Tuesday, July 26, 2011

ING Mobile, Much More Than Just a Mobile Banking Application

ING Group, one of the world's largest financial institutions, offers its customers a variety of products in banking, insurance, and asset management areas. ING Turkey recently chose Pozitron as its strategic partner to empower its extensive financial services network in Turkey. Pozitron's cross-platform mobile banking solution enables ING Bank customers to access their accounts on-the-go, authorizing them with even greater control over their personal finances.

ING Mobile is one of the most comprehensive mobile banking applications in the world. Besides the easy access to your accounts, you will be informed about the latest deals and be able to find the closest ATMs with ING mobile. Its wide-ranging features involve; loan, exchange rate, and mortgage calculators, credit card payments and transactions.

This unique application will save you from the hassle of calling or going to the bank. Manage your accounts, transfer funds, and make payments with ease from your phone.

Saturday, July 23, 2011

TTNET WiFi is powered by Pozitron to bring Internet everywhere!

TTNET provides thousands of WiFi Hotspots in 81 cities in Turkey but how will you know where they are located when you are out on the street? Now, with the help of Pozitron these WiFi Hotspots are more accessible than ever! Using Pozitron's "TTNET WiFi Nerede" application, you can easily spot the nearest locations with WiFi from your cell phone as well as locating TTNET shops.

With this app you can find the closest coffee shop in WiFi connection in seconds and will be sipping your latte and checking your emails in minutes. You can also share this WiFi spot with your friends via social networking sites and create the opportunity to get together and catch up with them.

One of the most loved features of this application is the ability to query your WiFi minutes rapidly and add more minutes as needed. If desired, you can obtain information about current TTNET campaigns and provide feedback or complaints.

Friday, July 22, 2011

Pozitron July Newsletter is Out!

We just sent out our July Newsletter last week. It includes detailed information about our most recent applications and international conferences we attended. Please check it out at
http://us1.campaign-archive2.com/?u=caeb547ebe2cfb61cc2b92781&id=fa470b541f

Pozitron’un Donanım Haber Söyleşisi

CEO’muz Fatih İşbecer 21 Haziran 2011'de RIM’in BlackBerry Playbook’u tanıtmak için düzenlediği etkinliğe katıldı. Bu organizasyon sırasında Donanım Haber editörü Erdi Özüağ ile Fatih Bey bir araya gelerek mobil platformda yazılım geliştirme, Blackberry Playbook özellikleri ve piyasadaki yeri üzerine sohbet ettiler. Ayrıca, Türkiye’nin mobil pazarında dünyadaki yeri ve bu pazardaki yeni trendler hakkında konuştular.


Thursday, July 7, 2011

Endeavor Entrepreneur Summit in San Francisco Brought Hundreds of Entrepreneurs Together





Pozitron recently participated in the Endeavor Entrepreneurship Summit in San Francisco that took place in June 28-30, 2011. This summit is a unique innovation conference held biannually that brings together Endeavor's worldwide network for three days of inspirational keynotes, informative panels, high-impact workshops, hands-on breakout sessions, and intimate networking opportunities.

The Summit convened over 300 of the leading entrepreneurs, innovators, and investors from Silicon Valley and over 16 countries in Endeavor's greater global network. Members from Turkey, Uruguay, Argentina, Brazil, South Africa, Mexico, Egypt, Colombia, and Chile came together to discuss innovation and technology. Reid Hoffman, founder of Linkedin, and Marc Benioff, CEO of Salesforce.com, were among the keynote speakers. Senior managers of Google, Dell, Kleiner Perkins, Ning and IBM were just some of the noteworthy leaders of showcases and workshops.

Here are some quotes from the contributors:

"Four trends in technology: cloud computing, mobile, social platforms, massive adoptation of IT products." - Marc Benioff

"Winning entrepreneurs in the high risk markets are the ones who go global from day one." - Dan Senor

"If everyone thinks you are doing the right thing- then everyone would be doing it. Have a controversial strategy." -Scott McNealy

You can find more information on www.endeavor.org and www.endeavor.org.tr

Monday, July 4, 2011

Where Silicon Valley Meets Emerging Market Entrepreneurs


“Sand Hill Road is two-way,” Turkish entrepreneur Fatih İşbecer noted on a visit in 2010. “And it’s easy to get from one side to the other. That’s nice.” Working in Anatolia’s bustling business capital İstanbul, where traffic has no logic or mercy, it was an odd, yet revealing observation.

While entrepreneurship is indeed alive and on the rise in Turkey, as it is in emerging markets worldwide, it continues to face tremendous obstacles such as lack of capital, mentors and networks. Breaking them down is the reason that Fatih, CEO of the mobile tech company Pozitron is, along with 170 other emerging market entrepreneurs, in Silicon Valley this week. He is attending the Endeavor Entrepreneur Summit that starts tomorrow.

The summit is hosted by Endeavor, the non-non-profit that identifies and supports “high-impact entrepreneurs,” that is the most promising innovators running “macro” businesses that the potential to create “hundreds, even thousands of jobs, generate millions in revenue and draw in global investments.” Last year, Endeavor’s network of over 500 emerging market entrepreneurs throughout Latin America, the Middle East, Africa and now Asia (it operates in 15 countries, including regional offices in Dubai and Singapore), created more than 150,000 jobs and generated over $4.1 billion in revenue.

