(Or, should it be Istanbulian? Istanbuli?)
Just read in CN Portfolio that Nouriel Roubini was born in Istanbul and lived here until the age of five.
Not surprising in hindsight. I think I can detect the levantine cynic in him. The same is true for Nassem Taleb, who was born in Lebanon.
Umair Haque, whose commentary I enjoy very much, has a ranting post in reaction to what he calls the continued looting of the society thorough tthe current bailout plans. He's got a great point in the lack of disincentives in the current financial set up:
To make better bankers, we have to give bankers disincentives.
Disincentives might revolve around the idea of liability, for example.
Doctors face a personal liability because of the human costs they might
impose. Bankers could too, given the clear and clearly massive costs
they're imposing on the rest of us.
Here's another kind of disincentive of a much more radical kind:
auctioning trading seats. If we auctioned seats on the trading desks of
the big banks, the problem of adverse selection would magically go
poof. Why? Because the bid price of a seat would rise to match the
expected value of benefits from trading, counterbalancing those
benefits, and diluting the incentive to loot.
For example, NYSE seat prices rise and fall with equity values – and
it's no coincidence that the bulk of fraud and deceit happened at
banks, not on exchanges. Auctioning trading seats in general would
offset massive bonuses with equally massive disincentives to loot.
I hear he'll be visiting Istanbul in April to participate in a conference. I'm excited to get the chance to meet him.
Last year, we spent quite a bit of time looking at the economics of news on the web. It's a very important area for the Turkish Internet. Our conclusions were in line with Clay Shirky's:
The P-I will require a staff of about 20, according to the NYTimes, so the economics benefits are significant. Plus, the P-I is already an established web property – with over 1.8m monthly AUVs. It will be interesting to observe whether the editorial quality will suffer.
There was an interesting concentration of thoughts on social media in my blogflow this weekend, triggered by a post by Jeremy. I want to put it out as a very brief outline. First, from danah boyd:
This last point is especially interesting. Kids are not using Twitter. Kids have a different sense and sensibility on what should be "public". The whole "we live in public in the new times" meme is more a creation of adults than what the Facebook generation experiences.
The NYT Magazine also had an article on the topic. It's a typical example of how many adults confuse the utility of Facebook with that of Classmates.com. The author ends her article with the comment:
In my opinion, this is simply misjudged. Facebook could not be more different than Friendster. The investment in the creation of the social graph on FB by every member is enormous.
Going back to the point on privacy and how Twitter and Facebook, my current thinking is that Twitter is really a feature that makes use of the social graph. It allowed a lower transaction-cost version of thet FB status update, before FB got to it. (Thanks, Ali for triggering the thought on this.) There's a lot more intelligence on Facebook and from a social graph perspective, it will continue to lead. And the social graph is where it will finally convert its attention to value: as the identity layer of the internet.
All of this reminds me of the early process we went through in designing Mondus. It is a privacy-first environment that allowed for extensive control. My friend Batuhan Okur recently commented on this in a private conversation. The problem we faced at Mondus was that it emphasized privacy before it had liquidity. When Facebook was first growing, it did not have the same problem, since it was hatched in semi-private universes: the Universities.
I predict we'll be seeing more utilities for privacy control in Twitter. I wonder if FB status and Twitter will converge or not.
According to Compete, Twitter grew to 8 million US users in February, roughly a 33% growth rate. (via SocialTimes)
This is huge. even with the global financial crisis at full swing, I think many have learned from previously missed early buyout opportunities. My guess is that Twitter gets sold by the end of 2009.
I'm a Paul Graham fan. I think he brings clarity of thought to a fairly soft area: Entrepreneurship. Here are his 13 things to tell a startup.
To this, especially for startups in Turkey, I'd add:
You can read further thoughts on these at Paul's blog.
Gmail's been down for about 30 minutes now and there's a storm over the internets!! Twitter is alight (well, the link won't stay live and relevant for long so here's a screenshot
) with the news, along with all major tech blogs.
Points to how critical redundancy in the cloud has become and makes you think how did we floow stuff like this pre-twitter.
So we should be looking right back at Yahoo.
In another leaked memo yesterday, Yahoo's new CEO Bartz is telling other Yahoos:
While I am a bit skeptical about the relevance of Autodesk's business (software) to Yahoo's (digital media), and thus the relevance of her observations here, it's nevertheless an exciting quote for those of us in the emerging markets. Yahoo's been largely ignoring Turkey so far and maybe that's about to change.
I just learned with sadness that Martin Schaedel, a recent friend I'd made on his visit to Istanbul in September, has been killed in a plane crash. Martin and I had been in frequent correspondence on Internet opportunities in Turkey and I will miss his unique approaches and insight. Goodbye, Martin.
Milan's Brazilian superstar Kaka just rejected $700K per week in wages to stay at his club, turning down a transfer bid from Manchester City. It is a truly inspiring move and I had to mention it. And, it's not entirely unrelated to this blog's main themes.
I try to focus my blog on value creation. Wrongly, value creation is solely associated with transaction value. However, time plays a tricky role in calculating the total value of any deal. With his decision to stay at Milan,, I think Kaka's made the value maximizing choice for his career.
Cem Sertoglu 
