Second Life

I have spent some time in SL and saw some exciting opportunities in it. It takes time to get used to but when you start to spend time in SL, it makes you feel good and create some interesting opportunities.

Here you can watch Apple's Store in SL, some brands on SL and Opening Show of Mercedes-Benz C-Class

If a lot of this big brands spend money and time on it, there must be something?

your parallel universe: stix.to

One day, when i was first meeting with the internet it was so difficult for me to remember where should i click and what to do then. I was a little child and no english knowledge. I was always asking to my dad; “dad, where should i click now, where to write my name and password?” It was a huge problem for my dad, to show me again and again and again where to click, what to do and so on.

Imagine that you can put notes on the pages you visited before and write there small notes, about where to click, what to do and some clues about the that specific web page. After 13-14 years later now I am a computer engineer and i decided to help people who faced this kind of problems before. We developed a new technology which enable you to put sticky notes to the web pages like you put notes to your wall or post its.

Referring to the pictures in this post, you can see how easy ad fast to use it. Imagine that you are teaching using internet to to your children or a friend who is really not familiar to use internet. You can write notes about where they should click, where to write their user-names, passwords and then where should they click on.

This was only a simple scenario. We can create more and more scenarios. Imagine that you are away from home and you found something interesting on a web page and wanna show it to your wife, husband, girlf-friend, boy-friend. Basically, you can write post to the wall of the web page by using our product and then he/she can visit the same page and see what you think about any specific product, video, picture and so on.

We believe that this is a discontinuous innovation which will enable to use internet effectively. By using our product you can post notes, videos, musics and read and listen others’ notes. We will add so may other features soon but this is the best until we do the better.

Importance of Business Cards

Since I am an entrepreneur, I have been in many mingling sessions and met with a lot of people. In my card holder I have about 100 different business cards(in 4-5 months) but unfortunately I cant remember many of them now (and I believe many of them don’t remember me either). After I realized this problem I was thinking about how to fix it (may be a business opportunity!!!) and decided to make a new and cool designed business card for myself.

Take a look at these cards and think again, could you remember the owner of one these cards easily or an ordinary one?

IT & TELECOMMUNICATIONS IN TURKEY

Information technology (IT) market size in Turkey was estimated at USD 1.8 billion in 2003, continuing its rather low paced recovery towards its peak of $2.4 billion in 2000. Until the twin financial crises in November 2000 and February 2001, the IT sector had always performed better growth rates compared to general economy, including the economical crisis of 1994. Worldwide crises in the internet and telecommunciations sectors added lower confidence and diminishing investment to the contracted demand by the local economic crises.
Until 1980, fixed telephone line penetration of Turkey was barely 2.5 %. New investment in the 1980s by the national operator Turk Telekom raised penetration to 27.3% by 2001 – making Turkey’s public switched telephone network (PSTN) the fourteenth largest in the world and the fifth largest in Europe by subscriber volume, although revenue per subscriber is still low. Turk Telekom invested $ 6.6 billion between 1990 and 1999, half of which was spent on digitalizing telephone exchanges. Other major investments include three communication satellites and an internet backbone. In 2004, voice transmission services dominated by Turk Telekom were liberalized and 14 companies were granted the right to provide data transmission services over fixed line and 41 companies were granted the right to provide long distance telephony service.

Mobile telecommunications were introduced in 1986 by Turk Telekom offering car phones using Nordic Mobile Telephone’s analog technology. In 1994, GSM 900 technology was introduced by two private operators, Turkcell and Telsim, but only when the full licenses were granted to these two companies in 1998 that GSM penetration boomed. In 2002, two other GSM operators were licensed, Aria (joint venture between Is-Bank and Telecom Italia Mobile) and Aycell (wholly owned by Turk Telekom) which merged in 2004 under the name Avea. Turk Telekom is planned to be privatized and the deadline for submitting bids for the tender is May 1, 2005.

Turkish PC market is a highly dynamic and rapidly growing market. The market experienced some slowing in pace after the economical crises in 2000 and 2001 but showed signs of recovery in 2003 and has been on a growth trend since then with almost 800,000 PC shipments on an annual basis. The penetration level in large enterprises is above 90% in approximately 350 accounts with this rate going down to 65% in medium size enterprises in approximately 1400 accounts and 9% in small business in approximately 1,000,000 accounts . The overall PC penetration rate for the country is forecasted to be around 6% by the end of 2004.

Market Evaluation
* Turkey, with her over 70 million population, is a growing market for information technology and telecommunication sectors; not only due this big volume but also due to the fact that 60% of the population is below the age of 25 which makes Turkey a market suitable for the introduction of new technologies.

* The low level of penetration rates of PC, internet, fixed-line telephony and mobile telephony enable room for growth in the short term.

* The IT market in Turkey is specifically ideal for companies that have customizable software solutions which can be marketed in Turkey via the already established and well-spread solution providers channel.

* Small business segment with 9% PC penetration rate but with high growth trend and one-millon companies in total is a segment that can be targeted by IT companies that have special IT solutions for SMEs which will help them grow their business.

MORE INFO:

CATALOG ABOUT TURKEY

Book Advice for ICT Entrepreneurs

I strongly recommend to ICT entrepreneurs to read these books. If you want to have my summaries of them, you can send me an e-mail and i will send them to you

1- Crossing the chasm (Geoffrey Moore)
2- Blue Ocean Strategy(W.Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne)
3- Inside the Tornado (Geoffrey A. Moore)
4- Good to Great (Jim Collins)
5- Art of the Start (Guy Kawasaki)
6- Rules for Revolutionaries (Guy Kawasaki)
7- Made to Stick (Dan Heath & Chip Heath)
8- The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People (Stephen R. Covey)

Second Life

Last week, in Global Entrepreneurial Leadership course we made a small virtual team work assignment. We divided in to 4 teams and each team had 10-12 individual participants. The goal of the exercise was, building a bridge by the materials that we had been provided, on the second life and improving leadership and communicational skills through virtual teams. Here you can find my opinions about the session, exercise and Second Life.

