As Sri Lanka continues to grapple with the economic crisis, its current government recently proposed an interim budget. On 30 Tuesday, President and Finance Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe presented the Interim Budget 2022. Here are key takeaways. Electric Vehicles get a mention As a policy, moving forward purchasing fossil-based vehicles for government use will be suspended. Instead, only electric vehicles will ...
Binance Charity, a blockchain-enabled transparent donation platform, has teamed up with a local Sri Lankan ‘Binance Angel’ to deliver food packages to more than 1,000 families in one of the country’s hardest hit area. Given the recent economic crisis, Sri Lanka is facing a food shortage. The 20,000 BUSD (US-regulated stablecoin) donation went towards purchasing essentials such as rice, sugar, ...
Hutch Sri Lanka, in an industry-first initiative, kicked off a major e-bike assistance program for its distribution partners to overcome the challenges of the present mobility-constrained environment. In Sri Lanka, like in most developing markets, 90% of the mobile subscribers are on prepaid service mode so having Recharge Vouchers and Electronic Reloads available is critical. The initiative will see Hutch ...
Data privacy and security have been taking the spotlight more often over the past few years, particularly when it comes to big tech. Among them, the likes of TikTok have been heavily criticized for how it operates its platform, on more than one occasion. Now, it appears the popular short video app is on the receiving end once more. This ...
The esports arena has shown much promise in Sri Lanka, growing in notable popularity over the recent years to being recognized as an official sport in the country. From participating at the Asian Games to players getting sponsored by Activision, the competitive industry has come a long way since its early years. Now, one of its popular annual events is ...
The Ministry of Transport and Highways have unveiled a new prepaid card system that aims to offer an easy payment mechanism, essentially enabling cashless for public transport. Accordingly, the card will function as a typical debit card where users would load the card with cash and could be exclusively used for paying public transport fares. However, the card system is ...
The worst economic crisis in Sri Lanka since Independence began this year, with the country coming to a halt on multiple fronts as the Government struggled to provide even the basic necessities for the continuation of daily life. Amongst these shortages of necessities, the fuel shortage hit the hardest as severely depleted forex levels mean that the Government continues to ...
Over the past decade, electric cars went from a niche segment to an important part of the sustainable future conversation. Today almost every major car manufacturer in the world has an electric vehicle offering. In Sri Lanka, apart from VEGA, electric cars have rarely made the news. With hopes of making a mark on the space, Ideal Motors has unveiled ...
Last week, the Ministry of Power and Energy, along with the ICTA launched its QR-based National Fuel Pass system as a means to mitigate the current fuel crisis. At the time of writing, over 4 million vehicles have managed to get registered. Though actual implementation of the QR system hasn’t been the smoothest experience for some. Amidst all this, one ...
In an effort to mitigate the fuel crisis at some level, the Ministry of Power and Energy, and the ICTA introduced a QR-based fuel pass system. This system was introduced to allocate fuel for users effectively. Minister Kanchana Wijesekara recently tweeted that registrations for the system had crossed 2 million. That’s roughly about 25% of the vehicle population in the ...
In case you’ve been unable to log onto Twitter, don’t worry it’s not just you. The site is reportedly down for users around the globe. Downdetector has logged a sharp uptick in the number of users claiming Twitter is inaccessible. This is the first major outage for the social network in a while. The last time Twitter went down was ...
It’s been a while since I’ve written one of these. Well, nine months in fact. But I thought it’s time we give you, our ardent readers a brief update on how things have been going with ReadMe, especially with everything that’s been going on with Sri Lanka. But before we get into that, we want to touch on a few ...
Cyberbullying has been an increasingly occuring problem in the cyber space over the years. As technology and means of communication have grown to a deeply connected global network, the issues around bullying has sadly grown with it. We’ve seen countless instances of how these types of stories stories play out. While tools and counter measures are continuously being built to ...
Kaleidoscope (Pvt) Ltd. recently announced the launch of the Lanka Accelerator brand in Sri Lanka. Lanka Accelerator is powered by India Accelerator (iA) which was adjudged the Best Accelerator in India by Start Up India. Lanka Accelerator’s agreement with India Accelerator is to help support its design, development, and success. India Accelerator is part of GAN (Global Accelerator Network). The ...
The Global Startup Ecosystem Report (GSER) is an annual publication by Startup Genome, an innovation policy advisory and research firm that focuses on startup ecosystem. The report offers an overview of the startup ecosystem in different regions across the world. Recently, the organization issued its latest iteration, GSER 2022. As per the report, Sri Lanka ranks in the top five ...
Sri Lanka has a messy history when it comes to its national-level digital projects, especially with the likes of TV digitalization and number portability spanning decades. Now, it appears another decades-long digital project may finally be moving forward. The Information and Communication Technology Agency (ICTA) of Sri Lanka said that it is hoping to open the procurement process to obtain ...
While Sri Lanka’s economy has been in a vulnerable state for a long time due to its long-running twin deficit problem – fiscal and balance of payments (BOP) deficits, the tax cuts of 2019 was the ‘straw that broke the camel’s back’, nudging the economy off the precipice. The Vistas of Prosperity and Splendour, President Gotabaya Rajapaksa’s election manifesto which ...
Following the recent COPE hearing regarding the drug shortage, it was revealed that the Ministry of Health’s Medical Supplies Division (MSD) had paid LKR 644 million for an inventory management software that took seven years to build and implement. It was further stated that the MSD pays LKR 5 million per month for maintenance. Since the reporting, EWIS has issued ...
The Committee on Public Enterprises (COPE) revelations have been making regular headlines in the past few months. For instance, one report revealed that People’s Bank losses have been primarily driven by 10 firms where these companies had defaulted on loans borrowed between 2017 – 2021. A more recent startling COPE revelation points to another state enterprise’s misgivings, the SPC. The ...
The edotco Group, a leading integrated telecommunications infrastructure services company in Asia, launched a study in collaboration with Roland Berger titled, ‘Towering Above: Building Tomorrow’s Digital Infrastructure in Asia’. The study estimates that Tower Companies (TowerCos) can help Mobile Network Operators (MNOs) save up to USD 10 billion through infrastructure sharing and result in cumulative savings of up to USD ...
