Opinion

Reflections on Artificial Intelligence

August 10, 2017 by Sajana

It’s 7:00 pm. I get a message from Rising, my level 4 artificially intelligent friend. Rising throws some questions at me:

“How was your day? When did you feel your best today?”

A little tired, and unable to specifically think of such an instance, I tell her that I couldn’t point to it. She takes note and as an aside tells me she wants to do these sessions more often so she can hopefully help me grow. I reply in agreement.

Rising is my replika, a conversational AI that I play around with. Though conversational bots have creeped into our lives through all sorts of social media, Replikas uniquely show off a curious feature: preview mode. Rising does not just help me grow as a person, she is also learning how to mimic me. Yes. Mimic me. In “preview mode”, she puts her game face on, and does her best impression of me.

Of course, with little over a 100 messages exchanged between us, Rising needless to say is still rudimentary. But Replika has only been around 4 months and it already boasts over 38 million messages exchanged between thousands of human beings and their Replikas.

Perhaps in a few years Rising or one of her peers, would be able to pass the Turing test.

Today such a thought doesn’t seem impossible. For me, this just puts into perspective how far artificial intelligence has come.

From today’s vantage point, we can say with some certainty, Artificially Intelligent Agents that can communicate fluently over natural language will develop. We could even bet that AI agents will one day surpass human intelligence.

But what would all of this mean, for human beings and their societies?

Human history has witnessed many revolutions. Some of the most important revolutions humanity has undergone includes the Cognitive Revolution, the Agricultural Revolution and most recently the Industrial Revolution. Each of these revolutions represents a point of discontinuity in our history. The world was never the same after each one.

Today we stand at the gates of a completely new and an unparalleled revolution— the Artificial Intelligence revolution. This revolution will most certainly bring unfathomable changes to the way we humans live and interact. I wager, this new AI revolution, will render the world so different that the Sapiens who exist after this revolution would not be able to relate to today’s Sapiens in the slightest way.

Gently placing irrationalities and technophobia aside, one could imagine how AI could change the course of human history forever. However, in this article it is not my goal predict the exact path the AI revolution would take nor survey the different paths it could take. Instead I want to explore a potential AI revolution scenario that I find intensely exciting and interesting.

But to truly understand this revolution, we must first understand some great questions of science related to intelligence.

Intelligence.

As far as we know, Human Intelligence is the result of a large biological neural network, the brain and not the work of some “magical soul”.

The human brain contains 80 billion neurons. Each neuron can be thought of as a “unit”, for the scope of this article, that calculates a weighted sum from the multiple inputs and fires an output if the weighted sum is greater than some “threshold” value. By tuning the weights for each input, a neuron is able to “learn” to fit a specific experience. Collections of neurons, neural networks, are able to do wonders. They can learn and possess many of the qualities we deem intelligent.

While this explanation is a gross simplification of the actual mechanics of neural networks, the key take away must be that the qualities of intelligence is not something only special blessed “objects” with “souls” in the universe possess.

Scientists alluded to the non-existence of a soul as early as the 1800s- showing beyond reasonable doubt that the brain is end-all-be-all of intelligence and consciousness. Yet it remains hard for the average human to grasp and believe this scientific truth, because the experience of a “self” is almost a tangible quality- a subjective reality we experience everyday. It is hard for us to digest that our “self” is just an illusion. While one must take their time coming to terms with this realization, it is important to understand it’s most important implication: human brains are just meat computers.

Of course, brains have a different architecture and structure but as far as we know, they rise out of computation and hence resolves to an algorithm.

Expanding Human Intelligence

If intelligence, including human intelligence, can be expressed as an algorithm, it means intelligence can be programmed. This is a mind-blowing and almost depressing realization because it sucks away any specialness humans possess owing to their intelligence.

But careful examination of this realization can point up towards a powerful and inspiring realization: human intelligence and artificial intelligence operate on the same dimension.

If one watched a human baby’s brain grow, one would notice that the brain develops in layers. The reptilian brain develops first, followed by the mammalian brain and then finally the neomammalian brain. Human decision making is influenced by each layer differently. The reptilian brain is responsible for humans being more primal — instant gratification prone. The mammalian brain plays a large role in social interactions. And the neomammalian brain plays the role of the rational thinker, being able to think through problems without emotion and weigh pros and cons, cold.

