As a result of this, we are planning to attend just about any event during the web week in Berlin this october. The highlight is of course the Web 2.0 Expo in Berlin. At least half of Expodea (Vadi & I) will be there. We also have the chance to provide our readers with a discount code: webeu08gr2 Check out the expo schedule at the official website.

I will not just be there, as a participant of the Blogging Web 2.0 Expo Europe 08 programme I’ll get the chance to interview speakers. Let me know if you have any questions for certain speakers at the conference. I’ll direct them.

Additionally, I’ll gladly help anyone to find accomodation and cheap flights to Berlin, who are willing to attend the event. Invitations for visa appliance are a subject that the organizers are working on. If any news arrive, I’ll post them here at the Expodea blog.

*mixxt started in Turkey. I’m running the operation as the Country Manager. Karaklm.com and Girişim Günleri are some of the first mixxt networks founded in Turkey.

*Çember.net is no more. From 26th July on, çember.net won’t exist anymore. All 300K Users will be logging in to Xing with their former çember.net accounts.

*The Techcrunch & Webrazzi Meetup took on the 28th of June place in Conrad Hotel, Istanbul. Some 400 people were there and all of the blogposts afterwards show, this kind of an event was a need and it’s gotta be repeated occasionally.

*Startup Weekend is coming to Istanbul. Girişim Günleri 2008 is on the weekend of 30th and 31st August in Istanbul. A little bit more than 100 people have registered for the event.

*Facebook is suing StudiVZ. StudiVZ is ‘the’ social network in Germany with 10m users. Last year, it was sold to Holtzbrinck Group for appr. $100m. Holtzbrinck has also assets in USA, so the law suit will affect the company directly. It’s being spectaculated a lot about the reason in the german blogosphere, the most popular answer is that Facebook is trying to lower the price of StudiVZ. Others say, that other copycats in the world will be sued as well, as Facebook makes its moves in other parts of the world.

*Sevenload expands to Poland, Netherland and Russia after Turkey, and is hiring. Turkey will be one of the countries, where Sevenload will establish a base for its expansion.

* Sevenload completed a funding round involving T-Ventures and the management team of Sevenload, raising 25 mio. euro. The arrangements in the share structure are being commented as a sign of going public in future.

* I attended Techcrunch Meetup in Berlin and met lots of startups, investors and professionals. Conclusion: There is a huge interest on Turkey and the turkish businesspeople are going to lead the traffic between Germany and Turkey. A close-up that i wrote will be published in Digital Age this month.

* etohum (eseed), the first organisation to educate and fund turkish startups in a collective, collaborative platform is going to start this friday, right before the Techcrunch & Webrazzi Meetup in Istanbul. The head of the organisation, Burak Büyükdemir has a huge interest in German know-how and we’ve been discussing the German interest in Turkey. It’s a solid and reliable organisation to channel the interest. More details to come.

* İbrahim Evsan, founder of Sevenload startet the social initiative “Living Together in Europe“. Dr. Hubert Burda (Burda Verlag), Lars Hinrichs (Xing) and Mehmet Gürcan Daimagüler (Yale University) are supporting the action. Main topic seems to be integration. Let’s see how it’s going to resonate in Turkey.

* Yesterday, i met Hakan Gönenli, Country Manager Turkey of Xing. He’s pretty experienced, which made me see how big internet has become in Turkey and how big it is going to be in a couple of months. Hakan Gönenli is saying “cooperation, cooperation, cooperation.” I couldn’t agree more.

For a couple of weeks I’ve been using YSlow which is really helpful in terms of understanding and finding the structural errors on your page. What’s more; it also gives you some tips about whan can be changed on the page.

Whenever you work on a complex coding I would really recommend to check the code with YSlow. It lists all the components in the page including their type, URL, Expires date, gzip status, load time, size, and ETag. You can also view the HTTP response headers for any component. In fact, this might be really helpful for the university students who just started to write some codes on Web Applications. Obviously many pages are now moving in a WEB 2.0 format, which includes dynamic building by the browser. This might result with some mistakes on the graphics or any kind of script that we can not see easily on the page. To have a proper format on the scripts and codes have a look at YSlow

Couple of quick notes on the event:

Go new media Ltd. & Co. KG told the audience about their new service called produktmelder.de. Produktmelder users can follow all offers made by “one deal per day” shops over the web just by giving in some keywords about the products that they’re looking to buy.

