From Creative Ideas to Innovative Enterprises

Organized by Tusiad, From Creative Ideas to Innovative Enterprises Conference took place on November 12th. The conference was held in Istanbul Modern as a part of Istanbul Design Biennial. Bringing together Turkish entrepreneurs and successful businessmen, the innovative capacity of Turkish business was the center point of the conference.

Various successful entrepreneurs were invited to the conference to share the success story of their innovative businesses. As one of the invitees, our CEO, Fatih Isbecer, shared the story of Pozitron with other participants.

Offering Mobile Tips For Retailers

12th Retail Days will place at Lutfi Kırdar Conference Hall in November 28th. Turkey's largest organization for retailers, Retail Days bring together experts from the industry to talk about latest trends and new business models.

Mobile has become a new dimension of Retail world. To explain the newest technologies, showcase best practices and give tips on mobile commerce, our CEO Fatih Isbecer will give a presentation called "New Competition: Mobile Commerce! The playfield is expanding in retail".

OSCON Open Source Convention

Pozitron's conference spree continues after attending Barca, QCON, AnDevCon and WWDC  we were in Portland, Oregon for Oscon, the largest Open Source conference. Since 1998 Oscon has been the gathering place for the entire open source community. Unlike other conferences, Oscon deals with the entire open source ecosystem not just part of the stack.

Oscon is a great place for developers to improve their skill sets. Participants can learn new techniques that they can immediately apply to coding, learn from over 300 speakers about best practices,  share and collaborate with more than 3000 open source developers.

As Pozitron we always seek opportunities to expand our expertise and Oscon was one of the best conventions to achieve this goal. Our CTO Mete Balcı attendeded sessions on ranging from Java 7/8, Scala, Clojure, Pyhton, to Android, HTML5, Mobile Web, Cloud Computing, git, testing and code review.

Here areMr. Balcı's impressions of the event;

"OSCON clearly shows the massive use of open-source software in wide range of areas, ranging from small embedded devices to the large datacenters. One of the strengths of the convention is the large amount of knowledge and information exchange among the attendees, which aligns proper with the idea of open and free software. It seems there are two key areas that the computing industry will focus over the following years/decade. One is cloud computing, other is power efficiency and how to make both of them available to public using open source technologies and non-proprietary ideas. Besides these, as a never ending research, advances on computer programming languages and software development efficiency will always attract the attention.

As the content of OSCON sessions show, it is also clear that we, at Pozitron, follow, evaluate and apply the recent ideas and advances in the industry and open-source technologies, for example by starting to use new languages like Scala, deploying distributed version control systems company wide, using cloud computing systems and using open-source technologies like Linux, Python, Java and Android.”

WWDC de Neler Öğrendik?

2 saat gibi rekor bir sürede yok satan WWDC 2012'ye katılma şansını yakalayarak, San Francisco'daki 5 günlük konferans boyunca Apple yazılım dünyasındaki son gelişmeler ve yenilikleri öğrenme fırsatı yakaladık. 

Keynote'da Apple kullanıcı ve geliştiricilerinin merakla beklediği yeni MacBook Pro serisi ve yeni Mac işletim sistemi Mountain Lion dışında Pozitron olarak bizi en çok heyecanladıran duyuru iOS 6 ve bununla birlikte gelen yüzlerce yenilikti. 

Yeni mobil işletim sistemi versiyonu iOS 6'yla birlikte gelen Passbook uygulaması ve bununla ilgili SDK eklentileri Türkiye'de loyalty card uygulamaları olan ve bilet satışı yapan firmaların mutlaka ilgilenmesi gereken bir özellik. Online ödemeler konusunda Apple'ın gelecek planlarıyla ilgili büyük bir ilerleme sayılabilecek bu özellik sayesinde iOS kullanıcıları artık dijital cüzdan teknolojisine ilk adımlarını atmış oluyorlar. iOS 5'le birlikte getirilen işletim sistemine entegre edilmiş Twitter paylaşım özelliklerine benzer şekilde entegre Facebook paylaşım özellikleri de iOS 6'yla birlikte geliyor. Bu da biz geliştiriciler için uygulamalarımızda sıklıkla kullandığımız Facebook entegrasyonu açısından büyük kolaylık ve de kullanıcılarımız açısından daha iyi bir kullanım deneyimi anlamına geliyor. Bunlar dışında iOS 6'yla birlikte Siri Türkçe desteğinin hala gelmemiş olması ve Apple'ın iOS cihazlarındaki Google Maps özelliklerinin yerini alacak kendi harita ve navigasyon yazılımlarının Türkiye'de tam anlamıyla desteklenmiyor olması biraz üzücü. 

Keynote'un hemen ardından Apple mühendislerinin sunum yaptığı ve 5 gün boyunca devam eden geliştirici seanslarına ve kodumuz üzerinden birebir sorularımızı sorabildiğimiz lab'lere katıldık. Aynı saatte birden fazla seans olduğundan, daha çok üzerinde çalıştığımız mobil uygulamaları ilgilendiren seansları tercih ettik. En kalabalık olanlar yeni iOS ve yeni Mac OS'la birlikte gelen özelliklerin tanıtıldığı ve kullanımına dair ipuçlarının verildiği seanslar oldu. Uygulama performansını artırmaya yönelik seanslar da epey ilgi görenler arasındaydı. Konferans boyunca katılamadığımz seansları da  birlikte çalıştığımız developerlar ile iPhone'larımız üzerinden birbirimizi haberdar ederek sıcağı sıcağına takip edebildik. 