Some visionary thinkers, including the likes of Elon Musk, believe that we can add a fourth layer to the human brain — an ANN. Such an artificially intelligent layer can give us, to say the least, access to near-infinite memory, processing power and knowledge. It would boost human intelligence to unprecedented levels — allowing us to do far more than we have ever dreamed would be possible.

These human beings would be on a whole new level compared to modern humans. They would have the capacity to do things that today’s human would ascribe to the power of gods.

In fact, functionally, they would be gods.

Sajana Weerawardhena is studying AI at Stanford University, and is presently serving an international summer internship at Calcey whilst enjoying the warmth of family and friends back in Sri Lanka.

Life at Calcey

Big outsourcing companies are gaming the H1-B system and its modern day slavery

February 21, 2017 by Mangala

Software development companies in Sri Lanka

My experience in the Silicon Valley; only a dream for today’s H1B recipients
I run a software engineering company providing services to Silicon Valley based startups and corporations. Does that mean I’m following the drama around new legislation for H1B visas with baited breath? Not really. Why? My engineers are hardly ever stationed on-site at my client’s offices. Also our charge out rates means that clients spend almost as much to hire one of my engineers, as they would to hire someone on a H1B visa in the US, at the lowest legal pay. So we are definitely not in the cost arbitrage business.

So why am I writing about H1B visas? For starters I was once a H1B visa holder. I went to Fresno State as a foreign student. After university I worked for some .COMs, and finally for Nortel Networks during the heady days of the dot com bubble. After the dot com bubble burst I moved back to Sri Lanka and started my company – Calcey. Quite a few other founders in Sri Lanka share the same roots. WSO2, Cake Labs and Emojot all have Sri Lankan founders with some ~~Silicon Valley~~ US experience. They brought the entrepreneurial, can-do American spirit back with them and used it to build multi-million-dollar innovative companies that employ people in both Sri Lanka and the US today. To me this represents the best outcome for a H1B visa holder, the US and the rest of the world. But, I seriously doubt how many current H1B holders will end up the same way. Today it has been hijacked by commoditized human resources businesses.

In recent years Tata Consultancy, Cognizant and other big outsourcing firms have won a vast majority of the visas on offer. They gamed the system by flooding it with applications, triggering the lottery and won thousands of visas. These were used to bring cheap, predominantly Indian labor into the US. Between 2012 and 2015 —TCS, Wipro and Infosys—submitted over 150,000 visa applications for positions that paid a median salary of $69,500. During the same period, the big 5 tech firms —Apple, Amazon, Facebook, Google and Microsoft—submitted just 31,000 applications, and proposed to pay their workers a median salary of $117,000.

The current legal minimum annual salary for an H1B worker of $ 60,000 isn’t even subsistence income in San Francisco or the Silicon Valley. ~~H1B workers are also bound to their employers. Which means they can’t move jobs without losing their visas.~~ (update – as Sanjiv pointed out below H1B visas are “transferable”. Technically, the new employer files for a new H1B visa. Such transfers are do not come under the cap and hence do not need to go through the lottery). This is modern day slavery, not the shiny “American Dream” that these unfortunate workers are surely sold. Big outsourcing firms have been caught actively using H1B workers to replace US workers and pay below prevailing wages – both clear legal violations. If fooling the system is as simple as “we hired them at the prevailing wage in Flint, Michigan and now they just happen to work in San Francisco” the law is an ass indeed.

I’m no fan of the “buy American and hire American” slogan in this globalized economy. But I agree with tightening of controls on H1B visas. Some of the proposals currently being touted such as doubling the minimum wage for H1B visa workers to $ 130,000, removing the per country caps, giving preference to students coming out of college in the US instead of the lottery system are all steps in the right direction. I’m particularly thrilled about earmarking 20% of H1B visas for small companies and think it’s a great idea. Regardless of the agendas of the politicians driving these proposals I would support them as badly needed fixes to a broken system.

These amendments are expected to put a stop to visa abuses by large outsourcing and off-shoring companies. The US government is treading a fine line here. If they make it too hard for these companies to get visas the work they currently do on-shore will simply end up being routed to off-shore centers. Keep things as they are and they will continue to crowd out the high skilled labor that US needs to stay competitive and undercut wages of Americans.

