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.

Augmented reality gets mobile

Augmented reality is such a hype nowadays. It is a -not very new- research area where the goal is to utilize computer-generated data and overlay that data onto physical environment in a meaningful and blended form. Although it sounds "very cool to be common", it is very likely that you experienced it many times especially if you are watching football matches on TV.

A portable device which has; GPS to sense its location, a compass to determine its direction, camera to capture real-world data, enough computing power and finally a screen to visualize output seamlessly sounds to be the ideal for utilizing AR technologies. Those devices are already being sold at reasonable prices in the stores. Since they have phone functionality as an addition, people mostly call them as mobile phones though :) Here are some apps worth watching:

acrossair on iPhone 3GS


Wikitude on Android G1


Sky Map on Android G1

Connectivity helps some even more

I have a perception that, among those fancy apps and gadgets, we sometimes forget how connectivity is changing our lives and the way companies are running their businesses. While we're discussing how cooler it would be to connect with our friends with more portable PCs or more advanced mobile phones, there still are lots of countries who have no connectivity at all.

Iqbal Quadir , a visionary entrepreneur, who is the owner of biggest mobile operator in Bangladesh tells why communication shouldn't be considered as an ordinary industry and how effective "connectivity" is on the improvement of welfare. The multiplier of communication services on the productivity levels of any industry in a relatively poor country is huge.

200X will be the year for mobile

"200X will be the year of mobile " is probably one of the most frequently used sentences of mobile, particularly by mobile advertising folks.

Doubtlessly, we've observed (and still are) an accelerated convergence among all the communication technologies out there in last 2 years. The number options of an average user for having a mobile communication experience at a reasonable price is way more then it was ever before. While traditional PCs are getting more dependent on "cloud" rather then their native hardwares, what we're observing on the "mobile" side is a noticeable tendency for more powerful and intuitive devices, which are again getting more focused on Internet capabilities. And the consumers are positively responding to influx of those products. The sales volume of super-cheap netbooks is impressive. Just check Amazon's most selling PCs. A similiar shift on demand is also valid for new mobile phone-like gadgets. So I believe the upcoming years will be much more interesting for all stake-holders and will bring some major opportunities and risks to the players. That seems to be just a beginning and my goal with that blog is to share the trends which I find very promising for the industry. By the way, I do believe that 20X0 will be the year of mobile where X is hopefully <2.

Sentt fron a moblei device so may inclde some typos