We met Andreas Gerads, author of EASN; a blog/organisation which provides just about everything a startup needs; dates, information about other startups, fonds and jobs.

André Goerres ve Andreas Herten authors of the fabulous physikblog, offered some laughs. Interesting blog, interesting people.

A cool coincidence is, Boxgraben, which is also the street where our office is located, is home of three other startups/bloggers. Including EASN.

However, I guess, the metrics are little bit different when you compare them with the other countries. Just a couple of days ago we have seen a new research by Ebay & Gittigidiyor.com. There are some interesting numbers, may be some of them are totally new for many people from Turkish online community.

The first interesting point for me is Turkey’s rank in the Facebook Networks. ( Actually we know this before this research) We’re the number 4 in the list. I think this is a kind of good measure to show that Turkey Internet users are really familiar with the Social Networking. The bad part is; it’s not something good for the social networks when one major site has a really high market share in terms of networking.

In this growing potential, the ones that are not as big as Facebook, should find someway to differentiate their selves from the major ones, and in this way they should be somehow important in the eyes of the Online Community. I believe that Turkey does not have enough Web Sites for different specific categories. The ones who believe that he/she has a good idea to spread must do it as soon as possible to get some kind of benefit from this growing opportunity in Turkey.

The second thing I want to point out is the youngest profile of Turkey. 45% of the users are between the age of 16-24. Young profiles make it little bit difficult to get money from the web because, at the end the content you’re trying to sell has not many audience to be bought because of the lack of buying power… However this young potential will change its usage to a professional way as the time passes by which might result with higher value on the web in terms of monetary issues. The good thing is you can always find some brands to invest on ads on the internet when you have a young profile.

The metrics are also telling that e-commerce will continue to increase in terms of money and volume. This is an obvious fact for all of us. However I always believe that the ideas are always much more valuable than the money you create from e-commerce. We should see the Internet as a medium when it’s the e-commerce we’re talking about, however when the thing is idea the internet itself can be accepted as both, the starting and the finishing point. I guess the latter one is much more attractive for us.

By the way the 93% of the users have a mobile phone… However in Turkey the mobile internet usage is really low… As i know from my Mobile Advertising Exp. Let me ask: Where are they ? Why do they not use that internet on mobile ? I wish we have a world that the percentages for the internet usage are same for mobile internet and broadband internet…

Here you can get the PPT of the research

Likemind Istanbul was one of the events I had in mind lately. I could finally attend the event, (on it’s 11th edition), which is bending the startup scene in Turkey and the interactive agencies together. Özgür Alaz and Alemşah Öztürk are organising Likemind Istanbul with the motto „an opportunity to enjoy coffee and conversation “. I have observed, that the participants were mostly from interactive agencies, web agencies and media planners. I had the chance to meet people from these agencies and some startups.

Exoin is one of them. The founders of Exoin, Hasan Toprakkaya and Sinan Kaplan. They are planning to bring a Tumblr like service, but because of some important subjects, prefer not to launch the technically ready service for now. One of them is the launching language of the platform. At this point, I shared my opinion about starting local. To be successful in a country, you have to have a crew there. Even Facebook has a hard time in Germany. But anyway, starting the creation of upper grade sevices is a good sign. In an environment, where the country’s biggest media establishment is trying to spread the formats like “yazduvara.com” from ancient times over its own channels, it is important to see two young entrepreneurs thinking about a microblog service.

In the short time I have spent in Istanbul, in the intense traffic of meetings, I have concluded that the market is looking forward for many new things and there is an arising possibility of decentral startup mentality, like in Europe. All the factors, which will make it happen are following: The new generation is convenient for creating initiatives, the market is small but expanding, inverstors are slowly awakening and the people who have already important positions in the market, can now concentrate on new projects. That is going to allow them to analyze the subordinate wave profoundly and lead their way. In the following months, we will be hearing many new startup names.