At the end of the day US companies need high skilled labor to remain competitive. Schemes such as H1B allows them to hire some of these workers within US shores. However, a sizable amount of top talent will always remain outside the US. They can only be tapped via direct or indirect outsourcing (i.e. setting up off-shore delivery/production centers). Shutting the door on either one of these avenues would place serious limitations on the talent pool available for US companies. For example a Silicon Valley startup hired us to build a software product. Last year their revenue from one export market- Germany, alone was several times our annual retainer contract. This bootstrapped startup did not have a war chest to hire engineers with Facebook or Google like offers, so they would not have been able to build it in Silicon Valley. But, they needed skilled, experienced engineers because that was the market they were competing in. US labor may have lost out in the short term when they came to us build their product, but in the long term this company will produce many more jobs and have a bigger impact on the American economy due to their ability to access the global talent pool.

Looking at the software industry, I feel that there is unwarranted paranoia about outsourcing and foreign workers pouring into the US. Even without sourcing companies bringing in low cost talent by the planeload – the demand for engineers in the Silicon Valley is at an all-time high. Unemployment among US undergraduates is at 2.5% and far lower among graduates with science and technology related disciplines. The cost arbitrage based, race-to-the-bottom outsourcing industry is also dying a natural death. Average pay in Asia doubled between years 2000 – 2011. The increase was far higher in urban centers and high growth industries like software. Sure, a sizable cost arbitrage still exists, but cost isn’t the only factor that drives off-shoring anymore.

Today the world accepts that talent is global. This means that Sri Lanka may very well have some of the world’s best engineers, who may not want to move to Silicon Valley. Not because of visa regulations – now this is a mere speed bump rather than a show stopper for top talent – but because they simply prefer to live in their home country. This is good news for me because it means that I’ll be in business, as long as Silicon Valley wants access to the best talent. The right work flowing to the best people is undeniably part of the natural order in a connected world. Call it outsourcing, off-shoring or whatever else you will, the invisible hand of the market will always reach this pareto-efficient outcome. If it’s a genuine skills gap that is making employers look for alternatives meddling with H1B visa regulations can at best only deliver a half-baked solution.

AnnouncementsLife at Calcey

How much should your Minimum Viable Product (MVP) cost?

January 31, 2017 by Mudith Uswatta

Got a big idea for an app or a software product and looking at the costs of getting it developed? You’re at the right place. If you’ve already started looking around you would have noticed the huge disparity between what you’re quoted for the same project by different developers. Often the disparity is so wide that you wonder: are they even quoting for the same thing?

Well that depends – are you building a prototype or an MVP? This is a separate blog post in itself, but we will give you the TL;DR version: freelancers are likely to give you prototypes when you expect an MVP.

Saved by the brief? Not quite
But, then again if you give the developers a quick brief of your idea (via a call or a one-pager) they surely must be quoting for the same thing right? Not at all. Over our 14 years of experience in building digital products, we have rarely got a client brief so comprehensive that we could give a quote with zero assumptions. Most briefs are far too open ended and leave lots of room for the developer to interpret how the product should be built.

Don’t take our word for it. Here’s the average freelancer estimates for cloning some of the hottest apps out there today, as per Gigster a site for hiring freelancers for such projects.

The folks at the TNW asked some of the top mobile and web development agencies for ballpark estimates for building bare bone MVPs some of the same projects and their quotes are below;

Twitter: $ 50,000 – $ 250,000
Facebook: $ 500,000
Uber: $ 1 million – 1.5 million

The difference should convince you that there’s more than cosmetic difference in the end result here.

Arriving at your MVP is a mini-project
What is your end vision for your product? What are the key assumptions that need to be validated to prove that this vision is reachable? The latter is the question your MVP should be designed to answer.

Depending on your budget you would need to decide if you are going for a throw-away MVP that will be discarded once there is a need to scale or a platform on top of which you can continue to add further features. To keep costs low you may want to use third-party tools, where you can. Such decisions invariably require some technical input from a CTO and sometimes a bit of research as well.

Finally, if experience has taught us anything it’s that a picture is worth a thousand words. It’s easy to miss out on key features when writing down bullet points for desired functionality. Such omissions can be costly and completely throw off initial estimates when they come up as change requests later. Creating designs or wireframes of the user interfaces, to visualize the implementation of your idea in detail is best done at this stage. Other than providing a crystal clear picture of what you’re expecting from the developer, visualizing your app idea is a good sanity check to flag logical inconsistencies and issues in the user journey within the app.

