Category Archives: Web/Tech

eBay Takes Majority at GittiGidiyor

Posted on by

Gittigidiyor_logo
eBay announced today that it has increased its stake in GittiGidiyor, Turkey's leading ecommerce company to 93%.  This is a landmark transaction for Turkish internet.  Congratulations to Serkan, Burak, Tolga, Aydonat, and the team at iLab!  This is the fruit of a lot of hard work.

The real winner in the deal is the Turkish internet, ecommerce and VC industries.  This is the first  internet exit of a magnitude that creates real wealth for the entrepreneurs.  That means the case for internet entrepreneurship as a viable career path for the best and the brightest coming out of the best schools in Turkey has gotten stronger.  The bottleneck of high quality talent for web startups might just get a bit eased.

I bet there are tens of LP presentation decks being updated today, as this transaction gets added to the top of the page dealing with the tough question of internet exits in Turkey.  A similar update will take place in corporate development departments of any global internet companies, as Turkey becomes more and more visible on the international M&A roadmap.

Finally, this is also a personal landmark for me and my career as an entrepreneur and investor in Turkey.  I'd met the GG team back in 2005 and had the chance to work on the deal alongside the iLab team in 2006.  Back then, I had felt that this was the greatest Turkish internet company to invest in. It's nice to see that after 6 years, eBay agreed.

+1 May Be Google’s Way In

Posted on by

The internets are abuzz this morning wıih +1, Google's Like button to counter Facebook's.  I continue to believe that Google sits on top of a very valuable social graph with Gmail, but has not had the chance to make it usable yet.  Unlike Buzz or Wave, this feels like it's the most on target attempt.  With the main difference being that it originates from search.

If Google can get its users to start +1ing their search results, the next step may very conceivably be the (successful) atomization of the +1 button throughout the internet.  Right now, Fb's Like button feels a bit frivolous.  You really don't quite understand what it will exactly do.  The same may be true for Google as well.  However, with Google, we're used to the secret sauce; to the fact that Google has this black box that makes sense of large, disassociated facts to rank pages for us.  We don't need to understand how it does it.  Just that it works for us.

Is Google finally cracking social?

How Defensible is the Social Graph?

Posted on by

Facebook-Places-vs-Google-Places-300x225 I was about to retweet Chris Dixon's blog post on social network interoperability (@cdixon is one of the clearest thinkers at the abstract level on the connected economy), but then I decided it's probably worth a blog post.

If you read my blog, you'll know that I am a very big believer in the value of the social graph, or the identity layer of the internet.  As Chris points out, Metcalf's Law suggests that Facebook's lead here is so big that it's insurmountable by any of the aspiring players.  However, I think there's a subtle and very complex factor also in effect here.  And Chris Dixon identifies it as a potential cause to push FB into interoperability.

I think that's a very interesting idea.  However, if I were to bet, Facebook would continue to be extremely protective of its social graph data.  Why?  Because it's in its DNA.

Today, I got access to a web-based CRM-type application.  The app made me walk through a very simple wizard, and quickly got a strong sense of my social graph.  Gmail can probably do the same, just by looking at the emails Facebook has sent to me.  When you operate as a platform, even if you're trying to be protective, you are more open than you think.

So, I would like to reverse my position on Facebook's lock on the identity layer.  A truly open player (and I am not sure if Google Me is going to be that open), can strip the identity layer from Facebook (or vkontakte, QQ, etc.)  This will be a tough race, similar to the iPhone vs. Android battle we have coming up.  But in this case, open will have an even stronger advantage, thanks to Metcalfe.

Twitter Killed My Blog

Posted on by

"Rewritten by machine and new technology,
and now I understand the problems you can see."

The Buggles – Video Killed the Radio Star

I realized today, with amazement, that it has almost been 3 months since my last blog post, and that this is just my 7th post since May.  This is by far the slowest blogging I have ever logged and I am a bit embarassed.

In parallel, I have probably been tweeting on average twice a day for the same period.

In short, Twitter has killed by blogging.  And I suspect I am not alone.

I also realized that I am not as good a blogger as I fancied myself to be.  When I analyze the 500+ blog entries I have written over the 5 year life span of this blog, I find that most of them are reflections on content that has been created elsewhere – mostly links and comments to others' blog posts,  videos, articles, etc.

In other words, they have been glorified ReTweets.  And the same act now takes me a few seconds (to retweet), as opposed to the 15-minute blocks of time that a blog post typically requires.

From now on, I'll stop fighting the natural flow and try to RT when that is all that's called for.  So this blog will probably see fewer entries but hopefully more original thinking.

If you enjoy hearing from me, you can follow me at http://twitter.com/csertoglu.

