etohum strikes back!

etohum is a platform of which main goal is to bring young entrepreneurs and potential investors together in Turkey. It was found by Burak Büyükdemir, a teacher of mine from ITU, and backed by a very experienced and talented group of people who might be considered as the idea leaders of the industry. I believe they had a very successful run last year, and now; starting today, etohum is inviting its second year candidates. Considering the recent 3G launch and its hype, I am expecting to see at least a few very promising mobile ideas this year.

Killer App for Your Appetite

"Being connected" on the go is usually a significant advantage in many cases and ordering food is one of those. Considering my experiences, I'd say that; the time period from work to home, is probably the one I make most of my food-related decisions. Pizza Hut has recently launched it mobile app for iPhone to address that need and TC reports that they already had ~100K downloads in just 2 weeks, which can obviously be considered as an impressive take off.

It is not secret that, many brands used to establish their mobile presence (as they did for their web presence a decade ago) for mostly branding purposes which is meanly led by the first-mover motivation. Many advertisers still do not actually measure their ROI from any of those efforts and they just assume that it will bring them long-term value. That actually might be the right motivation for experimenting, definitely better then just waiting the optimum conditions.

I don't have any insights on the cost for building such an application to Pizza Hut, but if you just make some rough calculations with pessimistic assumptions; you'd see that there really is a direct, profitable and scalable sales channel here. I believe it won't take as much time for advertisers to focus more on ROI at mobile platforms as it did at their web efforts.