We the blogging people were at Turkcell Headquarters again, for the introduction of a few value adding services that are new to some people. I couldn't miss the chance, I love gatherings with fellow bloggers.

I will dump some of the interesting services along with my comments here, for the sake of discussion:

• Tam Nerede (Where Exactly): It allows you to track people or assets. This was on wheels for a long while for fleet-tracking, good to have it available for personal use. It's competitor Google Latitude is free of charge, on the go with Maps Mobile and slightly more accurate. It's obvious that financial success of this service largely depends on marketing investment.
• Mobil İlanlar (inaccurately, Location-based Mobile Ads): Imagine you have a flat you're renting in a certain area of the city. People can find your ad when/if they search stuff in that area from the website and/or they are located in that area. I don't know why would they do that, because there's little yet to search. This service is currently free of charge, probably because it's very basic. I feel it lacks a workable business model, probably because it's intended to be a proof-of-concept. Hinty hint: Turkcell might be looking for a partner for this.
• Leylek (Stork): A mashup of a social network, online dating and location-based friend-finder service. It's a very cool and nice experiment. There were similar, for that matter (financially) failed, attempts with a Facebook application. I learned, through the hard way, failure is almost inevitable with these social obstacles: people lie a lot about a lot of things when dating online -- and this kind of mashups grant far less anonymity to their subscribers. Most will hold back when you ask them their phone number or credit card. You'd have to spend a lot on marketing to prove that your customers will be kept anonymous no matter what, and that's probably more than the revenue you will generate in the lifetime of the service.
• Konuşan İlanlar (Talking Ads): I love it, really. I dug a bit and found out that it's made by Alcatel-Lucent (called Mobile Enhanced Reality -- Dear Lord, please give them more time in their bowing moments so they can come up with better names). Start a video call to a pre-defined, shared-by-all-brands, short number. Make sure your phone camera can see the logo in the black square on the page of the newspaper you have in your hands, and voila. An image-recognition system will kick in, recognize the logo (surprisingly very accurate, I doubt it will be as accurate when there are 100 brands using the same service). You will be presented an interactive video - an IVR service - that you can watch and control with the keypad of your phone. It's a beautiful bridge between any printed content and mobile interactive video. Brilliant, because it's so simple. Alcatel-Lucent and any customer of this service is going to print money with this.

The rest was mostly meh for me. Mobile wallet, mobile payment, video call centers, video applied to some health-care services, video calls to do this and that, (relatively^{[citation needed]}) high speed mobile internet, etc.

I'd like to thank Alp Solak from Mese for inviting us. And big congrats go to our host Turkcell and particularly Serhat Ayan, for the great and carefully crafted venue experience. It's very hard to please someone with high expectations, I left the place pretty much happy and enlightened.