2010 is over, almost!

2010 is almost over and thought it's a good reason to check if my blog is still live. Apparently it is :-)

Here are few things that I probably should associate w/ 2010 over the next decade:

- 3rd year in Ireland. I'm not sure how I really feel about living in Ireland but I think on the overall I'm enjoying it so far (Do I?). Two of my closest friends have moved to Dublin this year and we've moved to a new house. One managed to make it to Google, other tried a lot too, no luck :/ But he still is in Dublin anyway ;)

- I've fully transitioned to a new team, and am now spending more and more time new Google products, particularly mobile ones, which is getting increasingly more chaotic, and "usually" translates to more fun :-)

- According to Tripit, I've travelled over 60.000 kms in 2010, to 10 countries and 12 different cities. I do like traveling but I'll probably try to make longer but less frequent trips in 2011.

- I've made my first trip to the US, to San Francisco. Unfortunately, I didn't really have any chance to the city as I was working whole week, but on the overall I think I liked it. Nothing very impressive though except the one below :-)

- I've visited Google HQ for the first time. It's incredible.

-We now have a 25% bigger but also more separate family :/ FroYo has joined us this year, probably the most ignorant dog ever. He still ignores me. Dad moved to Siberia for working in a new power plant there, my brother moved to another city to work as a teacher. And mum is still working in a hospital in Izmir. Skype is the new living room. I think I'll need to arrange a re-union sometime soon!

AdWords on Mobile

AdWords goes mobile with a super-intuitive interface. Works awesome if you have saved filters or custom alerts. Try it and please send us your feedback here.

Mary Meeker Internet Trends

Mary Meeker April 2010 Internet Trends

hippos and company culture

That is probably one of the most inspiring and insightful speeches I had chance to listen live and I'm happy it is out now. Jonathan Rosenberg is SVP for Procut Management at Google and he shares some "rules to success" with many good examples from Google culture.

Mobility

That is simply an impressing move from Honda on making humankind even more mobile, looking forward to see it in production.

same company, different role

Just a quick personal update on an upcoming change for my role at Google; starting this month and being effective by May, I'll be fully transitioning to EMEA Product Specialists team at Google; will initially be covering Mobile Ad products (and potentially 1-2 more products) across EMEA countries. I'll briefly be responsible for making sure that betas/launches of new mobile ads products/features in EMEA are successful; syncing with engineering and local sales teams for increasing advertiser acceptance levels and commercialization value of Google's mobile offerings. Working with the product team at Google, was something I had hoped for and looking forward to see what it will bring with.

Making Information Useful

A major newspaper in Turkey claims that Turkey is closing economical gap it has with some European countries, particularly with Germany. And the only argument leads them to make such an unfortunate/misleading statement is; GDP ratio of that couple has decreased to 3.2 in 2009 from 5.5 (1985). Seriously? I don't see any of those 2 curves meeting at some point...

Mobile Penetration Rate of Turkey / World

Google recently announced Google Public Data Explorer as a Labs product, it takes only few seconds to pull and visualize any data from various public data sets. Fun!

Web meets phone

Today, I am thrilled with Google Nexus One launch, which I believe will be remembered as a significant milestone in the future. I've been dogfooding (testing) that phone for almost 1 month all I can say is that, it is a piece of art with both its hardware and software. It has a super-fast processor, a very high resolution camera and a gorgeous screen.

iPhone application invasion in Turkey

There have been many major application releases in Turkey recently; mostly from the carriers and media companies. With the recent introduction of 3G to the market and marketing muscle of carriers for data consumption on high-end phones; Turkey is quickly ramping up to the position it was supposed to be in a -mature mobile market- world. Here are some recent numbers from the the leading operator of the market;

Turkcell has sold about 200,000 VINN modems and netbooks since it introduced 3G

on July 30th 2009

• The number of people in Turkey who have transitioned to 3G since July 30th is more

than 4 million

• There are about 2 million active 3G users in Turkey

• The number of Turkcell subscribers who have used Turkcell’s video service has

reached 1 million

• About 72% of Turkcell’s total data traffic takes place within the 3G network

• 93% of VINN modem users prefer 4GB packages and 78% of VINN subscribers use

Turkcell 3G for their broadband Internet needs

I found opportunity to review those recent apps and all I can say is they are already ahead of the curve in many fundamental aspects such as; speed, usability and stability. Vodafone's app is basically a follower to Turkcell's traffic app for Istanbul. But "support for all operators" is a thumbs-up for it. Turkcell's new app Pusula aims to meet all "local" needs of its subscribers with a cool AR support. CNN Turk's app is my favorite, which provides almost all the news-related content in a very intuitive form, including live stream. And ATV's application is a live-stream app as well, which runs pretty smoothly so far. Since I don't use my iPhone's phone function anymore, thanks to all those apps, it is my mobile multimedia device from now on.

We all know that Turkey is still an attractive market for Internet just because it is not very mature yet and Internet penetration is still relatively low and growing fast. But what I believe is the potential for mobile Internet is way bigger mostly because we were that late on 3G launch. There are many new value propositions that digital agencies can provide to meet their clients' short and medium term mobile needs, starting with basics; mobile presence.