"The Sri Lankan Gaming Industry to increase... yet an untapped market" -Gihan Thanushka Fernando, Managing Director, Gamos Technology Solutions and Editor-in-chief – diGIT online IT magazine

Ashan Kumar met Gihan Thanushka Fernando, Managing Director, Gamos Technology Solutions and Editor-in-chief – diGIT online IT magazine to get to know “How IT Changed his life”... (www.prwire.blog.com)

Gihan Thanushka Fernando, Managing Director, Gamos Technology Solutions and Editor-in-chief – diGIT online IT magazine

Considered by some as a curiosity in the mid-1970s, the computer and video game industries have grown from focused markets to mainstream. They took in about USD$9.5 billion in the US in 2007, and 11.7 billion in 2008 (ESA annual report).

A fairly recent practice, since the mid-1990s, of the video game industry is the rise of game players as developers of game content. The rise of video game players as fourth-party developers of game content allows for more open source models of game design, development and engineering. Game players create user modifications (mods), which in some cases become just as popular, maybe even more popular, as the original game created. An example of this is the game Counter-strike, which began as a mod of the video game Half-Life and eventually became a published game that was very successful.

According to Ben Sawyer, as many as 600,000 established online game community developers will exist by 2012. This will effectively add a new component to the game industry value chain and if it continues to mature it will integrate itself into the overall industry. The Gaming industry in Sri Lanka remains untapped according to young entrepreneur and Managing of Director of GTS Solutions. An old boy of Thurstan College and Wycherley International School, young Gihan had a passion for gaming since his childhood. He started computer classes in the early 90s, curious about how the computer operates.

 

He explained “we were taught GW-Basic and moved to QBasic which was quite fun to grasp, He recalls “ I still remember how I wrote a program at my earliest stage to create songs and music. I later developed my first game (tic-tac-toe) using QBasic and shared it among my school friends. I sold it for Rs 20 at the time, though only a few bought it. He used to sign it as GihanGames but then later on my brother recommended a minus ‘e’ and add an ‘o’ and from then on it became GihanGamos. That was when I was in the 7th grade. If you look at the name of my company now, you will see that I have still retained that name ‘Gamos’.

The grasp of IT and new technology was relatively easy for a young enthusiastic Gihan. He was able to conduct IT projects to both his O/Ls and A/Ls to which he was able to achieve high marks for. He described “I guess with that kind of a background it was a natural decision to use my strength to perceive as a career. After successfully completing my ALs I was selected into the University of Liverpool in the UK where I completed my first degree obtaining an Honours degree in Computer Science. With work experience, I completed my Masters in Advanced Software Engineering at Kings College, University of London”.

Speaking about the impact of IT in his life “I was into IT very early in my life. When my friends were writing essays and assignments on books and pieces of paper, I would not only type them out on my ‘486DX4’ computer but would also create a program so that others could also access my assignments (categorized according to topics). From a young age, I knew that the effective use of IT would have an immense impact on anybody’s life.

He added “IT is the only field where things change at a very rapid pace. You have to always keep your eye on the latest technology that is produced as it would one day change the existing technology that one use. At GTS, we specialize in creating games. We have made a name for our-self by creating the first Sinhala mobile game ‘Colombo Ride’ and have won national and an international award as well for it. Being in a niche segment has its advantages and disadvantages but keeping focused on giving our fans an entertaining product has been our priority along with exposing our sponsors inside the game. I think our game is one place where people want to see advertisements since it’s embedded into the game-play/story.

Speaking about his gaming experience and success, “Recently we were judged the best in South Asia for our 2nd version of ‘Colombo Ride’ and I am hopeful that we would be able to compete with the best in the world to make a name for ourselves with the big game companies like ‘Electronic Arts (EA)’, ‘Activision’, ‘Ubisoft’, ‘Nintendo’, ‘Square Enix’. We still have a long way to go but I am optimistic that we are on right track”. Planning work and working on that plan is one way to cope with an evolving industry.

He is a firm believer on the Sri Lankan knowledge economy and an individual’s knowledge are the most important assets that can be used to our countries strength in any situation. Education should be measured when ranking a country since an educated individual is indispensable. “One of the reasons myself and another 20 other people in the IT field in February 2009 decided to start on our diGIT IT magazine www.digit.lk was to further emphasize this point by giving knowledge in the IT stream to anyone that had access to the internet.

In addition to the good work that is in the process by the government in improving IT literacy, our initiations can also be utilized by the people to better understand IT and also be aware of the latest technologies that are being introduced. We want to break the digital divide and make our citizens to be working smart in addition to working hard. That is the only way in which a so-called ‘3rd world’ country like us can shine and compete with the best of the world” shared a passionate Gihan.

Contribution of the youth for a knowledge economy bloom is quite important. The youth are the future leaders of our country. The first thing they need to do is to get a sound education. They could utilize IT to educate others. Anyone can create a blog on the internet by logging to a blog platform like wordpress.com or blogger.com. What very few notice is that, when we make it a point to educate others with our knowledge by writing a blog post, one also dig deeper into the subject and in time becomes an expert at it. That is the contribution required from the youth, helping other to succeed and gaining themselves.

Sri Lanka is a country which has a population who are highly literate. This is a clear advantage and amalgamate with IT. Take a small company in Sri Lanka that sells a particular product that is greatly in demand. Using email messages or by having a website of the products, the company is able to take the message across and get a great number of orders. The quantity that is being ordered might be small at first but if a quality service is given, then via word of mouth from the internet, orders would increase and the small company can be turned into a midscale one and then into a large scale one in no time. A good service can be given to outside orders by using cheap communication tools such as Skype (to make international calls) and also keeping in touch with your customers via social media tools like Facebook and Twitter. The benefit to Sri Lankans is immense. With IT, in 5-10 years time, we are looking at areas of jobs that do not exist at the moment are a few ideas by Gihan.

The development of IT and access is an overall effort from both the private and public sector. The only thing that needs to be done is to use technology rather than just preach about it. He explained deeper, “I see a lot of initiatives to increase IT awareness but the same places still use traditional mechanisms to do it. For example we could easily communicate via email instead of faxes and the like. There is no real excuse since even with the slowest of dialup connections, we are able to access our e-mails. We need not waste our time commuting to get things done if they can be done via an email or over skype. All I can say is that we need people who know about not only the current technologies but also about technologies that might make a big mark in a few years too. We need to find ways to practically implement IT in Sri Lanka” he ended.