Can Köklü

Just a few of the millions that go out every day.

In a scant four years, Hamdi Ulukaya has built something that even Silicon Valley types should covet: a $700 million business that’s profitable, dominant and growing at a furious clip.

Even more incredible: Ulukaya makes yogurt.  YOGURT. The stuff comprised of milk and culture.  This is the ancient food that must be produced, packaged and shipped to grocery store chains who, if they feel like stocking their shelves, finally disseminate it to consumers.  It’s perishable (like software rot, but worse).  And the yogurt market is competitive, stocked with old stalwarts such as Yoplait, Dannon and Fage, the king of Greek yogurt before Ulukaya showed up.

On cigarette packages, QR codes reveal a nearby place to smoke

Ronhill has begun to use QR codes on its cigarette packaging to help consumers find a nearby place to smoke.

8th September 2011 in Lifestyle & Leisure.

how do we break down the artificial walls that keep us from creating great things together? How can organizations foster environments that encourage natural, unforced collaboration?

There are no quick fixes, but these are far from insurmountable problems. I propose the following five-level hierarchy as a solution:

There are no shortcuts to breaking down silos. You can’t fix the environment if the organization doesn’t understand the problem. You can’t improve the development process if the right environment doesn’t exist to enable healthy guidelines. You have to climb the pyramid brick by brick to the ultimate goal: better software through true collaboration.

Let’s look at each of these levels.

Social media has succeeded by being more human.

Social media succeeded by abandoning the traditional mindset and assumptions of our machine-based organizations, and instead embracing ideas that are much more consistent with what it means to be human. In social media, relationships matter. So does trust. So do things like meaning, humor, transparency, authenticity, and creativity. Social media is built on the principle that control is a thing of the past, and that the results you get are not always the ones that you were seeking when you started. Those principles are much more aligned with what it means to be human, than with what makes machines work well. That is fundamentally why social media has been so explosive. We like being human. We can’t help it. When we get access to something that lets more of our humanity come out, we are drawn to it. That is why we are flocking to social media.

Amazon’s entry is only rumored but I think the description of it is detailed enough to be credible. The day after the scoop with Amazon, Baidu announced the Yi platform. Baidu is the sixth most visited site in the world, so it’s not a bit player and it makes as much sense for Baidu to have a mobile platform as it does for Google.

Don't take yourself too seriously. Use humor, but ensure that the humor supports your brand. Humor is very personal, and in order for most things to be funny, it will usually push the edges of NSFW (not safe for work) -- and if you don't know that acronym then you should definitely not be judging whether something is funny).

Don't do creative by committee. If you want a viral video effort to work, you must free the hands of your agency from company politics.

Be aware that it might backfire. Inform those in the company that it may generate a lot of chatter, which is not always bad.

Don't get discouraged. If one viral video fails, get up and make another one.

Moontoast, one of the leading social commerce platforms working with retailers, publishers, musicians and celebrities has just published a new, useful and insightful e-book on Facebook commerce for brands.

It’s most definitely worth a download – from here (free) – as it contains some of the smartest advice we’ve found on f-commerce to date.  We think the smartest way for brands to understand Facebook and Facebook Commerce is as fan-media and fan-sales; Moontoast’s e-book provides invaluable insight for doing precisely that – and for creating an army of ‘super fans‘ (brilliant concept) who buy and advocate more and more often.

Image of Foursquare's board via Fortune

While some folks might attribute the rumbling feeling that hit New York this afternoon to a 5.9 earthquake in Virginia, Betabeat now knows better. It was the tectonic reverberations of defeat, as Facebook quietly phased out the Places feature of its mobile app which everyone was screaming for months would kill Foursquare.

Simply put, the key to increasing creativity in any organization is to make it start acting like a creative organization. Suppose you wanted to be an artist: You would begin behaving like an artist by painting every day. You may not become another Vincent Van Gogh, but you'll become much more of an artist than someone who has never tried. Similarly, you and your organization will become more creative if you start acting the part. The following are 16 suggestions to encourage you and your colleagues to start becoming more creative today.

Mike Bostock visualizes mobile patent lawsuits, improving on a graphic from Thomson Reuters that wasn't so good. Dashed lines are resolved suits and green ones are licenses to the company.

by Jenny Ng, Posted Aug 16th 2011 7:15PM

These days, many companies are turning to Facebook games as a way of connecting with and building their audience (e.g. Channel 4's Beauty Town). But one pioneering company, a Turkish bank called Akbank, is really throwing themselves into their official Facebook page.

As of this writing, Akbank's Facebook page has 508,397 fans. The bank itself has 913 branches serving 8 million customers, and they've been managing a total of 15 social media accounts between Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube. They've also created 5 Facebook applications, some of which, are games promoting their brand.

One of these games, Kur Yönet, which translates into "Manage the Exchange Rate", allows users to build a virtual factory that involves everything from production to marketing to R&D. All banking, of course, is handled by the Akbank branch within the game.