$4.1 billion in revenues shows that, unlike most non-profits supporting entrepreneurs, Endeavor does not think “micro” or aspire to Hallmark moments. With Wall Street rigor and Silicon Valley edge, it, under the guidance of its vivacious Co-Founder and CEO Linda Rottenberg and board chair Edgar Bronfman Jr., deploys a “mentor capitalist” model that breaks down the barriers preventing emerging market innovators from becoming the next Microsoft or Virgin. Its global network of seasoned business leaders, some of who pop on Forbes’s billionaires list, advise emerging market entrepreneurs on strengthening and scaling their operations to global excellence. The organization, as the summit’s agenda reflects, is about creating opportunity and social mobility in places where opportunity and mobility were only seen as an American dream.

The Endeavor Entrepreneur Summit is the 4th biannual gathering, the first to be held in San Francisco, of emerging market entrepreneurial innovators, business leaders and investors. And its the investors that couldn’t be happier.

Though entrepreneurship is the zeitgeist and there appears to more money flowing into start-ups, investors are cautious. “According to the National Venture Capital Association,” a New York Times article reported this week, “venture capitalists invested $5.9 billion in the first three months of the year, up 14 percent from the period a year earlier, but they invested in 51 fewer companies, indicating they were funneling more money into fewer start-ups.” With dismal U.S. job numbers, disappointing signs for an economic recovery and the threat of an American default on its debt, that is not good news. Caution stymies growth.

It also perpetuates pessimism. Since Wall Street’s meltdown in 2008 and the phenomenal rise of emerging market economies such as Brazil, China and India, talk about America’s economy inevitably becomes a discussion about America’s decline. “There is a sense that America has lost ground,” says Rottenberg. “The fact is America remains the most entrepreneurial economy on the planet.” Rottenberg hopes that Endeavor’s Summit will help restore that perspective, while also celebrating emerging market entrepreneurs.

Back in 1997 when Rottenberg launched Endeavor in Argentina and Chile where she had been working on venture financing and social entrepreneurship, no one celebrated emerging market entrepreneurs. “There wasn’t even a word for entrepreneur in Spanish or Portuguese,” Rottenberg is known to say. Entrepreneurship wasn’t inspired but pursued out of necessity. With no jobs or educational options, hobbling together your own business was unavoidable. No surprise then that Silicon Valley avoided emerging markets.

“Fifteen years ago, VCs used to say ‘this is Florence in the age of the Renaissance,’” says Rottenberg. Convinced that all the world’s entrepreneurship was contained in Silicon Valley, they felt little need to look elsewhere. Sand Hill Road was, metaphorically, a one-way street. Globalization has changed that. That is a positive in Rottenberg’s eye.

“Entrepreneurship isn’t a zero sum game,” she says. “It’s exciting for me to see that others (in Silicon Valley) see the same thing. There is a mutual interest from both the United States and emerging markets to learn from one another.” Argentine entrepreneur Wences Casares agrees.

“Starting a company from scratch anywhere is very hard,” says Casares, an Endeavor global board member and one of the organizations earliest selected entrepreneurs who made it big with Latin America’s first on-line brokerage firm Patagon. “But to do it in emerging markets where there is no access to capital, no culture or ecosystem to support entrepreneurship; where the rules of the game change often and without notice, it is much, much harder.” That is precisely the reason why Casares explains that Silicon Valley needs to engage with them. “When you meet these emerging market entrepreneurs and you see the passion and the fire in their eyes, you are reminded of the real reason entrepreneurs do what they do.”

Interestingly the reason isn’t money. While capital is indispensible to any entrepreneur’s foundation and success, value is what drives the type of entrepreneurs Endeavor selects in a highly competitive multi-layered process. “High impact entrepreneurs are those who create and add value to a society,” say Marc Dfouni and Nemr Nicholas Badine, founders of Eastline Marketing, Lebanon’s first digital marketing agency. “Their achievements aren’t solely monetary. High-impact entrepreneurs are defined by sustainability, building companies that last.”

According to Egyptian entrepreneurs Hind and Nadia Wassef they’re also defined by their resilience. That is something they have had to channel since the events in Tahrir square. “When you live in a country that has been under a totalitarian regime for 30 years, a lot of garbage needs to come up.” The sisters, who run Egypt’s popular bookstore operation Diwan, say much of this “garbage” had been directed at Egypt’s entrepreneurs who have been blamed for Egypt’s malaise. “The revolution was lovely and inspirational. I’m sure it looked lovely on Al-Jazeera, but you wouldn’t have liked being in its kitchen.”

That the Wassef sisters were “in the kitchen” with advice and insights gathered at previous Endeavor events made a difference. “I remember being at the selection panel in India in 2009 when the only thing anyone would talk about was the recession,” Hind Wassef says. She recalls being told ‘this is a crisis, cut to the chase, get down to the nuts and bolts, stick to your core.’ “That was useful to us during the mess of the revolution.”

The Wassef sisters are headed to San Francisco for similar insights as well as what Nadia says is “a much needed break.” She likens the Endeavor Summit to Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own. “It is a place where you can play around with ideas, experiment, and renew your drive.”

It is also a place they’re looking forward to connecting with the world’s greatest business and entrepreneurial minds. With keynotes from Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff and LinkedIn founder (and Endeavor board member) Reid Hoffman, along with insights from top names from Google, Dell, Kleiner Perkins, Ning, and IBM –including Watson himself, Endeavor’s summit is a gathering of entrepreneurship and venture capital’s best.

“I’m looking forward to hearing from these experts” says Fatih İşbecer. “But I’m also looking forward for them to hearing about what’s going on in Turkey.” He notes that it used to be that Turkish entrepreneurs, like those throughout emerging markets, could only learn from American talent. “Now they want to learn from us.” İşbecer nods vigorously when I say that it’s sounds as though entrepreneurship has become a “two-way street,” then pauses, “Actually, it’s bigger than a street, it’s a global freeway.” Fasten your seat belts.