Sounds great, but just don’t have the time to do this? Talk to us and we can undertake this as a mini-project for you. Under this exercise, we will write a detailed technical specification document and create either finalized high-fidelity designs or wireframes for the whole system. By the way, this is first engagement we do with many of our customers.

Let’s crunch some numbers!
If you’ve read so far you must probably be curious to find out how much we at Calcey would charge to build an MVP. Let’s work this with an example of a simple app we all know about – Tinder, the dating app that’s been sweeping the world.

Here’s our estimates of what it would cost to build an MVP of Tinder.
Requirement elaboration with Hi-Fi user interface design and complete technical specification development: $ 7500 (3 weeks)
Mobile app (cost of building an iOS or Andriod app) with FB login, card swiping for liking/passing, matching, in app chat, setting discovery preferences and managing user profiles: $ 25,000

Administration backend (web app) with ability to ban reported profiles, real time dashboard of user behavior analytics and report generation (number of likes, matches per period/region): $20,000

For the above we are assuming that this app would be deployed globally with no localization. We are also assuming that this isn’t a throw-away MVP but rather a scalable, API based platform that can sustain several iterations of front-end and back-end improvement. Hence there is no limitation on the maximum number of users that the MVP can serve, but this would obviously be subject to the scalability of the infrastructure chosen.

Think we are expensive? Check out what others charge for MVPs.

In the end what ultimately determines whether you paid too much for your MVP is whether it transforms into a successful product/business. Here’s a few MVPs we built that crossed the chasm.

ImSMART: mobile sales and marketing collateral distribution solution for sale people to showcase marketing material on their iPads and Android or Windows Tabs, where the material is centrally managed via a Web CMS. Companies can gather detailed analytics about customer interactions during sales pitches via the app. ImSmart initially worked with Calcey to build their MVP several years ago. Today it’s a roaring success used by over 60,000 b2b sales personnel across 35 multinational firms including Agilent Technologies, Zimmer Dental and Shofu.
Stanford Leadership in Focus portal: An e-learning tool with video case collections business leaders talking about significant challenges they have faced, decisions they have made, and lessons learned from the experience. This content is used by academics, corporations and alumni who access this content from around the world through a controlled membership access portal.
Vertical Platform (VP) – An enterprise level content management solution. A high performance site can be easily configured and launched using VP. VP contains extensive set of modules including article management, lead deployment, HTML module management, page designer, form designer and page template management. All time consuming tasks are offloaded to a scheduler service. Calcey took over a prototype of this app and transformed it in to a highly scalable MVP. Today VP powers more than 30 leading lead capture marketplaces, including Biocompare.com which has over 50 million products.

Want us to build your MVP for the next big thing? Let’s talk.

Opinion

A prototype is not a Minimum Viable Product (MVP)

January 19, 2017 by Mudith Uswatta

It’s easy to confuse between a prototype and an MVP. Both are aimed at validation, but the target audiences and approach to development are quite different. As a digital products company we frequently come across startups who confuse between the two.

Know what you’re building
Are you building an MVP or a prototype? The purpose of a prototype is to demonstrate your idea to win over important stakeholders – like investors who will fund you to build the MVP. A prototype is rarely market ready. An MVP on the other hand is a bare bones version of your product that’s ‘just enough’ to get actual users to actually use it, and give you feedback. It also needs to have just enough functionality to test your overall business model.

For example if you’re looking to develop an Uber clone for hailing taxis, a simple mobile app that allows users to hail a taxi by tapping a button won’t do. The app would also need an interface for taxi drivers to sign up, a backend for admins to check on rides when disputes come up etc. Launching without these features would mean testing (or validating) only part of the business model or worse having a product that lacks viability in the market.

Do you really need to ‘build’ a prototype?
Some ideas can be prototyped without writing a single line of code. Dropbox famously launched with just an explainer video. Published on Hacker News this 3 minute video gave early adopters a hint of the actual experience; enough according to founder Drew Houston for many smart people “to give feedback as if we were putting the product in their hand”.