 

 

The Future of Media: The Flipboard Edition

Posted on by

In 2005, Fred Wilson authored a blog post titled "The Future of Media".  It remains extremely relevant and insightful, 5 years after its publishing, and has been proven right throughout a few major waves of innovation, such as Facebook and the iPhone. In Fred's words, the future of media has 4 major components:

1 – Microchunk it – Reduce the content to its simplest
form. Thanks Umair.
2 –
Free it – Put it out there without walls around it or
strings on it. Thanks
Stewart.
3 – Syndicate it – Let anyone take it
and run with it.  Thanks Dave.
4
– Monetize it – Put the monetization and tracking
systems into the microchunk. Thanks Feedburner.

Today, I saw a new innovation that is feeding on the above points, but is also extremely good at the interface level:  The Flipboard.  And, yes, please add me to the fanboy list.  And please see the video below for Mike McCue's demo of the Flipboard.  It's really difficult to describe.

App Inventor

Posted on by

Google recently announced App Inventor for Android, which allows non-programmers to easily build applications for Android phones. The idea is not a new one, and as Google explains, it's been built on the efforts of many other initiatives.

However, it is critical that this is a development framework for a mass-market platform.  Imagine what kind of creativity we would have seen if the iPhone has a similar consumer-oriented app builder.  I think this is very cool.

No Conflict, No Interest

Posted on by

Angel investor Naval Ravikant has a good post on the Venture Hacks blog, focusing on the potential conflicts of interest when an entrepreneur is engaged with an investor.  This is an issue that comes up frequently in my experience, so I think it would be useful to note here.

Naval's post lays out a good framework to think of the issue, and he sums it up by what I think is the key take-away:

Consequently, the best entrepreneurs display a lot of chutzpah.
They aren’t fazed by the competition, nor do they see shadows in
every corner. They are their own biggest competition.

I could not agree more. 

PS. The title of this post is a quote I hear attributed to John Doerr.  I always read it as "where there's no conflict, there's not interest".  I am not sure that it makes sense to me but I figured it makes a catchy post title.

How to Get to Your Minimum Viable Product (MVP)

Posted on by

Derek Sivers is a great blogger, as well as an inspiration to me as an entrepreneur.  And in his latest blog post, he touches on an issue, how one goes about hiring a programmer for an idea they want to bring to life, that I find very important and useful.

I have written about the notion of Minimum Viable Product before and Sivers's post is really the first step towards an MVP.  But he takes it through a great, step by step, simple process and makes it very digestable and actionable.  I get a ton of questions from friends and associates around this issue so now I have a fantastic resource to point them to.

To summarize, here are Derek's steps, but the whole post is worth reading.

1. Reduce your big idea to “Version 1.0”.
2. Write a simple overview of what it does.
3. Write a detailed walk-through of every click.
4. Break it up into milestones.
5. Make your first milestone a stand-alone project.
6. Post it at elance, guru, odesk, vworker.
7. Hire one from each.
8. Continue with the one you like best.

By the way, I fully agree with his steps 7 and 8, even though they will seem reduntant to most people.  The power of a superstar developer is hard to overestimate.

Turkish Broadband Growth

Posted on by

Broadband First, apologies for a quite period on this blog. I have been buried in some new initiatives, which I will share soon.

However, this piece of news that crossed my screen today (via webrazzi) tipped me over to break the silence: 

The Turkish broadband market has reached almost 7.5m subscribers in 1Q2010 and has grown at an amazing 21% rate YoY.  (Source: BTK)

Internet-Rakamları-2010-1

I don't have the time to look it up, but this must be the fastest growth in Europe.  It certainly is the most encouraging news relating to my investment thesis on Turkish internet, since the comScore online engagement news about a year ago.

Broken Email

Posted on by

Email-icon The "email is broken" meme is not new.  I continue to depend on email for the bulk of my professional activity and have done a decent job managing my mailbox relatively effectively, unlike some others, who have declared email bankruptcy (I have no doubt they have significantly more inbound email than I do).  I also subscribe to Fred's assertion that Social Networking has usurped email in lightweight communications.

However, I also think that there is room for creativity and innovation in how email works right now.

Last week, I used email to communicate the launch of a recent investment of mine, Grupanya.  Since email allows for easy personal targeting, I crafted a few different messages for a few distinct audiences.  Then used email to send it out.

The result was appalling.  About 25% of the emails I sent out bounced back.  I do recognize that it's the fact I do a lousy job keeping my address book up-to-date, but with all application intelligence that surrounds us, that should not really be my burden.  There's a ton of data in the cloud that knows my relationships and that data can be turned into an intelligent contact management application.

Plaxo, at one point ,had a legitimate chance at this but they screwed it up by turning themselves into spammers.  Now the most likely candidates are Linkedin and Facebook, but neither really seems focused on this.  I think there lies a huge opportunity.