Virtual Teaming & Real Life
in virtual life was almost the same with real life. Trust, communication, efficient teamwork and coordination are some of the basics while working with a team.
To begin with, face-to-face communication is crucial in real life experiences. On the other hand, communication was quite difficult in the second life while working with other 4-5 people. Every body was talking during the experiment but none of them was listening. Because of the fact that, there was no boss or coordinator; every individual participant was acting like a boss.

Even if all the participants were from the same class, sometimes trusting each other is not easy. Working together in a team and being friends are very different things. In real life, it would be easy to trust or not to trust. Nevertheless, in second life you have to trust your teammates.

Next, efficient teamwork was not satisfying in the Second Life. Because of the communication problems and lack of commission plan it was really time wasting while working in the Second Life. In order to increase the quality and productivity on teamwork in Second Life, communication problems must be solved in advance and then working in a virtual team can be easier and faster.

Lastly, coordination was a big problem. In real life examples, there is always a boss, coordinator and there is level of responsibility. However, as we were all in the same level and we all had equal responsibility; sometimes coordinating the people was so difficult. Two people were trying to do the same job even if only one person was enough.

With all these in mind, virtual teaming still has some problems to solve. In order to improve the quality and efficiency in virtual teams; building trust is very important. However, we believe that virtual teaming can be beneficial while creating distributed teams spread around the different locations. Meeting face-to-face can add value to the virtual teams, and let them know each other better.

We can apply virtual teaming in business development branches or to new employees to make them understand the basics of job and organisational chart in real life.

Most important factors in building team

It is important for all the team members to understand why the team is created and have the same understanding of the objective and goal of the project and they should commit to the purpose of the project and shape it if necessary. Team need to develop a common approach or method on how they are going to accomplish to their purpose.

Team members should feel the team mission is important and in order to stay motivated and committed they need to know what they will get by participating in the tem work. What is in it for them?

We think the problems in our exercise were:

• People did not take the exercise seriously because nobody knew who was who and team members were not supposed to get any credit for the project!

• Communication problem, not using same communication tool

• Not familiar to the communication medium

• Not have a clear vision for the exercise

• Tasks were not divided among the team members (communication problem)

• They cannot use body language such as shaking head to show understanding and approving each other or raising hand to have attention etc.

Feedback on teaming exercise
We believe that, one of the most enjoyable aspects of this exercise was the ability to be someone else. In Second Life, you can be anyone regardless of your real physical appearance. In addition, when you mix “being anyone” with “being anonym”, just like in this exercise, it is more fun.
Because you know that, the person who is next to you and in pink t-shirt and long hair, can be anyone in the class. This also breaks the barriers between people. For instance, you can talk and work with someone in this exercise, that you are actually offended in real life. That way, you can see how cool that person is and then you can build relationship with him / her. There may be some people who you do not talk just because of your prejudgments about his gender, race or anything, but in this game, everybody is a combination of bytes and bits so everybody is same.

This ‘edutainment’ activity which mixes education and entertainment teaches people how to work in a team to achieve a specific goal which was building the bridge in this particular exercise. Yet there was no clear definition of how a bridge looks like, teams were able to have a common sense about this. Therefore, we also learned that, definitions change from person to person. That is why, we have to make things clear before we expect the others to do it.

Another thing that we learned from this exercise was the different approaches those can be developed against different situations. We saw that every team had the same goal but they had different approaches. This shows that there is not only one truth in the world. Besides, keeping an eye on what the others in your business are doing is an essential part of managing your team better.

We learned that, leadership skills are so important to control the distributed teams. In addition, not only being a leader but also being a team member is crucial to succeed in the team. While there is no level of responsibility, still acting like a team and try to listen the other’s opinion are basic of being a successful team. It is somehow very similar to the real world teams. Always listen the others opinions and suggestions and make a goal and do it all together.

Content of the exercise was good, but the process was a little confusing for us. Before starting the virtual team, we could meet in face-to-face and see who the others in our team are. Talking and defining a work process or an action plan could be better.

All the members in the virtual team should use the same communication tool as the real life communication, in our exercise some people were chatting while the others were talking and I think it was a big problem in communication. Talking over one another should be minimized to be able to follow the conversation. As a suggestion, you should buy 20 cheap headsets and loan them to the participants.
This would greatly enhance communication, which was the primary issue in our group. Also; you could specify preparation tasks more in detail so people really do them and are more familiar with the system when starting

In a nutshell, we know that this was the first time for the experiment. Here are our humble advices to make it better.

Customer or Money

For a start up there are a lot to learn. But one of the most important one is understanding why they are exist ? To make money, to make meaning ? I believe, you are nothing more than your customers.

If you think you are starting up for the money. Of course you surely are - you have to survive. But thinking about a business strictly in terms of revenue, profit and cost is a sure recipe for disaster. Peter Drucker, the father of modern management, wrote: “the purpose of business is to create a customer.” Your business is nothing more than your relationship with your customer. Do you educate him about your service? Do you treat him more like a client (under your protection), than you do a wallet full of cash? Do you consistently provide your target audience with outstanding service and products? Most importantly, do you continually strive to know who he /she is? Your number one goal is not to make money; it’s to create and keep a customer. In fact, all great businesses start from this side of the fence.

All in all, if you start up to make meaning for your customers’ life, then of course you will make money.