Another game, Kırmızı'nın Peşinde or "Pursuit of the Orange", is based on Pac-Man and comes with a super dramatic game trailer. Your characters run around each level collecting personal needs (e.g. education, vacation, home renovations). Ads are shown in-between level changes.

Aside from these two, there's also been a music trivia page offering free concert tickets that was targeted at the youth, a gift cards giveaway page on applying for personal loans, and another trivia game involving current events in Turkish history that later tells players how much money they could've made if only they opened a Cumulative Mutual Fund account on a certain date. These are all a bit of a stretch, but Akbank seems completely devoted to pushing their brand, wherever, whenever, and however possible. Moreover, it appears that all their efforts have paid off.

[Source: The Financial Brand]

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Tags: akbank, Kur Yönet, Sosyal Medya

Google Inc. (NASDAQ: GOOG) and Motorola Mobility Holdings, Inc. (NYSE: MMI) today announced that they have entered into a definitive agreement under which Google will acquire Motorola Mobility for $40.00 per share in cash, or a total of about $12.5 billion, a premium of 63% to the closing price of Motorola Mobility shares on Friday, August 12, 2011. The transaction was unanimously approved by the boards of directors of both companies.

The acquisition of Motorola Mobility, a dedicated Android partner, will enable Google to supercharge the Android ecosystem and will enhance competition in mobile computing. Motorola Mobility will remain a licensee of Android and Android will remain open. Google will run Motorola Mobility as a separate business.

In order to opt out of social advertising, the LinkedIn user has to take four steps to escape third-party advertisements:

Hover over the user name in the top right hand corner of any LinkedIn page and click ‘Settings’. On the Settings page, click ‘Account’. On the Account tab, click ‘Manage Social Advertising’. Uncheck the box next to “LinkedIn may use my name, photo in social advertising.” and click the save button.

BankSimple, the highly anticipated web-only bank being built with an emphasis on user experience and no fees, is getting closer to launching, the company said today. CEO Joshua Reich put up a blog post this afternoon announcing that BankSimple has secured partnerships with VISA, Barcorp and other institutions to enable its customers to get transaction rewards and have their deposits FDIC insured. Additionally, the company announced that it has grown its venture capital war-chest from $3.1 million to $13.1 million. The company is testing its products now and says it will launch within the year.

ON TOP OF THE WORLD? Gartner puts NFC payments right at the top of its hype curve, facing an uncomfortable slide into consumer and industry disillusionment. Hold on tight! Click to enlarge.

"Mobile technologies continue to be part of most of our clients' short- and long-range plans and are present on this Hype Cycle in the form of media tablets, NFC payments, QR codes and color codes, mobile application stores and location-aware applications," Fenn adds.

Creating the digital wallet, both on the mobile and web platforms, is no easy task. Visa has a name for itself in the credit card industry but the fact is that the brand still has to attach innovation to itself in order for people to take these products seriously. Perhaps that’s one of the reasons why Google’s Mobile Wallet news created waves, even though NFC technology is in its early stages.

Visa competitor American Express is also working hard to innovate both at the large retailer level, as well as among smaller retailers, with GoSocial.

While Visa, American Express and others are looking to capitalize on the changes taking place in the payments industry, it is a challenging effort. Local commerce is a big part of this, and everyone is trying to find a way to close the redemption loop. But e-commerce, amongst larger retailers, is also a multi-billion dollar market that Visa hopes to continue to play in with products like a digital wallet. And in-store payments, whether that be through NFC, Square or others, represent another market.

I’ve been talking to a number of executives of payments companies and founders of innovative payments startups, and while their objectives are different, they all seem to agree on one thing. It’s early and there is still much more innovation were going to see in the next few years in the online and mobile payments space.

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A big secret of Facebook marketing is that it is easy and cheap to drive promotions using ads targeted only at your fans that link to landing tabs that deliver the offer and encourage fans to share to their newsfeed.

A brand on Facebook should be like a casual friend or neighbor and not try to suck people into heavy levels of interaction. What do you do with a friend? Comment on their photos, like their status, vote on their outfit. These types of interactions take seconds, not minutes, and definitely not hours.

A brand on Facebook should offer their users regularly updated, simple to interact with engagement features. Each of the engagement apps should be fully branded, and run in a separate tab with traffic driven from wall posts, newsfeed and Facebook ad units to increase engagement. Start with a personality quiz. Then two weeks later put up a poll. Then try a trivia app. For special events, put up a gifting app for Valentine's Day, or for the holiday season, a holiday song card.

As businesses get more involved in using social media, they are starting to redo their landing pages, or places where you enter their ecosystems on Facebook, Twitter et al. We were reminded by this post by my colleague Paul Gillin that it could be a good time to brush up on your Facebook Markup Language and other techniques to not just pretty up the place, but provide solid information as well as calls to action for your visitors.