Kısaca özetlersek iOS 6'da eski versiyonlar üzerine yapılmış hem kullanıcı hem geliştiricileri olumlu yönde etkileyecek olan birçok yeni özellik, geliştirme ve düzeltmeler var. Çok az sayıda kalan iOS 4 kullanıcıları ve çoğunluğu oluşturan iOS 5 kullanıcılarının Eylül'deki release'den sonra hızlıca iOS 6'ya geçeceğini düşünerek uygulamalarımızı iOS 6 uyumlu hale getirme çalışmalarına şimdiden başladık. 

Apple yazılımları üzerine yaptığı trendi belirleyen geliştirmelerle heyecanımızı canlı tutmaya ve yaratıcılığımızı desteklemeye devam ediyor. 

Alper İncedalcı

Userspots UX Türkiye etkinliği

9-10 Haziran 2012 tarihlerinde İstanbul’da Microsoft Türkiye ofisinde düzenlenen UX Turkiye etkinliğinde ağırlıklı olarak kullanıcı (müşteri) deneyimi, kullanılabilirlik, e-ticaret ve kullanılabilrlik, tasarım süreçleri, tasarımda wireframe konuları ele alındı. İki günde 300 kişinin katıldığı etkinlik aynı zamanda Pozitif TV’den de canlı yayınlandı.

İkinci günün en yoğun sunumunda Fulya Şengil katılımcılara mobil kullanıcı deneyimi konusunda detaylı bilgiler verdi ve etkinliğin en etkili sunumlarından biri seçildi.

Pozitron at the Most Educational Android Development Event, AnDevCon

AnDevCon is the biggest, info-packed, most practical Android conference in the world. This year, hundreds of developers and software engineers attended AnDevCon to participate in more than 75 lectures particularly focused on Android development.

Our Android development team leader attended this must-go conference to represent Pozitron and learn new Android tricks and trends. With all the new info we gathered from this highly educational event, we will continue serving our customers with faster and smarter Android apps.

The Largest Digital Gathering in the MENA Region, Arabnet Summit

The Arabnet hosted 100 globally renowned speakers and thousands of participants at region's largest digital event that took place in Beirut. 5 day event included panel discussions, specialized workshops, exciting competitions, focused networking sessions and many more. Pozitron CEO, Fatih Isbecer, both participated in one of the panel discussions and gave a presentation on Enterprise Mobility with examples from the best practices in the world.

The ArabNet Digital Summit reached far beyond the conference halls.The Summit hashtag received more than 26,000 tweets across the 5 days of the event, and the live stream received more than 70,000 visits from 14,600 unique visitors. It was featured prominently in the media, including the Wall Street Journal, Forbes, All Things D, Monte Carlo, Wamda, Webrazzi [Turkish], Startupbusiness.it [Italian] and many more.

QCON London Software Development Conference

London is an enterprise software development conference designed for developers, team leads, architects and project management. One the biggest learning, networking and innovation events that's held in London, QCON brings together Java, .NET, HTML5, Mobile, Agile and Software Architecture communities.

Our Director of Software Development represented us in the sixth annual conference. Some of the major topics discussed in the conference were Cross Platform Mobile, Agile Adoptation, Bid Data and NoSQL, and Cloud Architectures.

SxSW Interactive

The 19th annual SxSW Interactive festival took place March 9-13, 2012 in Austin, Texas. Focused on the emerging technology, SxSW, known as the incubator of new ideas, brought together tech influencers from all around the world. Our Co-Founder and Business Development Director Firat Isbecer was at SxSW to network with greatest minds of the technology sector and view newest trends and innovations.

Here are some highlights from SxSW:

Skyrocketing Location Based Applications

We don't only want to access internet wherever we go, we also want our devices to know where we are, announce it to our friends and give us suggestions on what's around us.

At SxSW, one of the most important sessions on Location Based services was “Enabling New Experiences and Creating Serendipity Through Check-ins,” an interview of Dennis Crowley, CEO of Foursquare, by Mashable CEO Pete Cashmore that focused on providing value to both merchants and customers.

Another great session was “Where Are We Going? The Future of Location” by Gowalla CEO Josh Williams where he talked about how essential LBS are and how to integrate them to apps correctly.

For Location Based Services to be successful, it is extremely important to provide a good user experience and to interpret the data carefully.


Cloud Computing

Cloud computing had a huge impact on technology over the past years. The power of the cloud enables any company, big or small, anywhere in the world, to have access to virtually unlimited computing power for cheap.

Did you know that Instagram has only two founders? During SxSW, they actually confessed that they have a secret 3rd partner, called Cloud!

Other noteworthy names on cloud discussion were, of course, Google and Salesforce.com


Al Gore & Sean Parker Discussion on Democracy and Social Media Influence

Former Vice President, Al Gore's discussion Napster co-founder and former Facebook president, Sean Parker about “Occupy Democracy” on the Internet. They both agreed that Social Media is the least expensive way to reach millions and influence them.

Improving Our Skills Even More with the Java Conference

Our software development team leader, Eren Bekar, attended Java One conference in San Francisco the past month. Industry's long-awaited conference hosted thousands of developers from all around the globe. The four day conference was packed with technical and inspirational presentations, hand-on sessions and networking opportunities for the Java enthusiasts. Oracle Chief Architect Richard Bair, Intel Vice President Doug Fisher, Oracle Vice President of Development Adam Messinger, and Juniper Networks Chief Architect David Ward were among the keynote speakers. According to our software development team leader, some of the most-thought provoking sessions were "Rethinking Best practices with java EE 6", "Java Unleashed '2': More JVM Tuning from the Pros", and "Do you really get class loaders?".