Gourmates.com

Gourmates was designed with the food-lover in mind and is a web-based social application dedicated to dining. Dining is more than simply the act of eating food - it is a social activity that brings people together and nourishes not just the body but the mind and spirit as well. Gourmates is a place for taste-makers and food-lovers from around the world to connect and share the experience of good food and drink. We hope you find Gourmates to be a delicious place to network.

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Besides corporate / personal brands, the digital pr agencies will also get a chance to index their clients and publish their PR 2.0 works on this platform. This platform will actually bring every we need together!

kariyerGENC.com also contributes the business world by creating new term. The orange ties will also be used in the business world like Blue-collar and white collar. The orange ties will be a representative of university students and newly grads in KariyerGENC and its orange tie logo is a demonstration of the term presented.

The team that created this platform which livens the university and business world claims that “we believe in youth, which is large proportion of Turkish population, should meet with the leading companies in right time and place. “ In kariyerGENC.com, There are intern, part time, periodic and full time jjob opportunities which belong to the leading companies . The future YPs can apply to them if they enroll to kariyerGENC.com. Plus, companies can reach them by using “the pool of new talents”.

In kariyerGENC.com, there are many multi-national companies and Turkish originated companies that set a high value on young talents and consider youth as their future. Sabancı Holding, Eczacıbaşı Holding, Vodafone, Henkel, and Zorlu Holding are some examples of the employers in kariyerGENC.com. The team works for kariyerGENC.com is composed of students who are educating in various universities. as undergrads or masters degree. Each member is known as one of the most popular and active students in their campus. Their old experiences about organizations, successful projects and student activities are the reason which brought them together.

kariyerGENC team imply that the platform is noticed by both youth and companies searching young talents since their platform became online. The reason here is that this platform is a project born at the heart of business, the universities. The team determines their goal by underlining the fact that financial crisis can be turned into an opportunity. They also claim that ” we are not only congratulated but also they supported because of our courage
and enterpreneurship by the employers in the companies.”

kariyerGENC.com also presents innovations technologically by its interface and its tools which speaks the language of the youth. It also presents a step by step CV writing process just like preparing a profile on Facebook in order to help its members who complain about the difficulties of CV writing.

TiiSort.com just got online with the motto “With your t-shirt against the world”. Users can design their own t-shirts as well as purchase customized t-shirt designs. The portfolio of the site currently includes many different custom designs. This new startup is supported by Gittigidiyor.

TiiSort reminds us of Threadless.com as the designs created by users are voted and printed according to other users’ votes. The entire system belongs to Voltaj.org, which will include further similar startups soon.

Limango, one of the companies of the worlds biggest B2C company Otto Group, after Amazon, were preparing to enter the Turkish market. Today the service started up and registrations are open at the moment. The service is just open for the registered members and currently provides sale prices up to 70% for premium brands like Adidas, Trussardi, Mandarina Duck and GF Ferré. This model is called as “private shopping” worldwide.

If you want to be one of the first few members of Limango please use the following URL:
http://www.limango.com.tr/welcome/webrazzi

Fizy.org is yet another promising Turkish startup. They provide an easy access online music songs and music videos. This promising startup has been acquired by Site A.Ş, which is a member of Z Group. The groups also owns Turkey’s one of the leading online advertising agency ReklamZ.

Fizy.org currently broadcasts in 26 languages.  Additional features such as building a tracks list will be available soon. In such a short period of time Fizy.org hit a record Alexa ranking of 133rd in Turkey.

With this acquisition there will surely be a global expansion of Fizy.org and its name. We will keep you updated about Fizy.org’s journey.

With Botégo, you can:

# Replace your live support system and FAQ pages with smart virtual assistants,
# Automate e-mail support with content-sensitive autoresponders,
# Reduce the response time of your call center agents with a knowledgebase tool,
# Create virtual characters, offering your customers an enjoyable experience.

Working on the web, IM platforms or mobile devices, Botégo helps you;

# Significantly reduce customer service costs : A fraction of the cost of a real person!
# Increase customer satisfaction: No more waiting in the annoying call center queues!
# Increase the effectivity of your personnel: Retrieve information in a matter of seconds!

How Botégo helps you:

Virtual intelligent agents: These agents interact with users in a human-like way, helping them retrieve information in an informal, quick and easy way. They operate on the web, on instant messaging platforms and mobile devices.