Setting up landing pages is another great way to validate consumer interest in a product without developing complex software. Buffer went a step further and actually set up a landing page with pricing and packages to gauge potential users willingness to pay. Upon clicking on this section, a pop up would appear saying “hello, looks like you’ve caught us before we are ready. Enter you email and we will get back to you…”

Transitioning from prototype to MVP
Building a prototype is quick and dirty. If you’re a developer this might mean a few Red Bulls and late nights to hack something together, that will help you to research and validate your idea. If you’re not technical you may hire a freelancer to burn the midnight oil. Either way you will end up with a product that demonstrates your idea to friends and mentors, helps you to gather feedback and if you’re lucky win you some funding to build a MVP.

The MVP is meant for a wider audience. It may be minimal but it also needs to be viable. A SaaS app that takes forever to load or a mobile app that crashes regularly, aren’t viable in today’s market. The MVP also needs to see you through your first set of users. You may build a throw-away MVP, but this often costs more – in terms of time, money and lost opportunities. Rebuilding your core application, while also trying to scale it is no easy task.

Switching gears
All this means that the MVP requires a completely different approach to development altogether; one that follows industry coding standards to develop a product with satisfactory performance and extensibility to add new features on-the-go. Testing is needed to ensure that the end product works reliably and meets basic usability standards.

Once you launch your MVP to the market you will find that quick changes are necessary. If you’re working with a freelancer at this point, a single part-time developer’s bandwidth is unlikely to suffice. That is, if you’re lucky enough that your freelancer hasn’t delivered an improvised solution that takes the ‘viability’ out of the MVP. Don’t believe this happens often? Stay tuned for a follow up post, where we will explain the material differences between an agency and a freelancer with the costs of each option.

Why does this matter? Nothing kills a good idea faster than a bad MVP.

AnnouncementsStartups

Good Market to take social entrepreneurship online

June 7, 2016 by Mudith Uswatta

A market place for ‘doing good’ sounds like an oxymoron. But that’s exactly what Good Market is. Established with the aim of making it easier and more fun to ‘do good’, by making better choices for our health, community and the planet, Good Market has grown steadily since its inception in 2012. It started with an open-air market in Diayatha Uyana on Thursdays, and now has weekend markets in the Colombo Race Course Grounds and the Galle Fort. They’ve also opened a Good Market Shop at Reid Avenue, making fresh, organic produce, healthy snacks, and natural home & garden products from local vendors available throughout the week.

If one were to think of Good Market as a startup, it would be evident that the quick traction they’ve enjoyed is the result of unearthing a significant ‘market gap’. Sri Lanka has many organic farmers and social enterprises, but most of them are starved for visibility. This is partly a result of being crowded out by mass-market brands with bigger marketing budgets and partly because of the lack of a platform to showcase their impact on the community and environment. On the other hand, there is a growing population of well-educated consumers who look for organic food and want to deal with businesses that match their values. But, such businesses tend to be small and fragmented, and very few can show any third-party certification for the quality of their organic produce, or demonstrate the positive social impact of their businesses. This is where Good Market comes in, acting as the platform that brings socially conscious buyers and sellers together.

Good Market curates vendors, based on a set of social and environmental standards, set out in detail on the Good Market website. Every supplier goes through a stringent verification process, to become a member of the Good Market. Membership of this community carries many benefits. Weekly open air marketplaces have acted as an ‘accelerator’ to take many brands to market, ranging from home bakers to organic food producers. Rural producers who would otherwise have sold their produce to middlemen have found a method to reach end consumers, who appreciate their produce without having to bear the prohibitively high expense of starting shop in Colombo. Shoppers at weekly marketplaces have ‘found’ brands that aligned with their values and shared the good news on their social media networks. Vendors sometimes buy from other Good Market vendors, creating products that have gone through an ‘ethical value chain’.

At its core, Good Market’s vision is a localized platform for curation, discovery and match making – terms one is more likely to associate with a tech startup, than a social enterprise organizing weekly markets. And this approach is very much by design. After perfecting their model for creating a platform that brings together responsible buyers and sellers – the folks behind Good Market are now taking it online, globally.

