telly-friendly packages - continue to absorb fan interest and broadcast rights money, other sports will have to adapt. We look forward to single-frame snooker matches and 24-minute Le Mans races with glee.

Player power

It's the kind of term you expect to hear from newly redundant managers, but 'player power' will reach a new peak in 2009. Players have long been in control of tennis but come May, one will 'own' a tournament for the first time - Novak Djokovic's family bought the rights to the Dutch Open last year, and are relocating it to Belgrade to become the Serbian Open. Ana Ivanovic is expected to do something similar for the women's tour.

This year, the last major sport without a players' union, snooker, forms the Association of Snooker Professionals, pioneered by John Higgins. The Scot also helped launch - and then win - the World Series of Snooker, staged throughout 2008. And in cricket, players itchy to get to the Indian Premier League are able to hold their governing bodies to ransom: witness Sri Lanka's withdrawal from their tour of England this year.

Reference: http://www.guardian.co.uk/sport/2009/jan/04/4

COLOUR TRENDS IN JEWELERY DESIGN

COLOUR TRENDS IN JEWELERY DESIGN

"The Blues" was predicted for 2008 & shades of blue it surely has been. "The Blues" will stay with us for 2009 and most likely beyond.
The gemstones dominating here are tanzanite with its stunning purple blue, topaz ranging from light sky blue to a dark, rich London blue and last not least lapis lazuli continues its big comeback.

Green is a popular colour in jewellery design but right now it reigns, old favorites such as peridot or turquoise remain on the fashion radar, but 2009 sees a few newcomers such as amazonite and chrysoprase adding a Caribbean feel to the palette.
And if you thought that emerald is an old fashioned gem found at upper class tea parties - think again. The queen of green gems is back and ready to conquer the contemporary jewellery design arena.

Fairly new on the block for 2009 is the colour brown. Champagne & cognac diamonds and diamond beads dominate the top end market, champagne quartz and smokey quartz offer beautiful shades of brown in a more affordable price range. Even the pearl industry is going all the way releasing a chocolate brown south sea pearl.

When did black actually go out of fashion? Must have missed this... but anyway according to the trend forecast black is back. We are not only talking jet or black onyx - no it gets way more sparkly with black spinel, black pyrite and black diamonds becoming easily available.

And lets not forget purple, and, and...

Reference: http://www.anpa.co.za/trends.html

PlayAnywhere – Microsoft's Interactive Playground

Microsoft recently introduced “PlayAnywhere” – a front-projected computer vision-based interactive table system, which the company says demonstrates the latest improvements in projection technology. PlayAnywhere was designed using advanced image processing techniques and Microsoft says this compact product addresses installation, calibration, and portability issues that are typical in most vision-based table systems. PlayAnywhere’s creators said they aimed to create a system capable of sensing a variety of objects and of displaying animated graphics over large display surfaces.
Unlike many similar systems, PlayAnywhere’s projector and camera are placed on the side of the tabletop, and the device can sense and project images on a 40'' diagonal area at a relatively short distance. Andrew Wilson, one of the researchers who worked on the project, said the system demonstrates a number of important sensing capabilities that exploit the flexibility of computer vision techniques. These sensing capabilities include a novel touch detection algorithm based on the observation of shadows, and an optical flow-based algorithm for the manipulation of onscreen objects that does not rely on fragile tracking algorithms.
PlayAnywhere consists of three primary components: a projector, cameras, and an infrared illuminant – constructed as a single piece. The projector stands on a short pedestal, which is placed directly on the targeted surface, and uses four aspheric mirrors to project a visibly correct rectangular image from oblique angles at short distances. Multiple cameras and the infrared illuminant are mounted on the projector itself, in order to preserve the calibration of the vision system with the display, regardless of where PlayAnywhere is situated.

Reference: http://thefutureofthings.com/news/1037/playanywhere-microsofts-interactive-playground.html

A computer mouse stocking-filler

How do you improve on the 40-year-old design we call the mouse that has, together with the keyboard, become the default tool for computer interaction? Patrick Baudisch of Microsoft Research and the Hasso Plattner Institute in Potsdam, Germany, has a Christmas-themed answer - stuff it in a stocking.

The user no longer needs a flat surface to put the mouse on. Instead, they massage the sock with one hand to rotate the mouse which is free to move inside while the material remains stationary. The mouse movement is rather like a bar of wet soap rotating in your hand.
The mouse's laser detects the motion of the sock going by, just as it would a passing mouse pad, and translate what it sees into onscreen action. Baudisch designed the "soap" mouse in 2006, and has since gone onto other computer-human interaction projects including lucidTouch and, as reported in nanoTouch.