Knowledgebase tools: This product allows any employee, particularly call-center agents, get self-help on the web in a matter of seconds. It replaces conventional knowledgebase systems which are usually intranets in the form of plain HTML pages. Agents now retreive the information up to 66% faster!

Contextual e-mail autoresponders: Although in early production stage, this product is very promissing for companies dealing with large amount of inbound e-mail traffic.

The technology and applications were covered in a variety of national newspapers, magazines and TV channels, including Forbes, Marketing Türkiye and Digital Age.

For more information: http://botego.com/english.htm

A Turkish startup, 4Play and Turkcell’s Tonlakazan is awarded as the “Best Mobile Advertising Service”. We’d like to congratulate everyone involved in this big success for the Turkish tech scene!

TonlaKazan is the world’s first RingBackTone mobile advertising platform; a loyalty program for subscribers and an unconventional, unique and innovative media for brands. TonlaKazan was launched on May 7th, 2008 in Turkey for Turkcell subscribers. Turkcell subscribers win airtime or credit depending on the amount that their callers listen to their RBT advertisement music. By the end of December 2008 TonlaKazan reached more than 200,000 members. 50 different brands have launched 72 campaigns in TonlaKazan with a minimum of two weeks’ duration since May 7th 2008 including Coca Cola, Unilever, P&G, Nestle, Warner Bros and major national Turkish brands such as Garanti, Akbank, Digiturk, Arçelik. For further information please visit www.tonlakazan.com

Judges’ comments:“New, innovative, and effective. Putting choice in the hands of the user in terms of advertising selection is a great move – with properly targeted content, users will be more likely to participate and help to drive the adoption of mobile advertising.”

Source: http://www.globalmobileawards.com/winners.shtml

Here is another promising Turkish startup which was reviewed by several Turkish IT  magazines such as PC-Magazine and Chip.

Founded by Sarp Erdağ, the Kuizz.com allows its members create their own quizzes and let other people solve, discuss and comment on the quiz results. The site also has several social networking features such as adding members as friends, messaging, seeing online friends, rating quizzes, surveys, and comments.

Kuizz.com was a personal project of  Sarp Erdağ which he had started building in his free time during his undergraduate studies. Then he teamed up with Cağatay Kaptanoğlu (a colleague of Sarp from Bahcesehir University) and his cousin Efe Acıkgöz who is also doing a computer engineering bachelor’s at Bahcesehir University.

The members  can get experience points based on the quality of the quizzes they create, and the community’s interest to their content. Very similar to role playing games, the higher ranks the quizzes for a member achive, the higher level the member can become.

Kuizz.com also has several little fun applications inside such as sending gifts to your friends, tweeting or posting comments to other member’s profiles. The site’s community is made up mostly of high schools students which most of them are female users. According to the database queries over the member profiles, the average user age is 16.

Even though the site sustained an average of 5500 unique hits daily and more than 20,000 pageviews a day since last year, currently the development of the site has been suspended due to lack of a business model and monetization. Luckily Kuizz.com is able to get itself going with the Google Adsense income.

Sarp Erdağ and his team are planning to do a revision of the site structure and content if  they can find a suitable and sustainable business model which brings money in the future. There has not been any investors related with the project since the beginning.

Do you have any business model and monetization suggestions for Kuizz.com?

Here is yet another brilliant application from Turkey.mySchoolog is an online service which primary, high school and university students can organize their school life online. They can save their notes, to-dos, files and schedules. They can also export data and carry them wherever they go. Students can access their mySchoolog account from home, school and anywhere they want.

This practical application was founded and coded by  Ahmet Alp Balkan, a young Turkish university student from the Bilkent University. mySchoolog was launched in March 2007. It is available in 18 languages at the moment.  It was reviewed by 250+ blogs worldwide.  Also it was reviewed by  PC Magazine Turkey & Italy, PCnet, Byte, PC World, and TVnet Technolologic. The best of all it was awarded with Golden Medal in InfoMatrix Programming Contest in  Bucharest,Romania (2007). It was also mentioned in Mashable. See: 100+ Ways to Organize Your Life

Conclusion:

Currently mySchoolog is a non-profit service. Even though  a smart phone - friendly version is also  available, there is no investors at the moment. Who wants to become an angel investor for this promising startup?