I am in New Orleans at Auren Hoffman’s Dialog event. It’s an interesting and eclectic group of participants. I am looking forward to the discussions of the next few days.
Emre & Hakia
Emre Sokullu is an entrepreneur I have had the opportunity to meet and work with over the last year or so. He’s hard at work developing his company, Grou.ps, which I am backing.
Hakia is a search company hard at work to build the web’s "meaning based" search engine. It’s a very ambitious goal and the impressive team at Hakia is moving boldly towards it.
I am very happy to see Emre is now a Search Evangelist working for Hakia. I think the experience will be helpful for Grou.ps, as well.
Congratulations, Emre.
Google Health Questions
It’s very obvious to me that much of the challenges in managing one’s health have search as a solution. Google knows this too. Here’s a very interesting blog post about it. They conclude:
At the end of the day, all these questions are about how you find the
information you need. They are deceptively simple. If they were about
restaurants, they would be trivial. But they are actually matters of
life and death in the extreme and quality of life in the common case.
In short, they matter profoundly.
At some point Google will unveil a health product. If done right, it can double Google’s market cap. I continue to watch.
MoMo Istanbul April Meeting
Monday was one of the best Mobile Monday Istanbul events ever. See the MoMo Istanbul blog for a recap.
Mondus in Hürriyet
Mondus was featured in an article by Batuhan Okur in his biweekly column in Hürriyet (in Turkish), Turkey’s largest daily. Okur understands Mondus and our ambitions around it well. He commented (as translated by me from Turkish):
Privacy controls are very important for Mondus, which allows users to define the groups they belong to and communicate within them. This way, no matter how big Mondus gets, the existing users will not be bothered and diluted by the growth.
…
The best outcome of this approach will be the accuracy of user data. This kind of accuracy breeds trust and makes Mondus a strong candidate to become a viable social platform. The founders think it’s a strong advantage for Mondus against its competitors.
MoMo Istanbul Featuring a Discussion on User Generated Content
MoMo Istanbul’s April meeting (on Monday, April 2nd) topic is User Generated Content. Turkish media veteran Nuri Colakoglu is one of the presenters. He’s good, so I trust it will be a good meeting.
UPDATE: Also confirmed as a presenter is Firat Gonenc, the CEO of Trend Tech and Retromedia.
Erem Karabey Moves on from Google Turkey
Erem Karabey, Google Turkey’s GM, has resigned from his post. I have known Erem a long time and think his departure is a loss for both Google and the Turkish internet community. I wish him good luck in his endeavors.
UPDATE: Here’s Webrazzi‘s report on it (in Turkish).
HeliSkiing in the Kackars
I had heard about how wonderful heliskiing is from a few good friends who’ve done it before and have been following Fabrice Grinda’s writing on it, but I had no idea that the experience would be this amazing.
I got the opportunity to join a group of friends for a weekend of heliskiing in the Kackar mountain range in the Eastern Black Sea region of Turkey. We were not terribly lucky about the weather, and on Sunday, the only day we got to fly, I learned that there is such a thing as "too much snow" (4-6 meters base, 1-2 meters powder), but the little I got to ski, espceially higher up in the mountains, was incomparable to anything I have experienced in my 30 years of skiing.
The outfit Turkey HeliSki is a 3 year-old operation and they do an amazing job. A friend warned me before I left that I was about to take a very expensive step and he was right. I am getting ready to book next year’s trip.
PS. that’s my friend Refik in the pic who was skiing with a seperate group, since no one in our group took a camera up 🙂
Digital Media: Distributed Commerce will Reduce Friction
Fred calls it Superdistribution, and I think it’s one of the most important points he’s ever made.
Superdistribution means turning every consumer into a distribution
partner. Every person who buys a record, a movie, reads a newspaper, a
book, every person who buys a Sonos or a Vespa becomes a retailer of
that item. It’s word of mouth marketing, referral marketing, but with
one important difference. The consumer is the retailer.
…
I want to turn everyone on to Arcade FIre. I want to them to sell 100
million Arcade Fire mp3s. And I want to get paid for doing my part.
Distributed commerce will and up being a natural result of the information revolution. Traditional commercial models were built to overcome the limitations of time and space. Since digital media is not really bound by these boundaries, I expect that Fred’s model of superdistribution will flourish there first. In a way, we are getting glimpses of how this will work, with Napster, Bit Torrent, Skype and YouTube. The behavioral requirements are being established, and legal and commercial models will follow.
And, this will be truly disruptive.
Happiness
Fabrice Grinda is becoming an expert on happiness (there I contribute to the trend :)), and here are some thoughts on what it takes to be happy:
- Don’t equate happiness with money.
- Don’t commute.
- Exercise regularly.
- Have lots of sex.
- Devote time and effort to close relationships.
- Pause for reflection, meditate on the good things in life (in other words be grateful).
- Seek work that engages your skills, look to enjoy your job.
- Give your body the sleep it needs.
- Don’t pursue happiness for its own sake, enjoy the moment.
- Take control of your life, set yourself achievable goals (in other words have goals).
- Have an optimistic attitude and outlook on life.
On a more serious note, a previous post by Fabrice refers to a recent Harvard Magazine article, dealing with the issue.
Cem Sertoglu 