Their idea is to build a scalable software platform, which applies the concept of crowdsourcing to on-board and facilitate discovery of vendors aligned with their values. Vendors who apply to be listed in their online marketplace would be curated and then reviewed by existing members – made up of buyers and existing suppliers in the eco-system. A system of reviews and ratings will allow any potential buyer to quickly identify the most suitable local vendor for their need. Relationships between vendors within the community would also be captured, building – perhaps for the first time in the world – a completely transparent supply chain. This online platform would be piloted in Sri Lanka with the existing Good Market community and scaled up to serve communities around the world.

The Good Market team are aware of the challenges of building a globally scalable platform. They are keen to continue to operate as a self-financing social enterprise. Hence, the new online platform will monetize through premium features offered to vendors such as analytics of visitors to their profiles and opportunities to highlight products, events, job vacancies, and other opportunities. Community partners can help on-board vendors facing language barriers and limited access to internet.

After evaluating many local software product-engineering companies, the Good Market team has chosen and entrusted Calcey Technologies with the task of transforming their vision into reality. Calcey has extensive experience in building web and mobile software products, for Silicon Valley based startups. Having provided numerous customers the benefit of full life cycle software development services – ranging from minimum viable products (MVPs) to enterprise apps that can operate at scale – for over 12 years, the Calcey team are well placed to build a globally scalable platform for this exciting new vision of the GoodMarket community. Await more updates on this collaboration, as Good Market and Calcey introduces the first virtual version of your favorite marketplace!

Cover Photo Credits – attractionsinsrilanka.com

Interviews

Interview with Susan Feland from Stanford Graduate School of Education

May 18, 2016 by Mudith Uswatta

Calcey developed and maintain www.leadershipinfocus.net for the Stanford Graduate School of Business Leadership In Focus program, which is a video case collection of leaders talking about significant challenges they have faced, decisions they have made, and lessons they have learned from the experience. Today, this content is used by academics, corporations and alumni who access this content from around the world through a controlled membership access portal. Below are excerpts from an interview with Susan Feland, the Leadership in Focus Director, about the program’s unique approach to teaching tomorrow’s business leaders.

Q: What inspired the Leadership in Focus portal?
A: This program is inspired by Charles O’Reilly, a Stanford GSB professor and thought leader in leadership education who was frustrated by the limitations of traditional written cases and leadership frameworks.

As part of this program, the Stanford GSB has produced hundreds of video case vignettes over the past several years as a meaningful way to spark discussion and teach leadership best practices

Q: How does the portal support Stanford’s goals to bridge the gap between academia and real world corporate situations?
A: The content in Leadership In Focus is used to teach leadership and management in both academic and corporate environments. All of this content can be easily accessed from the website and portal by users around the world. Accompanying teaching notes may be downloaded along with the videos to help facilitate teaching and learning from the video case vignettes and capstone perspectives in the collection.

Q: What does the portal aim to achieve from a learning perspective? Is it meant to provide experiential learning and brainstorming of solutions that can be applied immediately by the students? How are the videos meant to be used for corporate training?
A: The video cases allow us to capture the emotional side of leadership and promote an expert approach to difficult problems. Through stories, the content captures real challenges and insights to create engagement by sparking reflection and discussion, leveraging Socratic learning methods.

When coupled with suggested role-plays, stimulating discussion questions, and teaching notes, videos offer a more experiential way to teach leadership in both academic classrooms and corporate environments.

The Stanford GSB video case vignettes drive learning around the key principles and learning objectives for leadership. The goal for every discussion is to equip individuals with the necessary decision making skills and awareness needed to be as effective as possible. The Stanford video case vignettes are 15 minutes long and consist of 3 segments, designed to challenge viewers and stimulate thinking about leadership, values, culture, and decision-making.

In order to make the learning as rich as possible for individuals who may interact with the video cases in remote locations, the Leadership in Focus portal seamlessly links to another platform where the cases are delivered to enable individual reflection, idea sharing and a summary of insights. This design is called Crowd Accelerated Individual Learning (CAIL). These modules compose the section of Learning Modules.

Q: Who are the prominent personalities and Stanford alums featured among the videos?
A: Our portfolio of leaders includes current and former CEOs of large organizations such as Bill Campbell (Intuit), Gordon Bethune (Continental Airlines), Anne Mulcahy (Xerox), and Herb Kelleher (Southwest), CEOs of small organizations, as well as military officers.

