As I projected previously, which was not difficult to predict, hardship awaits the Turkish markets. In that case, could e-commerce sites that are rightly classified as mostly luxurious and unnecessary consumption articles, still make good business? I hope one day our investors understand that core technology businesses are the real money makers. To those who are curious why there is still not a Google in Turkey, let me explain. You are making successful people who do understand technology run away from Turkey. Academicians are mostly writing articles for the sake of publication, which would be unlikely to yield an application or even impossible, due to minimal innovation. That is why they do not have patents, because their work does not have any patentable value. They must be feeling that even if they did, nobody would care. In other words, the Turkish academia is running a long con, but they have no other choice.

In entrepreneurship, the classical narrow Turkish mindset is effective; when one utters technology, he understands nothing but concrete, cell phone and cars. For there is no vision. Vision consists of the following: if we make a copy of a foreign website X, maybe it would work. Maybe it would work, true, but you will never compete in the global market with that kind of work. And then, when the Turkish markets tank, you tank along with them, because being a local internet salesman is not much different from being a salesman.

Turkish version:

Daha önceki post’umda belirttiğim gibi, ki tahmin etmek çok zor değildi, Türk piyasalarını çok zor günler bekliyor. Bu durumda çoğu lüks ve gereksiz tüketim sınıfına giren e-ticaret v.b. sitelerin iş yapmasını bekleyenler var mı? Umuyorum ki bir gün yatırımcılarımız gerçekten para getiren işlerin temel teknoloji olduğunu anlayacaklar. Hala neden bir google çıkmıyor diyenlere ben anlatayım. Teknolojiden anlayan başarılı insanları bu ülkeden kaçırıyorsunuz. Akademisyenlerin çoğu da sadece makale yazmak için makale yazıyor, yani bir uygulamasının olması zor ya da imkansız olan afaki katma değeri düşük işler peşinde koşuyorlar. Bu yüzden patent çıkmıyor, çünkü patentlenebilir değeri olan bir çalışma genelde yapılmıyor. Öyle bir şey yapsa da zaten kimsenin önemsemeyeceğinin farkında bir yerde. Kısacası girişimcilikte de klasik kıt Türk zihniyetini takınmış durumdayız, teknoloji deyince, beton, cep telefonu ve arabadan başka birşey anlamadığımız için bizim işimiz çok zor. Vizyon yok çünkü. Vizyon şundan ibaret gördüğüm kadarıyla: X yabancı sitenin kopyasını yaparsak belki tutar. Belki tutar, doğru, ama hiçbir zaman bu işlerle global pazarda yarışamazsınız. O zaman da Türk piyasası battığı zaman siz de onunla birlikte batarsınız, çünkü yerel internet esnafı olmanın diğer türlü esnaf olmaktan farkı çok yok.

Turkish Markets and Technological Entrepreneurship

examachine

Eray Özkural has obtained his PhD in computer engineering from Bilkent University, Ankara. He has a deep and long-running interest in human-level AI. His name appears in the acknowledgements of Marvin Minsky's The Emotion Machine. He has collaborated briefly with the founder of algorithmic information theory Ray Solomonoff, and in response to a challenge he posed, invented Heuristic Algorithmic Memory, which is a long-term memory design for general-purpose machine learning. Some other researchers have been inspired by HAM and call the approach "Bayesian Program Learning". He has designed a next-generation general-purpose machine learning architecture. He is the recipient of 2015 Kurzweil Best AGI Idea Award for his theoretical contributions to universal induction. He has previously invented an FPGA virtualization scheme for Global Supercomputing, Inc. which was internationally patented. He has also proposed a cryptocurrency called Cypher, and an energy based currency which can drive green energy proliferation. You may find his blog at http://log.examachine.net and some of his free software projects at https://github.com/examachine/.

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