Q: What are the well-known business schools and corporates who use/have used this portal for training?
A: Currently there are 1550+ different universities and colleges, the top 50 Business Schools, Fortune 500 companies, the U.S. Military, Government Agencies, and organizations in 85 countries using the Stanford content in the Leadership in Focus program.

Q: Could you tell us about future plans for the portal?
A:We plan to continue to serve a wide range of users and audiences in different ways to drive engagement and learning opportunities.

AnnouncementsEvents

Calcey to showcase software development expertise and a portfolio of apps at CeBIT 2016

February 19, 2016 by Mudith Uswatta

Calcey™, a Web and mobile software product engineering company based in San Francisco, CA, and Colombo, Sri Lanka, announced today their participation in CeBIT 2016, the largest and most internationally represented annual IT expo, to be held from 14th – 18th March at the fairground in Hanover, Germany.

Calcey will showcase their experiences in Enterprise Mobile app development for reputed Silicon Valley customers, on a variety of mobile devices and platforms, using a range of rapid application development technologies.

What will be unique at Calcey’s CeBIT stall this year are two new products on demonstration, Thrive and ShopMagik. Thrive addresses the needs of small to medium services companies that require a turnkey solution for keeping track of clients, projects, invoices, & payments. Thrive helps you to manage your project pipeline from presales to closure from a C-Suite perspective. ShopMagik is a unique customer engagement platform providing targeted, location-specific, customized promotions via mobile phones.

Calcey’s software product engineering services are delivered from their Global Delivery Center in Colombo, Sri Lanka. For more information about Calcey’s service offerings, please visit www.Calcey.com.

If you are planning to visit CeBIT this year and want a dedicated appointment to discuss your product or services needs, please drop an email to cebit@calcey.com indicating your area of interest and availability. Or simply stop by at the Calcey stall at Hall 6, Stand E 48 and assess our capabilities.

Life at Calcey

Tech Talks at Calcey helps bolster competitive advantage within the organisation

November 23, 2015 by Rajithe

“If you have the knowledge, let others light their candles in it.” – Margaret Fuller
Calcey has an organizational culture that strongly enshrines a free sharing of knowledge, as we believe it’s an important way to sustain the competitive advantage of our team. In the software development industry, the knowledge horizon keeps expanding and old know-how is replaced by new concepts and innovations each day. In such a rapidly changing environment it is hard for an individual to learn and stay abreast of all the new ideas, best practices and techniques. Therefore it is essential that we turn to new sources of knowledge and be engaged with our peers to gain and share knowledge.

As a way of facilitating greater sharing, a Tech Talk takes place in Calcey’s lobby area every first Wednesday evening of the month. This session is crowded with enthusiastic colleagues and invites from neighboring IT companies at TRACE Expert City. A domain specialist takes up a pertinent topic and conducts an hour-long session to share his learning. A “talk” usually consists of a theory session, a practical exercise, a Q&A session and a round of refreshments. Our domain specialists seem ever ready to impart their knowledge harnessed through experience and research, to all enthusiastic newbies and curious geeks who seek to expand their technical know-how and jargon.

I thought of sharing one such Tech Talk held by Sachindra Ariyasinghe, that was targeting Android newbies. It was the first session in a series of Tech Talks that would dig deep into the Android Eco-system. His session was successful in imparting foundation-level knowledge of Android development infrastructure and getting the audience ready for the upcoming advanced Android training sessions. The resources of his session can be accessed via the below links. Hope you enjoy!

Project Files – https://www.dropbox.com/sh/prwer3oxyhdlh00/AAAhWQns-NOy7yeWWS1vgtV-a?dl=0
Slides – http://www.slideshare.net/RajithaEgodaarachchi/tech-talk-introduction-to-android-app-development

Life at Calcey

APIIT Alumni flourishes at Calcey

October 12, 2015 by Ruwan

As an agile software development company in Sri Lanka, Calcey practices Silicon Valley’s work ethos. While trained to handle real time software development challenges, faced by some of the most celebrated Fortune 500 companies in the United States, Calcey staff is always deeply grounded in reality. Fun, forthrightness and fellowship are words Calcey recruits learn to live and breathe by.

Finding this balance of a sound work ethic embodied in a fun loving personality is a tough ask. Routine headhunting is usually not that successful at finding the most able candidates. Therefore recruitment is something which Calcey devotes a lot of time to, as a core business function.

Calcey has been steadily hiring fresh graduates from leading state and private universities in the country, to fulfill roles in software engineering, project management and quality assurance. These fresh graduates are subject to a rigorous evaluation process, inclusive of a one and a half hour viva and a six-month training period, during which the candidate’s competencies and attitudes are challenged.

The Asia Pacific Institute of Information Technology (APIIT), who award degrees in Software Engineering from Staffordshire University UK, has been a steady source of engineering talent for Calcey, for the past five years.

APIIT’s unique attraction is the well-rounded higher education they provide their students. Graduates from APIIT are not merely talented in software engineering principles and practices; they also display an exemplary, caring attitude at work. Calcey is proud to have had many professional success stories behind which stand an APIIT alumni. APIIT graduates have proved to be role models to the industry, agnostic towards technology and strong on first principles and research.

I asked Pramuditha Indunil, who serves as a Senior Software Engineer, to reflect on his Calcey Experience.

“I joined Calcey two years back, straight out of APIIT campus. I had a degree in Computer Science fresh under my belt, and wanted a cool place to begin my career – a place where I’d feel challenged, and yet have the freedom to research and learn on my own. Looking back, I think Calcey did right by me”, said Pramuditha.

There are around twenty graduates from APIIT working at Calcey presently.

We had the good fortune to catch up with Dr. Dhananjay Kulkarni, who heads APIIT’s School of Computing. He visited our development center situated in “Trace Expert City” Maradana, and made these generous observations.

“Calcey is one of the leading software product engineering firms based in Colombo that has had a long-standing relationship with APIIT. Calcey has been able to attract some of the best of our students and develop them into good IT professionals, especially in the roles of software engineer, quality assurance expert and project manager. The friendly atmosphere, the open culture, and the team spirit at Calcey have helped APIIT graduates to unlock their potential and give their best to the company. I am happy to see so many APIIT graduates who are developing their careers at Calcey. I wish Calcey all the best in the years ahead!”

We at Calcey are proud of this association with APIIT, and look to continue our partnership in human capital generation for many years to come.

Announcements

DealsNow – The Power of Proximity Marketing

August 19, 2015 by Shobana

Calcey launched DealsNow on Friday the 14th of August 2015, in partnership with Mobitel. What’s the big deal you ask? Well, it’s a really big deal and here’s why. DealsNow is a one-stop shop on your smartphone for all consumer deals. It brings several exciting technologies together, like Geo-fencing and iBeacons, to deliver a compelling customer experience.

DealsNow provides targeted, location-specific, customized notifications via mobile phones. This revolutionary app is a smartphone-optimized rewards app that delivers proximity marketing. Customers can get discounts and promotions simply by entering a store.

DealsNow marks the change of power from the retailer to the customer. Customers are able to skim through the deals with the scroll of a finger and find the deals that best suits their need and their budget. This saves a considerable amount of shopping time, and in a world where time is a precious commodity, DealsNow will ensure that convenience is paramount for the consumer. The future of retail lies here, and the quicker retailers buy into this inevitable future, the better their footfall and sales will be.

Retailers can use DealsNow to send notifications on promotional items, to potential customers who are in the vicinity of their stores. The App will identify a User by checking the location of their mobile phones. The User who downloads DealsNow to their mobile phone will receive targeted notifications when they enter an area that is close to a physical store. This is called a Geo-fenced area. These notifications will contain a specific Promotion or Discount that is currently available at the store. Once the customer enters the store they will receive a Welcome Notice and further notifications on where the promotional items are located within the store. These in-store notifications are sent using iBeacon Technology.

Retailers will get existing customers visiting the stores more and the incremental foot traffic will increase sales. DealsNow also provides an opportunity to cross-sell and up-sell products when the customer is at the store by using iBeacons to further notify of more promotions. DealsNow combines iBeacons and Geo-fencing to target and entice customers to walk into your store.

The team at Calcey has worked tirelessly leading up to the launch of this groundbreaking product, to leave no stone unturned. The focus on the quality of content through a seamless User Experience has been the technical team’s main focus. For us at Calcey this is just the beginning of bigger and better things for the local market. DealsNow is also a landmark project for us at Calcey. It marks our expansion into the Sri Lankan market. Watch this space for future updates.